Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

“Jesus,” you say as he swipes a feather boa along the nape of your neck. “Stop that.”

A chance intimacy arises when a mannequin tips over while you’re unspooling its collar of pearls. Of your clumsiness, Wade says only, “Oops”—but softly, as though your mishap is predictably endearing. As though he’s grown accustomed to telling you to watch yourself. His hand lingers on the small of your back as you right the dummy. Flushed with booze and the thrill of the break-in, you will him to lean in and close the final distance between you. Maybe get to it right there on the old card table where Crazy Jim Collins allegedly played his last hand of poker, amid the mining lanterns and a century’s worth of license plates from the forty-five states neither of you will ever see.

Instead, he sinks a plug hat onto your head. You force a laugh while he pries open the roll-top. Its dark insides smell like the woods after a rain.

In the morning you offer Kenny a ride to work. He bids his latest paramour for her address, and you find yourself winding up a familiar aspen-lined drive on Painter’s Knoll, past bison topiaries and frosted ponds. You slink around the house before finding Kenny hunched over a breakfast counter, pectorals roiling in an undershirt you’d mock were it not for the similarly clad waif charring pancakes within earshot. She calls you “honey” without raising her eyes and spoons three more puddles of batter onto the griddle.

Kenny slides his coffee over to you. “How’s your sad little heart?”

“Beat up.”

He squeezes the waif’s hips as he gets another mug, taking an age to select one. His movements are oddly, infuriatingly labored whenever he’s choosing his next words with caution.

“Why isn’t it enough just to be in love with him, Syl? I mean—what’ll happen if the feeling turns out to be mutual? You gonna give up on college, move back here for good? Wait around till the place goes bust?”

This enrages you. It’s meant to. “Maybe.”

Kenny shakes his head. “I doubt you’ve even thought that far.”

At dawn you climb into Wade’s truck fully intending to lay it all out in the open. His unwitting grin convinces you to leave it until after the hunt—no point in ruining the day. Your plan, however, doesn’t anticipate the phone call from your neighbor, whose breathless words all run together over the roar of the engine: “They took your father! They took your father!”

By the time you determine that they are the paramedics, you’re back in town and Wade is racing daylight on his way to the Refuge alone. You finally track Dad down at St. Luke’s. Laid up in urgent care, he’s pale and sallow, with a brown plash of blood on his sleeve where the nurse made a failed run at his veins.

“I got a little out of breath,” is all he offers as explanation.

You expect his chest scans to resemble an alien invasion. Bright orbs roaring out from the darkness between his ribs. But Dr. Miller only admonishes him for failing to take proper care of himself: “More protein, Mr. Rayles, more sleep.” Nodding and smiling, he looks exactly as a doctor should, which makes you wonder why he has yet to leave Carter County. He rifles through a chart as thick as a cornerstone. “I see you recently got some very good news about your biopsies—but that’s no excuse to get complacent about lifestyle.”

In the hallway outside, Dr. Miller spells it out for you: the pathologist gave your father the all-clear weeks ago. He squeezes your shoulder and hands you a pamphlet on panic disorder.

Your call goes straight to Wade’s voicemail. “You won’t believe this shit,” you say. “Come back and get me.”

From the foot of Dad’s bed, you read the pamphlet aloud: “Do you experience jolts of fear that make you think you are sick, dying, or losing your mind?”

“I know you’re angry,” he says, “but still, this is nice.” His fingers on your hand are so light they feel deboned.

An hour later, returning from a coffee run, you find him hyperventilating again. “I can’t stop thinking about all those water bottles I threw away.”

“Jesus,” you say. “Please don’t start.”

“How many gallons of water you think I just tossed into trash cans, back when I was a trucker?”

“I really don’t know, Dad.”

“Think it’s more than a hundred?”

“Probably. So what now? You want to moonlight as a capper? Dig through landfills for trapped water?”

He takes a hit of oxygen to steady himself. “When I was a teenager, I used to run the tub every time I went to the bathroom. And I mean every time. We lived in such a small house—I couldn’t stand the thought of anyone hearing.”

Your venom slips away from you. “Well, don’t worry,” you say. “Once we get you into that Serenity Pod, you’ll be square with the world, and everything will revert to the way it was.”

By the time you realize his eyes are wet, it’s too late. “When’d you get to be so cruel?” he says, without looking at you, which makes it worse. “Can’t you be a little gentler to me? Don’t I deserve to make amends? Aren’t I worthy of the things I want?”

Perhaps to break this weird, sour sadness, Dad turns on the TV. He flips between aerial shots of a dry riverbed and close-ups of manicured fingers pressing eggplant slices into a lasagna pan, before stumbling on the breaking news of a raid on the Refuge. Hovering above the trees, the chopper’s camera zooms in on rangers escorting a man toward waiting squad cars, while the chyron announces: Shed Poacher Caught!

“Syl,” Dad says, “isn’t that the guy from the mortuary?”

At Caviston’s the next morning, the barroom is clenched in a gallows hush. Wade’s compatriots fort up below the TV, as Channel Four loops footage of him getting pinned to the hood of a cruiser. There are no new details.

From behind the bar, Alfred, the owner, finally notices you and says: “Hey, ain’t you Wade’s girl?”

Suddenly drinks are on the house, and everyone’s trading Wade stories again and treating you like the widow: reassuring you while you all wait for the bail jar to top up.

“Ever wonder why he’s such a legend at shed-hunting?” Luckily, Alfred’s not the kind of man who asks questions to have them answered. He leans over the counter toward you. “He’s got elk in his blood.” In a whisper intended to carry to the far corners of the room, he tells you the secret you’ve been longing to hear.

On a shed hunt about twelve years back, Wade was caught out in a blizzard up near Brake Creek; and after stumbling around in the drifts for hours, he chanced on an old hunting bunker. The Caviston’s crowd argues about whether his entry was through a door or a ceiling. Inside were all the trappings of fonder days: meat cooler, bone boiler, rusted hooks. And in a corner, miraculously, an elk hung up for dressing. Alfred insists that the hunter’s body was there, too, but most agree it was just the elk, dangling with open eyes, as if its blood had run only hours before. So Wade hunkered down to outlast the weather as the snow piled up, burying any point of exit.

“He got to chewing the rawhide string of the dead hunter’s bow before he’d touch that elk,” Alfred continues, shaking his head. “A true child of Posterity. Not like Fitzy here. Wade would have done damn near anything to keep himself from putting teeth to flesh.”

But by the third day he had to square with the hard realities of his predicament, and he peeled hide off haunch and dug his knife tip into the blue gloss of muscle there.

“And you know what, Syl? It was so perfectly preserved by the cold that it was fine: raw and sweet, right down to the marrow.”

It kept Wade alive for three more days, until the rescue party dug him out. And it wasn’t bad meat that killed him, like some people said, or the cold. No, it was the warming-up that put him into cardiac arrest in the ambulance on the way to St. Luke’s.