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

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The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019) Page 24

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


  I see Mesut come away from the mouth of the mine and run to him. His face is black and he doesn’t recognize me. Behind me people start running for things, for shovels, for carts, for oxygen tanks, for picks, for stretchers, for a defibrillator, but we don’t know what we’re doing, we don’t know what’s going on.

  Exasperated, Mesut shouts for help, shouts that the slope to the mine is blocked by boulders and soil. I follow him back down the ramp to the shaft elevator, my arms swinging wildly as I try to keep up. The keys to his dad’s car must be in his pocket. People swarm around us, with buckets, with handcarts, with helmets, with outstretched shirts in vise-fingers. Others shovel rubble and dirt into every cart, every helmet, every palm to be carried away, up the tracks and into the sun. Everyone is shouting, cutting at the great barrier of earth between us and the shaft elevator with frenzied limbs. A scream of sirens, and the crowd breaks for a line of ambulances and the police chief’s car. Mesut is throwing boulders large as my torso into carts, up and down, up and down, like a piston. I’m bobbing my head up and down beside him, screaming that there’s no time to waste, there’s no time for digging. There’s a race up the coast, there’s a race we must get to.

  “Grab a shovel,” he says between grunts, between heaves.

  “Can I take the car?” I ask, because what else am I going to do? It’s all set, it’s my life at stake too.

  He doesn’t hear me. He shoves his fingers into the soil and unearths rock after rock like potatoes plucked for boiling.

  “Do you have the keys?”

  Mesut looks at me, confused. He keeps digging with his hands. He doesn’t say anything. He scratches at the black soil with callused fingertips. He’s bleeding from a few cuts on his arms, between his fingers. There are hundreds of people now, a number of trucks with emergency lights, a bulldozer, an excavator, a dump truck. More people arrive, some with pots to help scoop dirt. No one’s crying yet. I notice it, that no one’s crying yet.

  “Can I take the car?”

  Mesut throws a stone back into the rubble. Screaming, he grabs me by the shoulders and shoves me into the pile. He yells to get a fucking shovel, to start digging. With difficulty I pull myself up from the rubble and rocks, a stray point knocking me in the spine, and then there is Mesut’s fist, fast and fleshy, striking me squarely in the jaw. I can’t see for a moment in my right eye, the way the sight goes when I am swimming too long underwater. There’s a pounding moving from the exploded capillaries of my face, through my jaw and temples to my ears. Mesut is on top of me as my sight comes back, his dirt-caked face shouting at me through the fizzling little dots on my peripheries. I grab at his collar, I try pulling him to the side, but he’s bigger than me, pushing my chest into the dirt, shoving my head back so that I can feel the soil spill down my forehead. Desperate, I kick him off. No one around us seems to care. They are all singularly busy in their efforts to remove the rubble.

  Mesut drags me off the pile and onto the cart tracks. He throws the keys to his dad’s car at me and goes back to ripping at the rocks with his fingers. All around people are tearing into the mine. But I’m already packed, I’m already enrolled. I go to the car and drive away, north through the stalks of windmills. I listen the whole way for another explosion. I leave the radio off, and for the four-hour drive I listen carefully for another explosion, promising myself that if it gets worse I will turn back, but the four hours don’t take long, not really, and I’m in Çanakkale, with a view of the Dardanelles from a square window in the hostel. There’s an Australian named Bruce in the bunk next to me who asks me if I’m excited for the race tomorrow, who asks me if I got that bruise on my face from swimming.

