The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories

by Ben Marcus

  Lory was not allowed to work at the school where her father was principal, so she taught in a little mountain town called Warrensburg, about thirty miles north. She hated the job. The children had no respect for her, no love; they drank and died in fiery crashes, or were abused by their parents, or got cancer—they had no luck. Lory’s last name, her family’s name, was Iron, and one night the boys at her school had scratched with knives onto every desktop the words “I fucked Miss Iron.” Sometimes the boys touched her from behind when she was walking in the crowded halls.

  That night the brothers’ hearts beat so wildly, they lay in the grass for a while and then went and got their sisters. Lory was barely able to come out of her sleep but followed the brothers anyway, holding Jerry’s hand as if sleepwalking. She sat down with her back against the largest tree and dozed in and out, still exhausted from the school year. Lindsay, though, was wide awake, and sat cross-legged, leaning forward, listening.

  “We went down to the river today,” John said, plucking at stems of grass, putting them in his mouth and chewing on them for their sweetness, like a cow grazing. Jerry was doing hurdler’s stretches, had one leg extended in front of him. There was no moon, only stars through the trees.

  “Summer,” mumbled Lory in her half sleep. Often she talked in her sleep and had nightmares.

  “Who was your first lover?” Jerry asked her, grinning, speaking in a low voice, trying to trick her.

  Lindsay covered her sister’s ears and whispered, “Lory, no! Wake up! Don’t say it!”

  The brothers were overprotective of Lory, even though she was the oldest and hadn’t had any boyfriends for a long time.

  “Michael,” Lory mumbled uncomfortably. “No, no, Arthur. No, wait, Richard, William? No—Mack, no, Jerome, Atticus, no, that Caster boy—no, wait …”

  Slowly Lory opened her eyes, smiling at Jerry. “Got you,” she said.

  Jerry shrugged, embarrassed. “I just want to protect you.”

  Lory looked at him with sleepy, narrowed eyes. “Right.”

  They were silent for a moment, then John said, “We saw this big man today. He was pulling a boat. He was really pulling it.” John wanted to say more, but didn’t dare. He reached down and plucked a blade of night grass. They sat there in the moon shadows, a family, wide awake while the rest of the town slept.

  They waited a week, almost as if they had tired or depleted the big man, and as if they were now letting him gather back his whole self. John and Jerry went to the rapids every day to check on the map in the sand, and when it had finally begun to blur, almost to the point of disappearing, they realized they had to go find him soon, or risk never seeing him again.

  Lindsay drove, though she did not yet have her license, and John sat in the front with her and told her the directions, navigating from memory. (To have transcribed the map onto paper, even onto a napkin, would also somehow have run the risk of depleting or diminishing the big man, if he was still out there.) Jerry sat in the backseat, wearing sunglasses like a movie star and sipping a high-protein milk shake. John’s strength in the discus was his simple brute power, while Jerry’s strength—he was five years younger and sixty pounds lighter—was his speed.

  “Right!” Jerry cried every time John gave Lindsay the correct instructions. In his mind, Jerry could see the map as clear as anything, and when John gave Lindsay a bad piece of advice—a left turn, say, instead of a right—Jerry would shout out “Wrong!—Braaapp! Sham-bam-a-LOOM!”

  There were so many turns to the road: up and over hills, across small green valleys, around a lake, and down sun-dappled lanes, as if passing through tunnels—from shade to sun, shade to sun, with wooden bridges clattering beneath them, until Lindsay was sure they were lost. But Jerry, in the backseat, kept smiling, his face content behind the dark glasses, and John was confident, too. The closer they got to the big man, the more they could tell he was out there.

  The road had crossed over the border into Vermont, and turned to gravel. It followed a small creek for a stretch, and the brothers wondered if this creek flowed into the Sacandaga, if the big man had swum all the way upstream before turning into this side creek, to make his way home. It looked like the creek he had drawn on his map in the sand.

  Blackbirds flew up out of the marsh reeds along either side of them. They could feel him getting closer. There was very much the sense that they were hunting him, that they had to somehow capture him.

