The Best American Short Stories 2014

by Jennifer Egan

  At any rate, we made some sandwiches, put the dog in the car, and drove through the leafy streets of town, until the trees gave way and the countryside opened up around us, two bottles of marked-down shoppers’ special Australian Zinfandel in a bag on the floor in back. The radio was playing (bluegrass, a taste we’d acquired since moving out here to the heart of the country), and we had the windows rolled down to enjoy the breeze we were generating as the car humped through the cornfields and over a series of gently rolling hills that made us feel as if we were floating. Nome was in the back seat, hanging his head out the window and striping the fender with airborne slaver. All was well. But then we turned onto the unmarked blacktop road that led out to Chris and Anneliese’s and saw the car there, a silver Toyota, engine running, stopped in our lane and facing the wrong direction.

  As we got closer we saw a woman—girl—coming toward us down the center of the road, her face flushed and her eyes wet with what might have been the effects of overwrought emotion or maybe hay fever, which was endemic here, and we saw a man—boy—then too, perched on the hood of the car, shouting abuse at her retreating back. The term “lovers’ quarrel” came into my head at the very moment the girl lifted her face and Mallory yelled, “Stop!”

  “It’s a lovers’ quarrel,” I said, ever so slightly depressing the accelerator.

  “Stop!” Mallory repeated, more insistently this time. The guy was watching us, something like an angry smirk on his face. The girl—she was no more than a hundred feet away now—raised her hand as if to flag us down, and I eased up on the gas, thinking that maybe they were in trouble after all, something wrong with the car, the engine overheating, the fuel gauge on empty. It was hot. Grasshoppers flung themselves at the windshield like yellow hail. All you could smell was tar.

  The car slowed to a halt and the girl bent to my window, letting her face hover there a moment against the green tide of corn. “You need help?” I asked, and those were tears in her eyes, absolutely, tears that swelled against her lids and dried in translucent streaks radiating out from her cheekbones.

  “He’s such a jerk,” she said, sucking in her breath. “He’s, he’s”—another breath—“I hate him.”

  Mallory leaned over me so the girl could see her face. “Is he your—”

  “He’s a jerk,” the girl repeated. She was younger than us, late teens, early twenties. She wore her blond hair in braids and she was dressed in a black tank top, cut-off jeans, and pink Crocs. She threw a look at the guy, who was still perched on the hood of the car, then wiped her nose with the back of her hand and began to cry again.

  “That’s right,” he shouted. “Cry. Go ahead. And then you can run back to your mommy and daddy like the little retard you are!” He was blond too, more of a rusty blond, and he had the makings of a reddish beard creeping up into his sideburns. He was wearing a Banksy T-shirt, the one with the rat in sunglasses on it, and it clung to him as if it had been painted on. You could see that he spent time at the gym. A lot of time.

  “Get in the car,” Mallory said.

  “You can come with us—it’ll be all right.”

  I turned to Mallory, blocking her view of the girl. “It’s between them,” I said, and at the same time, I don’t know why, I hit the child lock so the door wouldn’t open. “It’s none of our business.”

  “None of our business?” she shot back at me. “She could be abused or, I don’t know, abducted, you ever think of that?” She strained to look around me to where the girl was still standing on the blacktop, as if she’d been fixed in place. “Did he hit you, is that it?”

  Another sob, sucked back as quickly as it was released. “No. He’s just a jerk, that’s all.”

  “Yeah,” he crowed, sliding down off the hood, “you tell them all about it, because you’re Little Miss Perfect, aren’t you? You want to see something? You, I’m talking to you, you in the car.” He raised one arm to show the long red striations there, evidence of what had passed between them. “You want her? You can have her.”

  “Get in,” Mallory said.

  Nome began to whine. The house was no more than half a mile up the road, and he could probably smell Chris and Anneliese’s dog, a malamute named Boxer, and maybe the sheep the farmer kept behind the fence that enclosed the barn. The girl shook her head.

  “Go ahead, bitch,” the guy called. He leaned back against the hood of the car and folded his arms across his chest as if he’d been at this awhile and was prepared to go on indefinitely.

