The Best American Short Stories 2015 (18 page)

An old woman in a floral print robe pulled the door open just enough to see him. She held the little dog back with her foot. She had thin, bleached hair and the rough, thick skin of a person who'd been willfully abused by the sun for decades. Her eyes were hidden somewhere deep inside her face where Wallace couldn't quite see. She stood there as if waiting for a sales pitch of some kind. Wallace realized he didn't know the man's name, didn't know how to ask for him.

“Is there a man who lives here?” he asked.

“What's happened?” the woman snapped.

Wallace didn't know how to answer that.

“What's he done?” the woman said.

Wallace told her that it wasn't exactly like that. He needed to talk to him, he said.

“We had a misunderstanding earlier,” Wallace said. “It was my fault. I wanted to apologize.”

The old woman looked down at her dog, as if checking to make sure he'd heard the same thing she had.

“Is this a trick?” she said.

Wallace told her no, it wasn't a trick. She looked at him for what felt like a long time, then she looked down at the little dog.

“We're going to trust this man and let him in to talk to us,” she said to the dog. “We're going to trust him and hope he is worthy of that.”

Please, Wallace thought. Don't you be crazy. I'm not sure I can handle it right now.

The woman led him into the living room. As he followed her across the tile floors he realized how small she was. Her floral robe trailed on the floor behind her. She stopped in the living room and turned to Wallace like she'd forgotten what they'd come in there for. She suggested that they sit out on the back patio and talk. It was nice out there, she explained. There was shade, and when the wind shifted the right way they could smell the ocean.

“It's delightful,” she said and closed her eyes. “Just delightful.”

That's when Wallace realized she was drunk. He figured it was better than crazy, but only by a little. The woman told him she was having some pineapple juice and asked him if he'd like a glass.

“I don't want to trouble you,” Wallace said.

“It's no trouble,” she said. “I like vodka in mine. How do you take yours?”

Wallace said that would be fine. He watched her pull a giant bottle out of the freezer and then pour the thick, syrupy vodka into their glasses. Wallace could smell the booze before he even brought it close to his mouth. He followed her to a glass table on the back patio. The shade from the awning enveloped them.

“I'll tell you right now, it's not often that people come here to talk about my husband and think that they should be the ones apologizing,” the woman said when they sat down.

Wallace felt himself flinch at the word
husband
. She had to be at least thirty years older than the man he'd gotten into it with. He wondered whether he'd gotten the wrong place, whether he wasn't caught up in the middle of some big misunderstanding.

“I know,” the woman said. “You think I don't recognize that look?”

“I didn't mean anything,” Wallace said.

“I can spot that look from across the street,” the woman said. “But I don't care. I know it's strange to most people. But most people are strange to me. He was a friend of my son's when they were in high school. Did he tell you that?”

Wallace explained that they hadn't had much of a conversation.

“They weren't best friends,” the woman said. “Almost acquaintances, really. Though it doesn't really matter anymore, does it?”

Wallace agreed that it didn't. The woman looked at him over the top of her pineapple drink. Wallace told her about the estuary. The woman listened patiently and gulped her drink as he told her about the joint, the run-in with her husband, the foot sweep into the marsh, all of it. When he heard how it sounded he felt the need to tell her more, if only to explain himself a little, to make it all make sense. If people just knew what you were dragging around with you, he thought, they might cut you some slack. But who had time for that? Who could be troubled?

“He really told you he had children over here?” the woman said when Wallace was done. “You're sure about that?”

Wallace nodded into his glass. The woman pinched her bottom lip.

“That's new,” she said. “That's troubling.”

Wallace sipped his drink and felt the acid from the pineapple and liquor burning together in his throat.

“The thing about my husband,” the woman was saying, “is that idleness gets the better of him. He's not a bad man, but he doesn't have much to do. Sometimes that leads to trouble.”

“He doesn't work?” Wallace said, and then wished he hadn't.

