The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

by Laura Furman

  You remember hearing her say, “Hal, it’s two a.m., he’s ten years old. Where do you think he is?… You demand to speak to your son? Call before closing time.”

  You remember the bruises on your shoulders, chest, and arms, and the awed looks in the locker room, and your Grandpa’s smile when you said they didn’t hurt, and how he took you to the Rexall and bought you Absorbine Jr. and to the Coffee Pot and told the men you were one tough customer, and asking him for long-sleeved shirts so she wouldn’t have to see.

  You remember hearing him tell her, her friend Joe needed reminding he was colored, and her saying, “What does that mean, exactly?” and him saying, “It means his children won’t be white, no matter who their mother is.”

  You remember hearing his voice shout your name when you ran onto the field, and it didn’t matter that she was sorry, sweetie, she just couldn’t face Raystown yet, because you were standing for her.

  And you remember realizing: what you craved was not the contact, but the instant before; when, balanced in your three-point stance, you knew exactly what to do: drive and keep on driving, until the whistle blew.

  Now you remember how the forest flared and the mountains looked like quilts, and the town grew fat with tourists come for the Foliage Festival, and the Public Squares were chockablock with booths selling cob corn brushed with butter, fried dough dusted with sugar, funnel cakes, pickled eggs, friendship bread, blood sausages, slabs of shoofly pie.

  You remember the Patrician descending from the Heights, your mother at the wheel, smelling of Jergens and White Rain. And her mouth was straight and her cheek was smooth and her hair was pinned up high, and she looked as lovely as the lady on the soap she used.

  You remember her holding your hand tight as you pulled her toward the crowd, and squeezing tighter when some ladies saw her and whispered to each other. But then an old man spoke her name and she spoke his, and an old lady patted her arm and said it was good to see her home, and she didn’t squeeze so tight.

  Then you walked together, hand in hand, and she spoke to people, and some spoke back but some didn’t and she said they must be hard of seeing, and she bought you a mug of hot spiced cider and, because she said you had to take sour with sweet, some pickled watermelon rind. A group of men was making music on a violin, banjo, bass, and sideways guitar, going fast and taking turns with the melody, and she let go of your hand to clap her hands in time. Some people were grumbling that it wasn’t real country, but she said, Pay them no mind, it was bluegrass and they’d like it once they got used to it. Then you saw Joe Wisdom.

  He had three girls with him, one holding each hand, one riding on his shoulders, and a tall woman with high caramel cheeks and long black braids. You said, “Hello, Mr. Wisdom,” and your mother stopped clapping and took your hand again and said, “Hello, Joe,” but there was no music in it.

  He said, “Jewels. You remember Margo,” and the woman said, “Juliana,” and your mother said, “Why, yes. Margo, from Home Ec. What sweet little girls!” Then she pulled you in front of her and said, “This is my son.”

  The woman gave Joe Wisdom a cockeyed look, then knelt and looked you in the eye, and hers were deep and black, but soft. And she said, “I hear you’re a man who’s not afraid to get his hands dirty,” and you said, “Yes, ma’am, I mean, no, ma’am, I mean, I’m just a boy,” and your face got hot and she smiled but didn’t laugh, and you realized: she was as lovely as your mother.

  But now you remember your mother on the veranda, bundled in your Grandpa’s overcoat, arms crossed across her chest like she was holding something in. Silver plumed before her face and you thought she was smoking again, but then you realized: she was breathing hard. And you wanted to tell her to pay no mind, that you’d been straight and true, but then the ring, ring, ringing started, and she left the veranda, and you heard her say, “Yes, Hal, I suppose it is time we talked.”

  Now you remember caw, caw, caw, and cold air slashing between sash and sill, and dead leaves raked into crackling piles, and gray smoke defiling the air, and her saying, over supper, your father had a new job, a better job, and your Grandpa asking, Better than the ones he’d got fired from or the ones he couldn’t get?

  You remember guns booming in the forest and your Grandpa saying not to go exploring, it was hunting season, but going anyway, forsaking paths and trail marks because nobody’d ever found it, only you had to because if there was room for Davy and his horse there’d be room for both of you.

  You remember him telling her, her friend Joe had settled out of court.

