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

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

  But Ebo had his plans. He understood enlisting meant a free trip to the induction center at Fort DeRussy on O’ahu, an island over. From there, he would travel to basic training on the mainland, to a place he’d never even seen on a map. But that didn’t matter. It was enough to first be sent to O’ahu, to where he could see Momo at the Waimano Home for the Feebleminded. He’d waited nine years to visit; there hadn’t been money for it sooner. What happened to Ebo afterward in Vietnam, he did not have the time to consider. Momo would be fourteen by now.

  * * *

  —

  The newly hatched squabs were the easiest to practice on. Ebo had taken a hammer to the yellow fuzz on their heads. The first squab, he’d struck too hard; the second, not hard enough. With a few other birds, Ebo had tried a sharp knife, but couldn’t get the pressure right, nearly cut them in two. In the end, with the older birds that had been with him some time, Ebo took each one tenderly in his hands, lifted them high above his head, and drove their skulls to pieces against the cement.

  This was the way Ebo would kill his last bird too. Better to do it now in the dull gray light of early morning than the less forgiving blare of later. He moved soundlessly through the bedroom and into the darkened hallway. He sidled past his mother’s room, timing each footstep with the click of the Westinghouse fan. In the living room, he saw Daddy sleeping on the couch with an arm draped over his head and one leg bent to the carpeted floor. Though he didn’t need to—Daddy was hard of hearing—Ebo eased the screen door against its latch.

  The low-slung moon was a chalky thumbprint in the sky. Ebo crossed his arms against the cool and turned by degrees to all that its sheer light touched around him. Happy Valley, he knew, was nothing more than the skin between the knuckled ridges of the West Maui Mountains. Only a smattering of houses crawled up its slopes, none of them much to look at. His feet found those few patches of grass to step on as he moved through the backyard. He dipped his head beneath the boughs of plumeria, heavy with flower, and knew where crab spiders predictably spun their webs. He could guess the size and heft of the gecko that clicked its tongue into the darkness. Big buggah, he thought.

  The coop was a mishmash of materials, built piecemeal with tin and scrap metal, spare plywood and chicken wire. It sat at the back of the yard on cinder blocks two feet off the ground with mounds of pigeon kaka beneath it. The landing jutted out from the roof to make the coop appear as if it leaned. The door itself was just two pieces of discarded mesh screen that Ebo had sewn together by hand.

  Next to the coop was a shallow sandbox that had been Momo’s playpen. Now it was where fifteen dead pigeons were buried. To ward off critters and stench, Ebo had placed a plank of plywood over its opening with a hollow tile brick on top for good measure. There was just the business of the final bird and then it would be a grave.

  He sat on his heels and plugged his fingers through the chicken wire of the coop, looking for that bird now. In earlier years, it had roosted on a high post with its head tucked into its plumped body, its eyes slivered in half sleep. But recently, with age, the bird had lost the battle for a perch and lived with the weakest as puffed dots about the wire floor. And there the bird was now, still responding to pecking order, though the others were dead.

  Ebo unlatched the eye hook and dipped through the door, startling the bird into winging itself backward, making little wafts of wind. Ebo called to it softly—pssssh, pssssh, pssssh—before swiping at it with trained hands, as was routine. He held the bird to his midsection, felt its heart like a tiny machine. He fanned the bird’s wings, one after the other, to check its feathers for lice. He then held the bird up to one side and peered into its ball-bearing eye flitting in its stitch of a socket, remembering only then that his purpose was to extinguish its tiny light.

  As he exited the coop, the screen door slapped against its frame as if to call Ebo awake to the yard, already flushed with sunshine. His dawdling had cost him the gray curtain of early morning that, now lifted, revealed a world vivid with color. The killing of his bird would need to be done in clear view, without ceremony or sentiment.

