The Best American Short Stories 2018

by Roxane Gay

  “Well,” he shrugs, “someday.”

  The prospect of this “someday”—whose advent he’s attempted to accelerate at least twice—sends you back to Serenity Pods one cloudy afternoon a few days later. Alone this time.

  Wade, still in his diaconal finest, tries to bring you around. “Tell me what’s giving you pause.”

  “Guilt rules my father’s life. And now he’s got it in his head that putting twelve grand down on a burial he might not even need—knock wood—is the best way to square his ecological debts.”

  “It’s not a bad place to start.”

  “Yeah, well. We run a housekeeping service. It’s about all we can do to keep the lights on.”

  Serenity Pods, it turns out, offers a payment plan. Wade pivots to show you the literature on making reabsorption accessible to everyone.

  You tell him you have all the pamphlets at home. “I didn’t come here for more of the company line.”

  He tilts his head a little, and says, “All right”—which is when you go all warm. You sit there, blowing ripples across the smoggy surface of your tea.

  “How did you die?”

  “Well, I guess in the end I didn’t.”

  As he resumes his pitch about soil renewal and generational duty, you’re disappointed in his failure to intuit what you really want to know: whether there’s a crack of light and an eventual shore to dying, or just darkness like you suspect. When the time comes, will trenching your father in a shawl full of seeds, so that filaments and roots can suck away everything that made him who he was, somehow render the former more likely? You can’t bring yourself to say: I’m afraid my father will simply cease to exist.

  “I’d like to hear more about burial from someone who doesn’t get commission selling it to me.”

  Wade laughs outright—a real laugh, earnest enough to furrow his whole nose. “Believe it or not, there’s fuck-all money in pod sales.”

  “Yeah? What about this?” You hook a finger under his tunic collar to reveal the strap of his FieldSight 5000s—the latest model, the one you’ve been eyeing for months—and you’re instantly embarrassed. Is it wrong to touch a man who dresses like a monk?

  “Those are an oversight.” Somehow, he’s managed to catch your wrist. “They’re for my other job. I usually remember not to wear them here.”

  “I didn’t think revenant pod people needed side gigs.”

  He smiles that smile. Huge white teeth from here to doomsday. “If anything, this is the side gig. The other’s more of a calling.”

  Which is how you get your start shed-hunting with Wade Dufrane.

  All winter you drift along trails and fire roads together in the blue hours before sunrise. Geese vault overhead. Thick mists leave the Bitterroot peaks and come coursing down into the Refuge. You grow to love the cold walk from your porch to the corner where Wade picks you up, the bitterness of his whiskey-laced coffee, the way the snowpack warps your bulky shadows. Together, you scout tracks, cut and climb fence, disable cameras, dodge patrols, sift through acres of deadfall in your pursuit of the shed antlers of bull elk.

  Most of the sheds have spent a decade or more underground, a vestige of the days of the great herds that once wintered around Fell Gulch. Generations of cast bone. Brittle scimitars snared in tree roots, or forking up where occasional mudslides have overturned the hills. You dig for them in gullies and creek beds below south-facing slopes, and along old game trails Wade first prospected with his father as a boy.

  You’re wary of encroaching on what was once a Dufrane family enterprise, but Wade has a lot of sympathy for your current predicament. He, too, grew up in West Gulch with a renter in the attic and a father prone to rash, costly decisions. He’s surprised your families don’t know one another: like yours, the Dufranes would let their house to snowies every Christmas and drive south to winter on the parched shores of Lenny Lake. Wade even supports an arthritic mother somewhere in Minnesota.

  All this is nominally why he sees fit to cut you in on his shed hunts. Of course, you suspect there may be something more to it. Something warm and visceral and conspicuously unspoken.

  On a good day, the two of you haul twenty or thirty pounds of bone back to Wade’s place, a converted garage behind Zeke’s Antiques. Between shots of whiskey, you lay the antlers out like kindling and sort them into pairs. Wade can read the life in them: tridents of bone notched with a hidden legacy of battles and famines and narrow escapes. He teaches you the criteria of appraisal: straight or crooked tines, spreads, points.