  You remember her asking, as she tucked you in, Didn’t you miss your room, your bunk bed? and wondering if she’d forgotten scooping you out of it, whispering, Shh shh, shh, going tiptoe barefoot past the La-Z-Boy, the shivaree of snore and static, the stink of whiskey and cigarettes. Then you realized: she didn’t want to see.

  And you remember the Patrician parked beneath the flag and your Grandpa waiting, but not reading or resting his eyes or saying anything.

  Now you remember the Thunderbird—blank-faced, boxy, Doeskin Beige over Colonial White, the bird flattened on the hood—and your father’s big-voiced brags of Cruise-O-Matic, Master Guide, dual headlights, dual horns, dual everything, and his demonstrations of the push-in cigarette lighter on the central console, and the lever that made the electric turn signals go tock-tick, tock-tick, tock-tick—no more horse-and-buggy, hand-out-the-window jazz, he said. And he said they called it the Car Everyone Would Love to Own, and when your Grandpa said he’d liked the roadster better, he said, “Well, Dad, as usual, you’re a few model-years behind.”

  You remember your Grandmother’s handmade tablecloth above and dragon legs below, and your mother asking was there too much lemon in the aspic, was the roast too done, did he want more of this or that, and jumping up to get it before he could say yes or no, and how when he said, “Julie, sit down and shut up,” your Grandpa left the table, but part of you was glad.

  You remember your Grandpa on the Lookout, staring across the valley to the mountain opposite, where head- and taillights on the Turnpike moved swiftly east and west. And he said, “This is Appalachian Bedrock. It’s been here a billion years. It’ll always be here, any time you need it,” and you knew what he meant. But you heard him saying, underneath, that he didn’t intend to interfere, and you despised him for it.

  And you remember waiting there, in your mackinaw and brogans, looking over treetops, steeples, rooftops, and smelling tobacco smoke and hearing your father say, “Well, don’t you look like Dan’l Boone. Kilt you a b’ar yet?” And you, not thinking, said, “That’s Davy Crockett …,” and stopped.

  He stepped out onto the rock beside you, took a drag on his cigarette. Then he said, “You’re confused. Your mother brought you here, and you’ve had her all to yourself. Your Grandfather buys you anything you want; you’re the son he couldn’t have. Now you don’t want to leave.

  “Well, let me unconfuse you. It doesn’t matter what you want. What matters is, I’m your father, and I demand respect. You will go where I say, when I say. You will look at me when I speak to you, and say sir when you speak to me. And don’t you dare ever correct me again. Do you understand?” And you said, “Yes, sir.”

  Then he stepped closer to the edge, looked down and said, “Man, this truly is the ass end of the earth.” And then he flicked his cigarette butt into the empty air.

  You watched it trace a glowing arc toward the bare treetops and thought, Only you can prevent, and dropped into your three-point stance, knowing but not caring that you’d go over too. You waited for him to turn, not to follow any rule, but so he’d see it coming when you fired out low and hard, and you felt it inside you: the blazing and the bellowing.

  Only then you realized: the bellowing was outside too. And you looked and saw a dump truck appear at the crest: cab and bed of forest green, bumper and grille of polished steel, twin air horns chromed and radiant, silver bulldog statant on the hood.

  It paused b
eside the Thunderbird, snorted once and hissed. Then it backed, grumbling, into the driveway, stopping at the woodpile, and magically the bed rose up on a thick, oily piston, and the tailgate lifted, and chunks came avalanching down, filling the air with dust and thunder.

  You straightened and went toward it, seeing your Grandpa, then your mother, coming out the kitchen door, and still the chunks came roaring down, covering the old wood with new, piling higher than you could reach. Then they stopped. The bed subsided. Joe Wisdom climbed down from the cab.

  Your Grandpa said, “Well, Joe, that Mack does haul quite a payload. I expect the price is double.” But Joe Wisdom said, “No charge, Judge. This boy earned one last load for you.” And he looked at you and said, “God keep you, son.” Then he looked at your mother and said, “Au revoir, Jewels. Un baiser de benediction.”

  But then you realized: you’d failed her again, because your father stepped from behind you and said, “Who the hell do you think you are, speaking to my wife like that? And he’s not your son, he’s mine.”