  Ebo stationed himself at the slab of concrete between the house and carport, widening his stance to be sure of his footing. He knew from practice to not hold back, to put his whole body into the effort. Allowing himself any fear or pity would result in pain for the bird, a dragging out of its death. The bird was just a steady heartbeat in his hands, bred for calmness, known for being trusting. With both hands, Ebo raised it high above him. He tightened his grip, working his fingers into the bird’s soft give, and still, it did not struggle. He then raised himself to his toes and hesitated by telling himself not to hesitate. He reached higher, the highest he could go, and one by one, loosened his fingers as if to release the bird to the immense sky it belonged to, the sky it now climbed.

  * * *

  —

  Long before any birds, it was just Ebo and his mother on their own. People had clucked their tongues in disapproval, but Ebo never minded. He had no father, but he had everything in a mother. Her hips were fuller then, more inviting, and little Ebo, wanting to be close, always had a fistful of her dress. He had seen how others watched her mouth as she spoke, her lipstick perfectly applied. He had seen this in the man his mother brought home when he was five, the man who flicked a Primo beer bottle cap at him and he happened to catch it. The man had winked, smiling so big his cheeks rounded into two mountain apples. By the time Ebo learned to call this man Daddy, there was another child, a girl they called Momo, and buckets full of bottle caps.

  All these years, they lived quietly across the street from Tasty Crust, the diner Ebo had been frequenting since small-kid time. This morning, he would go for his usual breakfast. But unlike most mornings, he would need to say good-bye. He breathed in the cool morning air with the heat just beneath it. Seeing no cars, he still skipped to a jog when crossing Mill Street, his rubber slippers slap-slapping like fat rain against the pavement. When he got to the other side, he turned to look at his house against the West Maui Mountains, the mountains against the blue-gray morning. It was unremarkable, his house. Walls of thin plywood held up a corrugated tin roof that had rust in the dips of its grooves. The carport sheltered a dead Ford on cinder blocks. Clothes hung on a sagging line and brushed against the Ford’s dusty hood so that the hems of Daddy’s work shirts were never entirely clean. This is what Ebo would leave behind and what he would take with him like a picture in his pocket.

  He walked into the sticky warmth of Tasty Crust, where the old-timers were at their usual stools, living out the best part of their day, the part that was spent in the company of others. They’d each brought their copy of The Maui News, though they’d read it through at home. This morning, they wore Aloha shirts and their veteran caps and pins. They’d done this, marked their calendars even, for Ebo, who had enlisted as they did for their wars.

  “Howzit, young man!” said Flora, the waitress who spoke for everyone.

  Ebo smiled, sat on a stool at the counter. Flora set down a mug of coffee, pivoted her body like a sprinkler as she wiped the counter. Her hair, a manapua bun sitting plump on the curve of her head, had never been let down, the coif of her fringe sprayed stiff for years. She had never been anything else, which was a comfort.

  “Big day today,” she said, as much to the counter as to Ebo. “We is proud of you, young man, I can tell you dat. You go get’m and say you is born and raised Happy Valley. We make’m good in Happy Valley.”

  An old-timer slapped a hand to a thigh. “I remembah when you was one small buggah, legs danglin from duh chair,” he said. “Hooooo-eeee! You was one cute buggah. But some rascal, you!” Small laughter then; the others remembered young Ebo too. To this, Ebo dipped his head low, nodding, shielding himself from the gleam of attention.

  “Time fo kau kau!” said Flora, setting before Ebo a plate of hotcakes with an ice cream scoop’s worth of butter on
top. It had been some time since Ebo’s mother had been there to stab at the butter with her fork and paint circles on his stack, then her own. Back then, she’d drizzle syrup too, when Ebo would say, at whatever age, “Ma, I get’m.” After Momo came along, his mother didn’t have time for Tasty Crust, for their early-morning breakfasts. After Momo, she stopped being just his.

  But Ebo understood. Even as a baby, Momo had been generous, smiling wide when spoken to, as if she had been born to give. Neighbors would wiggle a finger at her and she’d take it, holding their gaze. So smaht, they’d say, noting her dark irises, how they shone especially large and nearly covered the whites of her eyes. Her fine blue-black hair swirled into a single giri giri atop her head, a sign she would never be cause for trouble. But mostly she was a mirror for their mother, who looked at her baby girl to see her joy.