  Elk sheds sell by weight, and come out to about two hundred dollars a pound. This is for hard white, the stale stuff, probably older than you are. Fresh brown—newly fallen, dark with recent life—is a thing of the past. Wade hasn’t seen fresh brown sheds, or any other evidence of living elk, in years. He can’t begin to guess what they might be worth.

  Your dealer, a scrambled voice who goes by the moniker “Antlerdam,” communes with Wade once a week by telephone. He wraps your money in turn-of-the-century plastic bags, which he leaves in a broken toilet tank at the Carter County Library. He is responsible for shipping your plunder to lavish and remote destinations: Canada, where bone smiths work in secret to carve the antlers into walking sticks and knife handles and door knockers; or California, where black-market apothecaries grind them into powder, measure them into tinctures and compounds.

  On radio broadcasts and reward flyers, the Forest Service calls you poachers; yet in his more winsome moments, Wade likes to say you’re nothing but vernal custodians.

  Never mind that your exploits carry a $25,000 fine, and a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

  “Prison, Syl,” Kenny says, when you finally admit what you’ve been up to.

  His disgust is pretty righteous. Elk sheds, like everything on the Refuge, are protected under Posterity. They’re supposed to stay where they fall, reintegrate with the undergrowth. None of this is news to you.

  Luckily, you’ve got a line for just this moment: Wade knows what he’s doing, been at this for years. Besides, it’s not ivory. It’s not hurting anyone. “What am I supposed to do if Dad does turn out to have cancer, and I have to sell the house so he can come back as a tree?”

  Kenny’s having none of it. “I’m sure you’ll be a lot of help to him in prison.”

  His resolution not to speak to you lasts about a week. Your father, meanwhile, is too busy convincing himself of his imminent death to suspect that you’re flouting your entire upbringing. If he realizes that your agreed-upon eight-month hiatus from college has turned into two years, he doesn’t show it. He won’t interview new hires for Rayles Management, or let you teach him how to balance the budget by himself. Most days, he just ghouls around the house, checking for new skin lesions and comparing snowfall reports from down-valley towns. “Erlton only got twenty inches this year,” he says by way of good morning. “Twenty inches. I remember when they had to shell the pass all night to loose avalanches. Now I doubt they’ll get another real winter.”

  But it’s still real winter in Fell Gulch. The snowies keep coming: keep sledding, skating, building legions of snowmen. Zambonis chug back and forth across Highness Lake. Curtains of icicles rim the Main Street gables. Christmas lights twinkle well into March, like the whole place is some antique snow globe.

  You start picking up cleaning shifts whenever a staff member calls in sick. Changing sheets, staging ski compounds so you can visit the big mansions on Painter’s Knoll and study the handiwork of your clandestine life: antlers twisted up in huge chandeliers, trophy tips meeting neatly over stone fireplaces.

  “Nice twelve-point,” you say to the lady of a house on Ridge Street one afternoon, gazing at a mount above a mantel littered with pictures of towheaded kids. The elk’s eyes are dark and stygian. A tendril of cobweb drifts from one of his crowns.

  “Oh.” She pauses at the bottom of the banister, one sapling leg braced on the first stair. You can’t help thinking of her heating bill, what it must c
ost to be able to willow around in such a thin nightie this time of year. “I don’t really know. Somebody shot it a while back, I guess.”

  “Well, if we ever go bust, at least you know what to auction off first.”

  “Mm.”

  “That’s probably fifty inches of beam on each side.”

  Knowing more about her own possessions than she does thrills you. So does every corner of this new, secret world you’ve staked with Wade: the coded cuts on the trees, the white silence of the Refuge, the alpenglow gilding the rumpled chevrons of the Bitterroots, the black breaks of runoff ribboning the snow.

  For all Wade’s precautions, his lifework is hardly unknown. January through May, when the doors swing for him at Caviston’s Roadhouse, shots line the bar.

