The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019)

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2019 (retail) (epub)

  In the hour that remained before the dinner shift, we insisted on parading it around town, and on the walk we shared the cage between us, each of us nervously holding it by the tips of our fingers. And though it was obvious, by appearance alone, that the bird was no relation to a parrot, when my mother set its cage down on my bed that night she attempted to teach it phrases, as though the bird were capable of repeating them back to her. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. The bird stared out at both of us. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she repeated again, forcefully. The bird was silent.

  I yelled, “I really, really, really have to go to the bathroom!”

  I had been planning to name the bird the next morning, but I woke up to find that it had escaped from its cage and was lying in a wreath of its own feathers on the floor.

  Julen and I were the ones to bury the bird, because my mother had to stay at the tavern for work. We wandered the town for a little, looking for the right place to perform a burial, but in the end we decided not to bury it at all, and instead to leave it in the dumpster behind the cobbler’s shop. Julen swaddled the bird in discarded leather clippings.

  We felt silly for having brought the bird over in its birdcage when afterward we were left carrying the empty cage back across town.

  * * *

  —

  My brother left us, six months into our time at the tavern, for an apprenticeship at a tailor’s shop in downtown Bilbao. He had been looking for a full-time job for weeks, and while he could have easily picked one up at the tavern, he didn’t.

  We all mourned his absence in different ways. The bottom fell out of my mother’s jokes; she could never be properly funny after that. My father took to doubling up on Basque lessons with Mr. Ibarra. I started hanging around with the Maites until two or three in the morning, thinking of them, increasingly, as my own siblings. Maybe it was true that we had all spun out of orbit. Or maybe Julen had, and we, in the aftermath, each used it as an excuse to drift a little farther out.

  A little after Julen left, I started going to the clandestine Basque-language school that Maite and her friends attended. Mr. Ibarra had signed me up, and he was the one who drove me there on my first day. The school was housed inside an old textile factory off of a road just outside of town. Its sheet-metal sides had rusted to the shade of dirt, and on the outside it bore no markings.

  Inside, Mr. Ibarra led me through a hall of makeshift classrooms to a class of students who looked at least two years younger than me. I left the building during our break for lunch and stood out on the barren grass behind the school; I had thought I would need the time to cry, but I waited for a while, and it turned out that I didn’t. At one point a rush of birds burst across the sky and I watched them near each other, then separate in turns. I only remembered my own dead bird once they had all passed, and though I had never seen it fly, I imagined it dipping drunkenly around them, and the thought became hysterical to me. I actually stood out there and began to laugh.

  Later, when I returned to the building, I saw a flash of Maite going up the stairs between class sessions, and I realized that she hadn’t been in the car that morning, when Mr. Ibarra had driven me to school.

  Initially I was furious with Mr. Ibarra for having placed me in a class of fifth graders, but within a few months, without my even realizing it, my Basque flowered. At some point I understood the majority of what the Maites fired back and forth between each other, and I began to chime in in little ways: “You’re right, he’s a turd!” or, “Pass me a cigarette,” or even just, “Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Yes—totally.”

  I don’t even remember when I finally moved from the back steps to the alley with the rest of them; it happened seamlessly. I didn’t try any seductive poses, but I did note my own pooling flesh upon the cobblestones and the growing downhill tow on different parts of my body over the course of the nights that we spent there.

  The other barman at the tavern took over Julen’s old shifts, and he always joined us outside when we all got off work. His name was Gabriel, and he was immensely skinny, almost a ghost of a boy. If you didn’t know him, you could honestly confuse him and his chaste shyness for a sort of specter, haunting a place.

  But he was also nice to me. Out in the alley, we spoke to each other in slow sentences. The Maites lounged all around us and we carved a void in the flood of their ceaseless chatter. When he talked, I could see through his skin to each muscle in his face at work. When he listened, the dormant muscles sometimes spasmed at random, revealing the places where they lay temporarily hidden.

  No one had warned me that we were going to leave the alley on the night that we did. I was the last one cleaning up in the kitchen, and when I finally came out back I found a pool of a people milling in front of the stoop. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that the full assortment of Maites was there—girls who had worked only one or two other shifts with me, whose faces still stood out as foreign.

  The real Maite and one of her friends hovered at the top of the hill, detached from the group, and when they saw me shut the door to the kitchen, they began walking, and the rest of us followed them up and out of the alley. We turned left onto the broad central avenue, the closed storefronts appearing somehow naked and indecent, and then at the end of the avenue, where the street forked, Maite took us down the narrower of the two branches until it went all the way out of town. Somewhere, in one of those early chasms that stretched between the buildings, where the stone façades buckled into sky and weeds, Gabriel found his way to my side. I had already asked the girl nearest to me where we were going but I hadn’t understood her answer.

  “The quarry,” Gabriel said. I shook my head. “The quarry—like the place where they dig for rocks.”

  “Oh.”

  He told me about the strange rock they had discovered when they first began digging outside of our town. He described it like the inside of a raw piece of meat: blood red, roped with streaks of white.

