The Best American Short Stories 2015 (29 page)

“What's that?” Jack said to his stomach, which was mumbling something vague but insistent. He fed it a granola bar, and immediately vomited. Drank some water. Vomited again.

Dirt, weeds, a huge prickly pear like a coral reef. Jack covered his burning head with his T-shirt, exposing his belly. Why hadn't the Founding Fathers planted more shade trees out here? Probably because the bastards had never made it this far west. The only people who'd ventured this far, back then, were derelicts and thieves. Uprooted types, not prone to plant things.

Jack was leaning philosophically against a fence for several minutes before he spotted the dog, sleeping on the other side. Not a pit, just some big floppy collie. Still, it reminded him of Lisa.

How could an animal sleep in this heat with all that fur? Jack kneeled in the alley, winding his fingers through the chain-link.
“Psst.”
Rattled the fence. “Hey! Buster!”

The dog opened one eye, too stunned to get up. Shook a leg epileptically.

“You're just gonna lie there?” Piles of dried shit everywhere, like a miniature wigwam village. Again Jack rattled the fence.

“What are you doing? Why are you bothering him?” A little man with a lopsided beard, like a paintbrush that had dried crooked, appeared at a window.

“I'm not bothering him,” said Jack. “I thought he was someone else.”

“He's a dog,” said the man. “He ain't got nothing to do with you.”

Jack, riled, was ready to argue the point, but then let it go. He could see that the man was old, and so was the dog. Besides, his mouth was dry, and as he tried to get up his legs buckled.

The man snapped his fingers in Jack's direction. “No funny business!”

Jack nodded and backed away. “I'm going.”

He walked about ten feet before he stopped, opened his backpack, and pulled out another granola bar—which he quickly unwrapped and tossed over the fence. “Get up for that, I bet.”

The dog didn't hesitate. “I thought so,” said Jack.

Instantly, though, the old man shot from the back door and pulled the food from the dog's mouth.

“It's not poison!” shouted Jack. “It's granola!”

A firecracker went off in the distance, and Jack turned. Next time, he thought, I'll do
that
—stick a firecracker in the damn granola.

For years, he'd hated every dog and experienced a paralyzing weakness in their presence. Now, despite the occasional flash of cruel intention, Jack's anger had mostly turned into something else. A dog, any dog, was like the relentless sunshine: mind-alteringly sad. Jack sat on the curb, touched his hand to blazing macadam.

Sometimes it could be burned out of you—the pain.

But no, the past was here, before him now like a mirage, wavering with tiny figures, holograms he recognized.

Resistance is futile
, the Borg say.

Because not only had he run into a dog; he'd run out of his stash as well—and running out of crystal was like running out of time, sinking back into the mud that was your life. No dusting of white snow to prettify the view. With a mad, flea-scratching intensity, Jack scraped out the stem of his pookie, but what fell from it was worthless: a few flakes of irredeemable tar. The holograms grew to full size and came closer.

“Grrr,”
said Jack, hoping he didn't sound like an animal.

Jack had been with his sister that day—a summer morning, playing Frisbee in a field. The Frisbee had gone over a fence.

The dog was black, not huge, the size of a twenty-gallon ice chest.

After the attack, Jack wondered if they'd really killed it. The police had used the words
put to sleep
, but Jack had worried that the owners might have somehow woken the animal up and were hiding it inside their house. Lisa's fears, no doubt, had been far worse—but Jack had known better than to ask her.

Anyway, Lisa couldn't really talk after it happened. She had a lot of problems with her jaw. With everything, really. Her right hand was so nerve-damaged that she had to use her left, which she never got very good at. She shook a lot, refused to eat, mostly drank smoothies. Her pinkie was missing.

Her face, though, was the worst. Even after two surgeries, it looked like something badly made, lumpy—as if a child had made it out of clay. It was less a face than the idea of one, preliminary, a sketch—but careless, with terrible proportions and slightly skewed; primitive—a face that might be touching in art, but in life was hideous.

“Look at that!” Bertie had shouted at the lawyer, showing him pictures of what Lisa had looked like before. “
Beautiful
. And this is what they're saying she's worth?”