“Oh no,” she said. “Not for years. I have money, you see, and anyway he's not cut out for most jobs. He's very sensitive. He's not a bad man. But he is very, very sensitive. Does that make sense to you?”

Wallace said it did, and the woman smiled in an appreciative sort of way.

“And you,” she said. “Do you work?”

Wallace said that he did, sort of.

“I'm a fighter,” he offered.

“As in professionally?” the woman said.

Wallace nodded and tried to put his face as deep into his drink as it would go. It smelled sweet and sticky and boozy, a vague scent of suntan oil.

“That's what happened to your face, then,” the woman said, almost to herself. She asked him what it was like, that line of work.

Wallace had to think about it for a second. “It's awful,” he said, and then stopped.

That wasn't what he meant. What he meant was that it was the best thing he'd ever done with his life, the only thing he could do well, and what was awful was how it made everything else seem boring and fake. But there wasn't any way to explain that, so he didn't try. Instead he told her not to listen to him, that he was just coming off a bad fight.

“Oh dear,” she said. “And what's
that
like?”

He told her it was like breaking up. “You tell yourself, never again. But then, what else is there?”

“I understand completely,” the woman said. Wallace decided to believe her. That was a choice he was making.

When her face changed, he followed her gaze back toward the house and saw the man standing on the other side of the screen door, peering out at them. How long had he been there? He had the green jacket slung over one arm. Wallace could see where the dried mud was caked on, just beginning to flake off at the edges. He could see how he must look to the man, drinking pineapple and vodkas with his wife in the afternoon, telling each other about their lives.

The man opened the screen door slowly, two fingers pushing it down the track. The wind shifted. Wallace smelled the ocean. The woman was right. It was delightful.

ARNA BONTEMPS HEMENWAY

FROM
Alaska Quarterly Review

W
ILD TURKEY WAKES
up. It's the last day of June, and an early summer thunderhead has marched across the peripheral Kansas plain (the lights of town giving out to the solid pitch of farmland) while Wild Turkey slept. He knew it was coming, the lightning spidering forth behind and then above him last night as he walked, the air promising the rain that is now, as Wild Turkey blinks in the thin blue morning, making the rural highway overpass above his head drone, a toneless room of sound below.

Wild Turkey lifts himself out from the body-shaped concrete depression that nestles just under the eaves of the little overpass—that word too big for the little nexus; really it's just one lonely county road overlapping another. He knew to sleep here last night because of the rain and because he saw the overpass was old enough to have this body-shaped concavity, a “tornado bed” they used to call it, and now he reaches up into the dark of the girder's angle and feels around until he finds the ancient survival box for those erstwhile endangered motorists: a flashlight that doesn't work, a rusted weather radio, and—yes—a bottle of water, thick with dust, but Wild Turkey is thirsty and doesn't care. He stands and stretches on the sloped concrete bank, against the theater of the rain. He was right about the long night-walk out along the country road being good for coming down, the darkness being good for discouraging one of his fits, but wrong about being able to make it to the school before morning.

He makes it to the school now, in the rain, sopping wet. The school is, as it ever was, more or less in the middle of a cornfield, and the thick leaves and stalks cough in the rain as Wild Turkey comes once again upon the old buildings. He rounds the tiny campus in the storm as if he is still in junior high, still traipsing from class to class in the cloying polo and khaki uniform. Now, as then, he does not fail to think of the strangeness of time when he sees the buildings—themselves somehow eternal feeling, always but only half in ruin. Even in use (back then, as an ad hoc private Episcopalian school, and now, apparently repurposed as a child-care center) the moldering white portables and darkly aging main brick building sit in situ, oblivious.