  “Ew,” I said.

  “No,” Gabriel continued, “it’s beautiful. Everyone thinks so. It was so popular that they over-drilled the quarry. They went down too deep one day and hit a water supply. Within hours the whole thing had filled up.” He pantomimed water rising. The outline of his hands stood barely apart from the slate-colored clouds passing over us.

  At some point after that, I drifted from Gabriel. The road declined, and we sank down the mountain. Somehow I emerged at the helm. I still remember the view from below, as the Maites descended the road behind me, the whole group of them dispersed up the hill. I still remember the drone of the car engine approaching the sharp bend ahead, and its swinging headlights as it came upon us, and even after the real Maite yelled move, back to her friends, I remember the light striking their white summer clothes and their clearing the street idly while the car sat there, stranded. Still, I can’t decide if, caught in the sweep of the beams, the girls appeared as criminals unmasked or if the swing of their skirts as they left the road made them look instead like a suite of doves disbanding.

  At the quarry, everyone stripped down to their underclothes, and our shirts and pants and dresses lay heaped in piles upon the lip of sand. At the far end of the swimming hole, a wall of stone stretched high up into the sky. It was impossible, in the dark, to tell whether or not it was red.

  I went into the water with everyone else, but it was cold, and it dropped off quickly. When I saw the point of someone’s cigarette light up somewhere along the sand, I swam back to join them. One of Maite’s friends nodded to me and exhaled as I settled down beside her. We lounged alongside each other for a while, then she asked, “How deep do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It drops off fast.” She was silent. “Have you been in?”

  Out in the swimming hole, orphaned heads skimmed the water’s surface. I’m sure that they were talking to each other, or
else they were probably laughing about something, but in my memory the menace of the stone wall above them canceled all their sound.

  “Twenty-five meters,” she said. She tapped the tip of her cigarette against a rock. “That’s how far down they drilled before they hit the water.” When she brought the cigarette back to her mouth she looked at me for a brief moment, and she said, “No. I never go in.”

  Eventually other bodies surfaced and joined us up on the lip. “Hey,” Maite’s friend whispered. She nudged me, then motioned toward Gabriel splayed out upon the sand in his boxers. “Are you guys going to kiss or fuck or what?”

  I fake-slapped her like we were real friends.

  “Okay, I’m just joking,” she said. “You’re too young to fuck, but what are you going to do? You like him, right?”

  I shrugged. Stretched out and bent at odd angles, Gabriel’s spidery legs glowed.

  “You like him.” She was talking louder now. “So go do something, don’t waste your chance. There are some trees over there.” She gestured somewhere behind us. Gabriel had obviously heard her, and he looked over.

  “Look.” She grabbed one of my shoulders and pointed to him. “He wants to go off with you, too.” Gabriel had already gotten up and started loping over when she called out to him, “You want to, don’t you?” In response, sweet, spindly Gabriel said nothing. He just continued nearing, the whole time smiling at both of us.

  He led me into the trees, and we stumbled through branches for a couple of minutes until we could barely make out the edge of the quarry. When I strained my eyes I could just see the tip of the girl’s cigarette flying about in the air. Gabriel put his back to a tree and stared at me affectionately. I realized how little I really knew him.

  “Come closer.” He grasped my arms. He whispered, “What do you want me to do?”

  I don’t know how else to explain it: the question struck some sort of dormant reflex. I answered instinctively, as though I had always planned to say to him, “I want you to speak Spanish to me.”

  He was silent. In the dark, I watched the familiar tremor of his muscles. Eventually he tried, “Así?” Like this? I nodded, and signaled for him to keep going.

  “What do I say?” he asked, in Basque. I shrugged. Tears were already welling in my eyes. I waved my arms, to say continue.

  It’s not important what he said in the forest behind the quarry, whatever stories he told with poise and animation almost embarrassing to witness. I couldn’t tell you what he said because I didn’t even register the words as he spoke them. When he was several sentences in, I dropped to my knees, and listened to him like a child. I may have started crying when I heard the word cucharilla, unless it was instead caserío that began the flood. At one point, I may even have laid myself totally and completely upon the ground.

  When we emerged from the trees, the Maites were all collecting their clothes and getting ready to leave. On part of the walk home, Gabriel’s clammy hand held the tips of my fingers, but at some point he let go. When we reached the tavern, I slid inside without saying good night to him, and I felt no remorse for allowing him to walk alone to the far reaches of town. Upstairs, I tried to recover the words he had spoken, and that was when I realized I had never really heard them. I had listened only for their rhythm, for the shallow aesthetics of them, and alone in my room I had nothing to hold on to except for the fading memory of their sound.

  * * *

  —

  After our visit to the quarry, Gabriel began leaving me little presents around the tavern. I wasn’t purposely avoiding him, but I wasn’t spending my nights out in the alleyway either. When I heard him go down to the basement to restock the liquor cabinet at the end of our shift, I would dart past the bar and up the stairs to my room.