The settlement had not been much. “An outrage,” Bertie said to anyone who would listen. She tried to get another lawyer to take on the case. Jack would sit with his mother in cluttered offices, staring at the floor, telling the suits what he'd seen. “Happens every seven seconds,” one lawyer said with disturbing enthusiasm, as if discussing the odds of winning the lottery. “Plus, you know how people in Tucson love their Rotts and their pits.” Unfortunately, he explained, a jackpot settlement was usually tied to an attack catching the right wave of publicity. “Your moment has probably passed,” he said with a wince, a shrug.

“That baby,” Bertie would complain, referring to what she considered Lisa's competition.

The same summer, a two-year-old had been mauled near Sabino Canyon. There'd been a fund-raising campaign. “Foothills,” Bertie had scoffed, after seeing the child's parents on television, their big house on a ridge. “As if they need help! We should start our own campaign,” she'd muttered, after a sip, to Jack.

“We could make posters,” he'd suggested sheepishly.

“Posters, TV commercials, the whole shebang.” His mother pulled more deeply from her Captain Morgan mug, the ice clinking like money inside a piggy bank.

“Wanna make them pop, though,” she said of the posters. “Need to get us some big-ass pieces of paper.”

It would have been easy. Jack was artistic (everyone said so), and Bertie had balls. But, in the end, they'd never done a thing; never called a TV station or decorated a coffee can with ribbons and a picture of Lisa's face. Never took the case back to court—even though it was clear, after the initial surgeries, that Lisa would require more. The procedures couldn't be rushed, though. The doctor had recommended that Lisa wait before going back under the knife: “Too much trauma already. Let's see how the current work heals.”

What little remained of the settlement money was kept in a separate account, like a vacation fund or a Christmas club, some perverse dowry. Money for the future, earmarked for surgery.

Jack had helped, at some point, hadn't he? Standing at the edge of the alley, he scratched his leg—a vague recollection that he'd given Lisa some of his own skin. It had been more compatible than Bertie's.

In the fall, Lisa had refused to go back to school for her junior year. She mostly stayed inside, in her bedroom. There was a lot of pain medication—which was apparently, Jack learned, something to be shared. “I'm in pain too,” Bertie had cried, defensively, when he caught her one night with the bottle. “Anyway,” she chided, changing the subject, “your sister can't live in a fog for the rest of her life. She needs to get a job.”

Jack didn't understand why a person in Lisa's position couldn't be allowed to stay inside, in a dark bedroom, for the rest of her life. Bertie had a thing, though, about self-improvement and positive thinking, which often made her children shrink from her as if she were a terrorist.

Amazingly, Lisa had found a job fairly quickly, full-time at a telemarketing firm. “You see,” Bertie had chirped. “Up and at 'em,” practically shoving Lisa out the door, her hair strategically feathered over her cheeks. “Minimum wage,” Lisa said, and Bertie replied that there was no shame in that. All day, Lisa had sat in a cubicle, talked on the phone in her new funny voice. But maybe, thought Jack, the people his sister called just assumed she had a toothache, or an accent.

No one on the phone would have known that his sister was a high school dropout in Tucson—or that she'd been mutilated. That was a word no one had used—not the doctors or Lisa's friends or even the truth-obsessed women from Bertie's so-called church. No one ever said
maimed, destroyed, ruined
.

Bitten
, people preferred to say, modestly, as if Lisa's misfortune had been the work of an ant, or a fly.

Jack rubbed his eye, swatted his cheek. As he headed downtown in long, loping strides, his body was dangerously taut, a telephone wire stretched between time zones. He needed to bring his thinking back to 2000-whatever-the-fuck-it-was—
this
day,
this
street. “Excuse me,” he said to a woman with a briefcase and praying-mantis sunglasses—but before he could explain his purpose, she darted away and leaped into a black sedan. The woman obviously had issues; even from inside the vehicle, she was waving her hands at him in extreme sign language:
no tengo no tengo no tengo
.

