The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  The second angel rose again into the air and thrashed at the trees, ripping branches away and hurling them in every direction.

  Red shouted words into Jeremy’s face that were no more than breath in the storm of noise.

  He pressed his son’s face into the dirt and covered his own head. A tree branch the size of a man’s arm struck Jeremy and he curled into a ball. Above, the second angel ripped the trees to pieces, a tireless engine of wraith. Before them, the wounded angel moaned and writhed, bleeding on the ground.

  Jeremy opened his eyes, flakes of dirt-crusted goat’s blood cracking away. Red looked at him, his eyes shining with fear manic enough to become ecstatic, some awful perversion of joy.

  The top half of a tree shattered against the ground beside them, whipping the father and son with a dozen pencil-thin branches. Red pulled Jeremy closer to him, covering him with his body.

  Jeremy shut his eyes against the blood and soil, he was deafened by the storm and he was numb; but he could smell his father’s sweat, pungent with fear and rank with last night’s alcohol. He wept into his father’s shirt.

  The second angel left with dawn. Father and son pushed the wreckage of broken trees off of themselves and stood in the aftermath. The wounded angel had ceased its moaning, moving its arms and wings in tentative arcs, pushing against the ground.

  They could see for miles in the sunlight spilling from behind the mountains, the trees ripped away all around them, jagged spires of raw wood pointing at the sky.

  “We have to kill it before it gets in the air,” Red said. Neither he nor his son heard the words.

  Jeremy open and closed his mouth like a retching cat. He said “Dad” several times, testing his deafened ears.

  They dug through the fallen trees, walking cautious arcs around the wounded angel, but they could not find Red’s shotgun.

  Red stood looking at the angel. Jeremy continued to search for the gun, knowing he wouldn’t find it.

  “It takes gold,” Red said, knowing it would not be heard.

  He opened his hunting knife and pulled a Goldshot cartridge from his pocket. Jeremy stopped looking for the gun and watched his father pry the brass cap away from the plastic shell.

  He turned and motioned with the knife to Jeremy, indicating the far side of the angel. Jeremy high stepped through fallen branches slowly around the clearing until he stood opposite the angel from his father. Red motioned towards himself with the knife. “Come here.” Jeremy didn’t move. Red motioned again, and Jeremy walked slowly towards the wounded creature.

  It pulled itself around to face him, its blank head swaying slightly back and forth, tasting the air. It moaned and Jeremy had to bite the inside of his cheek to stifle a sob. The angel reached towards him in anger. Jeremy could not walk any closer.

  Red crept slowly towards the angel, holding the knife and broken shell before him like offerings. The creature seemed to shrink as Red approached it; excepting its wings, it was smaller than the man.

  It turned its head sharply when Red poured the contents of the Goldshot onto the side of its neck, but not sharply enough to disturb the pile of yellow-speckled powder before Red slammed the blade down through it.

  The angel screamed and died. It took them all day to dress the creature and get it down the mountain. They got twenty-four hundred dollars for the rack. Red told Jeremy’s mother that he had done well.

  People in the nineteenth century believed that the hunt was a peculiarly American phenomenon. Tintype photographs show diplomats presenting European dignitaries with feather capes, mounted heads, whole skeletons in enormous glass domes, the subjects ramrod stiff, staring back at us through the lens.

  But the Chinese had of course been hunting angels for millennia, their local species driven to extinction by the seventeenth century. Aborigines claimed to have hunted their own angels to extinction in their dreams.

  The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican reversed the church’s official stance on the hunt. It was largely a reaction to the perceptibly dwindling number of angels. If their population could be eradicated by men, if we could kill all of God’s heralds, then why couldn’t men kill God?

  Still it took nearly half a century for pressure from the rest of the world to stop Americans from the hunt. There were the vigils in Tibet and in Germany. Scathingly satirical French films. Charities set up in Africa and Australia. The activist group in Canada that achieved notoriety in the ’88 Olympics. A braless woman spray-painted Jeremy’s father coming out of the Wal-Mart. It was the bralessness that upset him.

  In 2001 public sentiment became law. People in the mountains couldn’t believe that America at large could support a view so opposite their own. By then, Jeremy was living in the borough of Queens, sleeping with a woman who considered his past an anthropological curiosity. His father called him late on a Tuesday night to ask what crooked path had led them to this current state of affairs. His son in New York City must have heard something; corruption so fundamental and large could not happen without making some noise. Jeremy didn’t try to explain that everybody he knew in the city would have considered the hunt quaint if they didn’t find it so morally outrageous.

  “Where are we living?” Red kept asking. Jeremy wondered if his father had heard about his mother’s settlement from her recent divorce. His girlfriend watched him as if looking for secrets, the way she always did when he talked to his family on the phone. She was mostly naked, eating a half avocado with a spoon.

  “You get the propane fixed?” Jeremy asked.

  “I’m all right.”

  “You might get snow this weekend. I could call Marshall, see if he could stop by and take a look.”

  “Where are we living?”

  Jeremy says, “Gillian’s pregnant. I’m gonna be a dad.”

