New Stories From the South 2010: The Year's Best

by Amy Hempel

  At the boat landing behind the Chevrolet dealer’s lot the river was broad and flat and black beneath a sky gauzy with the moon’s veiled light. Like old location Westerns where they’d shot night scenes during the day using something like smoked glass over the lens. She stood there listening to the faint gurgling of the current near the bank, seeing ripples from the stronger current out in the middle.

  She waded in to her waist, feeling her way with her old sneakers, and stood feeling the current pull gently at her jeans and the water soaking up into her faded purple T-shirt. The river was warm like bathwater late in the bath. She leaned forward and pushed out, swimming with her head above the water, and turned back to look at the bank now twenty feet behind her. She felt the need to be submerged for a moment, to shut out the upper world. She dunked her head in and pushed the sneakers off with her toes, then swam a few strokes underwater before coming up again, where she heard a shout, “There she is!”

  She threw a hand up. “Here I am!”

  It was Julie shouting again. “Beth, that’s too dangerous! Come back to the goddamn bank, you idiot!”

  “Beth!” May shouted. “I’m sorry! Come back!”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Beth said to herself. The water was still warm, though she passed here and there through columns of cool. She called out to them, “I’m just going to float along here for a while!”

  More shouted protests, but she was farther out now, and moving downstream. She saw them start trotting along the bank, then came a crashing of leaves and branches, a jumble of cussing and some shouting, and then she couldn’t see them anymore. She was maybe thirty yards off the bank, mostly floating or treading water, moving with the current. The moon was beautiful overhead, its light on the water and the trees on either bank silver and weightless. The river was almost silent, giving up an occasional soft gurgling burp, and she could feel a breeze funneling through the riverbed, cooling her forehead when she turned her face back upstream. Nothing out there but her. There could be barges. This thought came to her. But she was lucky, none of that just then. Some large bird, a massive shadow, swooped down and whooshed just over her head, then flapped back up and away toward the opposite bank. “My God,” she shouted. “An owl!”

  “Beth!” she heard from the near bank again, and she saw them, jogging along in a clearing atop a little bluff no more than a few feet above the water level.

  “Here I am!”

  “Swim in!”

  “Beth, please!” May struggled to keep up with Julie’s long strides, and Beth heard them both, between shouting, panting, Shit . . . Shit . . . Shit. “Fucking cigarettes,” she heard Julie say. They disappeared into a copse of thick pines. There must be a trail, Beth thought. From the pines she heard Julie’s voice come up again, “Goddammit, Beth! Are you still floating?”

  Their voices carried beautifully across the water, with the clarity of words transported whole and discrete across the surface, delivered to her in little pockets of sound.

  “Still floating!” she called back. Then, “I’m not going to be able to hear you for a while. I’m going to float on my back. Ears in the water!” And then she turned over onto her back and floated, the water up over her ears to the corners of her eye sockets. Wispy clouds skimmed along beneath the moon, or was she moving that swiftly down the river? There was a soft roaring of white noise from the water beneath her. So much water! You couldn’t even imagine it from the bank. You couldn’t imagine it even here, in it, unless maybe you were a fish and it was your whole world. She heard a clanking, a moaning like whale soundings that could’ve been giant catfish she’d heard about, catfish big enough to come up and take her in one sucking gulp. Some huge, sleek, bewhiskered monster to swallow her whole, her body encased within its own, traveling the slow and murky river bottom for ages, her brain growing around the fish’s brain, its stem lodged in her cerebellum.

  Half ancient fish, half woman with strange, submerged memories. She senses Tex on this river, in the early morning before first light, casting his line out into the waters. She follows some familiar current to where she hears the thin line hum past trailing the little worm, fluke tail squibbling by. It’s an easy thing to take it in, feel the hook set, sit there awhile against the determined pull on the line, giving way just enough to keep him from snapping it. Rising beside the little boat and looking walleyed into his astonished face, wouldn’t she see him then as she never had?

  She remembered Tex fucking her the night she knew Sarah was conceived, their bodies bowed into one another, movements fluid as waves. Watching his face.

