The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories

by Ben Marcus

  One day in October Mr. Pirzada asked upon arrival, “What are these large orange vegetables on people’s doorsteps? A type of squash?”

  “Pumpkins,” my mother replied. “Lilia, remind me to pick one up at the supermarket.”

  “And the purpose? It indicates what?”

  “You make a jack-o’-lantern,” I said, grinning ferociously. “Like this. To scare people away.”

  “I see,” Mr. Pirzada said, grinning back. “Very useful.”

  The next day my mother bought a ten-pound pumpkin, fat and round, and placed it on the dining table. Before supper, while my father and Mr. Pirzada were watching the local news, she told me to decorate it with markers, but I wanted to carve it properly like others I had noticed in the neighborhood.

  “Yes, let’s carve it,” Mr. Pirzada agreed, and rose from the sofa. “Hang the news tonight.” Asking no questions, he walked into the kitchen, opened a drawer, and returned, bearing a long serrated knife. He glanced at me for approval. “Shall I?”

  I nodded. For the first time we all gathered around the dining table, my mother, my father, Mr. Pirzada, and I. While the television aired unattended we covered the tabletop with newspapers. Mr. Pirzada draped his jacket over the chair behind him, removed a pair of opal cuff links, and rolled up the starched sleeves of his shirt.

  “First go around the top, like this,” I instructed, demonstrating with my index finger.

  He made an initial incision and drew the knife around. When he had come full circle he lifted the cap by the stem; it loosened effortlessly, and Mr. Pirzada leaned over the pumpkin for a moment to inspect and inhale its contents. My mother gave him a long metal spoon with which he gutted the interior until the last bits of string and seeds were gone. My father, meanwhile, separated the seeds from the pulp and set them out to dry on a cookie sheet, so that we could roast them later on. I drew two triangles against the ridged surface for the eyes, which Mr. Pirzada dutifully carved, and crescents for eyebrows, and another triangle for the nose. The mouth was all that remained, and the teeth posed a challenge. I hesitated.

  “Smile or frown?” I asked.

  “You choose,” Mr. Pirzada said.

  As a compromise I drew a kind of grimace, straight across, neither mournful nor friendly. Mr. Pirzada began carving, without the least bit of intimidation, as if he had been carving jack-o’-lanterns his whole life. He had nearly finished when the national news began. The reporter mentioned Dacca, and we all turned to listen: An Indian official announced that unless the world helped to relieve the burden of East Pakistani refugees, India would have to go to war against Pakistan. The reporter’s face dripped with sweat as he relayed the information. He did not wear a tie or a jacket, dressed instead as if he himself were about to take part in the battle. He shielded his scorched face as he hollered things to the cameraman. The knife slipped from Mr. Pirzada’s hand and made a gash dipping toward the base of the pumpkin.

  “Please forgive me.” He raised a hand to one side of his face, as if someone had slapped him there. “I am—it is terrible. I will buy another. We will try again.”

  “Not at all, not at all,” my father said. He took the knife from Mr. Pirzada, and carved around the gash, evening it out, dispensing altogether with the teeth I had drawn. What resulted was a disproportionately large hole the size of a lemon, so that our jack-o’-lantern wore an expression of placid astonishment, the eyebrows no longer fierce, floating in frozen surprise above a vacant, geometric gaze.

  For Halloween I was a witch. Dora, my trick-or-treating partner, was a witch too. We wore black capes fashioned from dyed pillowcases and conical hats with wide cardboard brims. We shaded our faces green with a broken eye shadow that belonged to Dora’s mother, and my mother gave us two burlap sacks that had once contained basmati rice, for collecting candy. That year our parents decided that we were old enough to roam the neighborhood unattended.Our plan was to walk from my house to Dora’s, from where I was to call to say I had arrived safely, and then Dora’s mother would drive me home. My father equipped us with flashlights, and I had to wear my watch and synchronize it with his. We were to return no later than nine o’clock.

  When Mr. Pirzada arrived that evening he presented me with a box of chocolate-covered mints.

  “In here,” I told him, and opened up the burlap sack. “Trick or treat!”