  “You don’t have to put up with that,” Mallory said, and her voice was honed and hard, the voice she used on me when she was in a mood, when I was talking too much or hadn’t got around to washing the dishes when it was my turn. “Come on, get in.”

  “No,” the girl said, stepping back from the car now, so that we got a full view of her. Her arms shone with sweat. There were beads of moisture dotting her upper lip. She was pretty, very pretty.

  I eased off the brake pedal and the car inched forward even as Mallory said, “Stop, Paul, what are you doing?” and I said, “She doesn’t want to,” and then, lamely, “It’s a lovers’ quarrel, can’t you see that?” Then we were moving up the channel the road cut through the greenest fields in the world, past the pissed-off guy with the scratched forearms and a hard harsh gloating look in his eyes, down into a dip and up the next undulating hill, Mallory furious, thumping at the locked door as if it were a set of drums and craning her neck to look back, as the whole scene receded in the rearview mirror.

  By the time we got to Chris and Anneliese’s, Mallory was in full crisis mode. The minute we pulled into the driveway I flicked off the child lock, but she just gave me a withering look, slammed out of the car, and stalked up the steps of the front porch, shouting, “Anneliese, Chris, where are you?” I was out of the car by then, Nome shooting over the front seat to rocket past me even as Boxer came tearing around the corner of the house, a yellow Lab pup I’d never seen before at his heels. The dogs barked rhapsodically, then the screen door swung open and there were Chris and Anneliese, spritzers clutched in their hands. Chris was barefoot and shirtless, Anneliese dressed almost identically to the girl on the road, except that her top was blue, to match her eyes, and she was wearing open-toed flats to show off her feet. Before grad school she’d been a hosiery model for Lord & Taylor in Chicago and she never missed an opportunity to let you know it. As for the rest of her, she was attractive enough, I suppose, with streamlined limbs, kinky copper-colored hair, and the whitest teeth I’d ever seen or imagined. My own teeth tended toward the yellowish, but then neither of my parents was a dentist and both of hers were.

  Mallory didn’t say “Hello” or “How are you?” or “Thanks for inviting us.” She just wheeled around in exasperation and pointed down the road. “I need a bicycle,” she said. “Can I borrow somebody’s bicycle?”

  Anneliese showed her teeth in an uncertain smile. “What are you talking about? You just got here.”

  The explanation was brief and vivid and unsparing with regard to my lack of concern or feeling. All three of them looked at me a moment, then Anneliese said, “What if he’s dangerous?”

  “He’s not dangerous,” I said reflexively.

  “I’m going with you,” Anneliese said, and in the next minute she was pushing a matching pair of ten-speed bicycles out the door, hers and Chris’s.

  Chris waved his glass. “You think maybe Paul and I should go instead? I mean, just in case?”

  Mallory was already straddling the bike. “Forget it,” she said, with a level of bitterness that went far beyond what was called for, if it was called for at all. I’d done what anyone would have done. Believe me, you just do not get between a couple when they’re in the middle of a fight. Especially strangers. And especially not on a sweltering afternoon on a deserted country road. You want to get involved? Call the cops. That was my feeling, anyway, but then the whole thing had happened so quickly I really hadn’t had time to work out the ramifications. I’d acted
instinctively, that was all. The problem was so had she.

  Mallory shot me a look. “You’d probably just wind up patting him on the back.” She gave it a beat, lasered in on Chris. “Both of you.”

  That was when things got confused, because before I could respond—before I could think—the women were cranking down the drive with the sun lighting them up, as if we were all in the second act of a stage play, and the dogs, spurred on by the Lab pup, chose that moment to bolt under the lowest slat of the bleached wooden fence and go after the sheep. The sheep were right there, right in the yard, milling around and letting off a sweaty ovine stink, and the two older dogs—mine and Chris’s—knew they were off limits, strictly and absolutely, and that heavy consequences would come down on them if they should ever slip and let their instincts take over. But that was exactly what happened. The pup, which, as it turned out, was a birthday present from Chris to Anneliese, didn’t yet comprehend the rules—these were sheep and he was a dog—and so he went for them and the sheep reacted and that reaction, predator and prey, drove the older dogs into a frenzy.