  Tex saying two weeks after it happened, We could try again, Beth. But it was almost as if he hadn’t meant to say it, as if the words had been spoken into his own brain some other time, recorded, and now tripped accidentally out. He sat on the sofa, long legs crossed, looking very tired, the skin beneath his eyes bruised, though she marveled at how otherwise youthful he was, his thick blond hair and unlined face, a tall and lanky boy with pale blue eyes. Though younger, she was surpassing his age.

  “I had this dream,” he said, “the other night.”

  In his dream he was talking to one of the doctors, though it wasn’t one of the doctors who’d been there in real life. The doctor said that if they had operated and taken Sarah out carefully, they could have brought her back to life. But she was dead, Tex said in the dream. Well, we have amazing technology these days, the doctor said.

  Tex’s long, tapered fingers fluttered against his knee. He blinked, gazing out the living room window at the pecan tree in the backyard.

  “I woke up sobbing like a child,” he said. “I was afraid I’d wake you up, but you were as still as a stone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Beth said.

  Tex shrugged. “It was just a dream.”

  In a minute, she said, “I just don’t think I could do it all again.” Her voice quavered and she stopped, frustrated at how hard it was to speak of it at all.

  “We’re not too old,” he said. “It’s not too late.”

  But she hadn’t said just that.

  “I didn’t mean that,” she said.

  She turned herself over in the water and came up again into the air, and her knees dragged bottom, and she saw the current had taken her into the shallows along the bank. She floated there and then sat on the muddy bottom, the water lapping the point of her chin. She wished she could push from herself everything that she felt. To be light as a sack of dried sticks floating on the river. She heard the thudding weary footsteps of the others approaching through the clearing at this landing, breath ragged, and they came and stood on the bank near her, hands on knees, heads bent low, dragging in gulps of air. “Oh, fuck, I’m dying,” Julie gasped. “Are you all right?” Beth raised a hand from the water in reply. May fell to her knees and began to throw up, one arm held flat-handed generally toward them. They were quiet except for the sound of May being sick, and when she was finished she rolled over onto her back in the grass and lay there.

  Beth and Julie carried May, fortunately tiny, with one of her arms across each of their shoulders, back along the river to the downtown landing and then back up the hill to Beth’s car. They left her in the backseat and struggled to walk through the deep pea gravel of the lot into the bar and borrowed some bar towels for Beth and then sat at a table drinking Jameson’s neat and not talking for a while. May dragged herself in and sat with them and the bartender brought her a cup of coffee. She lay her head beside the steaming cup and went to sleep again.

  Julie reached out and took Beth’s hand for a second and squeezed it.

  Beth squeezed back, and then they let go. Julie looked down at the floor and held out one of her feet, clad in a ragged dirty Keds.

  “Pretty soon I’ll need a new pair of honky-tonk shoes,” she said sadly.

  “I like them,” Beth said. “My mother had a pair just like that. She wore them to work in the yard.”

  “I didn’t cut these holes out, baby, I wore ’em out. I got
a big old toe on me”—she slipped her toe through a frayed hole and wiggled it—“like the head of a ball-peen hammer.”

  “My God,” Beth said. “Put it up.”

  “Billy says I could fuck a woman with that toe.”

  “Put it back in the shoe.”

  “I’m ’on put it up his ass one day,” Julie said.

  Somehow they’d become the only patrons left in the place. The bartender leaned on an elbow and watched sports news on a nearly silent TV above the bar. Julie looked at the sleeping May and said to Beth, “Don’t worry about all that, that shit May was saying. She’s just drunk. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  “No,” Beth said. “I know what she’s talking about. She’s right.”

  Julie stared at her blankly, then sat up and sighed.

  “I can’t even remember what all she was saying. Forget it. You should forget it.”

  “I don’t want to forget it,” Beth said, and set her shot glass down on the table harder than she’d meant to. “What do you mean?”

  Julie didn’t answer.

  “It changes you,” Beth said. “It’s changed me. It’s different,” she said. “It is worse, Julie. It’s not like the other time. It is worse. A real child.”