  Then they saw him in a pasture. A large two-story stone house stood at the end of the pasture, like a castle, with the creek passing by out front, the creek shaded by elm and maple trees, and giant elms that had somehow, in this one small area, avoided or been immune to the century’s blight. The pasture was deep with rich green summer hay, and they saw a few cows, Holsteins, grazing there.

  Again, the man wasn’t wearing anything, and he had one of the cows on his back. He was running through the tall grass with it, leaping sometimes, doing jetés and awkward but heartfelt pirouettes with the sagging cow draped across his wide shoulders. He had thick legs that jiggled as he ran, and he looked happy, as happy as they had ever seen anyone look. The rest of the cattle stood in front of the old house, grazing and watching without much interest.

  “Jiminy,” said Lindsay.

  “Let’s get him,” said John, the strongest. “Let’s wait until he goes to sleep and then tie him up and bring him home.”

  “We’ll teach him to throw the discus,” said Jerry.

  “If he doesn’t want to throw the discus, we’ll let him go,” said John. “We won’t force him to.”

  “Right,” said Jerry.

  But force wasn’t necessary. John and Jerry went into the field after him, warily, and he stopped spinning and shook hands with them. Lindsay stayed in the car, wanting to look away but unable to; she watched the man’s face, watched the cow on his back. The cow had a placid but somehow engaged look on its face, as if it were just beginning to awaken to the realization that it was aloft.

  The big man grinned and put the cow back on the ground. He told them that he had never thrown the discus, had never even seen it done, but would like to try, if that was what they wanted him to do. He left them and went into the stone house for a pair of jeans and tennis shoes and a white T-shirt. When he came back out, dressed, he looked even larger.

  He was too big to fit into the car—he was as tall as John but thirty pounds heavier, and built of rock-slab muscle—so he rode standing on the back bumper, grinning, with the wind blowing his long, already thinning hair back behind him. The big man’s face was young, his skin smooth and tanned.

  “My name’s A.C.!” he shouted to them as they puttered down the road. Lindsay leaned her head out the window and looked back at him, wanting to make sure he was all right. The little car’s engine shuddered and shook beneath him, trying to manage the strain. The back bumper scraped the road.

  “I’m Lindsay!” she shouted. “John’s driving! Jerry’s not!”

  Her hair swirled around her, a nest of red. She knew what Lory would say. Her sister thought that all the muscle on her brothers was froufrou, adornment, and unnecessary. Lindsay hoped that Lory would change her mind.

  “Lindsay, get back in the car!” John shouted, looking in the rearview mirror. But she couldn’t hear him. She was leaning farther out the window, reaching for A.C.’s wrist, and then higher, gripping his thick arm.

  “She’s mad,” Jerry howled, disbelieving. “She’s lost her mind.”

  A.C. grinned and held on to the car’s roof, taking the bumps with his legs.

  When they drove up to their house, Lory had awakened from her nap and was sitting on the picnic table in her shorts and a T-shirt, drinking from a bottle of red wine. She burst into laughter when she saw them approach with A.C. riding the back bumper as if he had hijacked them.

  “Three peas in a pod,” she cried. She danced down from the table and out to the driveway to meet him, to shake his hand.

  It was as if there were thre
e brothers.

  From the kitchen window, Louella watched, horrified.

  The huge young man in the front yard was not hers. He might think he was, and everyone else might too, but he wasn’t. She stopped drying the dishes and was alarmed at the size of him, standing there among her children, shaking hands, moving around in their midst. She had had one miscarriage, twenty years ago. This man could have been that child, could even have been that comeback soul.

  Louella felt the blood draining from her face and thought she was dying. She fell to the kitchen floor in a faint, breaking the coffee cup she was drying.

  It was the end of June. Fields and pastures all over the Hudson Valley were green. She had been worrying about Lory’s sadness all through the fall and winter, on through the rains and melting snows of spring, and even now, into the ease of green summer.

  Louella sat up groggily and adjusted her glasses. When she went outside to meet A.C., she could no longer say for sure whether she knew him or not; there was a moment’s hesitancy.

