The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

  “Peter shot her!”

  Then the wife, as if shaken from a daze, cried out, her voice trembling, “He gave you the pie, didn’t he?”

  “Please,” the red-haired child began to cry. “I don’t know where she is.”

  “Didn’t you give him the pie?” screamed the mother at the child, so that the infant in her arms began to wail.

  “Tell him to show me,” I said to Clyde. “Tell him to show me every little hiding place.”

  Clyde grunted at the boy, who stood at this order. Clyde, looking dizzy and defeated, sat back down. He seemed relieved ultimately that my business was with his son, and not with him. The wife sat down too and cooed at the screaming baby.

  The boy led me through three tiny rooms. He opened up the cellar door when I told him to, then I told him to pry open the door to the rotten shed and he did. I moved the hay away with my foot, and stamped the ground to check for any sign of softness, an echo. None. He opened the lids of four barrels filled with water. He tore down the boards over the window of a henhouse.

  “Where the owl killed our hens,” said the boy, nervously. He held the lantern up. “See, the glass is broken. That’s why we were hunting it. They’re not just my family’s chickens. They’re all of ours.”

  “Show me under there,” I said, and motioned to a large mound covered with burlap. The boy threw the burlap off. Underneath was only branches.

  “Which is Peter’s house?” I asked.

  “I don’t know where she is,” he said.

  “Is Peter’s the house to the north?”

  “He doesn’t know either,” said the boy.

  “Where does he live?”

  The boy pointed north.

  “Go inside now,” I said. “It’s all right.”

  But first I took his lantern.

  —

  A dog barked in the distance. I followed the sound. I approached the house from the back way, near a barn. I looked in through a window at a few cows and sheep. The sheep had gray, matted wool and knocked their heads against the boards of their pens, trying to turn around and look at me.

  I heard boys’ voices.

  As I got closer, I could see their bodies through the crack in the barn door. Three boys, their backs to me. The two brothers sitting on a gate, and Peter—his posture I knew, though I could not see his face. He leaned against a post, talking to the brothers on their gate, the three of them laughing brightly, so hard that Peter’s shoulders shook.

  And then, as if pulling herself up from the floor, I saw rising suddenly in the window the back of a woman. Jane. She wore a dress I didn’t recognize, loose over her shoulders. Her dark hair fell dully down her back.

  I kicked the door open, but stumbled as I came inside, over a crate of tools. As I tried to pick myself up, I heard one boy yell to another to run. I heard them stumbling and I heard Jane scream. In a moment I was there behind her, as she was trying desperately to climb up over the gate. I grabbed her shoulders. I turned her toward me. I shook her in my hands with my relief.

  A girl. Fifteen or so. She had a dirty face and her dress was falling down over her shoulder. I let go of her suddenly, shocked.

  The two brothers were both standing in front of the gate now. Peter was gone.

  “Where is she?” I asked them.

  “Who?” said the older one with a smirk.

  “Jane,” I yelled at them.

  I grabbed the older brother by the collar of his shirt and threw him back against the gate. But then, from behind me, came the girl’s slurred voice. “I’m Jane, here I am,” and when I turned to her she waved at me while her tongue flickered against her teeth. She laughed, looking at the boys for them to laugh too, which they did not. She looked back at me, her eyes shining.

  “Hey,” said this dirty-faced girl, and as she said this she came up very close to my face and tilted her head to see me better. Her dark hair curled around her pretty, filthy face. She smiled at me with her glassy eyes. She put her finger into her mouth, then drew it out. This did make the boys laugh, meanly and unafraid. The younger one tossed his hat at her.

  “They tied me up,” she said, as the hat hit her body. She held her wrists up in front of my face to show me her rope-burned skin. She giggled at my surprise, and when she moved her wrist even closer to my face, I grabbed it and moved her away roughly.

  “Hey,” said the girl, turning back to the two boys. “Which one of you is gonna marry me?” She went up to the older brother, and pushed him in the shoulder, then drew her hand back.

  “Stop it,” he spat at her.