  In that instant we forgot the women, forgot the couple on the road, forgot spritzers and croquet and the notion of chilling on a scalding afternoon, because the dogs were harrying the sheep and the sheep had nowhere to go and it was up to us—grad students, not farmers, not shepherds—to get in there and separate them. “Oh, shit,” Chris said, and then we both hurdled the fence and were right in the thick of it.

  I went after Nome, shouting his name in a fury, but he’d gone atavistic, tearing wool and hide from one bleating animal after another. I had him twice, flinging myself at him like a linebacker, but he wriggled away and I was down in the dirt, in the dust, a cyclone of dust, the sheep poking at my bare arms and outthrust hands with their stony black hooves. There was shit aplenty. There was blood. And by the time we’d wrestled the dogs down and got them out of there, half a dozen of the sheep had visible gashes on their faces and legs, a situation that was sure to disconcert the farmer—Chris’s landlord—if he were to find out about it, and we ourselves were in serious need of decontamination. I was bleeding. Chris was bleeding. The sheep were bleeding. And the dogs, the dogs we scolded and pinched and whacked, were in the process of being dragged across the front yard to a place where we could chain them up so they could lie panting through the afternoon and contemplate their sins. That was the moment, that was what we were caught up in, and if the women were on their bicycles someplace wearing a scrim of insects or stepping into somebody else’s quarrel, we didn’t know it.

  A car went by then, a silver Toyota, but I only caught a glimpse of it and couldn’t have said if there were two people in it or just one.

  We never did get around to playing croquet—Mallory was too worked up, and besides, just moving had us dripping with sweat— but we sat on the porch and drank Zinfandel-and-soda with shaved ice, while the dogs whined and dug in the dirt and finally settled down in a twitching fly-happy oblivion. Mallory was mum on the subject of the couple in the Toyota except to say that by the time she and Anneliese got there the girl was already in the car, which pulled a U-turn and shot past them up the road, and I thought—foolishly, as it turned out—that that was the end of it. When six o’clock rolled around, we wound up going to a pizza place, because I was outvoted, three to one, and after that we sat through a movie Anneliese had heard good things about but which turned out to be a dud. It was a French film about three nonspecifically unhappy couples who had serial affairs with one another and a troop of third and fourth parties, against a rainy Parisian backdrop that looked as if it had been shot through a translucent beach ball. At the end there was a closeup of each of the principals striding separately and glumly through the rain. The three actresses, heavily made up, suffered from smeared mascara. The music swelled.

  Then it was Gabe’s and the pounding air-conditioned exhilaration of an actual real-life band and limitless cocktails. Chris and Anneliese were great dancers, the kind everybody, participants and wallflowers alike, watches with envy, and they didn’t waste any time, not even bothering to find a table before they were out there in the middle of the floor, their arms flashing white and Anneliese’s coppery flag of hair draining all the color out of the room. We danced well too, Mallory and I, attuned to each other’s moves by way of long acquaintance, and while we weren’t maybe as showy as Chris and Anneliese, we could hold our own. I tried to take Mallory’s hand, but she withheld it and settled into one of the tables with a shrug of irritation. I stood there a moment in mute appeal, but she wouldn’t look me in the eye, and it was then that I began to realize it was going to be a long night. What did I want? I wanted to dance, wanted joy and release—summer break!—but I went to the bar instead and ordered a spritzer for Mallory and a rum-and-Coke for myself.

  The bar was crowded, more crowded than usual, it seemed, even though most of the undergrads had gone home or off to Europe or Costa Rica or wherever they went when somebody else was paying for it. There were two bartenders, both female and both showing off their assets, and it must have taken me five minutes just to get to the bar and another five to catch the attention of the nearest one. I shouted my order over the furious assault of the band. The drinks came. I paid, took one in each hand, and began to work my way back through the crowd. It was then that someone jostled me from behind—hard—and half the spritzer went down the front of my shirt and half the rum-and-Coke down the back of a girl in front of me. The girl swung around on me with an angry look and I swung around on whoever had jostled—pushed—me and found myself staring into the face of the guy from the blacktop road, the guy with the distraught girlfriend and the silver Toyota. It took a beat before I recognized him, a beat measured by the whining nasal complaint of the girl with the Coke-stained blouse—“Jesus, aren’t you even going to apologize?”—and then, without a word, he flashed both palms as if he were performing a magic trick and gave me a deliberate shove that tumbled me back into the girl and took the drinks to the floor in a silent shatter of glass and skittering ice cubes. The girl invoked Jesus again, louder this time, while the guy turned and slipped off into the crowd.

