The Best American Short Stories 2015 (7 page)

Last week you saw him on a corner begging for change. There was a cut above one eyebrow, like a boxer's cut, swabbed with Vaseline. He smiled drunkenly at those who passed, his smile widening for those who laughed at him. You hid behind a bus stop, backpack slung over your shoulder. When the bus came you hopped on, and from the back you seemed to catch his eyes. Your father, the village idiot, the fallen preacher, his own cut man, a sad clown smiling in a dirty suit. But he was already looking away.

He drinks a rocks glass of vodka. He drinks a plastic cup of Scotch. He drinks a Dixie Cup of ouzo, a beer stein of sherry, a mug of warm Chardonnay, he drinks handful after handful of water from the kitchen sink, combs his hair with his fingers. He has stopped shaking. You are just getting started.

The thief had come in through the kitchen window that led to the deck. The deck had been under construction but abandoned by the time we bought the house. The previous owner, a cop, lost his job and a couple years later lost the mortgage. At auction in 1983 my stepfather got the house for just over forty thousand dollars. It was on a dead-end street overlooking Bunnell's Pond, five blocks from Beardsley Terrace, one of the city's eight housing projects. The house was filled with empty tallboy beer cans and nudie magazines filled with black women. There were posters of naked black women—their skin greased, hair curled and wet, lips parted—on the walls of the bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen. The ceilings were painted brown, the carpet was dark chocolate shag. One wall was cocktail-olive green, another cat-tongue pink, another flaking, cheap gold wallpaper. On the first day we arrived, armed with garbage bags, disinfectant, sponges, and rubber gloves, we noticed again the deck jutting out from the back of the house. We walked up the steps, my stepfather, mother, sister, and I, and saw the deck half-built, the wood nailed down two years before now blond and raw in the sun. One of us peered through the kitchen window, a hand visored over our eyes. Inside, for whoever looked first: a florid signature of defeat.

A story about Bermuda. A father visits his two children through a window. Legally he is allowed to see them through a window, and the window must not be open more than four inches, court's order. He brings candy, toys small enough to pass through. He holds their small fingers in his hand, their faces shimmering behind glass. One day the mother is blow-drying her hair, or running toward burned toast, or yelling at a girlfriend or boss over the phone—and he convinces the boy, the smart one, the one who watches everything, to open the window wider. Not with the promise of candy or baseball cards, but with—we forget. But the boy is now being pulled through the window by his arms and his mother is screaming as she pulls him by the legs, and to make sure the scene doesn't get too comical the boy starts to cry in silence.

The father wins.

When he is arrested, twenty-two minutes later, at the train station in New Haven, the police ask him what in the hell he was thinking. “We were going to go live in Bermuda,” he says.

Some nights he would bring paperbacks. I'd pour him a drink and he would flip through dime-store books on nutrition or the paranormal. Books on Los Alamos and the Lindbergh baby. The Salem witch trials and the Connecticut witch trials. The Pequot graveyards that, he said, protected my great-great-great-grandmother. Cancer cures buried by the government. The Ouija board in the trunk of JFK's limo. Coenzyme Q10 and how to live on only water, honey, and cayenne pepper.

Once he brought three different books on the Bermuda Triangle. It was not something to scoff at, he said. The disappearances and ghost blips on NASA radar were not coincidence or fantasy. It was our Atlantis, he said, trying to speak to us.

Also missing: two slices of bread, half a pound of deli turkey, a handful of lettuce, a fat slice of tomato, and lots of mayonnaise, scooped out with fingers. The thief had left the dregs of his late-night snack on the kitchen table, along with a rusty knife. The knife was nearly brown, and looked like something someone might use hiking or hunting, who knew. No one hiked or hunted around here. And there was mayonnaise everywhere, oily mayonnaise fingerprints all over the house. On the jewelry box: fingerprints. On the coffee pot: fingerprints. On the toilet flush (but he didn't flush): fingerprints. On the photo of my father and me on the desk (the father clearly drunk, the boy on his shoulders screaming, but look, maybe in joy, in delight, and the father, let's face it, the father is happy): fingerprints. The cops dusted it all, didn't need any of it. Asleep at the wheel. High as a kite.

