The Best American Short Stories 2012

by Tom Perrotta

  “Hello,” he heard her say. He thought by the way she said it—polite and kind—that she must be talking not to Pat but to the woman next to her. Then Jennifer said, formally, “I’m so sorry for your loss,” and he realized she was talking to Pat after all.

  Pat reached for Jennifer’s hand, and the girl allowed it to be held. “Honey,” Pat said.

  “I’m Jennifer,” she said, introducing herself to her own mother.

  Pat blinked at her. Beside Calvin, Robin’s husband was saying something, but Calvin wasn’t listening. He watched Pat’s face turn confused, with furrowed brow and pursed lips. Jennifer kept up her polite, sad, chip-toothed smile. She covered Pat’s hand with her other hand.

  Calvin turned back to the man next to him. From the corner of the room, he heard Pat cry out, “Jennifer, stop it.”

  “You all right there?” Robin’s husband was saying to Calvin, whose stomach felt bad. Trent looked up at him, his dark eyes questioning.

  “Go get ready for bed,” Calvin heard himself say.

  “Hey. Hey, Calvin,” said the man. Calvin felt a strong hand on his shoulder.

  “I’m okay,” Calvin said. He brought his thumb and forefinger to the corners of his eyes. “I’m all right.”

  “You knew him pretty well, huh,” said Robin’s husband.

  Across the room, Pat was saying, between great, ratcheting sobs, “I’m your mother.” Calvin watched Jennifer, her face the picture of propriety, touch her mother’s back as impersonally as a funeral employee. He thought he heard her say, “There, there.” Pat dropped her face into her knees and covered her head, and Calvin lowered his eyes like every other guest in the room. He sensed, rather than saw, Jill hurrying over to help.

  Calvin thought he might be sick. Then he took a deep breath and said to Robin, to her husband, “I need some air.”

  Outside, it was dark and cold, but the rain had stopped. Calvin sank down onto the back cement stoop. He reached behind him into the cinder block of the house’s foundation where he and Jill always kept a fifth of vodka. For some reason it seemed different than keeping the hard stuff in the house.

  When he’d told Jennifer about the thing he used to do with his parents, wishing amnesia on them, he hadn’t told her everything. As a kid, when he kept up the fantasy of talking to his parents as if he didn’t know them, something eventually reversed itself. The longer he imagined their benign responses, the more he felt uneasy instead of relieved. In his head, he’d become desperate, leading them down the hall to his room, showing them things that would prove they had a son and that the son was he. His underwear drawer, his private collection of colored chalk dust, meticulously stacked in film canisters along the floor of his closet. In his mind’s eye, his parents kept nodding pleasantly, but without recognition, and this made the young Calvin suddenly, fitfully afraid. He began watching the clock, desperate for his parents to return. By the time they really did come home, he was so happy to see them that he found himself trailing them around the house, more helpful, suddenly, than was his teenage way, just to be near them, just to reassure himself that they knew him, until his mother said, one of these times, that he was behaving like a boy with a guilty conscience.

  When Jill found him, sometime later, he was sprawled on the steps, staring up at the night. The sky had cleared in spots, showing stars and a very bright half-moon.

  “Oh, Calvin,” Jill said, taking the half-empty bottle from him. She zipped up her coat and sat on the step above him. He leaned his head back on her knees, and she brushed his hair away from his forehead, like she did at night with the boys, like she had not done with him in a long time.

  “Jill,” he said, but his voice came out cracked and a little wild.

  She shushed him. “Just be quiet,” she said, still stroking his hair. Calvin thought he would cry from the feel of her hand. “This has been a day,” she said. “Pat’s a mess in there. Jennifer is a strange bird. She’s saying she fell at the office. She’s saying she hit her head and can’t remember her own mother. She’s way too old to pull this stuff.”

  Calvin took the bottle back from her and drank again. “I didn’t see her fall,” he said truthfully. “I didn’t know she hit her head, but maybe she did.”