  Only, you realized: you still had a chance. Because if you said what you wanted, what you wished, that would make it happen, and not to her—to you. And maybe if she saw she’d stop making believe, and maybe if he saw, your Grandpa would interfere.

  But then you realized: you couldn’t. Because Joe Wisdom would surely interfere, but what might most matter, afterward, was that he wasn’t People Like Us, and you couldn’t trust your Grandpa to be true instead of straight, and maybe not your mother either. And then you realized: you couldn’t let them stand for you.

  So you stepped in front of your father. You held out your hand. And you said, “Thank you, Mr. Wisdom, sir. Thank you for the wood.”

  They’re gone now. First your mother, of manner and cause detailed in the trial transcript; then your Grandpa, of grief, some said, and, you’d hoped, guilt, but probably just too many real country breakfasts; now your father, the twenty having turned out to be longer than the life.

  That should have ended it. But the Department of Corrections, while willing to cremate, insisted you come in person to perform the rites you requested. So you set out at the crack of dawn for the Western Penitentiary to receive the ashes, dump them in a toilet, urinate, and flush.

  With three hundred horses under the Firebird’s hood, you figured to get from the Delaware to the Ohio and back by supper, but after you crossed the Susquehanna you saw the Allegheny Front and could almost hear your Grandpa cribbing Kipling, and between Blue Mountain and Kittatinny you remembered the pin mill. Now you see the sign for Juniata Crossing, and without thinking, downshift, slip between jake-braking semis, take the off-ramp, pay the toll.

  Juniata Crossing is not as you remember: two off-brand gas stations, one greasy spoon, one ten-cabin motor lodge. Now it’s a junction of the Turnpike with a north-south interstate, and Route 30 is a four-lane lined with outlets of every oil company, fast-food franchise, and cheap motel chain known to man.

  But a mile west two-lane asphalt reappears, ascending sharply then descending in switchbacks through a green profusion of pine, oak, and sugar maple, to where River Road still runs along the north bank of the Raystown Branch, brown and swollen from recent rains. The valley spreads in herded pastures and husbanded fields, and you can almost hear your Grandpa naming the strains: Yorkshire, Berkshire, Poland China; Guernsey, Jersey, Holstein, Black Angus; timothy, alfalfa, black medick, white Dutch, yellow dent, Tuscarora white. The Firebird grumbles in third gear, but you feel yourself resting easy, recalling how, here, forward, backward, left, and right mean less than up and down. Too soon you see the fresh green of weeping willows, the mountain rearing ahead.

  But instead of swinging into empty air to bridge the Narrows, the road suddenly ascends through a raw cut blasted through the mountain, then widens into an expressway on a high embankment. The river and the town must be below and to your left, but all you can see are treetops and no sign for an exit.

  You shift the Firebird into top gear, thinking it’s better this way; you don’t really want to see what’s faded out, fallen in, been modernized to charmlessness or tarted up for tourists. Still, you find yourself looking up, hoping to glimpse the houses on the Heights. But suddenly somehow you are in the Thunderbird, looking through the rear window at your Grandpa on the veranda, then through the windshield at the statues, brown and gray, the bank, drugstore, and five-and-dime, the traffic light turning red. You see your father’s hand pushing in the lighter and picking up his Camels from the center console. You see his lips sucking a cigarette out of the pack. You hear tock-tick, tock-tick, and your mother saying, “No, go straight …,” and stopping.

  You remember part of you was glad. Because it was going to happen sooner or later, so let it happen here, where half the town would see and the rest would hear by noon, where you could tell the operator eight-three-nine-R-four.

  But it didn’t happen then or there. Instead, you heard him telling her things were going to be different, that they’d start by taking that scenic route the old man was always going on about. Then you heard the lighter twang and smelled tobacco burning.

  Only now you remember something more: him holding out the cigarette and her accepting it, inhaling deeply and exhaling, then leaning, stretching, twisting, contorting her whole body across the console to place the cigarette precisely between his lips. And you realize: there was nothing you could have done to save her.