After an hour and a half, he'd managed to assemble two dollars (a few quarters from a laundromat, a few obtained by outright begging). When he climbed onto the bus and dropped the coins in the chute, they made a sound like a slot machine promising a payout.

“What are you waiting for?” asked the driver.

“Nothing,” mumbled Jack, taking a seat at the back.

He'd been looking forward to the air conditioning, but now it made him shake—the cold air, like pins on his face. Sometimes he'd met Lisa after her shift, to accompany her home. She hadn't liked to take the bus alone. She'd wanted Jack to ride with her in the mornings as well—but how could he? He was fifteen; he had school.

Anyway, the afternoons were enough. The walk to the back of the bus had always seemed to take a lifetime. People stared, kids laughed. Lisa never said anything, but sometimes she took Jack's hand, which embarrassed him: what if people thought she was his girlfriend? Sometimes he could hear her breathing; sometimes, a sound in her throat like twigs snapping.

That same year, Jack met Flaco. The first time they went fast together, in Flaco's enamel-black bedroom, it was like,
oh yes
—total understanding, total big picture, all the nagging little details washed away. Soon Jack stopped meeting Lisa after work. He let her take the bus alone, with nothing but her feathered hair to protect her; her head drooping like a dead flower; a white glove on her right hand like Michael Jackson, the pinkie stuffed with cotton.

It was OK, though. Because the funny thing was, he'd been able to love her more, and with less effort, from a distance. He felt that by going fast he was actually helping Lisa, he was helping all of them. He was building a white city out of crystal, inside his heart. When it was finished, there'd be room for everyone. For the first time in his life Jack had understood Bertie's nonsense about positive thinking, about taking responsibility for your own life. After Jack met Flaco, there were nights he didn't come home at all. Sometimes their flights lasted for days. Bertie might have complained, but she too was spending more and more time at her meetings. It was no surprise when Lisa said she was going away.

“Away? Where could you possibly go?” cried Bertie.

Lisa said she'd heard there was a good doctor in Phoenix; she'd start there.

“For how long?” Bertie had asked—and when Lisa didn't answer—“And I suppose you plan on taking the money with you?”

“It
is
mine,” said Lisa.

No one could argue with that.

Jack pulled the cord, made his way to the rear exit of the bus. The door opened with a life-support hiss.

Whiplash of light coming off a skyscraper. Jack held up his hand to block the sun's reflection, a roundish blur of ghostly ectoplasm that hovered somewhere around the twentieth floor—which the boy's street sense interpreted, correctly, as roughly five o'clock.

Please be over soon, he thought, knowing full well that the day would linger for hours yet. Even after sunset, the heat would be terrible—the sidewalks, the streets, the buildings, radiating back the fire they'd absorbed all day. There'd be no relief until well after midnight.

Jack walked south, toward the barrio, toward the sound of firecrackers, the whistle of bottle rockets. Later, at dark, the neon pompoms would come—the big holiday displays at the foothills resorts, and the city-sponsored show on Sentinel Peak, which half the time had to be stopped due to the scrub catching on fire. From the valley, you could watch the flames flowing down the mountain like lava. People looked forward to that as much as to the fireworks.

Jack walked with no particular purpose and was surprised when he found himself standing before Flaco's house. There was the white storybook fence around the neatly swept yard; the saint with her garland of artificial flowers, standing on a lake of tinfoil. At the Virgin's feet, a weird mix of things: playing cards and plastic beads, and what looked like pieces of old bread. Jack had always loved this diorama, which lived inside a little cage like a chicken coop. To protect it from the rain, Flaco's mother had explained.

He wondered if she'd still recognize him, maybe give him some
carne seca
wrapped in a tortilla as thin as tissue paper. In so many ways, his life had started in this house. A thousand hopes and dreams. Jack wondered if they were still in there, inside Flaco's spray-painted bedroom. Wondered too if there might be any crystal left in one of the old hiding spots.

Five years was a long time, though. Someone would already have smoked it or flushed it down the drain. And besides, Jack didn't have the stamina to crawl through another window. He was done with windows and doors. He half considered climbing inside the chicken coop with the saint.