  “I understand that you don’t really need my contribution this evening,” he said, depositing the box. He gazed at my green face, and the hat secured by a string under my chin. Gingerly he lifted the hem of the cape, under which I was wearing a sweater and a zipped fleece jacket. “Will you be warm enough?”

  I nodded, causing the hat to tip to one side.

  He set it right. “Perhaps it is best to stand still.”

  The bottom of our staircase was lined with baskets of miniature candy, and when Mr. Pirzada removed his shoes he did not place them there as he normally did, but inside the closet instead. He began to unbutton his coat, and I waited to take it from him, but Dora called me from the bathroom to say that she needed my help drawing a mole on her chin. When we were finally ready my mother took a picture of us in front of the fireplace, and then I opened the front door to leave. Mr. Pirzada and my father, who had not gone into the living room yet, hovered in the foyer. Outside it was already dark. The air smelled of wet leaves, and our carved jack-o’-lantern flickered impressively against the shrubbery by the door. In the distance came the sounds of scampering feet, and the howls of the older boys who wore no costume at all other than a rubber mask, and the rustling apparel of the youngest children, some so young that they were carried from door to door in the arms of their parents.

  “Don’t go into any of the houses you don’t know,” my father warned.

  Mr. Pirzada knit his brows together. “Is there any danger?”

  “No, no,” my mother assured him. “All the children will be out. It’s a tradition.”

  “Perhaps I should accompany them?” Mr. Pirzada suggested. He looked suddenly tired and small, standing there in his splayed, stockinged feet, and his eyes contained a panic I had never seen before. In spite of the cold I began to sweat inside my pillowcase.

  “Really, Mr. Pirzada,” my mother said, “Lilia will be perfectly safe with her friend.”

  “But if it rains? If they lose their way?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. It was the first time I had uttered those words to Mr. Pirzada, two simple words I had tried but failed to tell him for weeks, had said only in my prayers. It shamed me now that I had said them for my own sake.

  He placed one of his stocky fingers on my cheek, then pressed it to the back of his own hand, leaving a faint green smear. “If the lady insists,” he conceded, and offered a small bow.

  We left, stumbling slightly in our black pointy thrift-store shoes, and when we turned at the end of the driveway to wave good-bye, Mr. Pirzada was standing in the frame of the doorway, a short figure between my parents, waving back.

  “Why did that man want to come with us?” Dora asked.

  “His daughters are missing.” As soon as I said it, I wished I had not. I felt that my saying it made it true, that Mr. Pirzada’s daughters really were missing, and that he would never see them again.

  “You mean they were kidnapped?” Dora continued. “From a park or something?”

  “I didn’t mean they were missing. I meant, he misses them. They live in a different country, and he hasn’t seen them in a while, that’s all.”

  We went from house to house, walking along pathways and pressing doorbells. Some people had switched off all their lights for effect, or strung rubber bats in their windows. At the McIntyres’ a coffin was placed in front of the door, and Mr. McIntyre rose from it in silence, his face covered with chalk, and deposited a fistful of candy corns into our sacks. Several people told me that they had never seen an Indian witch before. Others performed the transaction without comment. As we paved our way with the parallel beams of our flashlight
s we saw eggs cracked in the middle of the road, and cars covered with shaving cream, and toilet paper garlanding the branches of trees. By the time we reached Dora’s house our hands were chapped from carrying our bulging burlap bags, and our feet were sore and swollen. Her mother gave us bandages for our blisters and served us warm cider and caramel popcorn. She reminded me to call my parents to tell them I had arrived safely, and when I did I could hear the television in the background. My mother did not seem particularly relieved to hear from me. When I replaced the phone on the receiver it occurred to me that the television wasn’t on at Dora’s house at all. Her father was lying on the couch, reading a magazine, with a glass of wine on the coffee table, and there was saxophone music playing on the stereo.

  After Dora and I had sorted through our plunder, and counted and sampled and traded until we were satisfied, her mother drove me back to my house. I thanked her for the ride, and she waited in the driveway until I made it to the door. In the glare of her headlights I saw that our pumpkin had been shattered, its thick shell strewn in chunks across the grass. I felt the sting of tears in my eyes, and a sudden pain in my throat, as if it had been stuffed with the sharp tiny pebbles that crunched with each step under my aching feet. I opened the door, expecting the three of them to be standing in the foyer, waiting to receive me, and to grieve for our ruined pumpkin, but there was no one. In the living room Mr. Pirzada, my father, and mother were sitting side by side on the sofa. The television was turned off, and Mr. Pirzada had his head in his hands.