  “Okay,” said Jill. “Whatever. Only right now she’s in there asking people if they’ve ever seen that nice woman who keeps crying. As if anyone really gets amnesia, Calvin.” On his forehead, Jill’s hand went still. Calvin closed his eyes. He thought if she would just ask him for something, anything, he could do it. He knew he would be willing, in this way, for a long time.

  “Listen to me,” he said, expelling all his breath with the words. Two ragged breaths later he tried again, but Jill moved her hand from his forehead to his mouth. “Help me,” he said into her fingers. But the words were whispered, and she mistook them for a kiss, and smiled.

  ERIC PUCHNER

  Beautiful Monsters

  FROM Tin House

  THE BOY IS making breakfast for his sister—fried eggs and cheap frozen sausages, furred with ice—when he sees a man eating an apple from the tree outside the window. The boy drops his spatula. It is a gusty morning, sun-sharp and beautiful, and the man’s shirt flags out to one side of him, rippling in the wind. The boy has never seen a grown man in real life, only in books, and the sight is both more and less frightening than he expected. The man picks another apple from high in the tree and devours it in several bites. He is bearded and tall as a shadow, but the weirdest things of all are his hands. They seem huge, grotesque, as clumsy as crabs. The veins on them bulge out, forking around his knuckles. The man plucks some more apples from the tree and sticks them in a knapsack at his feet, ducking his head so that the boy can see a saucer of scalp in the middle of his hair.

  What do you think it wants? his sister whispers, joining him by the stove. She watches the hideous creature strip their tree of fruit; the boy might be out of work soon, and they need the apples themselves. The eggs have begun to scorch at the edges.

  I don’t know. He must have wandered away from the woods.

  I thought they’d be less . . . ugly, his sister says.

  The man’s face is damp, streaked with ash, and it occurs to the boy that he’s been crying. A twig dangles from his beard. The boy does not find the man ugly—he finds him, in fact, mesmerizing—but he does not mention this to his sister, who owns a comic book filled with pictures of handsome fathers, contraband drawings of twinkling, well-dressed men playing baseball with their daughters or throwing them high into the air. There is nothing well-dressed about this man, whose filthy pants—like his shirt—look like they’ve been sewn from deerskin. His bare feet are black with soot. Behind him the parched mountains seethe with smoke, charred by two-week-old wildfires. There have been rumors of encounters in the woods, of firefighters beset by giant, hairy-faced beasts stealing food or tents or sleeping bags, of girls being raped in their beds.

  The man stops picking apples and stares right at the kitchen window, as if he smells the eggs. The boy’s heart trips. The man wipes his mouth on his sleeve, then limps down the driveway and stoops inside the open door of the garage.

  He’s stealing something! the boy’s sister says.

  He barely fits, the boy says.

  Trap him. We can padlock the door.

  The boy goes and gets the .22 from the closet in the hall. He’s never had cause to take it out before—their only intruders are skunks and possums, the occasional raccoon—but he knows exactly how to use it, a flash of certainty in his brain, just as he knows how to use the lawn mower and fix the plumbing and operate the worm-drive saw at work without thinking twice. He builds houses for other boys and girls to live in, it is what he’s always done—he loves the smell of cut pine and sawdust in his nose, the fzzzzdddt of screws buzzing through Sheetrock into wood—and he can’t imagine not doing it, any more than he can imagine leaving this gusty town ringed by mountains. He was born knowing these things, will always know them; they ar
e as instinctive to him as breathing.

  But he has no knowledge of men, only what he’s learned from history books. And the illicit, sentimental fairy tales of his sister’s comic.

  He tells his sister to stay inside and then walks toward the garage, leading with the rifle. The wind swells the trees, and the few dead August leaves crunching under his feet smell like butterscotch. For some reason, perhaps because of the sadness in the man’s face, he is not as scared as he would have imagined. The boy stops inside the shadow of the garage and sees the man hunched behind the lawn mower, bent down so his head doesn’t scrape the rafters. One leg of the man’s pants is rolled up to reveal a bloody gash on his calf. He picks a fuel jug off the shelf and splashes some gasoline on the wound, grimacing. The boy clears his throat, loudly, but the man doesn’t look up.

