The Best American Short Stories 2015 Page 5

  “Stay out awhile,” Marlene said, calling after her.

  Georgie left the house through the kitchen and walked away from the group of islanders who had clustered near the dock. She wanted to tell them that they were right, that they should take the boat, but she was too ashamed to look them in the eyes, too afraid to speak against Joe. She wanted to talk to Phillip, so she followed the path of crushed oysters and sand north toward the simple silhouette of the small stone church.

  Georgie recalled the hymn her mother liked to sing—“O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” She was tone-deaf but couldn’t help herself from singing. As the words came, her tongue felt too big for her mouth, but still the sound of her voice filled her with unexpected serenity. She took another drink from the crystal tumbler she’d taken from the house and sang the first verse again, and then again, until she could feel her mother’s nails on her back, calming her down, loving her to sleep.

  She found Phillip passed out on a wooden bench in front of the church.

  “Phillip,” she said, gently rocking him with her hands. He was shirtless and his skin was warm. A single silver cross Joe had given him hung around his neck and across his chest.

  “Phillip,” she said. He stirred but didn’t open his eyes. She pinched the skin above his hip bone.

  “What?” he said, opening his eyes into slits.

  “Take the boat. Just take it.”

  “I’m in no shape to drive a boat.”

  “You have to. Someone has to.”

  “I like you, Georgie,” Phillip said. “But you have to leave me the hell alone now.” He waved her off with one hand, the other tucked underneath his head.

  “But you said—”

  “I give up. You should too.” He rolled away from her, turning his face toward the back of the bench.

  She took another sip of her drink while waiting for him to roll back over. When he didn’t, she walked to the place where the sandy island broke off into high cliffs and began to walk the rim of the island, staring at the water below.

  Looking down at the waves from the cliffs, she remembered Florida. She remembered sipping on the air hose and drinking Coca-Cola while tourists watched her through thick glass at the aquarium show. Sometimes Georgie had to remind herself that she could not, in fact, breathe underwater.

  “Whatever you do,” the aquarium owner had said, “be pretty.”

  And so the girls always pointed their toes and ignored the charley horses in their calves or the way their eyes began to sting in the brackish water. Georgie recalled the feeling of her hands on the arch of another swimmer’s back as they performed an underwater adagio, the fatigue in her body after the back-to-back Fourth of July shows. She remembered a time when she felt good about herself.

  She thought of Joe, and her arm around Marlene’s back. She thought of the stone house, and for a minute, she wanted to leave Whale Cay and return home. But home would never be the same.

  In days the yacht would pull away and Joe would wake her up with coffee in bed. Hannah would make her eggs, runny and heaped on a slice of white toast with fruit on the side. She would take her morning swims and read a book underneath the shade of a palm. And would that be enough?

  They had a rock in the yard back home. Her father used to lift the copperheads out of the garden shed with his hoe and slice them open with the metal edge, their poisonous bodies writhing without heads for a moment on top of the rock. The spring ritual had horrified and intrigued Georgie, and it was what she pictured now, standing above the sea, swaying, the feeling of rocks underneath her feet.

  But she might never see that rock again, she thought.

  It was dark and she couldn’t see well. There was shouting in the distance. She felt bewildered, hysterical.

  She set down her glass and took off her sandals. She would feel better in the water, stronger.

  With casual elegance, she brought her hands in front of her body and over her head and dove off the cliff. As she began to fall toward the water, falling beautifully, toes pointed, she wondered if she’d gotten mixed up and picked the wrong place to dive.

  She was falling into the tank again, the brackish water in her eyes, but no one was watching.

  She was cherry pie.

  She was a ticker-tape parade.

  Her hands hit the water first. The water rushed over her ears, deafening her. Her limbs went numb, adrenaline moving through her until she was upright again, gulping air.

  She treaded water, fingers moving against the dark sea, pushing it away to keep herself afloat. There were rocks jutting out from the water, a near miss. There were strange birds nesting in the tall grass, a native woman bleeding on a straw mattress in a hut on the south shore, a stone house strangled by fig trees.

