The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  “The thing is,” Ryan said, “I’m not a patient man. And what has occurred to me is that your pappy may be out of our reach at present moment, but here you are. And I’m guessing that you can get us into a house or two. Preferably ones with quality flat screens and high-thread-count sheets. I promised Mandy I was going to help her redecorate.”

  “Or else you could point us in the direction of your daddy’s private stash,” Kyle said.

  “And if I don’t choose to do neither?” Fran asked, crossing her arms.

  “I truly hope that you know what it is you’re doing,” Kyle said. “Ryan has not been in a good mood these last few days. He bit a sheriff’s deputy on the arm last night in a bar. Which is why we weren’t up here sooner.”

  “He was pigheaded, just like you,” Ryan said. “No pun intended. But I bet you’d taste better.”

  Fran stepped back. “Fine. There’s an old house farther up the road that nobody except me and my daddy knows about. It’s ruint. Nobody lives there, and so my daddy put his still up in it. He’s got all sorts of articles stashed up there. I’ll take you up. But you can’t tell him what I done.”

  “Course not, darlin’,” Kyle said. “We don’t aim to cause a rift in the family. Just to get what we have coming.”

  And so Fran found herself climbing right back up that same road. She got her feet wet in the drain but kept as far ahead of Kyle and Ryan as she dared. She didn’t know if she felt safe with them at her back.

  When they got up to the house, Kyle whistled. “Fancy sort of ruin.”

  “Wait’ll you see what’s inside,” Fran said. She led them around to the back, then held the door open. “Sorry about the lights. The power goes off more than it stays on. My daddy usually brings up a torch. Want me to go get one?”

  “We’ve got matches,” Ryan said. “You stay right there.”

  “The still is in the room over on the right. Mind how you go. He’s got it set up in a kind of maze, with the newspapers and all.”

  “Dark as the inside of a mine at midnight,” Kyle said. He felt his way down the hall. “I think I’m at the door. Sure enough, smells like what I’m lookin’ for. Guess I’ll just follow my nose. No booby traps or nothing like that?”

  “No sir,” Fran said. “He’d have blowed himself up a long time before now if he tried that.”

  “I might as well take in the sights,” Ryan said, the lit end of his cigarette flaring. “Now that I’m getting my night vision.”

  “Yes sir,” Fran said.

  “And might there be a pisser in this heap?”

  “Third door on the left, once you go up,” Fran said. “The door sticks some.”

  She waited until he was at the top of the stairs before she slipped out the back door again. She could hear Kyle fumbling toward the center of the Queen’s Room. She wondered what the queen would make of Kyle. She wasn’t worried about Ophelia at all. Ophelia was an invited guest. And anyhow, the summer people didn’t let anything happen to the ones who looked after them.

  One of the summer people was sitting on the porch swing when she came out. He was whittling a stick with a sharp knife.

  “Evening,” Fran said and bobbed her head.

  The summer personage didn’t even look up at her. He was one of the ones so pretty it almost hurt to peep at him, but you couldn’t not stare, neither. That was one of the ways they cotched you, Fran figured. Just like wild animals when you shone a light at them. She finally tore her gaze away and ran down the stairs like the devil was after her. When she stopped to look back, he was still setting there, smiling and whittling that poor stick down.

  She sold the guitar when she got to New York City. What was left of her daddy’s two hundred dollars had bought her a Greyhound ticket and a couple of burgers at the bus station. The guitar got her six hundred more, and she used that to buy a ticket to Paris, where she met a Lebanese boy who was squatting in an old factory. One day she came back from her under-the-table job at a hotel and found him looking through her backpack. He had the monkey egg in his hand. He wound it up and put it down on the dirty floor to dance. They both watched until it ran down. “Très jolie,” he said.

  It was a few days after Christmas, and there was snow melting in her hair. They didn’t have heat in the squat, or even running water. She’d had a bad cough for a few days. She sat down next to her boy, and when he started to wind up the monkey egg again, she put her hand out to make him stop.

  She didn’t remember packing it. And of course, maybe she hadn’t. For all she knew, they had winter places as well as summer places. Just because she’d never been able to travel didn’t mean they didn’t get around.

  A few days later, the Lebanese boy disappeared off, probably looking for someplace warmer. The monkey egg went with him. After that, all she had to remind herself of home was the tent that she kept folded up like a dirty handkerchief in her wallet.

  It’s been two years, and every now and again, while Fran is cleaning rooms in the pension, she closes the door and sets up the tent and gets inside. She looks out the window at the two apple trees. She tells herself that one day soon she will go home again.

  Alice Munro

  Leaving Maverley

  IN THE OLD DAYS when there was a movie theatre in every town there was one in this town, too, in Maverley, and it was called the Capital, as such theatres often were. Morgan Holly was the owner and the projectionist. He didn’t like dealing with the public—he preferred to sit in his upstairs cubbyhole managing the story on the screen—so naturally he was annoyed when the girl who took the tickets told him that she was going to have to quit, because she was having a baby. He might have expected this—she had been married for half a year, and in those days you were supposed to get out of the public eye before you began to show—but he so disliked change and the idea of people having private lives that he was taken by surprise.