  Growing up, you were made to understand that Dad would skin you alive if you ever set foot inside Caviston’s. It’s out on Route 29, a lopsided cabin where the fur-trapper great-grandfathers of the current regulars would rendezvous back in the days before the chili pepper lights and neon signs and shamrocks that now disgrace it. You feel a little out of place among all the pretty women and their black-marketeers: James Muldoon, who still harvests wood out near Silver Pass; Roy Fitzgerald, who charges Painter’s Knoll–types two thousand a head for an underground quail feast every fall. But once Wade announces that “Sylvia Rayles is no fucking waster,” you’re as welcome among them as anyone.

  And all assembled are eager to supplement what you know about Wade. There’s an ex-girlfriend he’s been hung up on, and a litany of hilarious entanglements with park rangers. They tell you not to worry about his vague idea of moving to his mother’s place in Minnesota—he always fails to follow through on his best intentions.

  Listening, you’re warmed as their stories fail to breach your own trove of hard-won intimacies: Before moving to Minnesota, his mother sang with the Silver Banshees down in Miller’s Hole. The night his father emptied his pill bottle he gave Wade twenty dollars, which still sits, untouched, in a tobacco tin under the sycamore at the old Dufrane house; passing on Pinedale Road, Wade reflexively pulls into the driveway sometimes. He’s never cooked a dish without burning it, or made it all the way through “Shenandoah” without his voice breaking.

  April brings mud season, and Antlerfest with it. Fell Gulch goes full cervine. Rangers scatter a modest haul of confiscated sheds all over Highness Park, and the whole town turns up to honor this last shred of heritage: ursine dads shouldering winter-swaddled daughters, reluctant teenagers milling around the parking lot, grandparents reminiscing about the days when you could hunt a whole elk, goddammit, and not just the antlers.

  A whistle-blow at sunup sends four hundred citizens charging out into the field. Aware that your absence might raise suspicion, you and Wade make a point of being seen. You overturn logs and comb through bushes, right in the thick of it with all the grannies. You watch the kids hauling back their finds—nothing but spikes, straight and thin and practically worthless, but borne along as tenderly as sacrificial offerings. And all the while you recognize that you are the villains in this scene; you are responsible for this dearth.

  You finally wind your way over to Kenny’s pickle stand to bridge the two sides of your life. Kenny grips Wade’s hand, then upsells him on a jar of beets and turnips.

  “Twelve dollars?” you say through gritted teeth. “Really?”

  Kenny shrugs. “They’re award-winning.”

  He makes no attempt to mask his dead-eyeing of Wade, who wanders the parking lot inspecting the Antlerfest auction lots laid out on the tarmac like shot-down chandeliers. A chinless, brown-eyed ranger touches your elbow, keen to tell you more about the sheds. Did you know that elk cast their antlers every year? That once upon a time, pretty much anybody could just scoop them right off the ground?

  You can hardly decide what thrills you more viscerally: knowing a man has underestimated you so profoundly, or flirting with a loathed enemy right in front of Wade.

  The prize set of antlers—with an atypically considerable fifty-two-inch spread—sells handily for four grand. Afterward, Wade boosts you into the truck bed. The matter-of-factness of his presumption is stunning. As he continues to stand there, scraping a gob of mud off your knee, it hits you.

  Still, you take a full week to say it aloud. “I think I might be in love with Wade.”

  “Well, fuck,” says Kenny, without looking up from his textbook. “Just give me a moment to absorb this completely unexpected piece of news.”

  Apart from marooning you in a constant state of impatience, the realization changes very little of your daily life. Maybe you sleep a little less, rotate your more flattering clothes to the top drawers. But most nights Wade just picks you up, and the two of you drive the long, pine-ribbed highway to the Serbian diner over in Gentry. You share burek and fries and tease out where you’ll land when Fell Gulch finally goes bust. You revisit the humor in familiar things: tourist tat shops, people who stand on ceremony, the daily reenactment of Crazy Jim Collins’s murder at the Wallet, in which you briefly appeared as Dolly Dove, the shrill whorehouse madam.

  Before your limited run, Wade had played Bertrand Stills, shooting ol’ Jim right in the heart every Tuesday and Thursday.

  “I’d have paid to see you in that white Stetson and bolo.”

  His fork dimples the top of your hand. “Those were mandatory.”