  “Come on,” she said, but she was stumbling now. She put her hand on the back of a sheep to keep her balance. “Come on.”

  “Stop it,” he said again.

  “Peter,” I said to the boys, “where did he go? Is he back there?” There was a corral behind the gate that the brothers seemed to be trying to block from my view.

  “What did Peter do?” said the drunken girl.

  “Shut up,” mumbled the younger brother.

  The girl looked at him in protest. “But I’m Jane.” Then she started to cry, clutching my arm. Her fingernails dug through the sleeve of my coat. She leaned in close to me. I looked at her face as if for the first time. Her drunken eyes, the bruise on her cheekbone. Her foul breath. And yet there was something familiar, as if somewhere inside of her was the girl I took away.

  “They tied you up?” I asked. I could only manage a whisper.

  “They tied me up,” she cried, “they put me here.” But after one long moment in which she looked into my eyes, her mouth open, she started to giggle again. Her face became something different, belonged to someone I didn’t know. I shoved her out of the way. I grabbed the older boy by his shirt and I slung him down. “Where is Peter?” I said.

  He rubbed his arm. He pointed behind the gate. “He’s in there.”

  I opened it and squinted to see. The space was deep and dark. I could hear the boy breathing, a coward crouched in the hay. I half-expected him to plunge a knife into my leg. But instead I heard him whimper.

  “I’m so sorry.” He sniffled. “I really am.”

  I reached down and grabbed his arms. I threw him out of the corral and into the light, facedown at the feet of the girl and the brothers. I turned him over with my boot.

  But the face I looked upon in that moment, the awkward face of a scared young man, did not fill up the darkness of my memory the way I thought it would. I do not mean this was not the boy who shot Jane. He was. I recognized him plainly from the awful night that he and the others stepped away from her, when she lay down in the grass, moving her head back and forth in the weeds. His eyes were as wide then as they had been the other night. There was no doubt of who he was.

  And yet there was no relief. There was only the pressing darkness in my head.

  “Hold still,” I yelled, because I needed to see. I needed to know.

  But he wouldn’t stop shaking his head, and there was no way to stop him except by the weight of my boot on his chest. His head stopped moving but his eyes flinched shut.

  “Open your eyes.”

  The tears ran out of them, closed.

  “Open your eyes!” But he opened his mouth instead. And so I put my rifle in. His eyes shot open then. Blue, wet. I didn’t take the rifle out. His eyes shone at me and I stared back. And so I knew. I knew for certain then. I felt, as I stared at this face that meant nothing to me, the tremors of the darkness in my head, and within that darkness, Jane. Running, running into it. All those years of looking out the window—! The weight of all that patience settled on my life like dust. I understood then her willingness, at any sign of movement in those trees—especially the sound of a young boy’s voice—to set down her book, turn her back on me, and run outside to meet him.

  Only not him, but other boys, hunting other things.

  Did she think he’d look like this, like them, after all these years had passed?

  The crudely dug hole, the secr
et board. A letter in the dirt.

  “Oh, oh, please,” the girl behind me managed. I could hear her body trembling in her voice.

  I took my rifle from Peter’s mouth. He rolled over onto his side. Holding himself like a small boy, he wept. The other three ran out of the barn, the older brother grasping the girl’s hand, and the girl crying so hard it sounded like joy.

  —

  The skulls haven’t been around in years. It wasn’t that I stopped with the cornmeal—I didn’t. I called to them like she had done. I’m not saying that I’m proud of that, but I was lonely.

  Then a few years back, one of the sheriff’s hounds had pups, and he offered me one, and I took it. A bluetick hound. The mother was one of the dogs the sheriff had looking for Jane. The search had ended, but the dog had looked a long time, so long I imagine that Jane’s smell is still moving through that body, carried in her dog blood and her dreams, and that each time she drank from the river she would breathe above the surface of the water first, looking for a trace of her footsteps—and his. That smell will remain in her long after it’s gone from the clothes in Jane’s drawers, which I never open, for fear it is already.

  But the little dog I’ve got now has no search in him, no hunt at all. He was very good about the skulls. He never chased them. But they got spooked anyway. Maybe it was the last hint of instinct the inbred beasts had left: They didn’t like his smell.

