Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

As far as what happened to you: I saw the pictures like everyone else, I read every account. I studied the cellphone video, frame by bloody frame. Here is your face, in which I have always recognized fragments of my own.

Here is your blood, too bright and pouring. Even as you lie stock-still, pinned to the pavement, the police shout staccato commands, which they seem desperate for you to follow. The camera veers and I see them too, sauntering by in spotless sneakers, their ball caps askew. They look relieved that it’s you there on the ground, or else they flash faux gang signs at a camera only they seem to appreciate. The police made a statement before the video surfaced, in defiance of the fact that there is always a video nowadays. You seemed dangerous, they said, and I think of you as a swaddled newborn. They feared for their safety, they said, and perhaps this is true. Later, in a press conference, they admitted you had an ID, but there was some discrepancy. It was from a neighboring state and unfamiliar. You did not appear to be who you said you were.

Beyond all of this, I understood a separate truth, one not yet found in any publication. I knew that they had chosen you out of all those wasted students partying on the strip of college bars. I knew this because I’d worked late that night, the first warm evening of spring. I’d decided to walk home through the carnival of youth, and only by chance spotted you out front of that bar on the corner. You were right there in the fray of students, half swaying to music that spilled from an open patio. You tilted your head toward me. Did you see me, too? Did you recognize me? I can’t adequately explain it, but I must tell you now that I was the one who called the precinct, claiming to have seen a “suspicious young man” at the corner of University and Second. I called but I did not specify your height, your color. Afterward, I hurried home, reassuring myself. Nothing will come of this, I tried to tell myself—and I will finally be able to let it go, or be let go by it. Son, please believe this, if you believe nothing else I’ve written: this was a test for them— for the world!—not for you.

But here, again, we must take a step back, and remind ourselves that this has all been in service to something bigger—that someday our sons’ sons might be spared. Your mother used to say to me, “The seas are rising, whatever you believe. Soon we will all be wet together, and together we will gasp for air…”

I saw you again the other day, out on the lawn at the student-led protests. At first I didn’t recognize you, with that white bandage plastered across your head and the new bowed way you hold your body. But then they delivered you to the front and the small crowd swelled in support. I’ve read there have been other demonstrations on other campuses along the East Coast. A rainbow of faces chanting and wailing as if there are multitudes of watchers now. When I saw you, I knew that you would recover, and it felt like I could breathe again for the first time in a very long while. But even closer to the bone was a feeling of grace that may well soon release me. I mean, look at you—look at all you’ve accomplished, in spite of everything. You made it here, just like they did. And I saw you, Son, turning and wild—free, even—for a moment at least.

The funeral is a Day of the Dead fever dream, all crowns and skeletons and robes and icons burning in the shimmering, dying light of the west. Women in face paint urge the icon down the street as mourners come and pin slips of green paper to his bedazzled robes, their faces slashed with tears. Men beat their chests and howl like apes, women offer up quiet prayers. Children dressed like mutilated angels kiss foreheads and pass out cardboard blessings. The air is thick and cloying with the cheap sugar of dollar-store candles and cigar smoke. This will last all day and deep into the denial of night, carried by songs of redemption and resurrection.

The mayor is dead, and the town, a part of it at least, dies with him and screams to be reborn.

Skeet’s down by the rivermark, cutting symbols into the spackly mud with a stick when his brother crests the hill past the fence and calls down to him.

“Dad’s looking for you.”

Skeet keeps cutting in the dirt. He decides that one of the symbols means ribbon. He draws it again, just to make sure he’s got it. Above him, Leonel skids down the crumbly hill, knocking sheets of dirt loose and tumbling down ahead of him.

“You have to come home.”

“Who says?”

“I told you. Dad.”

“He can come and get me himself then.”

“Don’t be a dick. He says the mayor’s dead.”

“I know he is.”

“How? You’ve been out here all morning.”

“Listen.”

The two of them go silent. At first, Leonel can’t hear anything, but then, a moment later, it’s there. A shaking, dissonant clanging, like three bands playing different dirges against each other. A three-way car crash of notes and melody, metallic and reedy and ugly.

“They’ve been going for hours now. They only play like that when somebody important dies.” Skeet keeps carving in the mud. He doesn’t turn around to face the other boy. Not yet. He knows his bigger brother doesn’t like to see the marks unless he has to, and right now, he doesn’t.

A silence passes between the two boys, brittle and porous, like dry bones. Skeet threads one long-nailed hand through his scrubby short hair, Leonel kicks at the mud.

“He’s waiting, Skeet.”

“Let him wait. I don’t want to go just yet and neither of you can make me.”

“He’s just gonna get madder.”

“He’s always mad.”

“He’s not.”

Fine, fuck it.

Skeet turns to look at his brother, gets in real close, so Leonel has to look at the thick black X tattoos carved on the thin skin under his eyes. His earliest memory, his father buzzing the needle-gun into his face with cold, meth-head determination. The pain, the way it lit his brain on fire. The way he sobbed, like he was never going to breathe again. Red tears cutting down and pooling along the line of his jaw, dribbling on his bare chest and collarbone.

“He is, Leo.”

Skeet studies his brother’s face, somehow left unscarred by the old man’s cruelties, shaped more by neglect and self-reliance than anything else. Agaju’s damages are clever, left in places hard to find. Scars webbed under the hair, bruises punched in under his arms, belt lashes striped along his back and thighs. Skeet’s suffered too at Dad’s hands, but they both know Skeet’s the favorite, a fact that neither of them will ever give voice to. To Leonel, Agaju’s an empty temple housing a withered, sadistic god. To Agaju, Leonel’s a first draft, a failed attempt. Something to send out for beer and cigarettes and to fetch his brother. Groceries. Bets at the horse track. A warm, crying body to smack the shit out of when he gets in the depths of his booze-rages. School, if there’s time, and if Leo’s not too marked up to go.

Skeet hasn’t ever been to school.

Agaju hasn’t left the house in seven years.

“You know he is.”

Leonel’s eyes are already wetting up from staring at the tattoos. He finally draws a breath, sharp and sudden, and tears himself away from his little brother. When he speaks again, it’s with a voice that shouldn’t be his yet, weary and haggard and worn threadbare.

“It’s just going to be worse for everyone if you don’t come with.”

Skeet turns and cuts another few symbols into the ground—still, time, death—then throws the stick into the dried-up crick. Smiles at his brother.