Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

He said nothing but opened the door enough for her and the baby to enter.

“It's dark, Horace. What about some light?”

He righted the lamp on the table and turned it on.

“Jesus in Heaven, Horace! What happened! My Lord Jesus! I can’t believe this.” The baby, startled by his mother's words, began to cry. “It's O.K.,” she said to him. “It's O.K.,” and gradually the baby calmed down. “Oh, Horace, I’m so sorry. I really am. This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” She touched his shoulder with her free hand, but he shrugged it off. “Oh, my dear God! Who could do this?”

She went to the couch and moved enough trash aside for the baby. She pulled a pacifier from her sweater pocket, put it momentarily in her mouth to remove the lint, then put it in the baby's mouth. He appeared satisfied and leaned back on the couch.

She went to Horace, and right away he grabbed her throat. “I’m gonna kill you tonight!” he shouted. “I just wish that bitch Catrina was here so I could kill her, too.” Elaine struggled and sputtered out one “please” before he gripped her tighter. She beat his arms but that seemed to give him more strength. She began to cry. “I’m gonna kill you tonight, girl, if it's the last thing I do.”

The baby began to cry, and she turned her head as much as she could to look at him. This made him slap her twice, and she started to fall, and he pulled her up and, as he did, went for a better grip, which was time enough for her to say, “Don’t kill me in front of my son, Horace.” He loosened his hands. “Don’t kill me in front of my boy, Horace.” Her tears ran down her face and over and into his hands. “He don’t deserve to see me die. You know that, Horace.”

“Where, then!”

“Anywhere but in front of him. He's innocent of everything.”

He let her go and backed away.

“I did nothin, Horace,” she whispered. “I give you my word, I did nothin.” The baby screamed, and she went to him and took him in her arms.

Horace sat down in the same chair he had been in.

“I would not do this to you, Horace.”

He looked at her and at the baby, who could not take his eyes off Horace, even through his tears.

One of the baby's cries seemed to get stuck in his throat, and to release it the baby raised a fist and punched the air, and finally the cry came free. How does a man start over with nothing? Horace thought. Elaine came near him, and the baby still watched him as his crying lessened. How does a man start from scratch?

He leaned down and picked up a few of the broken albums from the floor and read the labels. “I would not hurt you for anything in the world, Horace,” Elaine said. Okeh Phonograph Corporation. Domino Record

Co. RCA Victor. Darnell, Jr.,'s crying stopped, but he continued to look down at the top of Horaces head. Cameo Record Corporation, N.Y. “You been too good to me for me to hurt you like this, Horace.” He dropped the records one at a time: “It Takes an Irishman to Make Love.” “I’m Gonna Pin a Medal on the Girl I Left Behind.” “Ragtime Soldier Man.” “Whose Little Heart Are You Breaking Now.” “The Syncopated Walk.”

from The Threepenny Review

FIRST OF all, Adam. He creaked up beside me on a bicycle that seemed welded of leftover plumbing parts. “Pull over,” he said with all the authority of a Keystone Cop.

He was cute enough. In particular, the hair: black, thick, sticking out of his head in a dozen directions. His long thin legs straddled the flared central strut of his bicycle like denim-covered tent poles and he stared down at my own bike with eyes the color of asphalt-the old gray kind, with glass embedded in it to reflect light.

But this wasn’t a pickup.

“That is my bicycle,” he announced. A trace of an accent?

“I’m sure there's some misunderstanding,” I said. “I paid for this bike.”

“Then you bought stolen merchandise,” he said, his consonants soft. Eastern European. Shtolen mershendise. “I think you should show me where.”

I’d gone on a tip. Benny's East Village. “You won’t believe his prices,” a friend had told me. “Isn’t that the burrito place?” I’d said. In fact my friend had said, “They’re probably all stolen, but what you don’t know won’t hurt you.” “He steals burritos?” I’d said. “Bicycles” my friend said. “Come on.” By the time Adam and I arrived the shop had closed for the day. Adam's thin legs had labored to turn his creaking pedals, and it occurred to me I could have outrun him, but I didn’t. The sun was setting at our backs and our shadows stretched out in front of us like twinned towers. I thought we were a pair. I thought we were in it together.

Benny sat on a swivel chair on the sidewalk, a television propped in front of him on a pair of milk crates; a tin of rice and beans wobbled on his lap. We’d been there only a few minutes when a man half carried, half pushed a bike up the street. He held it by the seat, lifting the back wheel off the ground because it couldn’t turn: it was still locked to the frame. After inspecting the bicycle, Benny paid the man from a roll of bills he pulled from the breast pocket of his T-shirt, stowed the bicycle under the grate of his store, and returned to his chair.

I turned to Adam.

“I guess I should have investigated further.”

“You should have.”

He was pulling the kryptonite U-lock from its frame-mounted holder, and I inferred from this action that he wanted to trade bikes. I dismounted, and was unwinding my chain from the seat post when his lock caught me in the side of the head, just behind and below my left eye. Fireflies streaked through my field of vision when the lock struck me, but I didn’t actually lose consciousness until the sidewalk hit me in the forehead.

Charlie sponged the grit from my face. What was stuck to solid skin washed away easily, but the bits of gravel embedded in the gashes on my cheek and forehead resisted, had to be convinced to relinquish their berth. I closed my eyes against the water trickling from his rag.

One summer when I was seven or eight I carried cupfuls of water from a stream and poured them down chipmunk holes. The chipmunks would remain underground for as long as possible until, wobbling like drunken sailors, they staggered into the sunshine. Gently I lifted them into a tinfoil turkey tray I’d habitated with rocks, plants, a ribbed tin can laid on its side (a sleeping den, I’d thought), and then I watched as the chipmunks revived, explored their playground tentatively, and then, inevitably, hurdled the shiny wall and scrambled back down their holes.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to use a tweezers for the last of it.” I opened my eyes. Charlie was making a face, as if performing this surgery hurt him instead of me.

He asked me if it hurt me.

I was still remembering the way that last chipmunk had lain on its side after I’d fished it from its home, eyes closed, chest fluttering as rapidly as a bee's wings. I’d dared to stroke its heaving ribs. The chipmunk curled itself into a ball around my finger, its mouth and the claws of all four paws digging at me until I flung it away and it scurried to safety.

“It hurts,” I said, then caught Charlie's arm as he flinched. “My head hurts,” I said. “What you’re doing doesn’t hurt.”

Benny's East Village sold bikes every day except Sunday from eleven until seven, but seemed always to be bustling with activity. In the mornings a young woman worked on the bicycles. This was Deneisha, who seemed to live on the third floor. Every ten minutes a younger version of her leaned out the window to relay a request: “Deneisha, Mami says why you didn’t get no more coffee if you used the last of it?” “Deneisha, Benny says to call him back on his cell phone.” “Deneisha, Eduardo wants to know when are you gonna take the training wheels off my bike so I can go riding with him?” Deneisha, her thick body covered in greasy overalls, inky black spirals of hair rubberbanded off her smooth round face, ignored these interruptions, working with Allen wrenches and oil cans and tubes of glue on gears, brakes, tires. For bicycles that still had a chain fastened to them she had an enormous pair of snips, their handles as long as her meaty arms, and for U-locks she had a special saw that threw sparks like a torch as it chewed through tempered steel.