Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“Yes, we’re very hungry,” the elder Aleut said.

She took us to a booth near the kitchen. I could smell the food cooking. My stomach growled.

“You guys want separate checks?” the waitress asked.

“No, I’m paying,” I said.

“Aren’t you the generous one,” she said.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

“Do what?” she asked.

“Don’t ask me rhetorical questions. They scare me.”

She looked puzzled, and then she laughed.

“O.K., professor,” she said. “I’ll only ask you real questions from now on.”

“Thank you.”

“What do you guys want to eat?”

“That’s the best question anybody can ask anybody,” I said. “What have you got?”

“How much money you got?” she asked.

“Another good question,” I said. “I’ve got twenty-five dollars I can spend. Bring us all the breakfast you can, plus your tip.”

She knew the math.

“All right, that’s four specials and four coffees and fifteen percent for me.”

The Aleuts and I waited in silence. Soon enough, the waitress returned and poured us four coffees, and we sipped at them until she returned again, with four plates of food. Eggs, bacon, toast, hash brown potatoes. It’s amazing how much food you can buy for so little money.

Grateful, we feasted.

NOON

I said farewell to the Aleuts and walked toward the pawnshop. I heard later that the Aleuts had waded into the saltwater near Dock 47 and disappeared. Some Indians swore they had walked on the water and headed north. Other Indians saw the Aleuts drown. I don’t know what happened to them.

I looked for the pawnshop and couldn’t find it. I swear it wasn’t in the place where it had been before. I walked twenty or thirty blocks looking for the pawnshop, turned corners and bisected intersections, and looked up its name in the phone books and asked people walking past me if they’d ever heard of it. But that pawnshop seemed to have sailed away like a ghost ship. I wanted to cry. And just when I’d given up, when I turned one last corner and thought I might die if I didn’t find that pawnshop, there it was, in a space I swear it hadn’t occupied a few minutes ago.

I walked inside and greeted the pawnbroker, who looked a little younger than he had before.

“It’s you,” he said.

“Yes, it’s me,” I said.

“Jackson Jackson.”

“That is my name.”

“Where are your friends?”

“They went traveling. But it’s O.K. Indians are everywhere.”

“Do you have the money?”

“How much do you need again?” I asked, and hoped the price had changed.

“Nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars.”

It was still the same price. Of course, it was the same price. Why would it change?

“I don’t have that,” I said.

“What do you have?”

“Five dollars.”

I set the crumpled Lincoln on the countertop. The pawnbroker studied it.

“Is that the same five dollars from yesterday?”

“No, it’s different.”

He thought about the possibilities.

“Did you work hard for this money?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He closed his eyes and thought harder about the possibilities. Then he stepped into the back room and returned with my grandmother’s regalia.

“Take it,” he said, and held it out to me.

“I don’t have the money.”

“I don’t want your money.”

“But I wanted to win it.”

“You did win it. Now take it before I change my mind.”

Do you know how many good men live in this world? Too many to count!

I took my grandmother’s regalia and walked outside. I knew that solitary yellow bead was part of me. I knew I was that yellow bead in part. Outside, I wrapped myself in my grandmother’s regalia and breathed her in. I stepped off the sidewalk and into the intersection. Pedestrians stopped. Cars stopped. The city stopped. They all watched me dance with my grandmother. I was my grandmother, dancing.

EDWARD P. JONES was born in Washington, D.C. His mother had come north from Virginia and North Carolina. Jones says, “She did what they called ‘days work,’ taking care of a white child and cooking and cleaning. Then somehow she met my father… He was a drinker, so things started going bad pretty early on. Within a few years she was on her own, working full-time, with three kids… We lived in eighteen different places by the time I was eighteen.”

Jones won a scholarship to Holy Cross College and later earned his MFA at the University of Virginia. He began working for a tax newsletter, first as a proofreader and later as a columnist, a job he kept for more than ten years, all the while writing fiction. His first short story was published in Essence in 1976. Jones’s first book of short stories, Lost in the City , was published in 1992 and won the PEN/Hemingway Award, was shortlisted for the National Book Award, and was the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Award. His first novel, The Known World , received the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Of the book, critic Janet Maslin wrote, “Mr. Jones explores the unsettling, contradiction-prone world of a Virginia slaveholder who happens to be black.” Jones was named a MacArthur Fellow for 2004. All Aunt Hagar’s Children , his most recent collection of short stories, was published in 2006.

Jones’s writing largely explores race in Washington, D.C., where he currently lives.

★

THEY CAUGHT HIM after he had killed the second man. The law would never connect him to the first murder. So the victim — a stocky fellow Caesar Matthews shot in a Northeast alley only two blocks from the home of the guy’s parents, a man who died over a woman who was actually in love with a third man — was destined to lie in his grave without anyone officially paying for what had happened to him. It was almost as if, at least on the books the law kept, Caesar had got away with a free killing.

Seven months after he stabbed the second man — a twenty-two-year-old with prematurely gray hair who had ventured out of Southeast for only the sixth time in his life — Caesar was tried for murder in the second degree. During much of the trial, he remembered the name only of the first dead man — Percy, or “Golden Boy,” Weymouth — and not the second, Antwoine Stoddard, to whom everyone kept referring during the proceedings. The world had done things to Caesar since he’d left his father’s house for good at sixteen, nearly fourteen years ago, but he had done far more to himself.

So at trial, with the weight of all the harm done to him and because he had hidden for months in one shit hole after another, he was not always himself and thought many times that he was actually there for killing Golden Boy, the first dead man. He was not insane, but he was three doors from it, which was how an old girlfriend, Yvonne Miller, would now and again playfully refer to his behavior. Who the fuck is this Antwoine bitch? Caesar sometimes thought during the trial. And where is Percy? It was only when the judge sentenced him to seven years in Lorton, D.C.’s prison in Virginia, that matters became somewhat clear again, and in those last moments before they took him away he saw Antwoine spread out on the ground outside the Prime Property nightclub, blood spurting out of his chest like oil from a bountiful well. Caesar remembered it all: sitting on the sidewalk, the liquor spinning his brain, his friends begging him to run, the club’s music flooding out of the open door and going thumpety-thump-thump against his head. He sat a few feet from Antwoine and would have killed again for a cigarette. “That’s you, baby, so very near insanity it can touch you,” said Yvonne, who believed in unhappiness and who thought happiness was the greatest trick God had invented. Yvonne Miller would be waiting for Caesar at the end of the line.