The Best American Short Stories 2012

by Tom Perrotta

  If it comes to it, she will kill the man. She will grab the .22 and shoot him while he’s asleep.

  On Saturday, the girl comes back from the grocery store and the man is limping around the back yard with the boy on his shoulders. The lawn mower sits in a spiral of mown grass. The boy laughs, and she hisses at them that the neighbors will hear. The man plunks the boy down and then sweeps her up and heaves her onto his shoulders instead. The girl is taller than she’s ever imagined, so tall that she can see into the windows of her upstairs room. The mulchy smell of grass fills her nose. She wraps her legs around the man’s neck. A shiver goes through her, as if she’s climbed out of a lake. The shiver doesn’t end so much as wriggle its way inside of her, as elusive as a hair in her throat. The man trots around the yard and she can’t help herself, she begins to laugh as the boy did, closing her legs more tightly around his neck, giggling in a way she’s never giggled before—a weird, high-pitched sound, as if she can’t control her own mouth—ducking under the lowest branches of the pin oak shading the back porch. The man starts to laugh too. Then he sets her down and falls to all fours on the lawn and the boy climbs on top of him, spurring him with the heels of his feet, and the man tries in vain to buck him off, whinnying like a horse in the fresh-mown grass. The boy clutches the man’s homemade shirt. The girl watches them ride around the yard for a minute, the man’s face bright with joy, their long shadow bucking like a single creature, and then she comes up from behind and pushes the boy off, so hard it knocks the wind out of him.

  The boy squints at the girl, whose face has turned red. She has never pushed him for any reason. The boy stares at her face, so small and smooth and freckled compared to the man’s, and for the first time is filled with disgust.

  The man hobbles to his feet, gritting his teeth. His leg is bleeding. The gauze is soaked, a dark splotch of blood leaking spidery trickles down his shin.

  Look what you’ve done! the boy says before helping the man to the house.

  That night, the girl startles from a dream, as if her spine has been plucked. The man is standing in the corner of her room, clutching the hockey stick. His face—hideous, weirdly agleam—floats in the moonlight coming through the window. Her heart begins to race. She wonders if he’s come to rape her. The man wipes his eyes with the end of his robe, first one, then the other. Then he clops toward her and sits on the edge of the bed, so close she can smell the sourness of his breath. His eyes are still damp. I was just watching you sleep, he says. He begins to sing to her, the same sad song he croons in the shower, the one about traveling through this world of woe. There’s no sickness, toil, or danger, in that bright land to which I go. While he sings, he strokes the girl’s hair with the backs of his fingers, tucking some loose strands behind her ear. His knuckles, huge and scratchy, feel like acorns.

  What’s the bright land? the girl asks.

  The man stops stroking her hair. Heaven, he says.

  The girl has heard about these old beliefs; to think that you could live on after death is so quaint and gullible, it touches her strangely.

  Did someone you know die?

  The man doesn’t answer her. She can smell the murk of his sweat. Trembling, the girl reaches out and touches his knee where the sweatpants end, feeling its wilderness of hair. She moves her fingers under the hem of his sweats. The man does not move, closing his eyes as she inches her fingers up his leg. His breathing coarsens. Outside the wind picks up and rattles the window screen. Very suddenly, the man recoils, limping up from the bed.

  You’re just a girl, he whispers.

  She stares at him. His face is turned, as if he can’t bear to look at her. She does not know what she is.

  He calls her Sleepyhead and hobbles out of the room. She wonders at this strange name for her, so clearly an insult. Her eyes burn. Outside her window the moon looks big and stupid, a sleeping head.