  I don’t say anything, not to him or anyone else while I lie in my bed until morning, thinking about the route I must take to cross the channel, thinking about the landmarks I will use for bearings, timing out my breathing with imaginary strokes. In the morning, I have a small breakfast very early and ride the ferry to the other side of the Dardanelles. I sign in and look around the beach for a good spot to start from. The water is choppy. It will be difficult to navigate. Where the strait begins to narrow, near Çanakkale, it is only a kilometer and a half wide. The current there is inexorable. I set up at the north end of the beach, go as far as I can, an extra two or three hundred meters up from most of the other swimmers, all in their Speedos and caps and goggles, lubing themselves with Vaseline, slapping their muscles and shaking their limbs. I’ve done my preparations in the hostel. I don’t like this bit of showmanship beforehand. The novices take places as far south as they can squeeze, as close to the first marker as possible, without room to maneuver with the current. The man next to me is very old for this race, beside him is a woman a few years older. They are married and from Liverpool. I ask what it is they are putting in their mouths. Salt tablets, they say, they are good for preventing cramps. They give me some. I take them with water and start up with my little ritual of splashing water from the sea on my forearms, shins, thighs, chest.

  There’s a starter’s pistol, but we don’t hear it this far away, in this much wind. We take the cue of the hundreds of bodies diving into the water, cutting at it with frenzied limbs, violent lungs, combustion engines inside thoracic cavities. I dive in and aim directly across, aim straight for Asia though the finish line is a few kilometers down, past Çanakkale. It takes some time to escape the breakers, and I haven’t paced myself well, but soon enough I am out striding through the open water, I am beyond the sounds of shore, I am above a blur, a void, an ineffable divide. When I take a breath, I adjust my line. While I stroke, I gaze below me, watching the bottom until it dissolves behind the opacity of depth. But it is an illusion, the bottom is only a hundred meters at its deepest. There are men trapped now in a tunnel over two thousand meters underground, and their lungs must be deflated balloons.

  Most of the swimmers, especially those that started farthest south, are taken by the current of the water emptying into the Aegean. They broke too late, their lines too direct. They will not make it across. I make my turn and let the water carry me. In a long sweep I’ve aimed for the beach like a celestial body exiting orbit. There are a number of other racers who have done the same as me, there are a good number of them. But I am fast, I am calm, and I scrape at the crest of the water, I grip and tear and cut through it. Past the narrow I don’t bother looking around me, I don’t worry for nearby kicks or slaps. I don’t bother opening my eyes beneath the waves. I look only during breaths, I look only at the expanse of blue above—I think only of my breaths, conscious, measured like the breaths of men who must worry over the factor of oxygen. I am not any distance above or below; my elevation is zero. I am on the flat of the earth. Every few strokes, as I turn my head, there is the boom against my eardrum from the breeze. I listen below me, I listen for explosions in the earth but can’t hear anything over the slap and kick of a thousand hands and feet.

  I ride the breakers to shore. A man takes a picture from the beach as I slip through the glinting surf. I can taste the salt in my smile. My back is burned from the sun and the iodine. There are others in the water, the other swimmers. I am the only one on land, and my body feels heavy, the fibers of my muscles drip from my skeleton under the pressure of gravity.

  Before my feet have a chance to cake with sand, a committee brings me a ribbon and a bottle of liquor. I ask for water and let someone drive me back to my room in Çanakkale, where I pack my things and send a text to my mother telling her I’ll be back after dinner.

  But when I get back no one will ask me about what I’ve done here, what it means for me. Will they think me vile? When I pull the car back into Mesut’s shed, I check his house but no one is home. It’s evening, the sun is an orange radiance spread just below the mountaintops. I walk through an empty village, my hand out, reaching for the sides of houses, brushing them with fingertips until I’m outside my own home. I walk up to my room. No one is here. Lights are
not coming on in the other houses. I fall asleep and don’t wake up until a truck honks in the street the next morning.

  A procession of black cars curves around the truck, on their way to the square not far from Mesut’s house. I splash my face with water from the tap and look for my parents. They are out somewhere. Maybe at the mine. Outside, I follow a small group of people walking after the procession of cars. I ask them if they have any news. If there’s anyone still underground.

  “They aren’t sure if anyone’s still alive. Already they’ve hauled fifty bodies.”

  “How are they breathing? How are they breathing that deep?” I ask.