  And so they wandered off, and, I suspect, were killed off quickly, by coyotes or owls or—in one case that I admit was very hard—the traps of men.

  Becky Hagenston

  The Upside-Down World

  “TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES,” says Gertrude. “So we can say we dipped our feet in.”

  Jim has no desire to dip his feet in. It’s late August, and the rocky beach along the Promenade des Anglais is scattered with sunbathers at ten in the morning; a light breeze is whiffling the surface of the Mediterranean. He has been thinking of all the ways he and Gertrude are out of place here, in the South of France: They aren’t rich, tan, or beautiful; they can’t speak or understand French; they are neither honeymooners nor retirees. They are middle-aged siblings, with matching potbellies and thinning gray-brown hair, and Jim has come to rescue his sister from…from what, exactly? He’s not entirely sure. Jeannie, his wife, was the one who’d answered the phone in the middle of the night to Gertrude babbling. When Jim got on the line, she’d said, in strangely calm tones, “Jimmy boy. I just took a seven-hundred-euro taxi ride to Monte Carlo in my nightgown. Do you think I’m losing it again?”

  He rubbed his temples. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll get a flight to Nice.”

  “ ‘Fine, I’ll get a flight to Nice’?” his wife said, and rolled over in a huff. “As if there are direct flights to Nice.”

  Gertrude has gained at least thirty pounds since the last time he saw her, three Christmases ago. The weight has made her seem younger, less pinched, but he isn’t sure how to say this in a way that sounds flattering. She’s now pulling off her sneakers and socks. “Come on!” She has thrown off her canvas purse and is making her way, wincing, over the rocks, toward the water.

  When they were children vacationing in Ocean City, she was always swimming out too far and needing to be hauled to shore by lifeguards. “Keep an eye on Gertrude” was pretty much the theme of their vacations. There are no lifeguards here that Jim can see, just some teenagers, topless old women, and men with their bellies hanging over their Speedos. Would she actually start swimming in her clothes? There’s no telling.

  Jim kicks off his loafers and pulls off his socks, and he and Gertrude slip over the rocks together, the shifting smoothness of the pebbles giving way and almost tumbling him on his behind; Gertrude grabs his hand and they have a rare moment of triumphant camaraderie, holding on to each other as the surprisingly cold water laps their shins, until Gertrude turns around and says, “Oh, shit—my purse is gone.”

  —

  It’s all right there in the guidebook: Do not leave your valuables unattended, and absolutely do not take valuables, passports, or more cash than you need to the beach. Right there, under Security and Health. Elodie reads this out loud to Ted in their hotel room. She knows he likes it when she mispronounces things.

  “Health with an H,” he says. “And it’s beach, not bitch.” He grabs the book from her hands. “What else is in the bag?”

  She sorts through the stuff she’s poured out on the bed: an ancient flip-phone, a small leather wallet (Visa, American Express, Maryland driver’s license featuring a scowling, round, forty-five-year-old face, seventy-six euros), a L’Oréal lipstick (not Elodie’s color, but it’s new so she pockets it), a spatula-shaped plastic room key with a 2 on it but no hotel name, a half-empty packet of Kleenex, and a tube of fruit Mentos.

  “I don’t condone this sort of behavior,” Ted says, shaking his finger at her. Elodie knows he not only condones the behavior, he enjoys it. Ted is American, and she met him last week at the Gare Routière. He looks about thirty, and she told him she’s nineteen, adding two years. He sleeps on the far side of the bed, telling her he’s “a churchgoing man” in an accent from an old cowboy movie, but he has quick sex with her while she pretends to be asleep.

  “It is très utile to have a guidebook,” she says, flipping through the photos. “Perhaps we will learn some things.” Then she smiles at Ted to let him know she’s joking, that she already knows all she needs to.

  —

  At the hotel, the German proprietress shakes her head and says, “That was very stupid, to leave your valuables on the beach.”