  And now you see it, through the windshield: spanning frame sagging, guy wires snapped, gantries fallen, catwalks dangling like broken arms. Now you’re past it and see a sign warning of the expressway’s end, then another, offering a connector to the ’Pike. You double-clutch downshift, flick the lever, hear tock-tick, tock-tick, tock-tick.

  But suddenly somehow you realize: you’re rushing no place good for no good reason, when the road you’re on will get you where you need to go. And before that it will lift you to a summit from where the land looks like the sea, and after, it could take you anywhere—the Plains, the Rockies, clean to the Pacific.

  Kirstin Valdez Quade

  Nemecia

  THERE IS A PICTURE of me standing with my cousin Nemecia in the bean field. On the back is penciled in my mother’s hand, Nemecia and Maria, Tajique, 1929. Nemecia is thirteen; I am six. She is wearing a rayon dress that falls to her knees, glass beads, and real silk stockings, gifts from her mother in California. She wears a close-fitting hat, like a helmet, and her smiling lips are pursed. She holds tight to my hand. Even in my white dress I look like a boy; my hair, which I have cut myself, is short and jagged. Nemecia’s head is tilted; she looks out from under her eyelashes at the camera. My expression is sullen, guilty. I don’t remember the occasion for the photograph, or why we were dressed up in the middle of the dusty field. All I remember of the day is that Nemecia’s shoes had heels, and she had to walk tipped forward on her toes to prevent them from sinking into the dirt.

  Nemecia was the daughter of my mother’s sister. She came to live with my parents before I was born because my aunt Benigna couldn’t care for her. Later, when Aunt Benigna recovered and moved to Los Angeles, Nemecia had already lived with us for so long that she stayed. This was not unusual in our New Mexico town in those years between the wars; if someone died, or came upon hard times, or simply had too many children, there were always aunts or sisters or grandmothers with room for an extra child.

  The day after I was born my great-aunt Paulita led Nemecia into my mother’s bedroom to meet me. Nemecia was carrying the porcelain baby doll that had once belonged to Aunt Benigna. When they moved the blanket from my face so that she could see me, she smashed her doll against the plank floor. The pieces were all found; my father glued them together, wiping the surface with his handkerchief to remove what oozed between the cracks. The glue dried brown, or maybe it dried white and only turned brown with age. The doll sat on the bureau in our bedroom, its face round and placidly smiling behind its net of brown cracks, hands folded primly across white lac
e, a strange and terrifying mix of young and old.

  Nemecia had an air of tragedy about her, which she cultivated. She blackened her eyes with a kohl pencil. She spent her allowance on magazines and pinned the photographs of actors from silent films around the mirror on our dresser. I don’t think she ever saw a film—not, at least, until after she left us, since the nearest theater was all the way in Albuquerque, and my parents would not in any case have thought movies suitable for a young girl. Still, Nemecia modeled the upward glances and pouts of Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo in our small bedroom mirror.

  When I think of Nemecia as she was then, I think of her eating. My cousin was ravenous. She needed things, and she needed food. She took small bites, swallowed everything as neatly as a cat. She was never full and the food never showed on her figure.

  She told jokes as she served herself helping after helping, so that we were distracted and did not notice how many tortillas or how many bowls of green-chili stew she had eaten. If my father or little brothers teased her at the table for her appetite, she burned red. My mother would shush my father and say she was a growing girl.

  At night she stole food from the pantry, handfuls of prunes, beef jerky, pieces of ham. Her stealth was unnecessary; my mother would gladly have fed her until she was full. Still, in the mornings everything was in its place, the waxed paper folded neatly around the cheese, the lids tight on the jars. She was adept at slicing and spooning, so her thefts weren’t noticeable. I would wake to her kneeling on my bed, a tortilla spread with honey against my lips. “Here,” she’d whisper, and even if I was still full from dinner and not awake, I would take a bite, because she needed me to participate in her crime.

  Watching her eat made me hate food. The quick efficient bites, the movement of her jaw, the way the food slid down her throat—it made me sick to think of her body permitting such quantities. Her exquisite manners and the ladylike dip of her head as she accepted each mouthful somehow made it worse. But if I was a small eater, if I resented my dependence on food, it didn’t matter, because Nemecia would eat my portion, and nothing was ever wasted.