  What they heard that evening, and for many evenings after that, was that India and Pakistan were drawing closer and closer to war. Troops from both sides lined the border, and Dacca was insisting on nothing short of independence. The war was to be waged on East Pakistani soil. The United States was siding with West Pakistan, the Soviet Union with India and what was soon to be Bangladesh. War was declared officially on December 4, and twelve days later, the Pakistani army, weakened by having to fight three thousand miles from their source of supplies, surrendered in Dacca. All of these facts I know only now, for they are available to me in any history book, in any library. But then it remained, for the most part, a remote mystery with haphazard clues. What I remember during those twelve days of the war was that my father no longer asked me to watch the news with them, and that Mr. Pirzada stopped bringing me candy, and that my mother refused to serve anything other than boiled eggs with rice for dinner. I remember some nights helping my mother spread a sheet and blankets on the couch so that Mr. Pirzada could sleep there, and high-pitched voices hollering in the middle of the night when my parents called our relatives in Calcutta to learn more details about the situation. Most of all I remember the three of them operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear.

  In January, Mr. Pirzada flew back to his three-story home in Dacca, to discover what was left of it. We did not see much of him in those final weeks of the year; he was busy finishing his manuscript, and we went to Philadelphia to spend Christmas with friends of my parents. Just as I have no memory of his first visit, I have no memory of his last. My father drove him to the airport one afternoon while I was at school. For a long time we did not hear from him. Our evenings went on as usual, with dinners in front of the news. The only difference was that Mr. Pirzada and his extra watch were not there to accompany us. According to reports Dacca was repairing itself slowly, with a newly formed parliamentary government. The new leader, Sheikh Mujib Rahman, recently released from prison, asked countries for building materials to replace more than one million houses that had been destroyed in the war. Countless refugees returned from India, greeted, we learned, by unemployment and the threat of famine. Every now and then I studied the map above my father’s desk and pictured Mr. Pirzada on that small patch of yellow, perspiring heavily, I imagined, in one of his suits, searching for his family. Of course, the map was outdated by then.

  Finally, several months later, we received a card from Mr. Pirzada commemorating the Muslim New Year, along with a short letter. He was reunited, he wrote, with his wife and children. All were well, having survived the events of the past year at an estate belonging to his wife’s grandparents in the mountains of Shillong. His seven daughters were a bit taller, he wrote, but otherwise they were the same, and he still could not keep their names in order. At the end of the letter he thanked us for our hospitality, adding that although he now understood the meaning of the words “thank you” they still were not adequate to express his gratitude. To celebrate the good news my mother prepared a special dinner that evening, and when we sat down to eat at the coffee table we toasted our water glasses, but I did not feel like celebrating. Though I had not seen him for months, it was only then that I felt Mr. Pirzada’s absence. It was only then, raising my water glass in his name, that I knew what it meant to miss someone who was so many miles and hours away, just as he had missed his wife and daughters for so many months. He had no reason to return to us, and my parents predicted, correctly, that we would never see him again. Since January, each night before bed, I had continued to eat, for the sake of Mr. Pirzada’s family, a piece of candy I had saved from Halloween. That night there was no need to. Eventually, I threw them away.

  DOWN THE ROAD

  STEPHEN DIXON

  Just as it’s starting to get dark, the stick falls out of her hand, and she drops. “I told you to be more careful,” I say. “There are stones all over the road, cracks every third step. You all right?” She doesn’t answer. I shake her, try to wake her. She seems dead. I put my head close to her nose, hand on her wrist and then her temple. I hold my breath while I press my ear to her lips, put a finger in my ear and the other ear to her chest, but I still can’t hear her breathe or hear or feel any pulse or heartbeat.