Marie is combing the green glob of jelly into her niece's hair. She holds the comb in one hand and the jelly is stuck to the palm of the other. She dabs from the glob every few seconds, wiping different parts of her niece's head, then combing until the green disappears. Her other niece is the one you like, but you can't remember her name. You sit on the floor playing a game called Connect 4. Her eyes are green, her skin brown. Her hair is braided tightly and close to her head, with yellow and pink butterfly barrettes, like your sister's. You beat her every time, but she doesn't seem to care. Marie makes chicken and rice for dinner. She puts you to bed on the couch, tells you your mother will be back in a few days. You think that you have never slept so high in the air. The sixteenth floor. You might be in the clouds, but it is too dark to see.

Father Panic Village was torn down a few years ago. It was one of the remaining housing projects in Bridgeport. When my father grew up there, it was called Yellow Mill Apartments. My neighborhood, where I lived with my mother, stepfather, and sister, had once been called Whiskey Hill. It was where the Irish mobsters distilled and hid their whiskey during Prohibition. My father knew the city in a way I never would. Each street, building, and patch of grass he could describe in terms of its former self. He knew the story of Thomas Beardsley, the man who donated acres of park to the city under the condition that it never charge citizens admission. My father always sneaked us in through torn fences or secret dirt pathways off the interstate. He refused to pay dirty American money to enjoy the land that Beardsley had promised him. Beardsley's statue was once stolen, when I was in grade school—then, mysteriously, the next day, put back in its spot. This was not coincidence, my father said.

In the park we hid in places where security would not find us. We brought hot dogs and bags of whole-wheat bread. He taught me how to build fires without matches. He told me the Pequot names of plants. He ripped sassafras from the ground by its long roots and later, in his apartment, he would boil these roots and pour me a mug of hot unsweetened root beer. He would not allow me sugar, the white man's poison. He gave me a quarter for each apricot pit I ate. He explained the qualities of laetrile: a compound of two sugar molecules, one of them cyanide, which detaches when—and only when—confronted with the enzymes released by cancerous cells. He gave me baggies of apricot pits to take home to my mother and sister.

He drank while he drove me home, a forty-ounce bottle in a bag between his legs. He tipped his chauffeur's cap to police officers, who sat studying us at red lights.

Your mother tells you the story of your stepfather: Out of prison, he finds his way back east, gets a basement apartment in Brooklyn, finds a job busing tables at a Greek joint, just something to hold him over till he figures things out, gets his head straight—talks to some guys from the old neighborhood, sees what's cooking. And a month and a half later, after having robbed two jewelry stores, three homes, and a delivery van, he's headed west again, back to California, sunny California, 1958, walking the highway with his thumb out, his broken thumb, snapped by Fat Frannie—your stepfather, just a twenty-eight-year-old hood, convicted felon, about to get caught again, spend, this time, twelve years in prison. Fat Frannie takes his thumb in his hand and snaps it, clean with indifference. “Tomorrow. The rest of the money tomorrow, you fuck. Just like your old man.”

Your stepfather in slacks and a jacket, maybe a hat, a fedora, dark brown with a black feather, with his broken thumb in the wind, just needs to get back to California, Frisco maybe, there's that one girl made him breakfast, eggs and ham and coffee, orange juice, California orange juice, no one ever made him breakfast like that ever, the nuns in the orphanage would've said it was a sin, California itself a sin, the rising sun of the devil, and a woman in a chemise, that's what he thought it was called, a chemise the color of peaches, cooking him breakfast after they had made love with the curtains open. But what does he do? He leaves her for New York. And now what does he do?

He gets into a truck, the only vehicle to pull over for the forty-nine miles he's walked, somewhere now in New Jersey, on windy 78. He steps up into the truck and before he even looks at the driver, the gun is in his lap. “Out of the truck, friend. It's my truck now,” he says. Twenty-eight years old, driving a Nabisco truck to California, a day, almost exactly, until he's caught. He gets out of the can when he's forty.