  No one noticed young Ebo alone. By the time he was nine and Momo nearly five, he preferred the mountains of ‘Iao Valley to the tedium of school, passing his days by the river skipping rocks, catching guppies, doing nothing. He quickly learned the word truancy. His mother’s rice paddle had no effect and Daddy had said, Not my kid. When Ebo was held back a year, people just shook their heads, thinking him a good-for-nothing kolohe. But he’d proved himself good for enlisting—something to do, a way to be gone.

  After clearing his plate, Ebo dipped his hand into his shorts pocket to pay. Flora, ever watchful, said, “Dis one on me, soljah boy.” Her inflections and movements were a conductor’s wand to a stand, orchestrating the old-timers so they knew to rise with Ebo and to salute him. To this, Ebo extended his hand to each of them as the other diners watched in silence. The cooks turned down the radio in the kitchen and peered through their cutout window fringed with open tickets. All the while, Flora kept to her work, wiping the counter where Ebo had just been.

  * * *

  —

  Happy Valley by then was pulsing with moderate activity. The morning sun had risen to a low perch in a cloudless sky, emanating its white light as a softness on Ebo’s skin. He stood at the edge of Mill Street again, scanning the blue brightness for his bird beneath the visor of his hands.

  A Buick sounded its horn in two successive beeps, sending Ebo back a step. As the Buick coasted by, the driver threw Ebo a left-handed shaka out the window. “A hui hou!” said the driver, to say Until we meet again. Ebo’s head tilted back with a smile to acknowledge the driver, a smile that was gone by the time he crossed the street. Soon Ebo would not be so known, something he had wanted for years.

  Back at the house, his mother stood at the stove working a pan. Eggshells were halved, two Vienna sausage cans curled open, everything crackling with oil and heat. Daddy was still on the couch with a pillow pressed to his face. Ebo stood there watching the house as it would be without him in it.

  One hand to hip, his mother was in her usual meal-making stance: her weight shifted left and her right foot touching down to the linoleum by just a toe. Her National Dollar dress hung on her too-thin frame like drapery, as if there might not be anything behind it. To Ebo, she was the size of a child, but she was not new like a child. Her hair had lost its luster and could no longer hold color, had given in to a blank and lifeless gray. Her gaze avoided most living things and was too often fixed to the floor. She was a woman afraid of loss so that she was first afraid of life.

  Even when they were a family of four, and then three, there were only ever two chairs. As she plunked down on one now, his mother’s movements quickened. Not a minute passed before she turned to Ebo with a plate of food in hand and set it before him at the two-person table.

  “You hungry?” she asked.

  “Nah,” said Ebo, “I pau eat.”

  “No, you—eat.”

  She darted back and forth, bringing him a pair of chopsticks, a glass of milk, as though he were just a boy and not a young man of nineteen, all lean muscle and strength. But because he was her son, he was a boy still. And because he was leaving home that day, she stopped fussing about the kitchen and sat down opposite him. The only other time he could remember his mother sitting like this was the day she made that call about his first pigeon.

  That afternoon, she’d sat Ebo down and told him to sit still, which made him squirm. He had wanted to go play, but she shushed him, said to listen. She picked up the receiver of the rotary phone, as gleaming black as her hair was then. The dial turned and stuttered, turned and stuttered, and by the time she spoke, two warm hands had suctioned to Ebo’s eyes. He loosed himself free to face Momo, whose smile was shy one tooth. He flicked her forehead and called her puka mout to make fun, but she only smiled wider, which made them both laugh. Snapping her fingers to quiet them, their mother spoke a final few words into the phone. “Yes. Can.” She hung up smiling, something she didn’t hide then. She said, “What you tink, Ebo, you like birds?” Ebo had never been asked what he thought and looked to Momo for how he should feel. Momo beamed as if giving to Ebo was giving to her. She flitted across the kitchen floor on her toes and flapped her arms like wings. Over and over she said, “Happy Ebo! Happy Ebo!” and he knew then he’d been given a gift.

