Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

Late August we are caught, giggling and naked, fucking in the preacher’s bed. From his house we’d collected sheets of cardstock paper with his parish’s name embossed along the top. He will tell the police officers hours later as we are being loaded into the backseats of the cop cars that he’d left a pair of good shoes at the lake house. This explained his unexpected visit. The preacher opens the door to the beach house and Rio and I jump from the bed, pulling on our swim-trunks. He grabs Rio by the hair and slams him into the wall. He thunders like a sermon. We get away and run and hide down in our spot by the paddleboats.

Before we go home and before the cops arrive we are walking the shoreline, panting. Rio sees something and points. “Look,” he tells me. I see a brown mass—fur and antlers. It doesn’t move. I am scared to get closer. He runs ahead, kicking up sand. The beach looks so big, like he could get lost in it. I do not want to lose him. I follow, my ankles buckling to the uncertainty of the sand. The brown mass is huge. It is a monster—it could rear its ugly head and tear us limb from limb. It looks dead for weeks, stinking and bloated, its blood has turned the sand and water black. We know from Michigan Animal Magazine that this is a moose. Standing next to it Rio looks so small, but he is fourteen and taller and darker with skin still hot from Texas. He covers his mouth. We know from Michigan Animal Magazine that moose are only found in small numbers in the Upper Peninsula. We figure that the moose died up north and the water carried him here.

Rio crouches, covering his nose. He says we have to do something. “What can we do?” I ask. He starts to gather twigs and shells, leaves and driftwood. He uses what we have: scattered branches, pebbles, brittle shells. He scatters them around the moose, creates a perimeter of earthly discharge to sanction off this bit of beach for the moose. I help him. I pull bentgrass up and pick flowers from the beach trees. We sit away from the moose and lean our heads on one another. We watch the shoreline for Wisconsin. The moose’s antlers have already begun to bleach clean in the sun.

Our mothers will struggle through the winter. They will rely on second jobs cleaning houses. They won’t trust us alone in the same room together. The cop had been able to speak Spanish and had told our mothers what we’d been doing. The preacher dropped the charges. Rio will start to sleep with his mother and I will sleep with mine. Rio will crawl the coves without me. He is the gringo who falls through the ice that winter, but he will pull himself out and walk, shivering, back to our house where I will tell him how fucking stupid he is. I will take his clothes off and take my clothes off and press myself against him inside a scratchy mohair blanket.

He will flunk out of college and move back home. Carmen will put him to work in the taquería. We will barely talk for months. He will become the kind of brave that says yes to everything. When I graduate college he will be in rehab fighting a heroin addiction. He will call saying that one of the steps is making amends and a week later we will end up fucking against the walls of the apartment I share with my boyfriend. He will break off in me like shells. I will meet my husband, Fisher, when I am twenty-six and he will meet Rio that same year at Thanksgiving and Rio will not be happy about it. In the kitchen, while Fisher is trying his best to speak with our mothers, Rio will tell me that no one can love me as hard and as real as he has every year since we were fourteen. I will say something to destroy him: “It took this long to find someone that could love the rest of you out of me.” Fisher will hear our voices rising and will step into the kitchen as Rio slams his fist against the laminate countertop. Fisher will ask if everything is all right. I will have to explain that night on the drive home about Rio and I.

The summer we are fourteen and playing dress-up with our mothers’ clothes in their bedroom with Jesus hanging on a cross on the wall, we talk about getting older. We sit on my mother’s bed, the dresses zipped up halfway and pooling around our waists. We have not become monsters yet. We have not stolen the Euchre cards and buttons. We have not called the boys buoys. The boy from school that we hate has not drowned in the lake. The moose has not washed up on the banks of Lake Michigan. We do not know that we will never know our fathers. We will wonder what got into us. Outside, though the curtains are closed tight and all we can see are the curtains’ stitches in the sun, we know the beach is clean because summer is just getting started and the summer families haven’t moved in. Rio has just kissed me for the first time.

“I’ll get a sex change,” Rio says. He gathers the dress up around his hips and clips at his penis with two fingers.

“I like you as a boy,” I tell him.

“Then you’re gay,” he says.

“Don’t you like me?” I ask.

“I love you,” he says. “It’s wrong though. We have to stop or something bad will happen.”

We take off the dresses and hang them in the closet.

On the first day, there’s a sense of relief. There are other feelings, too, but relief is among them. She has arrived, at least. After three weeks. After a broken sandal strap, sunburn on her cheeks, mud in her ears, bugs in her hair, blisters around her ankles, bruises on her hips, boiled eggs, bottled water, sour berries, pickup trucks and train cars and footsteps through the dirt, sunrises and sunsets, nagging doubt and crackling hope—she has arrived.

They tell her to sleep, but that can’t be right. First she has to find her son, who is supposed to be here, too. They were separated along the way, overnight, a few days ago. The man who was leading them here divided the group. Twelve people drew too much attention, he claimed. He had sectioned off the women, silencing any protest with the back of his hand, swift to the jaw. “Do you want to get there or not?” They did. “Trust me,” he said.

He sent a friend to escort them. When she glanced back, she felt a shove between her shoulder blades. “It’s only for a few miles,” he hissed in her ear. “Walk.”

By morning, the men were gone, the children gone. The friend, a man with sunglasses and a chipped front tooth, said, “I am here to take care of you.” What he meant was that they were there to take care of him. Four women. Which they did. Which they were made to do.

“Where is my son?” she asks a guard who speaks Spanish. He shrugs in reply. “ ¿Mi hijo? ” she asks anyone who will listen and many who won’t. “He’s five years old. He has black hair, parted on one side, and a freckle, right here, under his eye. He was wearing a Spider-Man shirt.” People just shake their heads.

“There’s a family unit,” one woman says, pointing down the hall. “They have cribs,” she adds, as if that’s something.

In the family unit, which is one large room, she searches every crib. She gazes down at infants and eight-year-olds curled against the bars. She scans the faces of the children watching Dora the Explorer on a television set mounted to the wall.

“He’s coming,” a young mother sitting in the corner assures her. She has a child on her lap. “The same thing happened to me. The kids just take longer. They don’t walk as fast. Mine got here a whole week after I did. Everyone makes it eventually.”

She wants to believe that’s true.

The first night, she lies in a bed and listens to the noises of the women in the room with her. Dozens of them. They’re stacked neatly in bunk beds, like bodies in a morgue, and she stares at the bowing mattress above her, the straining metal coils, worried that they will not hold. She considers the possibility that the gray-haired woman who clambered up there earlier and who is snoring there now might fall through and crush her to death. She begins to laugh. What if? After everything? What if that’s how it ends? The sound of her laughter blooms in the dark. From across the room, a voice asks, “What the fuck is so funny?”