  Get out of my garage, the boy says.

  The man startles, banging his head on the rafters. He grabs a shovel leaning against the wall and holds it in front of him. The shovel, in his overgrown hands, looks as small as a baseball bat. The boy lifts the .22 up to his eye, so that it’s leveled at the man’s stomach. He tilts the barrel at the man’s face.

  What will you do?

  Shoot you, the boy says.

  The man smiles, dimpling his filthy cheeks. His teeth are as yellow as corn. I’d like to see you try.

  I’d aim right for the apricot. The medulla. You’d die instantly.

  You look like you’re nine, the man mutters.

  The boy doesn’t respond to this. He suspects the man’s disease has infected his brain. Slowly, the man puts down the shovel and ducks out of the garage, plucking cobwebs from his face. In the sunlight, the wound on his leg looks even worse, shreds of skin stuck to it like grass. He reeks of gasoline and smoke and something else, a foul body smell, like the inside of a ski boot.

  I was sterilizing my leg.

  Where do you live? the boy asks.

  In the mountains. The man looks at his gun. Don’t worry, I’m by myself. We split up so we’d be harder to kill.

  Why?

  Things are easier to hunt in a herd.

  No, the boy says. Why did you leave?

  The fire. Burned up everything we were storing for winter. The man squints at the house. Can I trouble you for a spot of water?

  The boy lowers his gun, taking pity on this towering creature that seems to have stepped out of one of his dreams. In the dreams, the men are like beautiful monsters, stickered all over with leaves, roaming through town in the middle of the night. The boy leads the man inside the house, where his sister is still standing at the window. The man looks at her and nods. That someone should have hair growing out of his face appalls her even more than the smell. There’s a grown man in my house, she says to herself, but she cannot reconcile the image this arouses in her brain with the stooped creature she sees limping into the kitchen. She’s often imagined what it would be like to live with a father—a dashing giant, someone who’d buy her presents and whisk her chivalrously from danger, like the brave, mortal fathers she reads about—but this man is as far from these handsome creatures as can be.

  And yet the sight of his sunburned hands, big enough to snap her neck, stirs something inside her, an unreachable itch.

  They have no chairs large enough for him, so the boy puts two side by side. He goes to the sink and returns with a mug of water. The man drinks the water in a single gulp, then immediately asks for another.

  How old are you? the girl says suspiciously.

  The man picks the twig from his beard. Forty-six.

  The girl snorts.

  No, really. I’m aging by the second.

  The girl blinks, amazed. She’s lived for thirty years and can’t imagine what it would be like for her body to mark the time. The man lays the twig on the table, ogling the cantaloupe sitting on the counter. The boy unsheathes a cleaver from the knife block and slices the melon in two, spooning out the pulp before chopping off a generous piece. He puts the orange smile of cantaloupe on a plate. The man devours it without a spoon, holding it like a harmonica.

  Where do you work? the man asks suddenly, gazing out the window at the pickup in the driveway. The toolbox in the bed glitters in the sun.

  Out by Old Harmony, the boy says. We’re building some houses.

  Anything to put your brilliant skills to use, eh?

  Actually, we’re almost finished, the boy says. The girl looks at him: increasingly, the boy and girl are worried about the future. The town has reached its population cap, and rumor is there are no plans to raise it again.

  Don’t worry, the man says, sighing. They’ll just repurpose you. Presto change-o.

  How do you know? the girl asks.

  I know about Perennials. You think I’m an ignorant ape? The man shakes his head. Jesus. The things I could teach you in my sleep.

  The girl smirks at her brother. Like what?

  The man opens his mouth as if to speak but then closes it again, staring at the pans hanging over the stove. They’re arranged, like the tail bones of a dinosaur, from large to small. His face seems to droop. I bet you, um, can’t make the sound of a loon.

  What?

  With your hands and mouth? A loon call?

  The boy feels nothing in his brain: an exotic blankness. The feeling frightens him. The man perks up, seeming to recover his spirits. He cups his hands together as if warming them and blows into his thumbs, fluttering one hand like a wing. The noise is perfect and uncanny: the ghostly call of a loon.