  JUSTIN BIGOS

  Fingerprints

  FROM McSweeney’s Quarterly

  A STORY: A man, once a wealthy banker but now anonymous in rags, retired, richer than ever, wandered the streets of our city. He dug through trash, ate trash, slept on sidewalks, walked with a slight limp, as if he had years before suffered a minor stroke, or a terrible beating. Years before, in fact, his wife and children had died on a highway. After drinking away a decade of his life, the man quit alcohol, quit his job, quit his life. He became someone else. Do we still think it possible? To become someone else? We know this is just a story, so: He wandered the streets of our city and he smiled at anyone who met his eyes. And to those who then returned his smile with their own, he would speak: “Excuse me, ma’am,” or “Sir, just a moment,” and he would fake-limp with all his dignity—they could see this now, the ones who looked—and he would reach out a hand. Those who took it—very few, very few, God save us all—would find he had pressed into their palm a hundred-dollar bill. And was already walking away.

  Another story: Sometime in your teens, in high school, around the time your father started showing up again, your house was robbed. In the night, the family asleep. No one awoke, no one was hurt. In the morning: “Mom, where’s the car?” The slow realization: missing VCR, missing jewelry, missing wallets and purses. Also missing: a baseball cap from your bedroom, a Cabbage Patch doll from your sister’s. “Are you sure, are you sure it’s gone?” said your mother, your sister crying. “Why would someone steal a doll?” Your stepfather silent, raging. The police found the car a few blocks away, in the projects, a man asleep, passed out, high as a kite, behind the wheel. It took weeks to get the smell out.

  Your father didn’t show up again until a few days after the robbery. Sitting at the table, shaking for alcohol: “It’s horrible, son. You should have an alarm system.” He comes, as if by magic, only when your mother and stepfather are not home. “Just pour me one drink, son.”

  This man you cannot say you love, cannot say you don’t. He is the mystery man, the question mark. After a few weeks of his visits, always at night, the house empty, your sister asleep, he stopped showing up. The last visit you knocked him to the ground. He limped to the door, faking it a little, maybe, it was impossible to know, and he said something deliciously cruel. But you have never been able to remember what it was.

  He said, Your eyes are like two sapphires in a window in Chinatown on the kind of day that makes a man want to get down on one knee. That was the first date, your mother tells you. Talked like that for a few months, then they got married. Her second marriage, his first. Marie had introduced her to him, the Italian guy who owned the deli across the street. He had noticed her walking by one day and asked Marie who she was. On the first date he wore about six gold chains around his neck, paid for everything with a fat wad of hundred-dollar bills. They did cocaine and drank beer, and he whipped out the line about the sapphires. Smooth customer, she says. Look at him.

  And you look, you remember: white T-shirt, two gold chains, pressed slacks, black loafers. He dresses like his brothers, his friends. Cooking calamari and clams casino on the deck, working at the deli all day, asking you why you want to date a nigger or kissing your mother behind
the ear, he has looked the same since the day you met him, when you were four years old. Your mother wanted at least a father for you and your sister. She got a man, twenty-one years older, who worshipped her—even if he eventually lost the words for it. On the first date, she tells you, I had no idea he’d been living with another woman and her daughter for almost ten years. An entirely different family. I told him, Look, you make a decision. And he left me. Next morning, there he is, at the door with a suitcase, cigarette in his lips. She smiles. That fucker, you should have seen the look on his face.

  But she hadn’t yet told him she was separated from her husband—that he had tried to kill her and was still trying to find her and his children. Like the new man she knew she would marry, she had an unshakable sense of timing.

  Your father at the table in jacket and tie. Have you ever seen him not in jacket and tie? Raised a Jehovah’s Witness, he learned early that one must represent God as His witness, and when you knock on someone’s door it can’t hurt to have pressed your slacks. He downs a glass of gin like milk.

  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 l
ights.

  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.