  The next day, when the boy comes home from work, the house is humid with the smell of cooking. The man is bent over the stove, leaning to one side to avoid putting too much weight on his injured leg. It’s been over a week now and the gash doesn’t look any better; in fact, the smell has started to change, an almondy stink like something left out in the rain. Yesterday, when the boy changed the bandage, the skin underneath the pus was yellowish brown, the color of an old leaf. But the boy’s not worried. He’s begun to see the man as some kind of god. All day long he looks forward to driving home from work and finding this huge ducking presence in his house, smelling the day’s sweat of his body through his robe. He feels a helpless urge to run to him. The man always seems slightly amazed to see him, unhappy even, but in a grateful way, shaking his head as if he’s spotted something he thought he’d lost, and though the boy can’t articulate his feelings to himself, it’s this amazement that he’s been waiting for and that fills him with such restlessness at work. Ahoy there, the man says. It’s not particularly funny, even kind of stupid, but the boy likes it. Ahoy, he says back. Sometimes the man clutches the boy’s shoulder while he changes his bandage, squeezing so hard the boy can feel it like a live wire up his neck, and the boy looks forward to this too, even though it hurts them both.

  Now the man lifts the frying pan from the stove and serves the boy and girl dinner. The boy looks at his plate: a scrawny-looking thing with the fur skinned off, like a miniature greyhound fried to a crisp. A squirrel.

  I caught them in the back yard, the man explains.

  Disgusting! the girl says, making a face.

  Would you rather go to your room, young lady? the man says.

  She pushes her chair back.

  No, please. I’m sorry. You don’t have to eat. He looks at his plate and frowns. My mother was the real cook. She could have turned this into a fricassee.

  What are they like? the boy asks.

  What?

  Mothers.

  They’re wonderful, the man says after a minute. Though sometimes you hate them. You hate them for years and years.

  Why?

  That’s a good question. The man cuts off a piece of squirrel but doesn’t eat it, instead stares at the window curtain, still bright with daylight at six o’clock. I remember when I was a kid, how hard it was to go to sleep in the summer. I used to tell my mom to turn off the day. That’s what I’d say, Turn off the day, and she’d reach up and pretend to turn it off.

  The man lifts his hand and yanks at the air, as if switching off a light.

  The boy eats half his squirrel even though it tastes a little bit like turpentine. He wants to make the man happy. He knows that the man is sad, and that it has to do with something that happened in the woods. The man has told him about the town where he grew up, nestled in the mountains many miles away—the last colony of its kind—and how some boys and girls moved in eventually and forced everyone out of their homes. How they spent years traveling around, searching for a spot where there was enough wilderness to hide in so they wouldn’t be discovered, where the food and water were plentiful, eventually settling in the parklands near the boy and girl’s house. But the boy’s favorite part is hearing about the disease itself: how exciting it was for the man to watch himself change, to grow tall and hairy and dark-headed, as strong as a beast. To feel ugly sometimes and hear his voice deepen into a stranger’s. To fall in love with a woman’s body and watch a baby come out of her stomach, still tied to her by a rope of flesh. The boy loves this part most of all, but when he asks about it, the man grows quiet and then says he understands why Perennials want to live forever. Did you have a baby like that? the boy asked him yesterday, and the man got up and limped into the back yard and stayed there for a while, picking up some stray airplanes and crumpling them into balls.

  After dinner, they go into the living room to escape the lingering smell of squirrel. Sighing, the man walks to the picture window and opens the curtains and looks out at the empty street, where bats flicker under the street lamps. He’s told them that when he was young the streets were filled with children: they pla
yed until it was dark, building things or shooting each other with sticks or playing Butts Up and Capture the Flag and Ghost in the Graveyard, games that he’s never explained.

  It’s a beautiful evening, he says, sighing again.

  The girl does not look up from her pocket computer, her eyes burning as they did last night. She is not a child; if anything, it’s the man’s head that’s sleepy, as dumb as the moon. Just listening to him talk about how nice it is outside, like he knows what’s best for them, makes her clench her teeth.

  What did you do when it rained? the boy asks.

  Puppet shows, the man says, brightening.

  Puppet shows?

  The man frowns. Performances! For our mom and dad. My brother and I would write our own scripts and memorize them. The man glances at the girl on the floor, busy on her computer. He claps in her face, loudly, but she doesn’t look up. Can you get me a marker and some different-colored socks?