  A machine is still pumping air down the shaft like a large snorkel, the few miners left alive are struggling to sip from it. They are stuck, trapped, some with bodies broken in a dozen places they tell me. They’ve pulled a few survivors from the mine, in a trickle are the miners, surfacing.

  “Is it a funeral?” I ask about the cars.

  President Erdoğan is visiting. He’s speaking in front of the old bey’s mansion. In the square, usually so stuffed with döner vendors and coffee drinkers, are all the people I have ever seen in my life, every face to haunt the little village. More than that, even, more faces, more people from other villages, from the city of Soma not far away. They’re hoisting banners, picket signs. They shout while the mayor introduces the president. He’s taller than you think, with eyes like coal. He tells us that mining accidents are typical, they are to be expected. He tells us of incidents in Britain and France in the nineteenth century, talking to us like we are anachronistic, like we are suspended in the past. Since the mine was privatized, the cost of producing one ton of coal has dropped over 80 percent. Our mines kill us at rates five times greater than in China, three hundred and sixty times greater than in America.

  Looking around, I am wrong. This is not everyone I have ever seen. This is only the semblance of the village. This is only the people not part of the mine. The people chant: Murderer Erdoğan. All around are men, some wearing suits, some in construction uniforms, some in miner’s coveralls, some in firemen gear, some with hardhats on, some with shovels over their heads. The women are in their living rooms, at the funeral homes, in morgues identifying bodies they barely recognize.

  The president steps off the platform and immediately his bodyguards wrap around him. His limousine is blocked by the crowd, so the guards escort him to the lobby of a bank at the corner while rocks fly through the air. I pick up a rock as well and think about throwing it, but I don’t deserve to, I don’t belong here with a rock to throw at a car. The rocks these men throw are dug from the mine, from atop the bodies of their friends. A guard fires his rifle into the air. The crowd parts for the limousine, though their chants grow louder. The president is ushered into his car and driven away. A man tears from the crowd and runs for the car.

  It’s Mesut. He kicks the wheel. He kicks the fender, and right away two bodyguards in fatigues with rifles at their shoulders grab him and throw him onto the pavement. The motorcade takes off, cutting through the crowd of mourners, protestors, locals. They throw rocks at the bodyguards. The two men in fatigues try to wrestle Mesut’s arms. A presidential aide in a suit pulls one of the bodyguards away. Fire in his mouth, he swings a sharp foot into Mesut’s side. He swings again, he swings a third time, kicks Mesut in the ribs while the two bodyguards in fatigues hold him down on the cold pavement. They will arrest Mesut, and hold him for weeks, maybe months, without charging him. His father, if he is not in the mine, will not find work. His mother will spend mornings in the prison visiting him until she is detained as well. I do nothing. I don’t stand out from the crowd. I’ve just won the race. I will pass my entrance exams. I go from the street full of people, down an alley, and I walk for a long way through a village I don’t recognize, until I’m not far from the cemetery they’ve been taking the coffins to in truckloads.

  Along the low stone wall stand relatives in long lines. A few politicians have stuck around, maybe they’re from nearby, maybe they’re up for reelection. The coffins are all covered with the flag, like the dead were soldiers, like they’ve just come back from the east, shot to bits.

  They’ve brought in digging machines, three of them. The undertaker and his two sons can’t keep up. They cut little rectangles into the dirt, long rows of them, you can’t count how many, you wouldn’t need to, the number will be in the headlines. The space between the graves is slight, out of necessity.

  I think of the speed sound travels through water. There’s a difference between salt water and fresh water. There’s a difference between loamy soil and geode. Supposedly sound travels fastest through solid objects, but that can’t be true. When I press my ear to the earth I still hear the whisper of methane, the crack of each molecule combusting, the slow fizzle. I can still hear the explosion in process.

  Am I so different? Am I not just the other side of the coin, the man who will climb up a shaft two hundred meters above the ground, and tinker with machinery so far from the surface, tinker with the things of power, of energy? I will tell my children stories of my work the way my father has told me. I will tell them of the world of light, the world without gravity.

