The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories Read online

  What could I say? He’s only barely related to me? He hardly ever does that?

  Angela’s eyes were like these little pies.

  I walked her home, got no kiss, came back, cleaned up the dishwasher as best I could. A few days later I got my class ring in the mail and a copy of the The Prophet.

  You will always be my first love, she’d written inside. But now my path converges to a higher ground. Be well always. Walk in joy. Please don’t think me cruel, it’s just that I want so much in terms of accomplishment, plus I couldn’t believe that guy peed right on your dishes.

  No way am I table dancing for Angela Silveri. No way am I asking Angela Silveri’s friend if she wants to see my cock. No way am I hanging around here so Angela can see me in my flight jacket and T-backs and wonder to herself how I went so wrong etc. etc.

  I hide in the kitchen until my shift is done, then walk home very, very slowly because I’m afraid of what Bernie’s going to do to me when I get there.

  Min meets me at the door. She’s got flour all over her blouse and it looks like she’s been crying.

  “I can’t take any more of this,” she says. “She’s like falling apart. I mean shit’s falling off her. Plus she made me bake a freaking pie.”

  On the table is a very lumpy pie. One of Bernie’s arms is now disconnected and lying across her lap.

  “What are you thinking of?” she shouts. “You didn’t show your cock even once? You think it’s easy making those thumbprints? You try it, smartass! Do you or do you not know the plan? You gotta get us out of here! And to get us out, you gotta use what you got. And you ain’t got much. A nice face. And a decent unit. Not huge, but shaped nice.”

  “Bernie, God,” says Min.

  “What, Miss Priss?” shouts Bernie, and slams the severed arm down hard on her lap, and her other ear falls off.

  “I’m sorry, but this is too fucking sickening,” says Min. “I’m going out.”

  “What’s sickening?” says Bernie. “Are you saying that I’m sickening? Well, I think you’re sickening. So many wonderful things in life and where’s your mind? You think with your lazy ass. Whatever life hands you, you take. You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying home and studying.”

  “I’m what?” says Min. “Studying what? I ain’t studying. Chick comes into my house and starts ordering me to study? I freaking doubt it.”

  “You don’t know nothing!” Bernie says. “What fun is life when you don’t know nothing? You can’t find your own town on the map. You can’t name a single president. When we go to Rome you won’t know nothing about the history. You’re going to study the World Book. Do we still have those World Books?”

  “Yeah right,” says Min. “We’re going to Rome.”

  “We’ll go to Rome when he’s a lawyer,” says Bernie.

  “Dream on, chick,” says Min. “And we’ll go to Mars when I’m a stockbreaker.”

  “Don’t you dare make fun of me!” Bernie shouts, and our only vase goes flying across the room and nearly nails Min in the head.

  “She’s been like this all day,” says Min.

  “Like what?” shouts Bernie. “We had a perfectly nice day.”

  “She made me help her try on my bras,” says Min.

  “I never had a nice sexy bra,” says Bernie.

  “And now mine are all ruined,” says Min. “They got this sort of goo on them.”

  “You ungrateful shit!” shouts Bernie. “Do you know what I’m doing for you? I’m saving your boy. And you got the nerve to say I made goo on your bras! Troy’s gonna get caught in a cross fire in the courtyard. In September. September eighteenth. He’s gonna get thrown off his little trike. With one leg twisted under him and blood pouring out of his ear. It’s a freaking prophecy. You know that word? It means prediction. You know that word? You think I’m bullshitting? Well I ain’t bullshitting. I got the power. Watch this: All day Jade sat licking labels at a desk by a window. Her boss bought everybody subs for lunch. She’s bringing some home in a green bag.”

  “That ain’t true about Troy, is it?” says Min. “Is it? I don’t believe it.”

  “Turn on the TV!” Bernie shouts. “Give me the changer.”

  I turn on the TV. I give her the changer. She puts on Nathan’s Body Shop. Nathan says washboard abs drive the women wild. Then there’s a close-up of his washboard abs.

  “Oh yes,” says Bernie. “Them are for me. I’d like to give those a lick. A lick and a pinch. I’d like to sort of straddle those things.”