  “No kidding,” says Jim. Gertrude just laughs. She refused to report the theft to the police, and now she says, “So what? What have I lost? Some cash and a guidebook and some credit cards I can just cancel. You have your phone and credit card, our passports are safe, I already paid for my room, and the plane tickets are electronic. So what’s the big whoop?”

  Jim feels neck sweat dripping down the back of his shirt. She’s right, it could have been worse, but her caution-to-the-wind attitude is disturbing. Also he didn’t bring any credit cards—just five hundred dollars which he then exchanged for a little over three hundred euros. Jeannie had insisted that he leave the credit cards at home in case he got pickpocketed, “and it would be such a hassle to get that straightened out.”

  “And if my money gets pickpocketed?”

  “Let your sister take care of you,” Jeannie said. “For once.”

  So much for that.

  “You’re going to take me to lunch now,” Gertrude announces. “And we can pour our hearts out to each other and talk about old times.” Then she starts laughing so hard that the proprietress rushes forward in alarm.

  “She does that sometimes,” Jim says by way of apology. Then he digs out a hundred euros from his wallet and says, “I’ll pay for my room now, before anything else gets stolen. We won’t need the Continental breakfast tomorrow.”

  Gertrude stops laughing long enough to punch him in the arm and say, “Yes, we will,” so he peels off another ten euros.

  —

  Elodie was sixteen when her mother killed herself last winter, and in the spring she took the bus from Aix-en-Provence to Cannes, where she met a dreadlocked Australian named Davey who told her she had eyes like sharks, lips like coral. He was a scuba diver. He was fifty-one but in no way reminded Elodie of her father, who is white-haired and chain-smokes and never goes barefoot, ever. In a small hotel room on the Rue Félix Faure she told Davey about her family’s apartment on the Cours Mirabeau, and her father’s business dealings with shady Corsicans, and how she was supposed to go to a grande école but had disappointed everyone by flunking out of the lycée. Then, more to her shock than Davey’s (who seemed to be expecting an opportunity to get her out of her clothes), she broke down sobbing; he pulled her shirt over her head and nudged her arm gently with a cold can of Kronenbourg. She stayed with him in his hotel for almost a week, but Cannes depressed her, so one night she
stole two hundred euros from his wallet and took a train to Paris, where she lived for a few weeks with a Belgian in a depressing banlieue full of concrete towers.

  In the months since then, she has been as far north as Normandy, but she knows she is a warm-blooded girl who belongs in the south, so three weeks ago she came to Nice, for the sun and the tourists. She had been staying in a dingy hotel near the train station and was at the Gare Routière to steal cash from more sunburned, khaki-pantsed Americans. Her hand was almost in Ted’s fanny pack when he grabbed her wrist and said in his deep, John Wayne voice, “Now just hold on there.”

  “I wasn’t doing anything,” she said, pulling away, but he had a tight grip.

  “You were robbin’ me,” he said. He smiled. “Come on, let me buy you a nice meal.” She knew the price for the meal—besides sex—would be a story about her life. Not the real story, of course, but the one she made up, the one she had practiced, featuring more elaborate and interesting tragedies than her own.

  —

  Lunch is getting expensive (Gertrude is on her third beer), they still have to get the bus to the airport tomorrow, and what about dinner? Maybe Gertrude is planning to stuff herself full enough to last until tomorrow. They are sitting outside at a small round table crammed up against other small round tables on the Place Masséna, a pedestrian mall, but they might as well be in Miami, with all the loud Americans shouting and laughing and clinking glasses. He and Jeannie went to Miami once early in their marriage—a present from her parents—and ate shrimp cocktail and argued at the pool, then made up in the dim white hotel room. They not only made up, they also made Claudia, and thinking of his lovely nine-year-old daughter now makes him feel as if he’s failed her, or is going to fail her, in ways he can’t even imagine.

  It occurs to him that this feeling of sharp anxiety is not unfamiliar in the least, which means he can’t blame it on Gertrude. It’s been lurking in his chest for years, a dull buzzing just below his skin, like the vibration from a distant chain saw. It’s almost a relief to feel the wind of it on the back of his neck.