  My father’s moustache still leaks black powder, but mine will not. My children will ask me of the mine, will crawl onto my lap and ask why the fathers of all their friends have moustaches of pitch, have backs like mountain ranges, have stories they share, they know by heart, they lived through side by side. I will tell them of my life in the sky and they will ask me of the men I left in the earth. Perhaps they will ask me of the mine when they’ve outgrown sitting on my lap, ask me why the men of Soma walk like phantoms of soot through the dawn, and I will tell them of my love for the slow swing of turbines. Perhaps they will ask me of the mine when they’ve just come back from it, hands caked, cracks of white on their faces, ask me why I’m not down there with them, why I’m still climbing ladders upward bound. Perhaps they will ask me what I did during the explosion, and I will tell them about the race, about the beautiful strokes of the windmills.

  Sarah Hall

  Goodnight Nobody

  JEM HAD SEEN THE DOG the week before, the day after her birthday, while she’d been breaking in her new shoes. It was a small dog, a Jack Russell or a terrier, not something that looked dangerous like the muscley Doberman and the mint-eyed Alsatian further down the street. She’d seen the man walking the dog by the weir, and she’d seen it tied up outside the Saracen’s Head. It didn’t choke its lead or drool or go for people. The man was hard-faced though, hair buzzed to the scalp, tight jeans he was too old to wear, dark red boots laced up his shins. He had a tattoo on his neck. A web. Or a net. Something stringy. Mumm-Ra said tattoos outside the collar and cuff meant people were beyond civilization. Mumm-Ra saw a lot of tattoos at work, in all kinds of hidden places. She often told Gran about them. Once a woman with only one breast had had one where the other breast wasn’t. A rose.

  Outside the man’s house there was a police van. It’d been there all morning. The lights and the engine were off, but it was very noticeable, very nosey looking. They would be taking the dog away soon, Jem was sure. The kids on the street had been trying to climb the backyard wall for a look-see before it was destroyed, even though it was the same dog it’d been the week before, nothing extra special or with superpowers.

  Destroyed made the dog sound like a battleship in a war game. Jem wondered how they’d do it—a gun, maybe, or by injection, like criminals in America. The dog would twitch and go to sleep and then its heart would stop. They’d been learning about the heart in biology. The heart was the last piece of equipment to keep going in a body; it worked the hardest. One cell told all the others what to do, and if the main cell died another normal cell took over. She’d shared that piece of information with Mumm-Ra and Gran. Gran had said it sounded like socialism. Dictatorship, more like, Mumm-Ra said. A vet might come to the man’s h
ouse and put the dog down, the same as if the dog had cancer or a broken leg. The dog wouldn’t know what was happening, so it wouldn’t be scared, although dogs did understand, they could sense things.

  Martin, Jem’s dad, had had cancer. He was extremely lucky. He had one lung and he’d had chemotherapy while living in his caravan in Catton Park. It’d taken months for him to get better and during that time Jem hadn’t seen him much. He’d said, before he’d been told he would be fine, that if he wasn’t going to be fine he wanted to be put down. Before he started to mess himself. He wanted sleeping pills or to be dropped off the bridge into the river. After the chemotherapy Martin’s eyebrows didn’t come back.

  He still smoked sometimes, at the pub, and after tea. Mumm-Ra said he was an imbecile and would be seeing her soon enough if he didn’t stop—she’d be zipping him up. Mumm-Ra worked in the mortuary at the hospital. She wore blue scrubs. She looked like a doctor, but she wasn’t one, even though she’d taken exams as part of the job. A practical exam and a written exam. After she’d said the thing about Martin, Jem had wondered for a while about people being zipped up, as if they were bags. She knew it meant something else. Jem didn’t like to think about what Mumm-Ra did at work, which involved glue and chemicals, and not crying while other people cried.

  Mortuary. Mortuary. Sometimes words got stuck in her head, usually if they sounded a certain way—strong, important.

 

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