  She looked hard into his eyes, dried her hands on her apron, and reached out and shook his big hand. She was swayed by her children’s happiness. There was a late-day breeze. A hummingbird dipped at the nectar feeder on the back porch. She let him come into their house.

  “We’re going to teach A.C. how to throw the discus,” said Jerry.

  “Thrilling,” said Lory.

  He had supper with the family, and they all played Monopoly that evening. Louella asked A.C. where he was from and what he did, but he would only smile and say that he was here to throw the discus. He wasn’t rude, he simply wouldn’t tell her where he was from. It was almost as if he did not know, or did not understand the question.

  They played Monopoly until it was time for bed. The brothers took him for a walk through the neighborhood and on into town. They stopped to pick up people’s cars occasionally, the three of them lifting together.

  There was a statue of Nathan Hale in the town square, and, drunk on the new moon, drunk with his new friends, A.C. waded through the shrubbery, crouched below the statue, and gave the cold metal a bear hug. He began twisting back and forth, pulling the statue from the ground, groaning, squeezing and lifting with his back and legs, his face turning redder and redder, rocking until he finally worked it loose. He stood up with it, sweating, grinning, holding it against his chest as if it were a dance partner, or a dressmaker’s dummy.

  They walked home after that, taking turns carrying the statue on their backs, and snuck it into Lory’s room and stood it in the corner by the door, so that it blocked her exit. It still smelled of fresh earth and crushed flowers. Lory was a sound sleeper, plunging into unconsciousness as an escape at every opportunity, and she never heard them.

  Then A.C. went downstairs to the basement and rested, lying on a cot, looking up at the ceiling with his hands behind his head. John and Jerry stayed in the kitchen, drinking beer.

  “Do you think it will happen?” Jerry asked.

  John was looking out the window at the garden. “I hope so,” he said. “I think it would be good for her.” He finished his beer. “Maybe we shouldn’t think about it, though. It might be wrong.”

  “Well,” said Jerry, sitting down as if to think about it himself, “maybe so.”

  John was still looking out the window. “But who cares?” he said. He looked at Jerry.

  “This guy’s okay,” said Jerry. “This one’s good.”

  “But do you think he can throw the discus?”

  “I don’t know,” Jerry said. “But I want you to go find some more statues for him. I liked that.”

  * * *

  That first night at the Irons’ house, A.C. thought about John and Jerry, about how excited he had been to see them walking up to him. He considered how they looked at each other sometimes when they were talking. They always seemed to agree.

  Then he thought about John’s hair, black and short, and about his heavy beard. And Jerry, he seemed so young with his green eyes. His hair was blond and curly. A.C. liked the way Jerry leaned forward slightly and narrowed his eyes, grinning, when he talked. Jerry seemed excited about almost anything, everything, and excited to be with his older brother, following him down the same path.

  Later, A.C. got up from his cot—he’d been sleeping among punching bags and exercise bikes, with dumbbells and barbells scattered about like toys—and went quietly up the stairs, past Lindsay’s room, through the kitchen, and into the living room.

  He sat down on the couch and looked out the big front window at the moon and clouds as if watching a play. He stayed there for a long time, occasionally dozing off for a few minutes. At around four in the morning he awoke to find Lory standing in front of him, blocking the moon. She was dark, with the moon behind her lighting only the edge of one side of her face. He could see her eyelashes on that one side. She was studying him almost the way Louella had.

  “Look,” he said, and pointed behind her.

  The clouds were moving past the moon in fast-running streams, like tidal currents, eddying, it seemed, all to the same place, all hurrying by as if late to some event.

  “What is that statue doing in my room?” Lory asked. She was whispering, and he thought her voice was beautiful. A.C. hoped he could be her friend too, as he’d become a friend of her brothers. He looked at the moon, a mottled disc.

  “Do you want to sit down?” he asked. He patted the side of the couch next to him.

  Slowly she did, and then, after a few seconds, she leaned into his shoulder and put her head against it. She put both her hands on his arm and held on.

