Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

“Can I buy y’all dinner?” I said.

Once I heard a teacher say that a sure way to change things was to honor opposite impulses. See where they take you. At the time-I was an impressionable young student with pen poised and mind open-this advice seemed a simple answer to the most difficult question there is: how to get across the room. I wanted to live my life scathed but not bleeding. This was before Fran came and well before she went, ages before such advice on How to Change would have struck me, before I even heard it, as superficial fluff to sell magazines in a checkout line.

Crouched by my car, I remembered that I had never actually tried this tactic, intentionally at least. I was all the time doing things I didn’t want to do, and saying the opposite of what I felt, but that was to me the only possible way to live this life.

In the car the man in the tie introduced himself as Darren. The other one, of the shorn head and confusing voice, went unnamed. The clerk had long ago sighed and disappeared inside the market.

We drove along the river road toward Albemarle Sound. I never named a restaurant, for it did not feel as if we were stepping out for a bite. It felt more like they were driving me to their clubhouse, some cinder-block hut down in the swamp bottom, where they would torture me with country music of the black-hat Vegas variety and perhaps a little later, when the bottles grew light, a stun gun. Out the window I watched Bell Island, where the schoolkids once hijacked the ferry that brought them across the sound to school and rode around the inlet smoking dope until the Coast Guard escorted them back in. Bell Island kept pace with the sunken Olds and I imagined the inside of the clubhouse, the club colors draped over cinder block and flanked with porn centerfolds.

“You going to get along all right without your boat?” Darren said.

“V-O-I-T. Like a dodgeball?”

“What a dodgeball has to do with you breaking bad on my boy Kirk I ain’t even going ask.”

I started in on a meditation about memory, how we all lived in closets cluttered with primal objects of childhood. Rosebud. Fran, come home. In the middle of a sentence I stopped, for we all had stopped-the driver had coasted still in the middle of the road, Darren was half turned to watch me.

I said, to turn it back on them, “I think maybe what happened was that y’all hurt some part of my brain that stored, you know, old stuff like dodgeballs.”

“We ain’t hurt shit,” said the driver, stepping indignantly on the gas. “You were already fried when we got there.”

I fell back into the seat. What could I say? It seemed time to deliver myself to whatever course of action I had set in motion by pushing the cashier in his pliant chest. I thought of a Halloween carnival in grade school, being blindfolded and having my hand plunged into a vat of Jell-O standing in for crushed eyeballs. I believed I laughed a little to myself, a little leak of laughter like air out of a tire which cemented whatever opinion my companions had of me, for they talked in low, brooding voices and I could not even muster up the energy to eavesdrop.

We arrived finally at a restaurant I did not recognize. I knew only that we were headed south, and could feel from the elements, from the song of tree frogs and the lonesome whine of the tires on rough pavement, that we were headed toward the Sound. I spent the last few miles of the trip listening to the road-grimy trucker beg for his baby back. Outside it was deep-country black except for a buzzing streetlight leaning above a pier over the water, casting a thin sheen on the rippling shallows. The establishment-from the low, vinyl-sided looks of it, a modular-unit, short-order grill-was obviously closed for the night. Dry-docked trawlers listed precariously in the parking lot. The scene felt illicit, excitedly so, as if we’d come to score drugs or rob someone. I thought, fleetingly, that I had found something to take the place of my fiercely coddled misery, but was quickly sucked under by those insipid strings, which dragged me to the bottom of the black sound.

The driver had a key to the restaurant. Darren ordered him to bring us beers and fry up some shrimp burgers. He said to me, “What the hell do you eat?”

“Not much from the looks of him,” called the driver from a kitchen, lit only by the lights of freezers he was rooting around in.

“I’m on a diet,” I said. A diet with its own soundtrack. The heartbreak diet.

“The thing about diets is all these people starving to death and these rich fuckers on a damn diet.” This line sputtered out from the darkened kitchen.

“Your point?” Darren said to the shadows.

“Ones that can afford to eat lobster every night going around starving. Bet they ain’t sending the money they save over to Africa.”

The driver brought us beers. I left mine untouched. Darren said, “His point is a good one, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’m not rich.”

“You’re just skinny and stupid.”

It seemed time to protest, to ask why we were here, alone in the south end of the county, where not only corpses but corpses still seat-belted into cars turned up in sullen lagoons. But instead I leaned forward and said, “I’m not real hungry.”

“Bring him some coleslaw,” said Darren. He squinted my way. “What's your problem?”

I said, “What do you mean?” though I knew exactly what he meant.

“Going off on Kirk for no reason, beating your head upside your car. Calling out for some damn dodgeball.”

“I guess I’m lonely,” I said. He widened his eyes, as if suddenly I had come into focus for him, and I added, “is all.”

“You ever had anyone die on you?” he asked, wincing slightly, as if it took great effort to send his words my way.

“Yes,” I lied. Maybe this was the worst lie I’d ever told-out of the dozens Fran knew about, the ones that passed undetected. She wasn’t dead; I was dead to her, maybe, but she lived and breathed and was, at that moment, getting on toward bedtime on a Wednesday night in late spring, no doubt moving against some Rick she met at a conference, and the thought of anyone else touching her in the places I’d discovered made me claim now all degrees of suffering as my own.

“You’re lying,” he said. The driver set a huge bowl of soupy coleslaw in front of me, a fresh beer for Darren. He laid out the place settings, lining up the fork and knife with a prissiness that amused me, given our surroundings.

“He's definitely lying,” the driver said, his words lingering as he disappeared back into the kitchen.

From the kitchen came the hiss of frozen meat dropped into a fryer. I tried hard to summon my song, those strings that had driven me out of the house and into the arms of fate; I tried to focus on the trucker's lament, but the tree frogs, the sibilance of fried meat, the buzz of the streetlights kept my song away.

“You think it's all up to you, don’t you?” said Darren.

I thought he wasn’t who he said he was. I thought Fran had sent him, or maybe the pathetic trucker wailing away the hours as he tried to scrub away his sins. My comrade in want, sending his messenger to set me straight. I thought Darren was not real and I asked him just who he was to the cashier. Friend? I said. Second cousin?

He looked through me and repeated: “Up to you, huh?”

I shrugged, mindful of what my shrug suggested: that the weight of the world was not upon me.

Darren shook his head, burped, pushed his chair back, summoned his driver, who had been eating back in the kitchen, as if he knew his place in the world.

“Get the bag out of the trunk,” said Darren. To me he said, “Let's get.”

I rose and followed, queasy from the coleslaw. I was thirsty, too, and exhausted, yet I felt oddly settled. Docility was the answer? I could have apprenticed myself to the migrants, their crooked crew boss, had I only known.