Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

“Because you’re one person before something like that,” Alfred says. “And another after it. And it’s a great shock for the body to switch between.”

Solemn faces fill your vision. The ensuing silence is giving you away. Wouldn’t he have told you by now, if you were really his girl?

You say the only thing that comes into your head: “I tell you what—after all that, if he’s the kind of person who can find a fresh brown shed out by Willow Fort when no one’s seen a live elk in a decade-plus, I’d say it’s worth the freeze.”

That earns you another shot of Brimminger’s, an inquest about the shed, and an earful about how Posterity is either our salvation or the single greatest disaster the country has ever faced.

The following morning, Wade makes his phone call—to Alfred, of all people—and it’s decided at Caviston’s by unanimous vote that you alone should go post his bail. You drive over to Moreland County, guts thudding with all your intended declarations.

Wade emerges looking tough as a two-dollar boot. A scruff of beard softens his jaw. He slings an arm around you and gives you a squeeze, and then sits quietly, looking out the window at the blur of trees. Whatever you say now won’t end the way you want it to.

“My dad got the all-clear.”

“That’s great,” Wade says, “he must be so relieved.”

You can’t seem to keep the car off the shoulder. “He’s never put too much stock in doctors’ opinions. Doubt it’ll talk him out of a Pod.”

You roll down the window as Wade slopes up the driveway to his place and call after him: “I should have been there with you.”

“So we could both get stung?” he says, without turning around. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

You don’t hear from him for days. His truck stays tarped under the big elm guarding his house, and by Wednesday is covered in a thick, neat coating of snow. On Friday, the driver’s side window and the margin of the door are clear, but then a cold snap glazes the exposed panels with ice well into the following week.

You ride the tram home from Painter’s Knoll most evenings, help Kenny with inventory at the Wallet. It feels like trying to remember a native language you haven’t spoken in years. One half-hearted morning, you wake up to a smell that reminds you of January so much it hurts, and you decide Wade is incidental to your happiness. You even make it out to the Refuge, probing ingress after boarded-off ingress until you’re scraping through the trees way north of Miller’s Hole, before the hopelessness of it all overwhelms you, and you give up and go home.

You’re driving by Zeke’s Antiques again a few days later when you see the bright glare of Wade’s taillights. You park at the corner and wait. Soon enough he appears, looking almost like the Wade you remember. Knowing he’s all right should be enough—but the sight of snowshoes hung over his shoulder finds you trailing a quarter mile behind him on Route 29, rehearsing your admonition of his silence: it’s cruel, it’s unnecessary. To avoid detection, you pass the Willow Fort turnout when he takes a left, and then double back a few minutes later to find his truck parked in the ditch.

Wade’s tracks start just beyond the fir trees, where the May sun has yet to breach the snowpack. Clouds hurry overhead, plunging the valley in and out of shadow. You keep the bald, brown domes of the Blacktooth Hills to your right and press on.

In a final insult to all your efforts, Wade is waiting for you at the far edge of the tree line. “Goddamn it, Syl.”

“Goddamn yourself.”

His pants are torn, and a small spot of blood blooms near his right knee. “Go home. You can’t be here.” Neither can he, you point out—and what’s he after anyway, a felony conviction? Is a couple thousand dollars worth getting stung again? He lets you go on for a while. Then he says: “I’m here to give Antlerdam the Judas kiss.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s meeting me just over the pass, and then we’re going up to Bitterroot Creek, where there’s about a dozen rangers hiding in the fucking bushes. After which I get off for giving him up. Still wanna come along?”

You stand there in the full glare of ruin. Eventually find your way to what feels like an acceptably sedate response: “What about my father?”

“If I’ve put away enough to move to Minnesota, you probably have enough to take care of the Pod.”

“Minnesota.” It’s supposed to be a question, but it lands as ridicule. As if he’s just told you that the earth is flat, or that the icecaps are intact. Minnesota. Impossibly absurd. “When did you decide this?”

“Right around the time I decided against three to five in county.”

There is no alternate version to this, no hidden meaning. You’ve waited too long, and now anything you can think to say rises to your mouth in some reduced form.

“You must realize I’d want to know something like that.”

“Syl,” he says. “Come on.”

And that’s it. The evening light purples the last dregs of winter all across the field, to the lodgepoles on the opposite hill. A shiver of movement catches your eye. A shadow leaving the shelter of the trees.

“There’s Antlerdam,” you say.

You don’t argue when Wade tells you to cover your face. The man raises both arms and waves. His gear is so new and tight you can practically hear it squeaking even at this distance, and he falls once or twice as he struggles through the snow, gouging a huge wake in the hillside. By the time he reaches the bottom, you’re following Wade to meet him. Up close, his face is battered and blood-plashed. His eyes are wild.

“Jesus,” Wade says.

“Oh, thank God,” the man says. “Rangers, thank God. I thought I’d have to spend the night for sure.”

Not Antlerdam, then—just some lost greenhorn bumbling his way toward nightfall.

Wade doesn’t miss a beat. “Do you realize you’re trespassing, sir?”

The guy’s nose is red and peeling, and you get the sense that he could throw himself into your arms at any moment. You lead him to a stump and sit him down.

“Got any water?” he says. “I’m so damn thirsty.”

It dawns on you both that he didn’t think to eat snow. Wade hides a smile. He hands the greenhorn his water pack, and turns to nudge your shoulder with his chin. Cold with sorrow, you edge away from him.

This is when you see the antler. Fresh brown, the bole stiffly cabled to the greenhorn’s backpack. “What the hell is this?”

“Oh, God.” The greenhorn twists around, clawing at his straps. “I forgot. Oh, God, please don’t arrest me—it’s my first time, I swear.”

Wade drives his voice real low. “What’s your name, sir?”

He says it’s Gavin—except that’s a lie, and all three of you know it. Wade takes out his notebook and writes it down anyway. You watch it materialize slowly— Gavin —right under the bloated consonants of Wade’s previous note to himself: Tell Syl.

“Where did you get this, sir?”

“I found it. Heard from some guys over at Caviston’s there might be new brown around.”

“Fresh brown,” you say, a little dizzily.

Wade grasps the greenhorn’s pack and squeezes the burr. “This can’t have cast more than a few hours ago. Were you trailing this bull?”

“No.” Then: “All right, yes—I trailed him. But only because I knew it was just a matter of time.” He turns to you confidentially. “So late in the season.”

“You understand that’s wildlife harassment?”

He understands, he’ll never do it again, it’s his first and only time—but if the two of you had seen that bull, the sheer size of him, the way this single antler weighed down his head, just magnificent. Well, it would have got the better of you, too.