The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

by Laura Furman

  When I read the words “dogged pursuit” I see the literal efforts of Nero. The grown-ups in the family were used to this and confident in the seven-foot fence, so I was the only one watching when Nero clambered to the rickety top, balanced, and leaped into space. It was early in the morning, and the shop was already busy, so in theory an entire day could elapse before Nero’s services were required and his escape was discovered. I filled my pockets with gingersnaps, told my grandmother I was going to play out in the field, and went straight across the sleepy fairgrounds to Priscilla Gamrod’s house.

  When Priscilla answered the door, Mitts barked viciously and darted for my ankle, but Priscilla elegantly kicked her dog down the hall with the pointed toe of her shoe. Mitts rolled, skidded, and trotted sullenly before us into the kitchen. She slumped in her pillowed corner, glowering as only a cocker spaniel can glower, while Priscilla sat me at the table and warmed some sugared milk with a bit of coffee in a small blue pan. She also made me cinnamon toast. The kitchen table was white enameled steel, painted with swirling green lines. The chairs were of curved aluminum with fat plastic cushions, green, too. The wallpaper was decorated with little black roosters.

  When I told Priscilla that Nero had cleared the fence, she said that she had the hose ready and would give him the works. She said this affectionately and even glanced at Mitts with a sort of amused pride, as if her dog’s attractions reflected upon her, too, though she needed no help. Priscilla was round-figured, silky-skinned, rosy, with black curls and great dark pixie eyes. The way her lashes curled, reaching nearly up to her curved brows, entranced me. Her eyes were a warm hazel. It was no wonder that her father fought off boy after boy. I said something about this without thinking.

  “Oh, you heard about that,” she said, smiling. “He’ll have a hell of a time fighting off the man I’m seeing now!”

  I wanted to ask who this man was, but right then Mitts yapped. Priscilla looked out the window, and, sure enough, there was Nero. He stood gravely in the scraggle of grass and sand pickers that passed for a yard. I stepped out the back door. “Gingersnap,” I said. Nero’s ears pricked up. I was elated. He knew me. He snatched cookies from the air while Priscilla made the phone call, then he turned, listened intently, and loped off. A moment later, my uncle pulled up in the shop’s meat truck. I stepped into the kitchen and, it so happened, entered at an angle from which I could just see the front door. Priscilla opened it for my uncle, who kissed her with a fast, furtive gesture, locking his hand for a moment in her black curls.

  My uncle was tall and spare, handsome only if you liked thin cheeks and big teeth. He had a protruding Adam’s apple, bulging temples, big ears. I didn’t think he’d be any match for Priscilla’s father. I was sure that their love was doomed, and my uncle was likely to be maimed or killed.

  “Any coffee left?”

  Uncle Jurgen walked into the kitchen, winked at me, then opened the refrigerator, which held half a frosted lemon layer cake. He grinned as Priscilla entered.

  “You’ll have your cake and eat it, too,” she laughed.

  As she cut the cake, she said, teasingly, “Happy birthday to us.” Jurgen reached down to pick up Mitts, who bit his hand. Instead of withdrawing his hand, my uncle stuck his fingers out and flicked her nose. He reached for her again. She bit him. He flicked her nose. This happened one more time, but the fourth time he reached for Mitts she didn’t bite. She allowed him to pick her up and she sat across his thighs as he ate a piece of cake and scratched her long silky ears.

  Uncle Jurgen said that he’d have to spend the rest of the afternoon building the fence higher.

  “You should make sure you’ve got your dog back first,” Priscilla said.

  “Oh, he won’t go far. He’s too hung up on poor Mitts.”

  “Poor Mitts?” I said. “She tried to bite off your fingers!”

  My uncle laughed and held up his hand. His long, thin fingers were heavily callused.

  “Mitts’s teeth can’t dent this hide,” he said. He stroked the dog’s throat, scratched her chin, and made soft clicking noises with his tongue. Mitts looked up at him with wet, adoring eyes.

  Priscilla took his plate to the sink. While her back was turned, Jurgen nudged me and nodded at the door. I went outside to sit on the back porch. They talked low for a while, laughed, and then Uncle Jurgen called out that I could catch a ride back with him. The warm truck smelled of scorched foam rubber, smoked sausages, and stale cigars. On the way, he told me that he had plans to marry Priscilla Gamrod. He’d asked her and she’d said yes.