  He decides that if the need for aliases should ever arise, the two of you will be “Stills” and “Dove.”

  On the drive home, Wade cracks a window to let in the smell of pine. His fingers drum the console between you. The truck feels too small to contain this electric haze of possibility. Your first kiss is imminent, a single dram of courage away. There’s safety in the knowledge that either of you could choose it anytime, a kind of chemical understanding. It’s a world beyond the high school boys who used to hold you down.

  Midnight, however, usually finds you on opposite ends of Wade’s sofa, reading aloud to one another. By two thirty, you’re home.

  Fielding your reports of the lack of consummation exasperates Kenny. “What’s taking him so long?”

  You’ve spent hours puzzling this out. Maybe you’ve overestimated your appeal. Maybe if you were more delicate, more serious. More feminine. Maybe if every meal didn’t stick to your ribs, if your body had any corners at all.

  Kenny doesn’t see the point of speculation. “You’ll never know unless you confront him, Syl; and the faster you get on with it, the better. Go for broke.”

  You will yourself to courage. But it’s easier to imagine almost anything—your father absolved, Fell Gulch parched—than that kiss and its aftermath. You can’t even slip your hand past your waistband in the darkness of your room for the sheer mortification of having to face Wade afterward.

  Again and again, you return to the same reality: a declaration of love will change things, one way or another. Better to linger in doubt than to lose your only source of joy, better to preserve the veil of promise. Like that shed hunt in mid-April, when you and Wade split up to cover more ground. He sends you down to Bitterroot Creek, a bottomland bearded with red-twig dogwoods. The day is warm and blindingly bright. You’re enjoying the solitude, the ftt-ftt of your steps mashing the snow, when there’s a whistle behind you. A rising note that could peel the enamel off your teeth. You twist around to find the source. A red flare explodes over the woods to your left, about a half mile away.

  It’s one thing to memorize protocol in case of a ranger encounter. Another thing entirely to follow it. You take off mindlessly into the trees, spraying snow everywhere, losing a snowshoe in the loamy creek bed. Finally you drop down in a stand of cottonwoods and wait. A line of melt drips beneath your collar. Through all that panting and hammering, you’re a long while in returning to silence.

  It’s dark by the time you hear Wade calling. He’s empty-handed, hatless, quietly infuriated by a wasted day, but relieved you’re in one piece—which is definitely something.

&nb
sp; The stars are out in their whorled millions. Eventually you give up arguing about where the road might be. Wade unpacks his winter hammock, strings it between two oaks, piles deadfall for insulation, while laughing periodically at your chattering teeth.

  “At least we’re together,” he says. “If it grows too cold, we can just get to fucking.” Then, after he sees your face: “Calm down, Syl. I’m joking.”

  The hammock sags with your combined weight, though your stomach is so empty it hurts. And even as the wind leaches all the heat from your back, there’s a higher order of warmth between you, knees clicking, ribs grazing, the white purl of your breath massing in the clear air.

  All night you commune over the truly celestial questions: What meat would you have most enjoyed, if you’d been born before Posterity? Wade thinks bacon; you say beef. How much nose could a person lose to frostbite and still look respectable? It apparently depends on the nose. “I could probably lose a good inch and be fine,” Wade says. He butts his forehead against yours. “But you’d be doomed with one tenth of that.”

  If ever there was a moment to ask. “How did you die?”

  “Briefly and stupidly.” His long silence makes you hopeful. Then he says: “When people measure distance by ‘a cunt hair,’ do you think they mean length or breadth?”

  You manage to reply: “Breadth.”

  The next morning, during your postmortem of the evening’s unrealized romantic potential, Kenny snaps. “I don’t care how long he lingers over his good-nights or how many Yeats poems he knows by heart: no guy breathes the words cunt hair to a woman he cares about.”

  “I don’t think I’m describing the moment properly.”

  He shakes his head. “You can take that to the bank, Syl.”

  You take it nowhere. You crumple it up and hurl it into the void that devours all evidence of Wade’s ambivalence toward you.

  Dad meets you in the doorway, floating around in a beloved tartan nightgown that refashions him as a junkie Ebenezer Scrooge. “Just getting in?”