  Just then Jade comes through the door with a big green bag.

  “Oh God,” says Min.

  “Told you so!” says Bernie, and pokes Min in the ribs. “Ha ha! I really got the power!”

  “I don’t get it,” Min says, all desperate. “What happens? Please. What happens to him? You better freaking tell me.”

  “I already told you,” Bernie says. “He’ll fly about fifteen feet and live about three minutes.”

  “Bernie, God,” Min says, and starts to cry. “You used to be so nice.”

  “I’m still so nice,” says Bernie, and bites into a sub and takes off the tip of her finger and starts chewing it up.

  Just after dawn she shouts out my name.

  “Take the blanket off,” she says. “I ain’t feeling so good.”

  I take the blanket off. She’s basically just this pile of parts: both arms in her lap, head on the arms, heel of one foot touching the heel of the other, all of it sort of wrapped up in her dress.

  “Get me a washcloth,” she says. “Do I got a fever? I feel like I got a fever. Oh, I knew it was too good to be true. But okay. New plan. New plan. I’m changing the first part of Phase One. If you see two thumbprints, that means the lady’ll screw you for cash. We’re in a fix here. We gotta speed this up. There ain’t gonna be nothing left of me. Who’s gonna be my lover now?”

  The doorbell rings.

  “Son of a bitch,” Bernie snarls.

  It’s Father Brian with a box of doughnuts. I step out quick and close the door behind me. He says he’s just checking in. Perhaps we’d like to talk? Perhaps we’re feeling some residual anger about Bernie’s situation? Which would of course be completely understandable. Once when he was a young priest someone broke in and drew a mustache on the Virgin Mary with a permanent marker, and for weeks he was tortured by visions of bending back the finger of the vandal until he or she burst into tears of apology.

  “I knew that wasn’t appropriate,” he says. “I knew that by indulging in that fantasy I was honoring violence. And yet it gave me pleasure. I also thought of catching them in the act and boinking them in the head with a rock. I also thought of jumping up and down on their backs until something in their spinal column cracked. Actually I had about a million ideas. But you know what I did instead? I scrubbed and scrubbed our Holy Mother, and soon she was as good as new. Her statue, I mean. She herself of course is always good as new.”

  From inside comes the sound of breaking glass. Breaking glass and then something heavy falling, and Jade yelling and Min yelling and the babies crying.

  “Oops, I guess?” he says. “I’ve come at a bad time? Look, all I’m trying to do is urge you, if at all possible, to forgive the perpetrators, as I forgave the perpetrator that drew on my Virgin Mary. The thing lost, after all, is only your aunt’s body, and what is essential, I assure you, is elsewhere, being well taken care of.”

  I nod. I smile. I say thanks for stopping by. I take the doughnuts and go back inside.

  The TV’s broke and the refrigerator’s tipped over and Bernie’s parts are strewn across the living room like she’s been shot out of a cannon.

  “She tried to get up,” says Jade.

  “I don’t know where the hell she thought she was going,” says Min.

  “Come here,” the head says to me, and I squat down. “That’s it for me. I’m fucked. As per usual. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Although come to think of it I was never even the freaking bridesmaid. Lo
ok, show your cock. It’s the shortest line between two points. The world ain’t giving away nice lives. You got a trust fund? You a genius? Show your cock. It’s what you got. And remember: Troy in September. On his trike. One leg twisted. Don’t forget. And also. Don’t remember me like this. Remember me like how I was the night we all went to Red Lobster and I had that new perm. Ah Christ. At least buy me a stone.”

  I rub her shoulder, which is next to her foot.

  “We loved you,” I say.

  “Why do some people get everything and I got nothing?” she says. “Why? Why was that?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Show your cock,” she says, and dies again.

  We stand there looking down at the pile of parts. Mac crawls toward it and Min moves him back with her foot.

  “This is too freaking much,” says Jade, and starts crying.

  “What do we do now?” says Min.

  “Call the cops,” Jade says.

  “And say what?” says Min.

  We think about this awhile.

  I get a Hefty bag. I get my winter gloves.

