Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

“Well, fuck,” says Kenny, without looking up from his textbook. “Just give me a moment to absorb this completely unexpected piece of news.”

Apart from marooning you in a constant state of impatience, the realization changes very little of your daily life. Maybe you sleep a little less, rotate your more flattering clothes to the top drawers. But most nights Wade just picks you up, and the two of you drive the long, pine-ribbed highway to the Serbian diner over in Gentry. You share burek and fries and tease out where you’ll land when Fell Gulch finally goes bust. You revisit the humor in familiar things: tourist tat shops, people who stand on ceremony, the daily reenactment of Crazy Jim Collins’s murder at the Wallet, in which you briefly appeared as Dolly Dove, the shrill whorehouse madam.

Before your limited run, Wade had played Bertrand Stills, shooting ol’ Jim right in the heart every Tuesday and Thursday.

“I’d have paid to see you in that white Stetson and bolo.”

His fork dimples the top of your hand. “Those were mandatory.”

He decides that if the need for aliases should ever arise, the two of you will be “Stills” and “Dove.”

On the drive home, Wade cracks a window to let in the smell of pine. His fingers drum the console between you. The truck feels too small to contain this electric haze of possibility. Your first kiss is imminent, a single dram of courage away. There’s safety in the knowledge that either of you could choose it anytime, a kind of chemical understanding. It’s a world beyond the high school boys who used to hold you down.

Midnight, however, usually finds you on opposite ends of Wade’s sofa, reading aloud to one another. By two thirty, you’re home.

Fielding your reports of the lack of consummation exasperates Kenny. “What’s taking him so long?”

You’ve spent hours puzzling this out. Maybe you’ve overestimated your appeal. Maybe if you were more delicate, more serious. More feminine. Maybe if every meal didn’t stick to your ribs, if your body had any corners at all.

Kenny doesn’t see the point of speculation. “You’ll never know unless you confront him, Syl; and the faster you get on with it, the better. Go for broke.”

You will yourself to courage. But it’s easier to imagine almost anything—your father absolved, Fell Gulch parched—than that kiss and its aftermath. You can’t even slip your hand past your waistband in the darkness of your room for the sheer mortification of having to face Wade afterward.

Again and again, you return to the same reality: a declaration of love will change things, one way or another. Better to linger in doubt than to lose your only source of joy, better to preserve the veil of promise. Like that shed hunt in mid-April, when you and Wade split up to cover more ground. He sends you down to Bitterroot Creek, a bottomland bearded with red-twig dogwoods. The day is warm and blindingly bright. You’re enjoying the solitude, the ftt-ftt of your steps mashing the snow, when there’s a whistle behind you. A rising note that could peel the enamel off your teeth. You twist around to find the source. A red flare explodes over the woods to your left, about a half mile away.

It’s one thing to memorize protocol in case of a ranger encounter. Another thing entirely to follow it. You take off mindlessly into the trees, spraying snow everywhere, losing a snowshoe in the loamy creek bed. Finally you drop down in a stand of cottonwoods and wait. A line of melt drips beneath your collar. Through all that panting and hammering, you’re a long while in returning to silence.

It’s dark by the time you hear Wade calling. He’s empty-handed, hatless, quietly infuriated by a wasted day, but relieved you’re in one piece—which is definitely something.

The stars are out in their whorled millions. Eventually you give up arguing about where the road might be. Wade unpacks his winter hammock, strings it between two oaks, piles deadfall for insulation, while laughing periodically at your chattering teeth.

“At least we’re together,” he says. “If it grows too cold, we can just get to fucking.” Then, after he sees your face: “Calm down, Syl. I’m joking.”

The hammock sags with your combined weight, though your stomach is so empty it hurts. And even as the wind leaches all the heat from your back, there’s a higher order of warmth between you, knees clicking, ribs grazing, the white purl of your breath massing in the clear air.

All night you commune over the truly celestial questions: What meat would you have most enjoyed, if you’d been born before Posterity? Wade thinks bacon; you say beef. How much nose could a person lose to frostbite and still look respectable? It apparently depends on the nose. “I could probably lose a good inch and be fine,” Wade says. He butts his forehead against yours. “But you’d be doomed with one tenth of that.”

If ever there was a moment to ask. “How did you die?”

“Briefly and stupidly.” His long silence makes you hopeful. Then he says: “When people measure distance by ‘a cunt hair,’ do you think they mean length or breadth?”

You manage to reply: “Breadth.”

The next morning, during your postmortem of the evening’s unrealized romantic potential, Kenny snaps. “I don’t care how long he lingers over his good-nights or how many Yeats poems he knows by heart: no guy breathes the words cunt hair to a woman he cares about.”

“I don’t think I’m describing the moment properly.”

He shakes his head. “You can take that to the bank, Syl.”

You take it nowhere. You crumple it up and hurl it into the void that devours all evidence of Wade’s ambivalence toward you.

Dad meets you in the doorway, floating around in a beloved tartan nightgown that refashions him as a junkie Ebenezer Scrooge. “Just getting in?”

“You know I am.”

He watches you unlace your boots. “I almost called the police.”

You glance up at him. How to explain you can’t be officially unaccounted for the same night poachers are spotted on the Refuge?

“Well? Did you?”

“Kenny said you were out with that Wade fella from the mortuary. You could have called to check on me.” He gives you a dubious once-over. “You look like you slept in a ditch.”

In late April you find a cast antler out by Willow Fort. Just lying there, sharp as a scythe, half-buried by last night’s snowfall. Fresh brown. Wade glasses it from across the field and starts running. By the time you get there, Wade is standing it up. It’s taller than you, so big your hand can’t fit around its knotty stem. The burr is pink with blood.

Ice encrusts Wade’s nostrils, and in the morning sun his laughter courses out in shining eddies.

“It’ll be a grand a pound if we can find the matching one.”

“To hell with the matching one,” you say. “If there’s a live elk around, I want to see him.”

Wade indulges your frantic search for the bull’s tracks. The few hoofprints evident disappear into a bluestem grove. He isn’t surprised.

“You’re chasing ghosts,” he says.

All the way back to the road, you let him rhapsodize about the living elk of his childhood. The disheveled bulls, with their flat, dark eyes, mean-mugging like he owed them money. Riled as hell in winter as they shed and looked utterly robbed. Often a single antler would linger, listing the head, the empty pedicle raw and leprous. The cows, with their accusatory stares, distinguishable from one another only by the tick trails in their coats.

That night, emboldened by tequila, the two of you try the door of Zeke’s Antiques. Cones of light fall through the hangar windows. You trail your fingers delicately along racks of empty dresses. Wade won’t quit with conjectures about where Zeke’s old partner might be rotting. The steamer trunk is the obvious choice—but there’s room enough for a body in the old roll-top desk, too.