Standing on the concrete path along the portables and trying to look into the darkened window of an abandoned room, Wild Turkey has one of his little gyres in time—a brief one, only sending his mind back to those moments when he just an hour ago woke under the little bridge—and he realizes he woke thinking of Mrs. Budnitz, his second-grade teacher, specifically of the rank, slightly fetid scent that would occasionally waft subtly from somewhere inside her gingham dress on a tendril of air in the last weeks of school before summer. Though the scent or smell itself wasn't subtle at all but sharp, rich, pungent, even vaguely sweet, like the smell of human shit anywhere outside a bathroom. Nor was it really a smell so much as an
emanation
, or at least that's how it'd seemed to Wild Turkey, sitting on the carpet in the middle of the room, transfixed by this sensate experience delivered to him on the wavering bough of the window fan's breeze.

They did not have air conditioning installed in their classroom yet and the heat and consequent sweat, secreted beneath Mrs. Budnitz's plain, sturdy dresses and folds of fat and thigh, probably amplified the smell. It was only noticeable every ninth or tenth breath and so not really something Wild Turkey ever felt he could really speak or complain about. But it was distinctly sexual, or carnal in its fleshy, mildly lurid bodilyness—in its intimate note of vaginal musk, though of course this particular understanding would come only later, the experience at the time being importantly a momentary one. The scent refused to linger, and so existed for Wild Turkey mostly in the wince of shame at his own interest, in the same way he sometimes at that age lingered for just a few seconds too long in the school's bathroom over the shit-stained toilet paper in his hand before flushing it, feeling a rush of something he didn't understand. It was oddly comforting, in the end.

And why this smell now, or rather, then, upon waking—why does it chase him? Maybe this school harkens his mind back to that other classroom, Wild Turkey thinks. Though really it's the feeling of it as he drifted on the carpet in Mrs. Budnitz's classroom during “naptime,” the confluence of those two sensations—drifting helplessly into a tired, sweaty sleep; drifting helplessly into that intriguing, somewhat disgusting scent. It was a kind of surrender, a voiding of the mind; a reversion to some pre-infantile state of abandon. He's been finding the declensions of that experience in his life ever since, often as he falls asleep, or which he wakes into: the stagnant air of soiled women's bed linen and spilt chamber pot in the small house in Ramadi; the attenuated scent of the bare bed after he and Merry Darwani had anal sex for the first time; the closeness of the rain-soured, coppery metal of the small bridge's girding. Wild Turkey is used to his life proceeding this way: this or that detail of his day stepping down out of some first world of previous, essential experience. These sensate allusions are always only whiffs or pale imitations of the original, in the same way that the rainy, pallid light now breaking from the clouds as the morning regains its heat is cousin to the small fist of bright fire over the limbs of the girl in the courtyard in Ramadi, or the rhythmic flash of the tactical grenade's phosphorous strobe, and all three are mere shavings of the pure white lightning of one of Wild Turkey's fits.

He turns away from the window. There is nothing to see here. It was stupid to come. He begins the long walk back.

Wild Turkey wakes up. He's eight years old, on his back in the middle of the wheat field that has sprung up by chance in the sprawling park behind his parents' subdivision. He does not know why he's on his back, does not remember how he got there. Strangely, however, he does remember what happened just before he woke up, which is that he had his first fit (though he doesn't know to call it that yet, knows only the image lingering spectacularly in his retinas, in the theater of his mind). He'd been running through the field, feeling the itchy stalks resist his stomping feet, and then he'd been standing in the field, caught up by something in the air, by a small flash in the sky, and then he was looking and looking and seeing only the beauty of the high afternoon sun on the blurry tips of the wheat as it rose and fell on the invisible currents of wind. Like on a sea floor, he thought, just before the brightening in the sky, before it turned in a flash into an overwhelming field of white lightning, so much and so close that he remembers nothing else.

Later, he will not tell the marine recruiters or doctors about the fits but will have one anyway on the first night of initiation, before he even gets to boot camp proper. He will be among the guys at the long tables in the gym of the local armory building: the recruits being kept awake all night, forced to keep their hands flat out in front of them, hovering four inches above the tabletop. They are not allowed to move, or to move their hands, or to let their hands touch the tabletop. Then, the lightning.