  “I ain’t watching,” says Jade.

  “I ain’t watching either,” says Min, and they take the babies into the bedroom.

  I close my eyes and wrap Bernie up in the Hefty bag and twistie-tie the bag shut and lug it out to the trunk of the K-car. I throw in a shovel. I drive up to St. Leo’s. I lower the bag into the hole using a bungee cord, then fill the hole back in.

  Down in the city are the nice houses and the so-so houses and the lovers making out in the dark yards and the babies crying for their moms, and I wonder if, other than Jesus, this has ever happened before. Maybe it happens all the time. Maybe there’s angry dead all over, hiding in rooms, covered with blankets, bossing around their scared, embarrassed relatives. Because how would we know?

  I for sure don’t plan on broadcasting this.

  I smooth over the dirt and say a quick prayer: If it was wrong for her to come back, forgive her, she never got beans in this life, plus she was trying to help us.

  At the car I think of an additional prayer: But please don’t let her come back again.

  When I get home the babies are asleep and Jade and Min are watching a phone-sex infomercial, three girls in leather jumpsuits eating bananas in slo-mo while across the screen runs a constant disclaimer: “Not Necessarily the Girls Who Man the Phones! Not Necessarily the Girls Who Man the Phones!”

  “Them chicks seem to really be enjoying those bananas,” says Min in a thin little voice.

  “I like them jumpsuits though,” says Jade.

  “Yeah them jumpsuits look decent,” says Min.

  Then they look up at me. I’ve never seen them so sad and beat and sick.

  “It’s done,” I say.

  Then we hug and cry and promise never to forget Bernie the way she really was, and I use some Resolve on the rug and they go do some reading in their World Books.

  Next day I go in early. I don’t see a single thumbprint. But it doesn’t matter. I get with Sonny Vance and he tells me how to do it. First you ask the woman would she like a private tour. Then you show her the fake P-40, the Gallery of Historical Aces, the shower stall where we get oiled up, etc. etc. and then in the hall near the restroom you ask if there’s anything else she’d like to see. It’s sleazy. It’s gross. But when I do it I think of September. September and Troy in the cross fire, his little leg bent under him etc. etc.

  Most say no but quite a few say yes.

  I’ve got a place picked out at a complex called Swan’s Glen. They’ve never had a shooting or a knifing and the public school is great and every Saturday they have a nature walk for kids behind the clubhouse.

  For every hundred bucks I make, I set aside five for Bernie’s stone.

  What do you write on something like that? LIFE PASSED HER BY? DIED DISAPPOINTED? CAME BACK TO LIFE BUT FELL APART? All true, but too sad, and no way I’m writing any of those.

  BERNIE KOWALSKI, it’s going to say: BELOVED AUNT.

  Sometimes she comes to me in dreams. She never looks good. Sometimes she’s wearing a dirty smock. Once she had on handcuffs. Once she was naked and dirty and this mean cat was clawing its way up her front. But every time it’s the same thing.

  “Some people get everything and I got nothing,” she says. “Why? Why did that happen?”

  Every time I say I don’t know.

  And I don’t.

  EVERYTHING RAVAGED, EVERYTHING BURNED

  WELLS TOWER

  Just as we were all getting back into the mainland domestic groove, somebody started in with dragons and crop blights from across the North Sea. We all knew who it was. A turncoat Norwegian monk named Naddod had been big medicine on the dragon-and-blight circuit for the last decade or so, and was known to bring heavy ordnance for whoever could lay out some silver. Scuttlebutt had it that Naddod was operating out of a monastery on Lindisfarne, whose people we’d troubled on a pillage-and-consternation junket in Northumbria after Corn Harvesting Month last fall. Now bitter winds were screaming in from the west, searing the land and ripping the grass from the soil. Salmon were turning up spattered with sores, and grasshoppers clung to the wheat in rapacious buzzing bunches.