  A circle opened around me. The bartender gave me a disgusted look. “Sorry,” I said to the girl, “but you saw that, didn’t you? He shoved me.” And then, though it no longer mattered and he was already passing by the bouncer and swinging open the door to the deepening night beyond, I added, my own voice pinched in complaint, “I don’t even know him.”

  When I got back to the table, sans drinks, Mallory gave me a long squint through her glasses and said—or, rather, screamed over the noise of the band—“What took you so long?” And then, “Where’re the drinks?”

  That was the defining moment. My shirt was wet. I’d been humiliated, adrenaline was rocketing through my veins and my heart was doing paradiddles, and what I was thinking was, Who’s to blame here? Who stuck her nose in where it wasn’t wanted? So we got into it. Right there. And I didn’t care who was watching. And when the band took a break and Chris and Anneliese joined us and we finally got a round of drinks, the conversation was strained, to say the least. As soon as the band started up again, I asked Anneliese to dance and then, out of sympathy or etiquette or simple boredom, Chris asked Mallory, and for a long while we were all out on the dance floor, Chris eventually going back to Anneliese, but Mallory dancing with a succession of random guys just to stick it to me, which she succeeded in doing, with flying colors and interest compounded by the minute.

  And that was how we found ourselves out in that dark field on the night of the satellite, letting things spill out of us, angry things, hurtful things, things that made me want to leave her to the mosquitoes and go off and rent a room on the other side of town and never talk to her again. She’d just told me she hated me for maybe the hundredth time—we were drunk, both of us, as I’ve said, the encounter on the road the tipping point and no going back—and I was going to retort, going to say something incisive like “Yeah, me too,” wh
en I felt something hit my shoulder. It was a blow, a palpable hit, and my first thought was that the Toyota guy had followed us in order to exact some sort of twisted revenge for an incident that never happened, that was less than nothing—the girl hadn’t got in our car, had she?—but then I felt whatever it was skew off me and drop into the wet high grass with an audible thump. “What was that?” Mallory said.

  I wasn’t making the connection—not yet—with the streak of light that had shot overhead as we’d slammed out of the car.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Here,” she said, pulling out her phone to shine the light on the ground.

  The object was right there, at our feet, cradled in a gray-green bowl of broken stalks. It was metallic, definitely metallic, some sort of steel or titanium mesh six inches long and maybe three wide, like a sock, the size of a sock. And it wasn’t hot, as you’d expect, not at all. In fact—and this was when it came to me—the heating had taken place twenty-three miles up and by the time it had got here, to earth, to me, it was as lukewarm as a carton of milk left out on the counter.

  It was a sign, but of what I wasn’t sure. I went online the next day and found an article confirming that the streak in the sky had been produced by the reentry of a decommissioned twenty-year-old NASA climate satellite that scientists had been tracking as it fell out of orbit. The satellite had been the size of a school bus and weighed six and a half tons and that fact alone had caused considerable anxiety as it became increasingly clear that its trajectory would take it over populated areas in Canada and the United States. A picture of it, in grainy black-and-white, showed the least aerodynamic structure you could imagine, all sharp edges and functional planes, the whole overshadowed by a solar panel the size of the screen at a drive-in movie. The article went on to claim that all debris of any consequence had most likely been incinerated in the upper atmosphere and that the chances of any fragment of it hitting a given person anywhere within its range had been calculated at one in thirty-two hundred. All right. But it had hit me, so either they needed to recalculate or Mallory and I should get in the car and go straight to Vegas. I brought my laptop into the kitchen, where she was sitting at the table in the alcove, working a serrated knife through the sections of her grapefruit.