Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

Which means the ritual isn’t far off, now.

I won’t watch this time. You can’t make me.

He turns and runs deeper into the back lot, a maze of junked cars and corrugated metal, wire and bone and oil. He runs until he can’t breathe and his legs quake and threaten collapse from beating against the earth. His face boils hot under his skin and his eyes well and blink.

Over ruined rusty sedans and towers of broken old TVs, he winds a path to his safe room, a gutted-out station wagon filled with books and a camp light and a sleeping bag and a couple porno magazines he swiped from Agaju’s collection. He tells himself that he likes the pictures, but the truth is they make him feel funny and uncomfortable inside. The women are all hairy and misshapen and stare at him from the glossy paper with something dead and gross in their eyes. Some of the girls have dicks.

This is his real home, where he keeps his things, precious and obscene. His sanctuary from the strange hell that is his father’s home. Out here, he can be alone. Out here, he can be himself. With all of his stolen things.

Under the hood of the station wagon, though. That’s where he keeps his real treasure.

He vaults over the top of the station wagon and looks around, making sure no one’s spying. Satisfied, he pops the catch and lifts the hood. Inside, where there should be an engine is a half-rotted, splintery wooden box. Inside that, the treasure, wrapped in a towel. Leonel pulls it out, slams the hood, then climbs into the wagon. Nestles down on the bunched-up sleeping bag and lays the bundle across his knees. Unwraps it carefully, as if he were handling a sick infant. Feels his guts curl up with something almost like arousal once it’s in his hands.

Sleek and heavy and cold, black-blued and cut with walnut. The Henry .45-70 Government. Lever action. Pretty much the most perfect weapon ever devised by man or god.

One of Agaju’s, but he’s not good with rifles anymore. Obvious reasons. Still buys them, though. The old man buys all sorts of guns. Hides them around the house like he’s expecting a revolution or a siege. He didn’t even notice when this one went away. Leonel snuck it out of the house one night with a few boxes of bullets, kept it out here ever since.

He practices shooting when Skeet’s away and the old man’s drunk himself entirely under. The gun barks like a dog trying to rupture its own throat, spits bullets bigger than his fingers. It kicks purple blotches into his shoulder, grinds the second knuckle of his first finger into callused sausage. He’s gotten a lot better at hitting all the targets.

In the secret places deep away in his heart, he likes to call the gun Ochosi.

He loads the weapon—four in—and snaps the lever shut. Slides the barrel out of one of the wagon’s windows, toward the house. Imagines putting holes in the walls until metal hits meat. Either of them, both. Let their holy wounds fill the house with blood and drown their attendants. He and Ochosi alchemizing living things into empty objects.

Skeet and Agaju and their bullshit magic.

This is real magic right here, motherfuckers.

He sets the rifle down next to the bag and turns toward the other side of the car, face to the sun. The warmth is radiant and sets his insides glowing. He stares until the burned-out afterimage of the sun eclipses the real thing. He doesn’t think he’s blind, but still clenches his eyes and basks in the liquid, fluttering nothing dark until the pain dismounts.

When he opens his eyes again, he sees the note.

Hermano, written across the top in his brother’s clumsy script.

He unfolds it, holds it up to read. Goes through it twice. He even signed with his real name. Not that bullshit nickname Agaju makes them use because he’s scared of the real one. Skeet. Agaju’s own personal joke, his sons little more than wasted cum-shots to him, outside the utility of the rituals.

Leonel reads the note again, and again.

He likes what he reads.

Steam climbs the mirror and blurs out the blood, leaks out the hole in the wall. Through the churning fog, the marks under his eyes look different now. Like ampersands, or pound signs. Skeet can still hear his brother wailing when he climbs in the shower and starts rinsing off the blood. The water darkens as it licks along his new cuts. The heat stings. Makes it feel like his whole body’s on fire.

Soap’s only gonna make it worse.

Still, he reaches for the bar of dollar-store Kleenscrub and tries to get the thin, gritty pulp to lather. The hurt gets worse and worse. Alcohol in the soap. Makes him want to scream, but he doesn’t, saves it for later. Gonna need all that air, all that power for the ritual. So he soaks the pain and swipes a finger through the cheap suds. Starts writing on the Plexiglas with one finger.

C

H

A

N

Two more letters and he’s done. Admires his name, clear against the steam, then wipes it away. Gonna need that for later, too. A quarter of a mile away, in the rusted depths of the lot, his brother should be finding the letter. No way to tell if it worked until later. But he believes. And that might be enough.

The warmth in the water starts to gutter. Skeet turns it up as high as it will go and burns the chemical sting away. Lost in the steam.

Agaju rolls the bottom of his lighter over another piece of glass. Relishes the brittle crunch of it, no other sound like that in the world. Empties the crumbles into the bulb of the pipe, fires up the lighter, the flame a steady blue dagger of heat. Rolls the pipe over the fire until little lizard tongues of smoke appear inside and tangle around themselves. Puts the other end to his raw, chappy lips and hits it.

Chemical biters cut with sweet decay fill his mouth and lungs and spark hectic at his nerves and fillings. Like smoking wet garbage on fire. The rush is a demon whistling through his veins on a supersonic jet. For a moment, he forgets just how much of himself he’s missing. For a moment, he’s whole again. Restored masterfully by a loving god, the shine back on the apple here at the bottom of the world.

Then it fades and the old familiar wells around the emptiness like blood from a wound. Useless, alone. A heart filled with rotting pink vapor.

He’s still got time. He’s got plenty of time.

He takes a heavy slug from the bottle of mezcal and fires up the pipe again.

Come back. Please.

For the love of god, please just come back.

All around the house, there’s nothing.

A grand empty washed in sand and mottled with vegetal scrub under the unchanging, unforgiving dome of the desert sky. Their house, a lone outpost built up against the edge of a wasteland, fortified with rust and steel and magic and blood and hate. Night falls in a heap and Leonel can see for miles. Lights stud the horizon, the town in the distance, a cluster of lives burning electric.

Soon they’ll come, bearing the light as they wade through the darkness, draped in their strangest finery and all their desperate cruelties. Pressed under the cold livestock weight of the mayor on slab. Come to pay witness to the sermon, Agaju’s ritual. Come to see real magic.

Leonel clutches Ochosi in both hands and nestles down in his tower of scrap and broken glass. Closes his eyes. Waits for the sounds of them to rusk and clatter up the empty miles between the house and the town. There’ll be no mistaking it—Leonel is the only one who walks the dirt road, and he’s already here. They only come for the ritual, and discourage the curious. Agaju shoots at the curious from behind broken-out windows. You only have to kill someone once before they learn. Only a few townies bear the marks of Agaju’s education, treated as heretic plague. Examples of the priest’s wrath, for all to see. Hasn’t been a new one in years.