  * * *

  —

  Ebo washed the dishes for his mother, the only thing he could think to do for her. At the sink, he watched his coop through the screen window, waiting for his bird, always the last to finish circling. When it finally descended, Ebo turned off the water to see it skitter back and forth along the length of the landing. He knew the bird needed food—it was long past the hour when it was usually fed. But Ebo knew he shouldn’t feed what he would soon kill, something he’d allowed himself to be distracted from doing.

  He reasoned with himself. Better to give the bird a little more time in the sun while he packed, was his thinking. He calculated the hours he had left before his ride to the airport arrived and went about gathering his few toiletries in the bathroom. There really wasn’t much he needed where he was going, all of it amounting to the knapsack he’d had since grade school, the one with the busted zipper. He went to retrieve it from his bedroom closet and found it laid out on his futon instead. Even more startling was a shirt folded neatly and, next to it, a pair of shoes. Ebo kneeled down to these things, astonished they were there and that they were his. He pressed a finger to one milky-white button in a long line of them. He lifted a shoe to his nose to breathe in the leather, put the tip of his tongue to the heel. He’d never had anything new before, let alone anything with buttons or laces. How his mother had fixed the zipper on his knapsack, he didn’t know. How she’d found the money for these things was even more of a mystery. All he knew was that this was his mother’s way: to give all she could, and when there was nothing left, to give her very will.

  Once she had secured Ebo’s first pigeon with the breeder, the bird soon posed another problem for his mother—it needed a loft. For two weeks, she had pressed Daddy to build one, but he’d only shaken his head at the expense, though it was the effort he wouldn’t give. When she made up her mind to build one herself, she made her way on foot to the junkyard, with Ebo and Momo trailing. There she selected wood panels either discarded as excess or abandoned as trash. Ebo found a large piece of chicken wire curled around a tire, which he worked hard to unfurl. All the while, Momo picked through the dirt for nails, examining each one closely, speaking aloud what she discovered. “You good for Ebo,” or, “You no good. Not for my Ebo.” The usable few she clenched in one hand, as if Ebo’s happiness was something she could hold and keep safe.

  That his mother and sister did this on his behalf was almost enough for Ebo. All of the fuss was just for him—he didn’t need more. The small makeshift coop they built, however shoddy, was entirely his. With the little coop, he started to believe. He believed in the promise of this pigeon and he believed Daddy might be pleased, maybe even impressed, with their handiwork.

  When Daddy’s ride dropped him home from work that evening, Ebo and Momo hu
rried to the jalousie window in the bathroom to watch him discover what they’d built. He nearly missed it, but then he didn’t. Setting down his lunch pail and water jug, he crouched low to examine the structure. When he began to circle it, sizing it up, Momo pressed her head to Ebo’s shoulder. Ebo felt her flinch when Daddy kicked the heel of his foot into the coop so that the sorry thing folded into itself and fell. Daddy used both his feet to further trample what they’d built, until there was no trace of their efforts in the tangle that remained.

  Chest heaving, Daddy snapped open a folded lawn chair and set it down facing the pile of wood and wire. Ebo stared hard at Daddy sitting there, one knee bouncing wildly. By that evening hour, with everything on its way to darkness, Daddy appeared a darker shadow. But then movement caught Ebo’s eye. Momo was no longer next to him—she was in the carport. She walked toward Daddy so slowly her dress barely moved at her knees. Her hands were cupped protectively in front of her, as if in prayer. When she stood before Daddy, she splayed open her hands from prayer to sacrifice. Daddy glanced at her offering, which Ebo knew was a Lucky Strike. Daddy looked at his child, who was every inch his, and scooped her onto his lap. They stayed that way awhile, long enough for Ebo’s mother to flick on the overhead light and see what had happened, long enough for Momo to begin picking through the dirt again for nails and for Daddy to help.

  * * *

  —

  Now, whenever Ebo looked for Daddy, Ebo knew to look there, in the carport, where Daddy smoked on the bench seat of the dead Ford. Daddy had had the bench seat removed from the car years ago, after Momo was sent away, after he’d injured his back at work and could no longer sit down in a lawn chair.