  “Won’t you have to fight her father?” I asked.

  Jurgen said he wasn’t worried. I was too shy to disagree with an adult out loud, but what muscles my uncle had were thin and ropy. He even had a slight stoop. Mr. Gamrod stood upright as a fireplug, and his muscles were thick and hard.

  At my grandparents’ house, I helped my uncle carry some odds and ends of wood to the backyard so that he could add another foot or so to Nero’s fence. Jurgen stood on top of the stepladder.

  “This is as far as I can work without buying an extension ladder,” he said. “And I’m saving for a ring.”

  The fence was now close to eight feet. When Nero finally turned up, hungry for his supper, I was disappointed that he hadn’t kept on running, found his way up north, and joined a wolf pack.

  A couple of days later, there was an explosion in the bookkeeping office. Not the usual explosion, which was of papers—toppling stacks, tipping files. This explosion involved a lot of shouting and swearing as Mr. Gamrod strode around the counter and into the office, where Priscilla was writing out invoices.

  I was helping my grandmother unpack boxes to restock the cleaning-supply section with glossy cardboard cylinders of Comet and bars of Lava soap. Uncle Jurgen and my grandfather were out on a delivery. When the yelling commenced, my grandmother rushed to the office, slippers flapping, and stood for a moment in the doorway with her hands on her hips.

  “Psia krew!”

  My grandmother was the daughter of a Polish coal miner, and her one curse, rarely uttered, always silenced the Germans.

  Mr. Gamrod held out the wedding-announcement page from the local newspaper. My grandmother took it from him and read it.

  “You coulda told us,” she said to Priscilla, then nodded at Mr. Gamrod. “They coulda told us.”

  Mr. Gamrod, happy to take on her hurt indignation along with his own fury, nodded soberly.

  Suddenly, there were tears in my grandmother’s hard eyes. As we all stood immobilized by those tears, we heard Uncle Jurgen and my grandfather drive to the back entrance. The truck’s motor quit, and there was a slide of suspense. They entered the house and came down the hall talking casually, but when they saw us they stopped.

  My grandmother rammed herself toward Jurgen and pushed the paper into his chest. She continued down the hall without speaking. We heard the door to the sacred bedroom slam, the dead bolt thwock.

  “Well, Mr. Announcement Page,” Gamrod said to Jurgen, rolling up his sleeves. “When’s it going to be?”

  “You’ll fight me first,” my grandfather said. His sleeves were already rolled up and his thick forearms bulged. Everyone knew about his prize wrestling, but also that his heart was weak.

  “If Gamrod needs a fight, I’ll fight,” Jurgen said. He folded his gangly arms, with the cuffs of his blue plaid shirt neatly buttoned. Even I could tell that the statement was made with a certain irony, pointing out the absurdity of Mr. Gamrod’s challenge.

  “Daddy,” Priscilla said. “I could’ve eloped!” She shook her black curls at her father and cradled Mitts, whose eyes rolled toward Jurgen.

  All of a sudden, Nero set up a quavering high howl from the backyard. His howling was a liquid gargle that mesmerized us until my grandmother opened the bedroom door and shouted at me to run out and throw a bucket of water on the damn dog.

  I went into the kitchen and took all the gingersnaps out of the jar. Then I stood in the bac
kyard tossing them to Nero. I ate a couple, too. By the time they were gone, the Gamrods had left and my grandparents and my uncle were sitting in the kitchen, drinking beer and eating slices of summer sausage with dill pickles and rye bread. They were discussing the upcoming fight between Jurgen and Mr. Gamrod. It turned out that they’d agreed to host this fight out in the back field, where there was a sandy spot. They’d meet around dusk. The spectators would bring flashlights. Because the fight was on private property, shielded from the road, it probably wouldn’t draw the police. Something in the calm and even good-natured way they discussed the upcoming battle, their laughter at how Mr. Gamrod had roared in, should have reassured me.

  During my first full year of school, a lyceum show had been held in the school gym. This show, one of many small educational productions that toured our state, had had a powerful impact on me. The subject was dangerous exotic creatures. It was not a slide show or a movie; the performance featured the animals themselves.

