Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

You can’t help yourself: “Yet here you are, sucking air and drinking water—I guess that means your folks are still in arrears.”

Dad says: “Syl. Please.”

Wade, as it happens, came dangerously close to reabsorption when he was a teenager. Some vague cardiac incident briefly killed him en route to the hospital. He perceived himself floating up, above the gurney, above the bald EMT trying to resuscitate him. Of his three remaining sensations—besides filial love and the strange, sulfuric odor of his chest hair frying under the paddles—what stood out most was how complete he felt, knowing that he would soon give sustenance to a new tree. Even his miraculous return to his body, and the continuation of his life, haven’t dispelled the strength of that feeling.

Dad nods gravely. As if Wade’s story has firmed the legs of a newborn notion.

“We want to take a couple of days,” you say, standing to leave. “Consult with the rest of the family.”

The rest of the family consists of an uncle in Cleveland who hasn’t returned your father’s calls in years and the dog who’s been underfoot ever since the combined chaos of veterinary school and bartending forced Kenny to abandon her at your house.

Wade insists you take all the time you need. “It’s a tough mind-shift. In the end, we’re all just items awaiting protective enclosure. Most of us have a vision of what that is—a coffin, an urn. Not everyone can get used to the idea of a tree. But remember that with a Serenity Pod, the whole world is your memorial.”

The trouble is, he really means it. The spell is cast. All the way home, Dad rests his head dreamily against the window. The tram winds past the Refuge boundary, past Highness Park, with its cocoa stands and skate rentals and brightly bundled husks of winter tourists, and then up Painter’s Knoll, where the constellated hillside mansions recall the Fell Gulch of twenty years ago, when people were still able to convince themselves that everything would work itself out somehow, as it always had before.

Your father had been one of those people. Then came the Posterity Initiative, and a complete 180. He spent your entire childhood collecting prairie grasses for the Rocky Mountain Seed Vault, tallying pollinators, teaching you to culture penicillin. All the while bewailing what was lost: bacon and air travel and elephants. Things you would never have, thanks to his generation’s excesses.

You could never see the point of his retrospective hand-wringing.

At home, Dad fans the pamphlets out on the dining table. He shouts pull quotes over the crack of your knife on the cutting board: “Did you know that the average Serenity Pod offsets two peoples’ worth of carbon dioxide a year?”

“If it’s so clean, they should be paying you to commit to it. Not the other way around.”

“Ha.”

“Don’t you think this is all a bit premature?” He looks up from the blue columns of numbers on his napkin. “We haven’t got the biopsy results back. You’re probably not even dying.”

“Well,” he shrugs, “someday.”

The prospect of this “someday”—whose advent he’s attempted to accelerate at least twice—sends you back to Serenity Pods one cloudy afternoon a few days later. Alone this time.

Wade, still in his diaconal finest, tries to bring you around. “Tell me what’s giving you pause.”

“Guilt rules my father’s life. And now he’s got it in his head that putting twelve grand down on a burial he might not even need—knock wood—is the best way to square his ecological debts.”

“It’s not a bad place to start.”

“Yeah, well. We run a housekeeping service. It’s about all we can do to keep the lights on.”

Serenity Pods, it turns out, offers a payment plan. Wade pivots to show you the literature on making reabsorption accessible to everyone.

You tell him you have all the pamphlets at home. “I didn’t come here for more of the company line.”

He tilts his head a little, and says, “All right”—which is when you go all warm. You sit there, blowing ripples across the smoggy surface of your tea.

“How did you die?”

“Well, I guess in the end I didn’t.”

As he resumes his pitch about soil renewal and generational duty, you’re disappointed in his failure to intuit what you really want to know: whether there’s a crack of light and an eventual shore to dying, or just darkness like you suspect. When the time comes, will trenching your father in a shawl full of seeds, so that filaments and roots can suck away everything that made him who he was, somehow render the former more likely? You can’t bring yourself to say: I’m afraid my father will simply cease to exist.

“I’d like to hear more about burial from someone who doesn’t get commission selling it to me.”

Wade laughs outright—a real laugh, earnest enough to furrow his whole nose. “Believe it or not, there’s fuck-all money in pod sales.”

“Yeah? What about this?” You hook a finger under his tunic collar to reveal the strap of his FieldSight 5000s—the latest model, the one you’ve been eyeing for months—and you’re instantly embarrassed. Is it wrong to touch a man who dresses like a monk?

“Those are an oversight.” Somehow, he’s managed to catch your wrist. “They’re for my other job. I usually remember not to wear them here.”

“I didn’t think revenant pod people needed side gigs.”

He smiles that smile. Huge white teeth from here to doomsday. “If anything, this is the side gig. The other’s more of a calling.”

Which is how you get your start shed-hunting with Wade Dufrane.

All winter you drift along trails and fire roads together in the blue hours before sunrise. Geese vault overhead. Thick mists leave the Bitterroot peaks and come coursing down into the Refuge. You grow to love the cold walk from your porch to the corner where Wade picks you up, the bitterness of his whiskey-laced coffee, the way the snowpack warps your bulky shadows. Together, you scout tracks, cut and climb fence, disable cameras, dodge patrols, sift through acres of deadfall in your pursuit of the shed antlers of bull elk.

Most of the sheds have spent a decade or more underground, a vestige of the days of the great herds that once wintered around Fell Gulch. Generations of cast bone. Brittle scimitars snared in tree roots, or forking up where occasional mudslides have overturned the hills. You dig for them in gullies and creek beds below south-facing slopes, and along old game trails Wade first prospected with his father as a boy.

You’re wary of encroaching on what was once a Dufrane family enterprise, but Wade has a lot of sympathy for your current predicament. He, too, grew up in West Gulch with a renter in the attic and a father prone to rash, costly decisions. He’s surprised your families don’t know one another: like yours, the Dufranes would let their house to snowies every Christmas and drive south to winter on the parched shores of Lenny Lake. Wade even supports an arthritic mother somewhere in Minnesota.

All this is nominally why he sees fit to cut you in on his shed hunts. Of course, you suspect there may be something more to it. Something warm and visceral and conspicuously unspoken.

On a good day, the two of you haul twenty or thirty pounds of bone back to Wade’s place, a converted garage behind Zeke’s Antiques. Between shots of whiskey, you lay the antlers out like kindling and sort them into pairs. Wade can read the life in them: tridents of bone notched with a hidden legacy of battles and famines and narrow escapes. He teaches you the criteria of appraisal: straight or crooked tines, spreads, points.

Elk sheds sell by weight, and come out to about two hundred dollars a pound. This is for hard white, the stale stuff, probably older than you are. Fresh brown—newly fallen, dark with recent life—is a thing of the past. Wade hasn’t seen fresh brown sheds, or any other evidence of living elk, in years. He can’t begin to guess what they might be worth.