  After a while, A.C. lifted her into his lap, holding her in both arms as if she were a small child, and slowly he rocked her. She curled against him as tightly as she could, and he rocked her like that, watching her watch him, until dawn.

  When it got light, she reached up and kissed him quickly, touching his face with her hands, and got out of his lap and hurried into the kitchen to fix coffee before anyone else was up. A few minutes later, Louella appeared in the living room, sleepy-eyed, shuffling, wearing a faded blue flannel robe and old slippers, holding the paper. She almost stepped on A.C.’s big feet. She stopped, surprised to see him up so early, and in her living room. He stood up and said, “Good morning,” and she smiled in spite of herself.

  Around eight o’clock John and Jerry got up, and they chased each other into the kitchen, playing some advanced form of tag. The lighter, faster Jerry stayed just ahead of John, leaping over the coffee table, spinning, tossing a footstool into his path for John to trip over. Lory shrieked, spilled some milk from the carton she was holding, and Louella shouted at them to stop it, tried to look stern, but was made young again by all the motion, and secretly loved it—and A.C., having come meekly in from the living room, stood back and smiled. Louella glanced over at him and saw him smiling, looking at the brothers, and she thought again of how eerie the fit was, of how he seemed to glide into all the right spots them all along—or even stranger, it was as if he were some sort of weight or stone placed on a scale that better balanced them now.

  After breakfast—a dozen eggs each, some cantaloupes, a pound of sausage split among them, a gallon of milk, and a couple of plates of pancakes—the brothers went out to their car and tossed all their throwing equipment in it—tape measure, discs, throwing shoes—and they leaned the driver’s seat forward so that A.C. could get in the back, but still he wouldn’t fit.

  He rode standing on the bumper again. They drove to the school, to the high, windy field where they threw. From there it seemed they could see the whole Hudson Valley and the knife-cut through the trees where the river rushed, the Sacandaga melting through the mountains, and on the other side the green walls of the Adirondacks. A.C. looked around at the new town as they drove. He thought about Lory, about how soft and light she’d been in his arms, and of how he’d been frightened by her. Riding on the back of the tiny car reminded him of being in the river, swimming up through the rapids: all tha
t rushing force, relentless, crashing down over and around him, speeding past. Things were going by so fast. He looked around and felt dizzy at the beauty of the town.

  There was a ring in the center of the field, a flat, smooth, unpainted circle of cement, and that was where the brothers and A.C. set their things and began to dress. The brothers sat down like bears in the zoo and took their street shoes off. As they laced up their heavy leather throwing shoes, stretching and grasping their toes, they looked out at the wire fence running along the south end of the field, which was the point they tried to reach with their throws.

  A.C. put his shoes on, too, the ones they had given him, and stood up. He felt how solid the earth was beneath him. His legs were dense and strong, and he kicked the ground a couple of times with the heavy shoes. A.C. imagined that he could feel the earth shudder when he kicked. He jumped up and down a couple of times, short little hops, just to feel the shudder again.

  “I hope you like this,” said Jerry, still stretching, twisting his body into further unrecognizable shapes and positions. He was loosening up, his movements fluid, and to A.C. it was exactly like watching the river.

  A.C. sat down next to them and tried to do some of the stretches, but it didn’t work for him yet. He watched them for half an hour, as the blue air over the mountains and valley waned, turning to a sweet haze, a slow sort of shimmer that told A.C. it was June. Jerry was the one he most liked to watch.

  Jerry would crouch in the ring, twisted—wound up—with his eyes closed, his mouth open, and the disc hanging back, hanging low, his knees bent. When he began to spin, it was as if some magical force were being born, something that no other force on earth would be able to stop.

  He stayed in the small circle, hopping from one foot to the other, crouched low, but with the hint of rising, and then he was suddenly at the other end of the small ring, out of room—if he went over the little wooden curb and into the grass, it would be a foul—and with no time or space left in which to spin, he shouted, brought his arm all the way around on the spin, his elbow locking straight out as he released the disc, and only then did the rest of his body react, starting with his head; it snapped back and then forward from the recoil, as if he’d first made the throw and then had a massive heart attack.