  They won’t fit you, the boy says.

  We’ll do a puppet show. The three of us.

  The boy grins. What about?

  Anything. Pretend you’re kids like I was.

  We’ll do one for you, the boy says, sensing how much this would please the man.

  He goes to get some socks from his room and then watches as the man draws eyes and a nose on each one. The girl watches too, avoiding the man’s face. If it will make the boy happy, she will do what he wants. They disappear into the boy’s room to think up a script. After a while, they come out with the puppets on their hands and crouch behind the sofa, as the man has instructed them. The puppet show begins.

  Hello, red puppet.

  Hello, white puppet.

  I can’t even drive.

  Me either.

  Let’s play Capture the Graveyard.

  Okay.

  In seventy years I’m going to die. First, though, I will grow old and weak and disease-ridden. This is called aging. It was thought to be incurable, in the Age of Senescence.

  Will you lose your hair?

  I am male, so there’s a four in seven chance of baldness.

  If you procreate with me, my breasts will become engorged with milk.

  I’m sorry.

  Don’t apologize. The milk will feed my baby.

  But how?

  It will leak from my nipples.

  I do not find you disgusting, red puppet. Many animals have milk-producing mammary glands. I just wish it wasn’t so expensive to grow old and die.

  Everyone will have to pay more taxes, because we’ll be too feeble to work and pay for our useless medicines.

  Jesus Christ, the man says, interrupting them. He limps over and yanks the socks from their hands. What’s wrong with you?

  Nothing, the girl says.

  Can’t you even do a fucking puppet show?

  He limps into the boy’s room and shuts the door. The boy does not know what he’s done to make him angry. Bizarrely, he feels like he might cry. He sits on the couch for a long time, staring out the window at the empty street. Moths eddy under the street lamps like snow. The girl is jealous of his silence; she has never made the boy look like this, as if he might throw up from unhappiness. She walks to the window and shuts the curtains without speaking and shows him something on her computer: a news article, all about the tribe of Senescents. There have been twelve sightings in three days. Most have managed to elude capture, but one, a woman, was shot by a policeboy as she tried to climb through his neighbor’s window. There’s a close-up of her body, older even than the man’s, her face gruesome with wrinkles. A detective holds her lips apart with two fingers to reveal the scant yellow teeth, as crooked as fence posts. The girl calls up another picture: a crowd of children, a search party, many of them holding rifles. They are standing in someone’s yard, next to a garden looted of vegetables. The town is offering an official reward for any Senescent captured. Five thousand dollars, dead or alive. The girl widens her eyes, hoping the boy will widen his back, but he squints at her as if he doesn’t know who she is.

  At work, the boy has fallen behind on the house he’s drywalling. The tapers have already begun on the walls downstairs. In the summer heat, the boy hangs the last panel of Sheetrock upstairs and then sits down to rest in the haze of gypsum dust. He has always liked this chalky smell, always felt that his work meant something: he was building homes for new Perennials to move into and begin their lives. But something has changed. The boy looks through the empty window square beside him and sees the evergreens that border the lot. Before long they’ll turn white with snow and then drip themselves dry and then go back to being as green and silent and lonely-looking as they are now. It will happen, the boy thinks, in the blink of an eye.

  There’s a utility knife sitting by his boot, and he picks it up and imagines what it would be like to slit his throat.

  Did you see the news this morning? his coworker, a taper who was perennialized so long ago, he’s stopped counting the years, asks at lunch.

  The boy shakes his head, struggling to keep his eyes open. He has not been sleeping well on the couch.

  They found another Senescent, at the hospital. He wanted shots.

  But it’s too late, the boy says. Their cells are corrupted.

  Apparently the dumbfuck didn’t know that. The police promised to treat him if he told them where the new camp is.

  The boy’s scalp tightens. What camp?

  Where most of them ended up ’cause of the fire.

  Did he tell them?

  Conover Pass, the taper says, laughing. The info got online. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a mob on its way already.