  “Then I guess I’ll have to try to make it alone,” I say. Louder: “Alone. I’m going. Leah, I said I’m going, I have to, I can’t carry you and try to make it also. You’re too heavy. Not ‘too heavy,’ meaning overweight. Just that I’ve been weakened by this trip too and can barely make it on my own. We’ve both been weakened. We’ve had little food these last few days, not much to drink. Both of us have walked three times the amount someone our age and particularly in our physical condition would normally be able to walk in the last three days. Monday … Thursday. Four days. This is our fourth day on the road. We’re weak in just about every way, that’s all. You can’t carry me, and I can’t carry you. I might be able to help you up, but that’s about all I can do for you. All right, I’ll not only help you up but help you walk as long as I’m able to. But I can’t carry you, remember that. I just can’t.”

  She’s on her back. I lift her up so she’s in a sitting position and keep her up. Her eyes are closed. She still doesn’t seem to be breathing. “Leah, you alive or not? Because we can’t stay here. Night’s just fallen. It’s what I’d call semidark. It’s dusk, that’s the word, but a dark dusk, almost completely dark so almost not dusk. It’s already about five degrees colder than it was a half hour ago. We have to find shelter in the next hour, or we’ll freeze to death. We certainly won’t last the night. Or if we do, we’ll be so weak by morning that neither of us will be able to walk a single step or at least go very far, even on our knees. So try to stand up. All right, I’ll help you all the way up and help you walk, if that’s what you think it’ll take to get you to walk, but also because I said I would. But I won’t carry you—we agreed on that.”

  I pull her up by her wrists. I say, “Walk. Walk with me. Or first try to walk on your own. Let’s just see if you can.” I let her go. She starts to fall. I catch her and hold her up. I put my arm around her waist, hold one of her hands, and start to walk. I have to drag her along, but we are now walking. Or moving. Slowly. Moving step by step, but my steps. Five steps already, six. It’s dark. Few stars out. I don’t know where there’ll be shelter ahead. There wasn’t any shelter the last mile or two. I don’t know this area. I
might have been over it years ago in a car, but I forget. “There seem to be fewer and fewer trees,” I say to her, “and more and more rocks. But no tree or rock with any shelter underneath and no rock with a space for even one of us to crawl into. What do you make of it? Well, it’s the only way we could come. They say we couldn’t go the other way—or rather shouldn’t. That the other way would even be worse for us. ‘Worse’ meaning less chance to get food, fewer places to rest and find shelter for the night or from the rain. That it’d be colder, rainier, snowier. How it could be rainier than it’s been or snowier or colder, I don’t know. Of course I know. It’s not raining or snowing now, though the ground’s so soaked we could never be able to rest on it for the next couple of days or so or rest without getting wet and sick or just wet, and it could always be colder. If it’s thirty degrees now, it could be twenty degrees in an hour and ten degrees and then zero degrees later on and so forth. I’m saying it could always get colder. Maybe fifty degrees below, sixty, seventy degrees below is the limit, or has been the limit as far as I know, but only for the coldest regions on earth, which this area isn’t one. And snowier. It could snow for days. Could have snowed a couple of inches an hour for days. It didn’t. It just snowed, a moderate snow. Five inches one day, six? Rained a lot, though. I’d say two or three inches a day for the last three days. That’s a lot of rain. Maybe a record of rain in that time period for this area. How did we stand it? We just said, ‘It isn’t raining.’ Or ‘The rain can’t hurt us—our skins are unalterably waterproof.’ Or ‘You say that’s rain? That’s not rain. Those are sun rays coming down on us that only look like rain. So it’s sunny, and we should get out of the sun, or we’ll get a bad burn.’ Foolish, right, but it worked, didn’t it? And now the rain’s stopped. But it is getting colder. So we should do the same thing with the cold that we did with the rain. Call the cold ‘warmth.’ Say, ‘My, but it’s getting warm. Very comfortable. What a welcome change.’ Then when it gets much colder, say, ‘It’s getting too warm. I’d call it hot. We should get out of the heat. It’s beginning to stifle us. It’s at least stifled me. We should remove some of our clothes, in fact.’ Without doing it, of course. In other words, work the reverse. That’s a good self-preserving philosophy for now. Or self-surviving, self-sustaining, but you know what I mean. How you doing, by the way?”