  So then she’d said it. Julie had started to say something, then turned her head away, toward the wall. Neither said any more after that. The bartender roused himself, flicked off the TV, and his heels clicked through the tall-ceilinged old station as he went from table to table, wiping them down.

  They drank up, paid, and left, hefting May’s arms again onto their shoulders, and put her into the car. Beth drove them to May’s house, and they helped her to the front door, got her keys from her pocket, and let themselves in. Her husband, Calvin, was at the hunting camp building stands. They took her to the bed and undressed her, tucked her in, put a glass of water beside the bed and a couple of ibuprofen beside it, and left. They pulled into Julie’s driveway. Julie started to get out.

  “You okay to drive home?” She sat with one leg out the open door, in the car’s bleak interior light.

  “Sure, I’m fine,” Beth said. She caught herself nodding like a trained horse and stopped. Julie looked at her a long moment and then said, “Okay,” and got out. Beth watched her till she got inside and waved from the window beside the door. And then she drove home through the streets where wisps of fog rose from cracks in the asphalt as if from rumbling, muffled engines down in the bedrock, leaking steam.

  She was prone these days to wake in the middle of the night as if someone had called to her while she’d slept. A kind of fear held her heart with an intimate and gentle suppression, a strange hand inside her chest. She was terrified. Soft and narrow strips of light slipped through the blinds and lay on the floor. Their silence was chilling.

  Just after 4 A.M. she woke and Tex was already gone. He hadn’t moved when she’d come in, his face like a sleeping child’s. She’d lowered her ear to his nostrils, felt his warm breath. He slept with arms crisscrossed on his chest, eyebrows lifted above closed lids, ears attuned to the voices speaking to him in his other world. She hadn’t heard him rise and leave.

  The covers on his side were laid back neatly as a folded flag. One crumpled dent marked the center of his pillow. He had risen, she knew, without the aid of an alarm, his internal clock rousing him at three so that he would be out on the lake at four, casting when he couldn’t even see where his bait plopped into the water, playing it all by ear and touch. He knew what was out there in the water. If a voice truly whispered to him as he slept she hoped it spoke of bass alert and silent in their cold, quiet havens, awaiting him. She hoped it was his divining vision, in the way some people envisioned the idea of God.

  For her the worst had been prior to the delivery, after she’d learned what she feared, that the child had died inside her and she would have to carry her until they could attempt a natural delivery, and that would be at least a month, maybe two. That had been worse than the delivery, because sometimes in her distraction she almost thought the delivery had not really happened, it had been only a nightmare that would momentarily well into her consciousness and then recede. This was not so with Tex, because he’d seen it all happen, it was imprinted in his memory as surely as Sarah had been implanted in her womb. It was what his mind worked to obscure, awake and asleep, in its different ways.

  She lay in bed as dawn suffused the linen curtains with slow and muted particles of gray light. The room softened with this light, and she slept.

  It was noon. The front that had kept them under clouds and in light fog was moving, the same clouds she’d seen beneath the river moon scudding rapidly, diagonally, to the northeast, and occasional rafts of yellow light passed through the bright green leaves and over the weed-grown lawn.

  From the living-room picture window she could see Tex in the backyard cleaning his catch in the shade of the splayed pecan tree. He worked on the plain wooden table he had built for that. His rod and reel leaned against the table’s end, his tackle box on the ground beside it. A stringer of other fish lay on the ground beside the box, and Beth could see, every few seconds or so, a fish tail rise slowly from the mess—as if the tail had an eye with which to look around, stunned—and then relax. Tex wore a baseball cap and a gauzy-thin, ragged T-shirt. The muscles on his neck and shoulders bunched as he worked away at one of the fish, his back to the house. He left them gutted but whole, heads on. He hadn’t always. When he slit their undersides to gut them, he did it carefully with just the tip of his sharp fillet knife. He gently lifted out the bright entrails with a finger, the button-sized heart sometimes still beating. Then he pulled them free of the body with a casual tug, as if distracted, an after-action.

