Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

“Big Francis Bacon fan?” he asks. He’s wearing dark green khakis, a button-up shirt, and a skinny tie.

I’ve forgotten his voice by now, but in the dream I think it sounds just like him.

“I think it’s so funny that there are two Francis Bacons,” I say, a precocious little shit, looking at the painting before me. My voice doesn’t quite make it out my throat, though, and it’s like one of those nightmares when you need to scream for help, but no matter how much you want it your voice isn’t going to come.

I can’t speak, so I take the gun in my hand and point it to the world. “Here I am,” I say. “And yes, I am a big Francis Bacon fan.” The blast from the revolver says what I can’t.

I awake to the sound of Luz loudly watching cartoons. Sunday mornings should be easier than this. They tend to wait patiently.

“Sorry if I woke you,” she says, looking up from her cartoon. “How come you don’t work?”

“What?”

“How come you don’t work?” she asks again, crossing her legs together. She’s got on the polka dot knee socks we bought yesterday.

“I live off of an inheritance,” I say.

“Whoa,” she says. “Bourgie. Shit. So I had rich grandparents? Were they like, those W.E.B. DuBois black assimilationist intellectuals? Did they pressure you to have someone else raise me?”

“No,” I say. “Daddy was a bus driver. My mama was in medical billing. When was the last time you combed that head?” I ask. Her long strands are starting to mat together. “Looks like a bird’s nest.”

“I like my hair how it is,” she says. “One of my foster mothers said she thought I had Irish in me. Do I?”

I walk to the kitchen, flummoxed by the question. I set my percolator on the stove.

“What does it even mean to have Irish in you?” I ask. “That’s a child’s question and not worthy of an answer. Do you think there’s a piece of a country inside your bones? Or in your belly? Floating around? Making tea?”

“You know what I mean. Is my father Irish?” she asks. “Or part Irish?”

“I don’t know. He had red hair, yes, if that’s what you want to know.”

“Is he how you got all the money?” she asks, standing up to join me in the question. It’s not an accusation, but I take it that way, so defensive.

“I didn’t ask for it,” I say, remembering being contacted by police and lawyers.

“Was he a good man?” she asks. “Did he play music at all? I can play the violin, you know. I don’t see any instruments around here. Maybe it comes from him?”

“Maybe it comes from you,” I say, not wanting to think any part of her is from me, ruined, pathetic woman.

“I thought you’d have answers for me.” Her breath comes out in a loud huff as she curls up next to the arm of the sofa. “I want to know everything, and you don’t know anything.”

I take a seat next to her, making sure a foot of distance remains between us. “Not even Sir Isaac Newton knew everything,” I say.

“Who is that?”

Luciana decides to go for a walk, and she wears the brown leather jacket I got her over the sweatshirt from my alma mater. She stops at the door, resting her shoulder against the frame. “Do you hate me?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “Don’t catch cold out there. The weather’s getting bad.”

I wave at her retreating form until she disappears around the block.

Before I had Luz, Wheelock asked me, “What are you going to do?”

“Adoption, I think,” I said. “I’m not ready to be a mother and I don’t know. I’m too far along to do the other thing. I can’t provide a good home. I just can’t.”

He said, “I’ll provide you a home. It’s ours to raise.” He was always like this, so sure that his way was the right away. “If you try to give my child away,” he went on, “I’ll have no choice but to claim my rights as father.”

“They’re not going to make me give my baby to a sick pervert,” I said, meaning every word. I knew what he was. I knew that I was nothing to him but my youth.

“You really think they’re going to believe the word of some slut black girl over me? Who would want you?”

And it’s wrong and a lie, but I’m sixteen and don’t know any better. His words sound like truth to me, like something to be afraid of, and all my life he has only ever given me what at the time felt like honesty.

I turned from him, stomping toward the door in a fit of adolescent theatrics. He snatched me by the wrist and twisted me backwards, pulling me close against his body. I’m trapped in his embrace, and a looker-on might think that the whole thing was affectionate, but there is vomit in my throat. Mr. Wheelock pushes me against the wall with enough force to snap my head back against the exposed brick. He steps back, then, taking in the sight of me, a desperate apology on his lips.

I shoot him in the chest three times, and it isn’t even hard.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” is all lies.

I hear a crack of thunder and worry after Luciana. She’s been gone for half an hour now, and the storm’s picking up.

Like a high schooler, I recite one of my favorite poems. “Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain… / Remembering again that I shall die / And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks / For washing me cleaner than I have been / Since I was born into this solitude.” Edward Thomas.

Mr. Wheelock introduced me to war poetry.

Sometimes I think he left me all this stuff to keep his hold on me. To strangle me. As I look out the window out into the gray, I think it’s worked. Jobless, damaged, friendless, I do not feel like a full-grown adult. Luciana will tire of me when she realizes I have nothing to offer beyond shopping trips and random historical and literary trivia.

I walk barefoot to my room, feeling the texture change from hardwood to soft carpet. A draft is coming through, and thinking of Luz, I turn up the thermostat.

I write my girl—yes, my girl, mine—a note:

A percolator: a type of coffee-pot in which boiling water rises through a cylindrical compartment, then falls again into the pot by way of diversion, all the while passing through a basket containing ground coffee beans.

In this, I pass along to you one of the only things that your father did not teach me.

I cannot talk to the girl directly about so many things, not yet, but I leave her this small piece of myself on the coffee table so that she’ll see it when she comes home.

Or perhaps she’ll stay out, walk along the street until the paved road meets the dirt road and eventually the small wood by the river. Maybe she’ll jump in, lose herself in the current, and find she doesn’t need me at all. Part of me wishes for that to happen, so that I do not have to see her face again. There’s too much feeling going on here lately.

Mr. Wheelock used to read me the letters of James Joyce while I lounged at his breakfast nook eating Lucky Charms. I would memorize the lines, recite passages to my English teachers in order to prove to them that I was worldly and experienced. One in particular I said aloud many an evening but never shared with another, holding it close to me like a twisted secret: “When that person… whose heart I long to stop with the click of a revolver, put his hand or hands under your skirts[,] did he only tickle you outside or did he put his finger or fingers up into you?… Did you feel it?”

I felt it, yes. I felt everything.

Sometimes, you hope for the viper to come, and it does, but you can’t get off your shot fast enough. When that happens you squeeze your eyes shut and just endure the bite, let the venom rush through you, allow your blood to slow and clog, and wait for the toxin to invade every part of you.