  The boy drives home after work, his eyes so heavy he can barely focus on the road. Conover Pass is not far from his house; he would have taken the man there, perhaps, if he’d known. It’s been a month since the boy first saw him in the yard, devouring apples, so tall and mighty that he seemed invincible. Now the man can barely finish a piece of toast. The boy changes his bandages every night, without being asked, though secretly he’s begun to dread it. The wound has stopped bleeding and is beginning to turn black and fungal. It smells horribly, like a dead possum. When the man needs a bath, the boy has to undress him, gripping his waist to help him into the tub. His arms are thinner than the boy’s, angular as wings, and his penis floating in the bath looks shriveled and weedlike. The boy leaves the bathroom, embarrassed. It’s amazing to think that this frail, bony creature ever filled him with awe.

  Last night the man asked the boy to put his dead body under the ground. Don’t let them take it away, he said.

  Shhhh, the boy said, tucking a pillow under the man’s head.

  I don’t want to end up in a museum or something.

  You’re not going to die, the boy said stupidly. He blushed, wondering why he felt compelled to lie. Perhaps this was what being a Senescent was like. You had to lie all the time, convincing yourself that you weren’t going to disappear. He said it again, more vehemently, and saw a gleam of hope flicker in the man’s eye.

  Ahoy there, the man says now when he gets home.

  Ahoy.

  The smell is worse than usual. The man has soiled his sheets. The boy helps him from bed and lets him lean his weight on one shoulder and then walks him to the bathtub, where he cleans him off with a washcloth. The blackness has spread down to his foot; the leg looks like a rotting log. The boy has things to do—it’s his turn to cook dinner, and there’s a stack of bills that need to go out tomorrow—and now he has to run laundry on top of everything else. He grabs the man’s wrists and tries to lift him out of the bathtub, but his arms are like dead things. The man won’t flex them enough to be useful. The boy kneels and tries to get him out by his armpits, but the man slips from his hands and crashes back into the tub. He howls in pain, cursing the boy.

  The boy leaves him in the tub and goes into the kitchen, where the girl is washing dishes from breakfast. The bills on the table have not been touched.

  He’ll be dead in a week, the
girl says.

  The boy doesn’t respond.

  I did some math this morning. We’ve got about three months, after you’re furloughed.

  The boy looks at her. The man has become a burden to him as well—she can see this in his face. She can see too that he loves this pathetic creature that came into their life to die, though she knows just as certainly that he’ll be relieved once it happens. He might not admit it, but he will be.

  I’ll take care of us, the girl says tenderly.

  How?

  She looks down at the counter. Go distract him.

  The boy does not ask why. The man will die, but he and the girl will be together forever. He goes back into the bathroom; the man has tried to get out of the tub and has fallen onto the floor. He is whimpering. The boy slides an arm around his waist and helps him back to bed. A lightning bug has gotten through the window, strobing very slowly around the room, but the man doesn’t seem to notice.

  What do you think about when you’re old? the boy asks.

  The man laughs. Home, I guess.

  Do you mean the woods?

  Childhood, he says, as if it were a place.

  So you miss it, the boy says after a minute.

  When you’re a child, you can’t wait to get out. Sometimes it’s hell.

  Through the wall, the boy hears his sister on the phone: the careful, well-dressed voice she uses with strangers. He feels sick.

  At least there’s heaven, he says, trying to console the man.

  The man looks at him oddly, then frowns. Where I can be like you?

  A tiny feather, small as a snowflake, clings to the man’s eyelash. The boy does something strange. He wets his finger in the glass on the bedside table and traces a T on the man’s forehead. He has no idea what this means; it’s half-remembered trivia. The man tries to smile. He reaches up and yanks the air.

  The man closes his eyes; it takes the boy a moment to realize he’s fallen asleep. The flares of the lightning bug are brighter now. Some water trickles from the man’s forehead and drips down his withered face. The boy tries to remember what it was like to see it for the first time—chewing on an apple, covered in ash—but the image has already faded to a blur, distant as a dream.