  I tried to put these things out of my mind. We’d been away three long months harrying the Hibernian shores, and now I was back with Pila, my common-law, and thinking that home was very close to paradise in these endless golden summer days. We’d built our house together, Pila and I. It was a fine little wattle-and-daub cabin on a pretty bit of plain where a wide blue fjord stabbed into the land. On summer evenings my young wife and I would sit out front, high on potato wine, and watch the sun stitch a brilliant orange skirt across the horizon. At times such as these, you get a big feeling, like the gods made this place, this moment, first, and concocted you as an afterthought just to be there to enjoy it.

  I was doing a lot of enjoying and relishing and a lot of lying around the rack with Pila, though I knew what it meant when I heard those flint-edged winds howling past the house. Sons of bitches three weeks’ boat ride off were fucking up our summer and were probably going to need their asses whipped.

  Of course, Djarf Fairhair had his stinger out even before his wife spotted those dragons winging it inland from the coast. He was boss on our ship and a fool for warfare. His appetite for action was so terrifying and infectious, he’d once riled up a gang of Frankish slaves and led them south to afflict and maim their own countrymen. He’d gotten in four days of decent sacking when the slaves began to see the situation for what it was and underwent a sudden change of attitude. Djarf had been fighting his way up the Rhine Valley, making steady progress through a half-assed citizens’ militia of children and farmers, when the slaves closed in behind him. People who were there say he turned absolutely feral and began berserking with a pair of broadaxes, chewing through the lines like corn kernels on a cob, and that when the axes broke, he cut loose with a dismembered human head, so horrifying those gentle provincials that they fell back and gave him wide berth to the ship.

  Djarf was from Hedeby-Slesvig up the Slie fjord, a fairly foul and rocky locality whose people take a worrisome pleasure in the gruesome sides of life. They have a habit down there if they don’t like a child’s looks when he slides from the womb. They pitch him into the deep waters and wait for the next one. Djarf himself was supposedly a colicky, peaked baby, and it was only the beneficence of the tides and his own vicious tenacity that got him to the far shore when his father grew tired of his caterwauling and tried to wash him from the world.

  He’d been campaigning for payback ever since. I was with him on a search-and-destroy tour against Louis the Pious, and with my own eyes watched him climb up over the soldiers’ backs and stride like a saint across men’s heads, golf-stroking skulls as he went. On that same trip, we ran low on food, and it was Djarf who decided to throw our own dead on the fire and have at last night’s mutton when their stomachs burst. He’d been the only
one of us to dig in, apart from a crazy Arab along as a spellbuster. He reached right in there, scooping out chewed-up victuals with a shank of pine bark. “Faggot greenhorns,” he called us, the firelight twitching on his face. “Food’s food. If these guys hadn’t gotten their threads snipped, they’d tell you the same thing.”

  So Djarf, whose wife was a rotten, carp-mouthed thing and little argument for staying home, was agitating to hop back in the ship and go straighten things out in Northumbria. My buddy Gnut, who lived just over the stony moraine our wheat field backed up on, came down the hill one day and admitted that he too was giving it some thought. Like me, he wasn’t big on warrioring. He was just crazy for boat. We used to joke and say Gnut would ride a boat from his shack to his shithouse if somebody would invent one whose prow could cut sod. Gnut’s wife had passed years ago, dead from bad milk, and now that she was gone, the part of him that felt peaceful in a place that didn’t move beneath him had sickened and died as well.

  Pila saw him coming down the hill and frowned at me. “Don’t need to guess what he’ll be wanting,” she said. She scowled and headed back indoors. Gnut ambled down over the hummocky earth and stopped at the pair of stump chairs Pila and I had put up on the hill where the view was so fine. From there, the fjord shone like poured silver, and sometimes you could spot a seal poking his head up through the waves.

  Gnut’s wool coat was stiff with filth and his long hair so heavy and unclean that even the wind keening up from the shore was having a hard time getting it to move. He had a good crust of snot going in his mustache, not a pleasant thing to look at, but then he had no one around to find it disagreeable. He tore a sprig of heather from the ground and chewed at its sweet roots.

  “Djarf get at you yet?” he asked.

  “No, not yet, but I’m not worried he’ll forget.”

  He took the sprig from his teeth and briefly jammed it into his ear before tossing it away. “You gonna go?”

  “Not until I hear the particulars, I won’t.”