Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

I was quiet. Koda gave up and lay down next to me.

“You’re not living in this trailer for good, are you?” said Jenny. “You can’t wash dishes forever.” He sat on the porch steps and stuck the unlit joint all the way inside his mouth, pulled it slowly out to coat it with spit, and passed the lighter back and forth as he rotated it, drying out the paper, before lighting it.

“Your dad was a weird duck—never knew what that guy was thinking. But guys like him, they’re so nice they sometimes can’t say what it is they want. I think wherever he is, it hurt him bad to leave you. That’s all you need to know.”

I took a big drag of the joint and coughed. We passed it back and forth, pressing our lips to the same soggy end, and sat there awhile after we finished.

“Man, I’m flipped outta my rig,” said Jenny. “Flipped outta my fucking rig!” He hauled himself up by the porch railing, taking a last coughing drag, and stumbled down the steps. He tripped on a piece of quartz on the last one, picked it up, cussed, and chucked it toward the forest. It bounced off something and came rolling back into view.

Over a year after Dad left, I was still living with Koda in that trailer, working at the Chinese restaurant. I’d been alive nineteen years and had no idea what to do with myself. I’d finally cleaned out Dad’s old wallet and threw it away. After staring into his face for a long time, I threw out his driver’s license and old ID cards too.

I saw my friend Blake outside the gas station, holding a cup of shit coffee in a fancy portable mug. It was summer. The asphalt was starting to radiate heat. Blake had heard about Dad, and he didn’t like that I was still living in the trailer.

“It’s not so bad,” I said.

He told me about Williston, where he worked on an oil rig. He was here to see his folks. “Hard living, but a couple years of this and I’ll be doing anything I want.” I didn’t understand exactly what it was he did. “Two weeks on, one off, bud. Hundred thou a year. Pretty good for a Bonner High School grad, huh bud.”

“It’s not bad here,” I said.

“Cal, you want to end up like these people?” He looked around the empty parking lot. Across the street, guys piled into a truck loaded with construction supplies, and we heard one give a loud, girlish giggle. They seemed all right to me.

“Williston’s the kind of place that can change your luck,” said Blake. “Make enough money to do whatever you want. Hell, you could live in my basement. Bring Koda. Think about it. We could get beach houses in Florida, bud. Watch ladies in bikinis walk through our yard every day. Track caribou up in Canada. You could finally teach me how to hunt.”

I’d heard about guys losing a finger or arm at those jobs, or getting hooked on pills or whatever else they had down there. But a beach house sounded nice.

In the fall Jenny and I hunted together. Mulies, mostly. Once in a while an elk. He didn’t need my help and I didn’t need his, but I think we both liked the company.

Jenny’s legs had gotten so thin his pants hung off them. Whatever sickness he had seemed to be getting worse. His face wasn’t smooth and puffy anymore. His cheekskin hung on two cheekbones. Oily skin under his eyes the color of chow mein. Looking at it made me hungry, even though I hated chow mein. The rattail was the only thing that looked healthy about him. It looked fatter than before. It reminded me somehow of the waving cat at the restaurant, this long piece of hair rooted into his skull, wagging at me as I followed it through the woods. Slowly sucking the fat out of him, but also saying, don’t worry, don’t worry. I wondered where his meat was going, since we split whatever we got. He was so skinny. I figured he gave some of it as presents when women visited.

We had to walk farther than usual to find game, and the animals we did find looked hungry. On our longest hike, I shot a porcupine. Jenny showed me how to skin it. We roasted it over a fire, and he explained you have to cook it a long time because of tapeworms. The meat was greasy and crisp and tasted like pine.

“You think my dad killed himself?” I asked. That’s what I’d come to believe. It was easiest thinking he’d made a choice and acted on it. That he hadn’t left me to go live somewhere else, or died by accident in some far-off ravine in the woods. Even if I didn’t believe it, it seemed like the best way to stop wondering.

“I don’t think he would,” said Jenny. “But you never know.”

We never saw the cougar that killed Shively’s colt. The Korean grandma told me she’d seen it on one of her nighttime walks around town. “My son thinks mountain lions are the most beautiful animal in Montana,” she said. Her son was tracking him. Wanted to stuff him, mount him on the restaurant wall like he was about to jump. “Like a display he saw in a museum in San Francisco,” she said. “It would bring business in. People like to see.” I pictured a cougar crammed with stuffing, bigger than he’d ever been alive. Stuck crouching sadly above diners. Eyes made in a factory in China by little girls. Wanting to maim these Chinese-food-eating cretins. The gross orange sauce and greasy chicken smells seeping into his corpse.

A postcard came from Blake. A well spit up black oil on the front. On the back, in smashed-together handwriting, like maybe his hands were tired, it said, Basemnt still free. Talked to my boss abt a job for you. Come out, bud. I stuck it on the fridge.

At the restaurant, I came to look forward to talking to the grandma. There was never anything to report on her son’s cougar hunt, so she’d tell me about the sad-looking man in the shrine photo and how he and her dad had sampled LSD and eaten gas-station steak and eggs every morning for a month. He’d also smuggled a lemon the size of a football from California to Korea in the ’70s. This all seemed unappealing to me, stuff I’d never want to do. The lemon, her dad said, was from a famous lemon farm and would bring his family luck. She said she came from a place called Soul.

I started smoking rez cigarettes too. Mostly quit buying beer. Drove slower to save gas, so that the trailer was now a six-cigarette drive from town. Stole more than usual from the Missoula Walmart, filling a trash can in the self-checkout line with Koda’s food and other junk and just ringing up the heavy can, which I’d later return. I’d save as much cash as I could every month, rolling the twenties and sticking them in a cigarette carton.

After work I’d sit with my back to the living room window and the forest, watching shapes the light and trees made on the wall. I made a beer last a long time, closing my eyes and sipping and looking at the shapes the sun made through the skin of my eyelids.

Blake called to tell me he’d spoken to his boss about me, but I needed to pass a test first. Over the next weeks he helped me study over the phone. I drove to Missoula for the exam. Most questions I had to just guess. At least, that’s what I thought. A few weeks later a letter came. I’d passed.

When Jenny smoked a cigarette I’d go out and smoke one too, so I could wave at him and see him wave back. I’d wave up and down, like the cat in the shrine. I’d go inside, sit on the couch, and think about how many moments like this a man could have in a day, a week, a year. A year felt like an unbearably long time.

When Jenny didn’t want to hunt, Koda and I roamed even farther from the trailer, and I guided us back by leaving little landmarks from torn-up construction vests I’d stolen from work sites. The Clark was muddy from runoff and no longer as blue. I was still leaving trash at the huge pile in the sawmill, which was drawing more flies and bees.

One day I was sitting on the porch hoping Jenny would come over after he was finished with the woman whose camper was parked in his yard. I hoped he’d bring another joint.