Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

I heard a strange, muffled wheeze, the kind Koda would make if she had to make a noise. At first I just saw her running. A ways behind her was the cougar. The air smelled sour. The cougar was moving fast but with a limp. In front of the cougar was Koda, running along the side of the ravine. She was heading for the brush where the forest started. I needed to run inside for the rifle, but I couldn’t move. I wanted to throw up. She was going fast for an old dog, but not as fast as I knew she could run. As she neared the forest, she became a white blur.

He got her before she could reach the brush pile. I went inside for the rifle. When I got outside they were one big shape, like a cartoon of the Tasmanian Devil I’d watched as a kid, churning up dust. He had her by the neck. I got a bead on the shape and shot. I’d hit Koda in the leg. The cougar dropped her and loped away.

I carried her back to the trailer and tried to pry the bullet out with a knife while I hugged her body to keep her still. She panted but otherwise made no sound. She grinned in pain. All I could do was move the bullet around. Finally I carried her inside and laid her on my bed.

The next morning when I woke up, Koda was gone. I got the rifle and ran outside. I ran along the ravine, thinking she maybe went for water. There was one spot with a lot of blood that looked shiny in the sun. It might not have been hers.

I looked for her until it got too dark to see.

That night I sat outside until I couldn’t feel my hands or face. I thought of how the cougar had returned to eat the rest of Shively’s colt. For the next few days I kept looking for Koda, barely taking time to eat, ditching work. I saw what I thought was cougar shit, which looks like cat shit, only bigger. There was no sign of Koda.

At work the son told me to start collecting uneaten meat from peoples’ plates for his dogs, though I was pretty sure he didn’t have any dogs. I turned the water to the hottest setting and sprayed my hands until they turned red, until I couldn’t stand it anymore. When the cook warned me a pan was hot, I’d pick it up anyway. Soon my hands were covered with burns. I couldn’t stop looking for Koda. I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie awake looking at the friendly burns on my hands. In the dark they looked like puffy leeches.

After a week, I found her. There were big cat prints around her body. Smaller prints that looked like little hands—raccoon, probably—had been patting the ground around her, as if trying to comfort the tail and the paws that still looked like paws and the matted and reeking outsides of her. None of this looked like it had ever been part of the dog that used to watch me while I slept. Her eyes were closed and her lips were pulled back into a snarl, or a grimace. Her front paws were bent, as if trying to protect her stomach; this part of her that I’d watched rise and fall was gone. The middle of her had been eaten, everything inside her rib cage and some of the bones too, and the ground where her stomach used to be was dark. The fur around her back paws was pink. I hugged her head, stroked her big smooth teeth. I buried her under the living room window, inside one of Dad’s old sleeping bags.

I threw out her bowls and blanket. I wouldn’t need them in Williston. After a few years, I’d go to California to see the lemon farms, if those still existed. I’d go to Florida and buy a house with a pool and pay someone to clean it.

I’d wake up and find Koda’s white hair everywhere. The hair both depressed and comforted me. I tried to pick it off my clothes, but it kept reappearing on stuff I’d already washed. I missed sleeping with her in my bed, letting her eat fried rice out of my hand, dumping out her water bowl, shouting her name to call her back inside, an excuse to yell as loud as I could. Later I removed her water bowl from the trash, running a finger along the rough white calcified crust. At breakfast I’d read the calcification rings like a cereal box, looking for something I could use.

A postcard arrived from Blake with the same oil well. Maybe they sold only one kind of postcard in Williston. It said in that same smashed handwriting, Florida. Beach. Caribou. Come out, brother. Boss has ben asking abt you. I put it next to the other one on the fridge. I took out the cigarette carton and counted the cash I’d saved so far. Not much.

The grandma was unhappy I missed work. She cut my hours. I tried not to worry. I quit putting twenties in the carton. Sometimes I needed to borrow a few, and I could never pay myself back.

One morning I walked to Jenny’s. He’d installed a Cherokee Nation sticker on the mailbox: a man’s face inside a red square. Above him, a star and some kind of branch. The man looked tired, stuck to that mailbox, like he was sick of seeing the mailman’s hand crammed inside his little metal establishment every day, stuffing circulars and impersonal letters, never a fat check or a Penthouse or a wedding invitation.

Jenny emerged from his trailer. He was wearing clothes that struck me as not being his, though of course they could be no one else’s. I asked him if he’d seen the cougar.

“The thing killed Koda,” I said.

“Dammit. Dammit, Cal, I’m sure as hell sorry to hear that.” Jenny scratched his knee through a hole in his jeans, moving the hole around to reach more skin. He coughed and wiped his chin. “Sometimes those big cats, they come down from the mountains when they can’t get enough to eat.”

“Jenny.” I’d never asked him for any help since my dad went away, tried never to be late on rent. I asked if he’d help me find the cougar.

“Why? You thinking of killing him?” said Jenny.

I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I did. I wanted to at least get a good look.

“I’m not sure an animal deserves getting shot for being hungry,” said Jenny. “Nope, I’m not sure it does at all.”

I resolved to go out on my own but lost my nerve.

The grandma fired me from the restaurant. Her son’s son had aged out of his paper route. “My grandson tried to find a job everywhere else in town, you know. He did not want to work here. But no one would hire him. You’re a good worker, but he’s family, you know? You know we are the only Korean people in Bonner?” She lit her cigarette on the third try and tucked my lighter into my sweatshirt pocket.

“We had a Korean restaurant but no one came. People here only want shit Chinese food. No kalguksu, no gimbap, no bibimbap. Nothing crazy. Nothing they wouldn’t like. But they didn’t want it. They wanted shit. They wanted very cheap, big portion of shit.” She closed her eyes. “What I decide is, people want shit, you give them shit,” she said.

I finished my shift even though she implied I wouldn’t get paid for it. I wondered if my trailer was shit, if my way of living was shit. If Dad’s life had been shit. As I was leaving—I later regretted this—I kicked the shrine. Clementines rolled across the floor, and the grandma’s dad, the lemon smuggler, tipped face-first onto the ground. The cat fell on its side but kept waving.

“Bibimbap! Bibimbap! Bibimbap!” I said. I shot the place up with guns I made with my hands. I didn’t shoot any people, just the walls. Even this felt wrong to me. But something had clenched inside me when I got fired, Williston and beach houses and chicks in bikinis all shriveling up, and so I shot. I looked back before running out, and the grandma was standing there, looking tired and old.

I’d already sold Dad’s truck, and the money from that was gone. The two oil wells had slid lower and lower on my fridge as the magnet lost its stick. It was almost winter. I daydreamed about jumping into a Florida swimming pool, my body cold all over and weightless. I’d keep a waving cat in the window where I could see it from the pool, reminding me that the times I worried about money were over for good.