  The man who ran the show had a confident air and a polished, domelike head. He was probably called Mr. Johnson, like so many men in the Midwest. He wore a gray three-piece suit and had a young Burmese python draped over his shoulders. He seemed to feed on our shocked murmuring as he proudly carried the patterned bronze loop of muscle to an open blue suitcase. He laid the snake inside and lowered the lid. From another case, he removed a large jar with enough white sand in the bottom to bury a tarantula. Sure enough, when he opened the jar and set it down on its side, an enormous brown spider tiptoed out. Miss Sillet, the fourth-grade teacher, fainted in her chair. None of the children noticed. Mr. Johnson had removed a soft plume from his vest.

  “A feather is the only thing that should ever be used to coax along a tarantula,” Mr. Johnson said. “They do not like to be poked.”

  As he brushed the tarantula along, encouraging it to climb the leg of his pants, he described how tarantulas use their long fangs to inject paralyzing venom into their prey. He explained how this venom liquefied the insides of insects, rodents, even small birds. The spiders sucked out this inner soup, leaving only the creature’s husk. He told us that tarantulas could live to be thirty years old. The spider paused at his belt and then tested the cloth of Mr. Johnson’s sleeve. It continued climbing, with only the lightest touches from the feather, until it was poised on Mr. Johnson’s shoulder. There were gasps as its eerily jointed legs used the tip of Mr. Johnson’s ear to ascend. Once it had reached the top of Mr. Johnson’s head, the tarantula braced its awful legs and lowered its abdomen. There it rested. We were riveted. Mr. Johnson told us that the bite of a tarantula is no more dangerous to a human than a bee sting, but we didn’t believe him. After a few minutes, he slowly tipped his head, signaling to the tarantula that it was time to make its way back down his body to the jar of sand. But just as the tarantula was testing the cuff of his trouser leg all hell broke loose.

  The lid popped up on the blue suitcase. The young snake writhed through the air like living electrical current and connected with Mr. Johnson. The jolt, as it threw its coils around Mr. Johnson’s hips, sent the tarantula spinning like a flailing discus. When the spider hit the ground, it rose to show its fangs and danced aggressively to the front of the stage. In the meantime, Mr. Johnson was trying to stave off the snake’s crushing hug. All this occurred just as his two assistants, plus the janitor and our gym teacher, Miss Oten, were carrying in what was supposed to be the show’s grand finale, the African rock python.

  They were bringing it down the aisle in the longest carrying case I’d ever seen. It was specially made of leather, with mesh windows through which the snake’s mottled bulk could be glimpsed. The front of the case had been opened so that all the children could behold the spectacular somnolent indifference of the python’s face. But we barely noticed it—we were watching Mr. Johnson. His snake had got the wrap on him and was squeezing tighter with every breath. Mr. Johnson had fallen to the stage floor and was kicking the boards resoundingly, with useless desperation, and not even the air to yelp. The tarantula had stopped prancing about on its hind legs and now picked its way down the side of the stage, away from the dangerous vibrations and toward the screaming children. At that point, the four people carrying the long python case dropped it and rushed to the assistance of Mr. Johnson. They vaulted onto the stage and were trying to pry Mr. Johnson free when the python glided into the mob of children.

  Most of us were now standing on our chairs. The cheap tin folding chairs were rickety, and children were crashing to the ground right and left. The teachers didn’t know what to do. They kept picking children up and shoving them toward the doors. One was using a collapsed chair to stave off the tarantula. The python slid among the chair legs, and, as if in a nightmare, I fell right in front of it. I looked straight into its wise, primordial face. Its tongue flickered, sensing the currents of pandemonium, and then the forked tip touched my cheek. That’s all. It did not open its jaws to try to swallow me whole or attempt to squeeze the life out of me first. It moved away. I thought perhaps I would be marked forever with the python’s kiss, but there was no sign of it when I looked in the bathroom mirror. In any case, it was the other snake that dominated my thoughts the night that Uncle Jurgen fought Mr. Gamrod.

  My grandfather drew a ring in the sand, and directed the men with flashlights to position themselves just outside the wide circle. That afternoon, I had gone out to the field and cleared the area of sand pickers. The spectators were mostly in favor of Mr. Gamrod’s showing a certain leniency. There was talk of not being too harsh on the young man, of cutting him up just a bit, of doing only small damage to his face. They were telling Mr. Gamrod to have his fun but not go overboard. Mainly, they were worried that Priscilla would show up.