  Fortunately, she came up with somebody who might replace her. A girl who lived on her street had mentioned that she would like to have an evening job. She was not able to work in the daytime, because she had to help her mother look after the younger children. She was smart enough to manage, though shy.

  Morgan said that that was fine—he didn’t hire a ticket-taker to gab with the customers.

  So the girl came. Her name was Leah, and Morgan’s first and last question for her was to ask what kind of name that was. She said that it was out of the Bible. He noticed then that she did not have any makeup on and that her hair was slicked unbecomingly tight to her head and held there with bobby pins. He had a moment’s worry about whether she was really sixteen and could legally hold a job, but close up he saw that it was likely the truth. He told her that she would need to work one show, starting at eight o’clock, on week nights and two shows, starting at seven, on Saturday nights. After closing, she would be responsible for counting the take and locking it away.

  There was only one problem. She said that she would be able to walk herself home on week nights but it would not be allowed on Saturday nights and her father could not come for her then, because he himself had a night job at the mill.

  Morgan said that he did not know what there was to be scared of in a place like this, and was about to tell her to get lost, when he remembered the night policeman who often broke his rounds to watch a little of the movie. Perhaps he could be charged with getting Leah home.

  She said that she would ask her father.

  Her father agreed, but he had to be satisfied on other accounts. Leah was not to look at the screen or listen to any of the dialogue. The religion that the family belonged to did not allow it. Morgan said that he did not hire his ticket-takers to give them a free peek at the show. As for the dialogue, he lied and said that the theatre was soundproofed.

  Ray Elliot, the night policeman, had taken the job so that he would be able to help his wife manage for at least some part of the daytime. He could get by with about five hours’ sleep in the morning and then a nap in the late afternoon. Ofte
n, the nap did not materialize, because of some chore that had to be done or just because he and his wife—her name was Isabel—got to talking. They had no children and could get talking anytime about anything. He brought her the news of the town, which often made her laugh, and she told him about the books she was reading.

  Ray had joined up for the war as soon as he was eighteen. He chose the Air Force, which promised, as was said, the most adventure and the quickest death. He had been a mid-upper gunner—a position that Isabel could never get straight in her head—and he had survived. Close to the end of the war, he’d been transferred to a new crew, and within a couple of weeks his old crew, the men he’d flown with so many times, were shot down and lost. He came home with a vague idea that he had to do something meaningful with the life that had so inexplicably been left to him, but he didn’t know what.

  First, he had to finish high school. In the town where he had grown up, a special school had been set up for veterans who were doing just that and hoping to go on to college, courtesy of the grateful citizens. The teacher of English Language and Literature was Isabel. She was thirty years old and married. Her husband, too, was a veteran, who considerably outranked the students in her English class. She was planning to put in this one year of teaching out of general patriotism, and then she was going to retire and start a family. She discussed this openly with her students, who said, just out of her earshot, that some guys got all the luck.

  Ray disliked hearing that kind of talk, and the reason was that he had fallen in love with her. And she with him, which seemed infinitely more surprising. It was preposterous to everybody except themselves. There was a divorce—a scandal to her well-connected family and a shock to her husband, who had wanted to marry her since they were children. Ray had an easier time of it than she did, because he had little family to speak of, and those he did have announced that they supposed they wouldn’t be good enough for him now that he was marrying so high up, and they would just stay out of his way in the future. If they expected any denial or reassurance in response to this, they did not get it. Okay with him was what he more or less said. Time to make a fresh start. Isabel said that she could go on teaching until Ray had finished college and got established in whatever it was that he wanted to do.

  But the plan had to change. She was not well. At first, they thought it was nerves. The upheaval. The foolish fuss.

  Then the pains came. Pain whenever she took a deep breath. Pain under the breastbone and in her left shoulder. She ignored it. She joked about God punishing her for her amorous adventure and said that he, God, was wasting his time when she didn’t even believe in him.

  She had something called pericarditis. It was serious and she had ignored it to her peril. It was something she would not be cured of but could manage, with difficulty. She could never teach again. Any infection would be dangerous, and where is infection more rampant than in a schoolroom? It was Ray now who had to support her, and he took a job as a policeman in this small town called Maverley, just over the Grey-Bruce border. He didn’t mind the work and she didn’t mind, after a while, her semi-seclusion.

  There was one thing they didn’t talk about. Each of them wondered whether the other minded not being able to have children. It occurred to Ray that that disappointment might have something to do with Isabel’s wanting to hear all about the girl he had to walk home on Saturday nights.

  “That is deplorable,” she said when she heard about the ban on movies, and she was even more upset when he told her that the girl had been kept out of high school to help at home.

  “And you say she’s intelligent.”