  First, he left me a bag of almond cookies that his mother had made, my name written in careful, feminine handwriting across the front. I discovered them sitting on one of the empty tables in the dining room on my way to the stairs. Sometime later I found a silver bracelet on the corner of the counter where I normally helped with prep work in the kitchen. There was no note, but I was fairly sure that I knew who had left it; a bracelet had been found on the floor of the dining room the day before. The next week I received a random assortment of glass beads, then a collection of tea bags, a patterned matchbook, a pile of loose stamps.

  One Sunday afternoon, when my parents were downstairs in their usual lesson with Mr. Ibarra, Gabriel knocked on the door to my room.

  “Ana,” he called. “I know that I’m annoying you, but please let me give you one last thing.”

  I hadn’t expected to feel nervous around him, but when he stood there before me I saw him again in his boxers, me again, in my underwear, on the ground. He apologized for his other gifts, and I told him not to be stupid, that they were very nice. He said no, they weren’t right. What he should have given me from the beginning was this: he produced a small, used radio from his bag.

  “So that we can listen together,” he said. “In Spanish.”

  The radio wasn’t the same model as my father’s. In fact, it looked totally different, but it prompted my first thought of that original radio in more than a year. I got caught up in assessing how each of its individual features compared to the original, whose body, I only realized then, I had committed to memory. When I didn’t respond, Gabriel said, “Spanish, remember?” His face thawed into that same, timid smile. “It’s sort of…our thing.”

  I knew that I was being mean when I took the radio from Gabriel, thanked him, and told him that I couldn’t listen that afternoon. I was sorry for a moment, when I closed the door on his sinking face, but there was nothing else I could do. When I set the radio on my bed, the hefty mechanical weight of it sank into the mattress and sprouted a crown of pleats in the covers. The whole time, I thought, that was how easy it could have been: I could have nudged the needle past the covert station that broadcast in Basque, and I could have found Spanish waiting there on any channel.

  I thought then that if time were as flexible as it was in my mind, I would have done it all over again. I would have pulled a pair of my father’s shoes from my parents’ closet, while they remained in the dining room downstairs, cycling through their slow-growing vocabulary and diligently practicing the construction of conditional clauses. I would have put the radio on the bed, put my head on those shoes, and listened for hours. And if I really arranged it all right, maybe the year would have bent back on itself, and delivered me back to the kitchen in our old farmhouse, and maybe my father would be there, waving around his arms, saying, “We will all forget about Basque, is that clear?”

  Maybe my brother would be there too, coming in through the back door, his arms wound around a tangle of sheets and a comforter. Maybe they came straight from the clothesline, clean from my mother’s scrubbing, dry from a night suspended in the mid-August air.

  Rachel Kondo

  Girl of Few Seasons

  THE NIGHT BEFORE he left for basic training, Ebo had one last pigeon to kill—a cream barred homer from the old line of Stichelbaut. The bird was from a long strain of impressive racers, a gift from his mother when he was nine years old. Ebo had put off killing this bird, his favorite, by killing all the others first: one, sometimes two, a day. It had to be done. The birds would not stay away from their coop and his leaving home meant there would be no one to care for them. Not his mother; not Daddy, who wasn’t his father; and especially not his younger sister, Momoyo, who was a ward of the state. Momo would have if she could.

  Ebo lay awake on his futon with his ankles crossed and one arm crooked behind his head, so still he could see the moonlight shifting about him. Even the water stain on the ceiling felt like something new to see, as if the old blight was now a bloom. In a matter of hours, Ebo would be a soldier, though he hadn’t much considered it. He was thinking of Momo, her absence his con
stant companion.

  As children, on a night like this, they’d creep through the house and out the door. The Buddhist temple wasn’t far, just down the street. There, a half circle of taiko drummers practiced their beats. They were bare-chested men with strips of braided cloth tied around their heads. They struck the drum skins with such force sweat leaped from their bodies in an upward rain. Momo’s delight always found expression. She would throw her arms wide and bend her knees, the rhythm moving through her like a small-lipped wave. Her eyes would close, her mouth rounded to a little plum seed. Her face would cant to the moon as if its meager light was warm like the sun—something Ebo could see, but not feel himself.

  Now what he could feel, he could not see—these memories of his sister, each a smooth river stone set to his naked chest. Ebo shifted on his futon and tried to bring his hand to the heaviness, but the arm behind his head was numb. He waited for life to return to it as the darkness began to lift. It was no longer late, but early.

  * * *

  —

  For some, the Vietnam War was about moral duty. For others, it was a son grown too fast and gone. But for Ebo, the war was not about anything, not even killing or dying. He thought Vietnam might be like Maui, a place too quiet for fear. He thought the war might be a nameless river flowing strong after a heavy rain. If he let it, the war would take him away from Happy Valley to places he’d never been.

  The United States Army had deemed him private E-1, a ranking so low it didn’t even warrant insignia. Those people who knew Ebo thought his graduating from high school a minor miracle; that he’d languished for ten months without a job was no surprise. When word of his enlistment got around, they figured the army would give him a haircut, a uniform, something decent to do.