  Mr. Gamrod divested himself of his shirt. He handed it delicately, by the tip of its collar, to his beer supplier and asked the man to hold it carefully so as not to ruin Priscilla’s starching. Uncle Jurgen was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of old dungarees. Both men went barefoot and gloveless. I thought Jurgen was keeping his T-shirt on so as not to reveal his skinny physique, but it turned out that he had another reason. Mr. Gamrod wanted Jurgen to cry quit, or signal quit if he couldn’t speak. This was supposed to be a fight to submission, although the fact was that it could be stopped at any time by my grandfather. Or if my grandmother were to charge across the field and yell her Polish curse—it would most certainly stop then. So I was allowed to stay. Jurgen had even argued for it. I stood spellbound at my grandfather’s hip.

  Dukes up, head down, Mr. Gamrod advanced. His face darkened as he searched out an opening for the punch he would use to knock Jurgen out. That was the plan I’d heard from Gamrod myself: “I’ll show mercy, all right—one punch should do it.” A shudder rose in me at the look of him with his barbell-trained muscles. He was Mad Dog Vachon—a neckless peg of hairy power. But Jurgen was no Vern Gagne—the straight-arrow champion TV wrestler of those days. He edged out with his fists raised, too, but instead of hopping around he studied Mr. Gamrod with an infuriating professorial air that had no place in the sandy ring. Mr. Gamrod hopped closer; punched the air, as if to test it; then slammed forward to connect with his famous left hook. But Jurgen ducked. In fact, he not only ducked but in a bizarre blur folded his gangly body into a ball, rolled behind Mr. Gamrod, and came back up with an air of calm readiness. Mr. Gamrod whirled, his eyes narrowed, and he charged. Again Jurgen slid from his fists—this time to the far side of the ring. Badapuckpuck! Someone made chicken noises. A smile creased Mr. Gamrod’s face, the flashlights flickered, and I thought my uncle was finished. Mr. Gamrod plunged at Jurgen and managed to grab hold of his T-shirt so that he could punch him. But after a bit of thrashing about, the punches always missing their target, Jurgen was out of the shirt and had neatly wrapped Mr. Gamrod’s arms together with it. Gamrod managed to pull away.

  It was what happened next that brought the Burmese python to mind. Jurgen moved. But to say that he simply moved doesn’t capture it. He move
d the way that that snake had flung itself from the unlatched case. He was one long stream of electric, muscular motion that connected beneath Mr. Gamrod’s fists. A twist of Jurgen’s leg behind Gamrod’s solid calf and the two continued onward, borne down into the sand. Mr. Gamrod was a wrestler also, known for his early years as a champion Greco-Roman grappler on the college circuit. So it was no surprise when he flipped Jurgen onto his back and seemed to pin him down, but as this was not a regular wrestling match, with scorekeeping, Jurgen would have to signal for the match to be over.

  It was over in the minds of most of the flashlight holders. A few yelled out that Jurgen was beat. But my grandfather reminded everyone of the rules. In the meantime, Jurgen had wrapped his legs around the bulging mound of Mr. Gamrod, hooking his ankles into the small of Gamrod’s back. Perhaps Gamrod was feeling claustrophobic. With an enormous groan of effort, he reared back and tried to punch Jurgen in the head, but Jurgen now pressed his legs together even more tightly, pulling Gamrod down again. This time you could see that Gamrod didn’t want to be pulled down. His eyes rolled. He struggled the way Mr. Johnson had struggled. Jurgen’s legs, arms, and feet were constantly maneuvering Mr. Gamrod, squeezing at him, positioning him. I thought of the many animals that Jurgen had subdued. Every time Mr. Gamrod strained against him, Jurgen used that energy to his own advantage. He was exhausting Gamrod, pacifying Gamrod, letting Gamrod know what the animals eventually knew: Jurgen was inevitable. His arms were clasped, tight as a drowning child’s, around Gamrod’s neck. Jurgen’s eyes were clear, dispassionate. He wasn’t breathing hard, though his face was suffused with color. He was simply waiting for Mr. Gamrod’s dizziness to turn into amazement and for Mr. Gamrod to beat his arm on the sand when he understood that his amazement could turn into death.