  The girl grabs the cleaver from the counter. How did you do that?

  Ha! Experts of the universe! The man smiles, eyes bright with disdain. Come here and I’ll teach you.

  The girl refuses, still brandishing the knife, but the boy swallows his fear and approaches the table. The man shows him how to cup his hands together in a box and then tells him to blow into his knuckles. The boy tries, but no sound comes out. The man laughs. The boy blows until his cheeks hurt, until he’s ready to give up, angry at the whole idea of bird calls and at loons for making them, which only makes the man laugh harder. He pinches the boy’s thumbs together. The boy recoils, so rough and startling is the man’s touch. Trembling, the boy presses his lips to his knuckles again and blows, producing a low airy whistle that surprises him—his chest filling with something he can’t explain, a shy arrogant pleasure, like a blush.

  The boy and girl let the man use their shower. While he’s undressing, they creep outside and take turns at the bathroom window, their hands cupped to the glass, sneaking looks at his strange hairy body and giant shoulders tucked in like a vulture’s and long terrible penis, which shocks them when he turns. The girl is especially shocked by the scrotum. It’s limp and bushy and speckled on one side with veiny bursts. She has read about the ancient way of making babies, has even tried to imagine what it would be like to grow a fetus in her belly, a tiny bean-sized thing blooming into something curled and sac-bound and miraculous. She works as an assistant in a lab where frozen embryos are kept, and she wonders sometimes, staring at the incubators of black-eyed little beings, what it would be like to raise one of them and smoosh him to her breast, like a gorilla does. Sometimes she even feels a pang of loneliness when they’re hatched, encoded with all the knowledge they’ll ever need, sent off to the orphanage to be raised until they’re old enough for treatments. But, of course, the same thing happened to her, and what does she have to feel lonely about?

  Once in a while the girl will peek into her brother’s room and see him getting dressed for work, see his little bobbing string of a penis, vestigial as his appendix, and her mouth will dry up. It lasts only for a second, this feeling, before her brain commands it to stop.

  Now, staring at the man’s hideous body, she feels her mouth dry up in the same way, aware of each silent bump of her heart.

  The man spends the night. A fugitive, the boy calls him, closing the curtains so that no one can see in. The man’s clothes are torn and stiff with blood, stinking of secret
man-things, so the boy gives him his bathrobe to wear as a T-shirt and fashions a pair of shorts out of some sweatpants, slitting the elastic so that they fit his waist. The man changes into his new clothes, exposing the little beards under his arms. He seems happy with his ridiculous outfit and even does a funny bow that makes the boy laugh. He tries it on the girl as well, rolling his hand through the air in front of him, but she scowls and shuts the door to her room.

  As the week stretches on, the girl grows more and more unhappy. There’s the smell of him every morning, a sour blend of sweat and old-person breath and nightly blood seeping into the gauze the boy uses to dress his wound. There’s his ugly limp, the hockey stick he’s taken to using as a cane, which you can hear clopping from every room of the house. There’s the cosmic stench he leaves in the bathroom, so powerful it makes her eyes water. There are the paper airplanes littering the back yard, ones he’s taught the boy to make, sleek and bird-nosed and complicated as origami. Normally, the boy and girl drink a beer together in the kitchen after work—sometimes he massages her feet while they listen to music—but all week when she gets home he’s out back with the man, flying his stupid airplanes around the yard. He checks the man’s face after every throw, which makes her feel like going outside with a fly swatter and batting the planes down. The yard is protected by a windbreak of pines, but the girl worries one of the neighbors might see somehow and call the police. If anyone finds out there’s a man in their house, she could get fired from the lab. Perhaps they’ll even put her in jail.

  Sometimes the man yells at them. The outbursts are unpredictable. Turn that awful noise down! he’ll yell if they’re playing music while he’s trying to watch the news. Once, when the girl answers her phone during dinner, the man grabs it from her hand and hurls it into the sink. Next time, he tells her, he’ll smash it with a brick. The worst thing is that they have to do what he says to quiet him down.