  She watched now from the picture window as he almost reverently palmed a cleaned fish into the pail of water. He rinsed his hand before sliding another one off the stringer. The shadows of patchy clouds moved across the yard and over him with the slow gravity of large beasts floating by. She still felt the effects of sleep, of the drinking and smoking, and a mild vertigo, as if she’d stood up too quickly. That hungover sense of having waked into a life and body that were not her own. She reached out to the window and steadied herself.

  As if he’d heard her, Tex turned to look, fish and knife poised in his hands, interrupted so deeply into his task he seemed lost, either not seeing or not recognizing her image behind the windowpane.

  She had dreamed, reentering the waking dream she’d had of the catfish in the river. Her sight in the dream through the eyes of the fish. Tex had lifted her into the boat, taken her home, lain her on the old plyboard table, and carefully slit the fish skin covering the length of her belly, worked it away from her own true form. But he was unable to detach the fish’s brain from her own. Her words, some gurgly attempt to say she loved him, bubbled out and then she died.

  It was a whole world, the way dreams can be.

  He buried her in the yard, with a stone on top to keep the cats from digging her up to sniff at the bones. But over time she drifted in the soil. The grass grew from her own cells into the light and air. She watched him when he passed over with the lawn mower. The times between mowings were ages.

  Brad Watson’s books include Last Days of the Dog-Men, The Heaven of Mercury, and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives. A native of Mississippi who also spent most of his adult life in Alabama, he now teaches at the University of Wyoming. He does not yet know how to write about Wyoming.

  Noon” grew out of a strange and disorienting experience that happened just days before my second son’s mother was to deliver. We were talking to a tired, hardened ob-gyn in her office at the hospital. For some reason, no reason I suppose, she told us the story of a couple who’d had an experience in the delivery room just like the one Beth and Tex experience with their child in this story. We were horrified, or terrified. Both. We couldn’t believe she’d told us about this when my wife was about to go into the delivery room herself. I never could sha
ke the story. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the couple to whom it actually happened. It took a while to get there. If I did.

  Danielle Evans

  SOMEONE OUGHT TO TELL HER THERE’S NOWHERE TO GO

  (from A Public Space)

  Georgie knew before he left that Lanae would be fucking Kenny by the time he got back to Virginia. At least she’d been up-front about it, not like all those other husbands and wives and girlfriends and boyfriends, shined up and cheesing for the five o’ clock news on the day their lovers shipped out, and then jumping into bed with each other before the plane landed. When he’d told Lanae about his orders, she’d just lifted an eyebrow, shook her head, and said, “I told you not to join the goddamn army.” Before he left for basic training, she’d stopped seeing him, stopped taking his calls even, said, “I’m not waiting for you to come home dead, and I’m damn sure not having Esther upset when you get killed.”

  That was how he knew she loved him at least a little bit; she’d brought the kids into it. Lanae wasn’t like some single mothers, always throwing their kid up in people’s faces. She was fiercely protective of Esther, kept her apart from everything, even him, and they’d been in each other’s lives so long that he didn’t believe for a second that she was really through with him this time. Still, he missed her when everyone else was getting loved visibly and he was standing there with no one to say good-bye to. Even her love was strategic, goddamn her, and he felt more violently toward the men he imagined touching her in his absence than toward the imaginary enemy they’d been war-gaming against. On the plane he had stared out of the window at more water than he’d ever seen at once, and thought of the look on her face when he said good-bye.

  She had come to his going-away party like it was nothing, showed up in skintight jeans and that cheap but sweet-smelling baby powder perfume and spent a good twenty minutes exchanging pleasantries with his mother before she even said hello to him. She’d brought a cake that she’d picked up from the bakery at the second restaurant she worked at, told one of the church ladies she was thinking of starting her own cake business. Really? he thought, before she winked at him and put a silver fingernail to her lips. Lanae could cook a little, but the only time Georgie remembered her trying to bake she’d burnt a cake she’d made from boxed mix and then tried to cover it up with pink frosting. Esther wouldn’t touch the thing, and he’d run out and gotten a Minnie Mouse ice cream cake from the grocery store. He’d found himself silently listing these non-secrets, the things about Lanae he was certain of: she couldn’t bake, there was a thin but awful scar running down the back of her right calf, her eyes were amber in the right light.