There was the time he crashed into a girder on I-95, his ridiculous Cadillac suddenly in front of her Cutlass. I swerved, she says, and I don't know how, there was traffic all around us, but I got over to the edge of the highway and pulled over. I saw his car totally wrecked. I couldn't move. The police came and your father, he's sitting there covered in blood, the steering wheel was split in half from his chest, you know your father, he's big but back then he was huge, and both his eyes black and blue, and his leg, the right one, we found out later, broken. But he was awake, and he kept looking at me. The cops are trying to get him to say something, what day is it, who's the president, how many fingers, you know, and he's sitting there in all this blood, looking right at me. The whole highway was blocked off and I was standing right in the middle of it. Can you imagine? Right in the middle of I-95 in broad daylight, all these ambulance and police lights, just standing right there. Do you know what he did? When they cut off the door and get him onto a stretcher, he's looking at me again, and right before they put him in the ambulance, he grins. She pauses. I had just left him that morning. We were going to his mother's so I could get you and your sister. I told him it was over. Do you understand what I'm saying? She finishes her cigarette. Your father, she says, the way she has always said it.

A rocks glass of Scotch. A plastic cup of vodka.

The difference between your mother and me, he says, is my demons are real. Satan's angels. They visit me, son. Last night, he says, then stops. These angels, he says. They once walked the earth. God had already expelled Lucifer from His Kingdom, and Lucifer, listen, son, bitter, angry, proud, had begun his reign on earth. He sent these angels to breed with Woman. The offspring were the Nephilim. They were giants, demigods. They stole land, beat their neighbors, raped their own daughters. Listen. In the beginning of the Old Testament, right there in Genesis, he says, the tale of these human demons is there for anyone who wants to see. Look around, he says. They never left.

After he falls to the ground, you tower over him, and that is when he gets back up and takes off his clown nose. Flattens it like a silver dollar and slips it into a pocket of his oversized trousers. Takes off his dented stovepipe hat, his enormous bow tie, wipes each cheek stippled with gray grease paint, and says something through his lips smeared white. Before he leaves, he says: When you were a baby I gave you a bath but I didn't know how hot the water was. I couldn't tell your mother, explain; she just kept screaming. She was in her nurse's aide uniform, she just got home. In the ambulance I prayed to Jehovah, first time in years, I was praying and your skin, it looked so red and you, I can't remember if you were still screaming. I had never bathed you before. I was your father. I was off booze. Driving a cab and making good money—this is what, 1977, 1978? Jimmy Carter. Your mother took me back. Maybe it was. A mistake. I can still hear your voice, screaming to me, when we were up in the sky. The circus when you were two or three. You wanted to get down, but the ride was broke, we were stuck up there for what. Over an hour. I could see the ocean, and, across the Sound, Long Island. I could see the whole circus below us, in miniature, just like at the Barnum Museum. Do you remember? All the little tightrope walkers and clowns and weightlifters, all the wild animals, the cotton candy. The music.

Then, limping toward the door, his voice slurred with whiskey, victorious in its cruelty, the last thing he ever said to me: We could see all the way to Bermuda.

Over twenty years later, walking early one morning into the private country club where I tended bar: the lock on the bar's refrigerator busted, two empty bottles of Burgundy in the trash, the maître d's tie slung over the bar's mirror. As if all he had wanted was to finally catch himself in the act.

You dream of waking in the night, or half-waking, or less, but there is something there. You cannot see anything except your desk, your homework from the night before lit up a little by the streetlight outside. Your pencil. Your baseball cap. Then, more faintly, the television to the left, resting on a small bookshelf. A poster of Larry Bird above it, his green Converse almost black. Out the window the streetlight is hidden, but its light sifts through at an angle, and on the right side of your room, right in front of your bed, is a darkness. And it moves, like a muscle, like a heartbeat, before you wake up.

Another story: this one true. A married couple wanders the streets of the city for years. Everyone has grown used to their presence. They never ask for money. They sleep together, spooning, in a house made of cardboard and blankets. Their faces are ruddy and without expression, and when not asleep they are always in motion, always searching through garbage for survival.