  Ray did not remember having said that. He had said that she was weirdly shy, so that during their walks he had to rack his brains for a subject of conversation. Some questions he thought of wouldn’t do. Such as, What is your favorite subject at school? That would have had to go into the past tense and it would not matter now whether she’d liked anything. Or, What did she want to do when she was grown up? She was grown up now, for all intents and purposes, and she had her work cut out for her, whether she wanted it or not. Also the question of whether she liked this town, and did she miss wherever it was that she used to live—pointless. And they had already gone through, without elaboration, the names and ages of the younger children in her family. When he inquired after a dog or a cat, she reported that she didn’t have any.

  She did come up with a question for him eventually. She asked what it was that people had been laughing about in the movie that night.

  He didn’t think he should remind her that she wasn’t supposed to have heard anything. But he could not remember what might have been funny. So he said that it must have been some stupid thing—you could never tell what would make the audience laugh. He said that he didn’t get too involved in the movies, seeing them as he did, in bits and pieces. He seldom followed the plots.

  “Plots,” she said.

  He had to tell her what that meant—that there were stories being told. And from that time on there was no problem making conversation. Nor did he need to warn her that it might not be wise to repeat any of it at home. She understood. He was called upon not to tell any specific story—which he could hardly have done anyway—but to explain that the stories were often about crooks and innocent people and that the crooks generally managed well enough at first by committing their crimes and hoodwinking people singing in night clubs (which were like dance halls) or sometimes, God knows why, singing on mountaintops or in some other unlikely outdoor scenery, holding up the action. Sometimes the movies were in color. With magnificent costumes if the story was set in the past. Dressed-up actors making a big show of killing one another. Glycerin tears running down ladies’ cheeks. Jungle animals brought in from zoos, probably, and teased to act ferocious. People getting up from being murdered in various ways the moment the camera was off them. Alive and well, though you had just seen them shot or on the executioner’s block with their heads rolling in a basket.

  “You should take it easy,” Isabel said. “You could give her nightmares.”

  Ray said he’d be surprised. And certainly the girl had an air of figuring things out, rather than being alarmed or confused. For instance, she never asked what the executioner’s block was or seemed surprised at the thought of heads on it. There was something in her, he told Isabel, something that made her want to absorb whatever you said to her, instead of just being thrilled or mystified by it. Some way in which he thought she had already shut herself off from her family. Not to be contemptuous of them, or unkind. She was just rock-bottom thoughtful.

  But then he said what made him sorrier than he knew why.

  “She hasn’t got much to look forward to, one way or the other.”

  “Well, we could snatch her away,” Isabel said.

  Then he warned her. Be serious.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  Shortly before Christmas (though the cold had not really set in yet), Morgan came to the police station around midnight one night in the middle of the week to say that Leah was missing.

  She had sold the tickets as usual and closed the window and put the money where it was supposed to go and set off for home, so far as he knew. He himself had shut things up when the show was done, but when he got outside this woman he didn’t know had appeared, asking what had become of Leah. This was the mother—Leah’s mother. The father was still at his job at the mill, and Morgan had suggested that the girl might have taken it into her head to go and see him at work. The mother didn’t seem to know what he was talking about, so he said that they could go to the mill and see if the girl was there, and she—the mother—cried and begged him not to do any such thing. So Morgan gave her a ride home, thinking that the girl might have turned up by now, but no luck, and then he thought he had better go and inform Ray.

  He didn’t relish the thought of having to break the news to the father.

  Ray said that they should go to the mill at once—there was a slim chance she might
be there. But of course when they located the father he hadn’t seen anything of her, and he got into a rage about his wife’s going out like that when she did not have permission to leave the house.

  Ray asked about friends and was not surprised to learn that Leah didn’t have any. Then he let Morgan go home and went himself to the house, where the mother was very much in the distracted state that Morgan had described. The children were still up, or some of them were, and they, too, proved to be speechless. They trembled either from fright and their misgivings about the stranger in the house or from the cold, which Ray noticed was definitely on the rise, even indoors. Maybe the father had rules about the heat as well.

  Leah had been wearing her winter coat—he got that much out of them. He knew the baggy brown checked garment and thought that it would keep her warm for a while, at least. Between the time that Morgan had first shown up and now, snow had begun to fall fairly heavily.

  When his shift was over, Ray went home and told Isabel what had happened. Then he went out again and she didn’t try to stop him.

  An hour later, he was back with no results, and the news that the roads were likely to be closed for the first big snowstorm of the winter.

  By morning, that was in fact the case; the town was boxed in for the first time that year and the main street was the only one that the snowplows tried to keep open. Nearly all the stores were closed, and in the part of town where Leah’s family lived the power had gone out and there was nothing that could be done about it, with the wind arching and bowing the trees until it looked as if they were trying to sweep the ground.

  The day-shift policeman had an idea that had not occurred to Ray. He was a member of the United Church and he was aware—or his wife was aware—that Leah did ironing every week for the minister’s wife. He and Ray went to the parsonage to see if anybody there knew anything that could account for the girl’s disappearance, but there was no information to be had, and after that brief stirring of hope the trail seemed even more hopeless than before.