  Red laughs like it’s a dirty joke, coughs and wipes at his eyes, then moves fitfully around the trailer rearranging things.

  “This calls for a drink, doesn’t it? Not Bud Light. For a drink.”

  Red’s truck is still broken. They drive down to town in Jeremy’s hatchback. Cindy, still tending bar at the tavern, greets Jeremy as if he’s been gone for days instead of years.

  “Jim Beam and a Bud, darling.”

  “Jesus, Red, I know that by now,” Cindy says.

  “Two of each.”

  “How are you, Cindy?” Jeremy says when she puts the drinks in front of him. She rolls her eyes and pinches the fat at her neck. She’d been old and a maudlin flirt when she’d served fifteen-year-old Jeremy shots of schnapps, a chubby boy come to collect his father for dinner. She hasn’t visibly aged since, except for a small but ambitious goiter at the hairline behind her left ear.

  “I’m gonna be a old granddad,” Red says.

  “That true?” Cindy asks.

  “In four months,” Jeremy says, “in January.”

  “Well shit. I can’t charge you for them drinks then I guess. Congratulations.” She touches Jeremy’s cheek and he surprises himself by leaning into it; her palm is cold and soft, a comfort he unexpectedly needs.

  “January,” says Red, sipping a thin taste from the top of his Jim Beam. “Goddamn,” he says, and throws the rest of the liquor down his throat.

  Red says he’s going to come down to New York City for the birth. He tells Jeremy not to be tempted to name the baby “Red,” it won’t hurt his feelings and it can be a hard name to go through grade school with. He guarantees that the baby will be a boy, claiming deep ancestral knowledge, the questioning of which could only lead to genetic misfortune.

  Cindy starts to make them pay for their drinks on the third round, and Red stops pretending at an effort to pay by the fifth. Jeremy drinks with a frugal glee, beer and whiskey at permanent happy hour prices this far from the city. A thirsty nausea stirs Jeremy’s belly, momentarily calmed but ultimately widened by each sip. He watches two men and three women his own age enter the bar at dusk, strangers to him in his hometown.

  Jeremy sees her watch hi
m, the slight glow from the Big Buck Hunter video-game cabinet casting her face in pale television blues.

  Two beers later she rubs her elbow against his at the bar, asking Cindy for another round of Amstel Lights.

  Red swerves the conversation towards her like a drunken leftward yank on a steering wheel. “. . . And if they can’t come up with something better to say on the TV then hello there my name is Red and this is my son Jeremy.”

  “Is that it,” she says. “We were trying to figure out what the two of you were. How you fit together.”

  “Like fucking peas in a pod.”

  “What’s your name?” Jeremy asks.

  “Jen.”

  “Jen. You’re from around here?”

  “Sure.”

  “Seems like I oughta know you.”

  “You might think my son was making eyes at you and your friends,” Red says, “but I know for a fact he was more interested in Big Buck Hunter over there. He is a dead-eye Dick. Boy could shoot the tits off a lady-fly.”

  Jeremy laughs, baffled. Jen watches Red uncertainly.

  “You’re gonna need help carrying all those beers and we’re nothing but chivalrous,” Red says, “and while we’re over there we’ll show you how to kill the fuck out of some video deer.”

  They all drink together and Red keeps talking. Jeremy watches Jen and her friends laugh at his father, watches his father know it and not care. Jen can tell that Jeremy’s embarrassed and tries to make him feel better. Jeremy starts talking about Gillian as if they were already married, but he doesn’t mention the child.

  “Show her how to shoot,” Red says, pushing Jeremy into Jen. She laughs and stumbles forward into the cabinet; she wiggles her bottom against his crotch and leans back against his chest.

  “Show me how to shoot,” she says.

  Twenty minutes later Jeremy goes outside to breathe some cold air.

  Cindy is smoking halfway down the block, looking in the window of a thrift store and rocking on her heels.

  Jeremy looks at the tavern entrance and tries to release himself from the responsibility of decision. If Jen follows him out here, then it’s not really his choice, whatever happens. If Red comes out, then he doesn’t have to do anything. He sways drunk, looks upwards, and watches his breath fog and swirl against stars, has the sensation of downward gazing from a perilous height, the vertigo lurch in his gut, the temptation to jump.

  The tavern door opens and Jeremy looks down, smiling.

  His father grins at him, rubbing his palms together.

  “Maybe I should leave you to it,” Red says.

  Jeremy shakes his head.

  “Let’s go to another bar, I’m tired of this one.”

  “But you made a friend,” Red says.

  “This bar is making me melancholy.” Jeremy, drunk, reminds himself of his father.

  “There are no other bars,” Red says.

  “There’s the Snake and Dove.”

  “Fuck that place.”

  “They’re got whiskey don’t they?”

  “Fuck the Snake and fuck the Dove.”

  “I’m not going back in there.” Jeremy points at the tavern. “Snake and Dove or we’re done drinking.”

  “Jesus, I raised a willful boy.”

  They walk down the middle of the street, Red claiming the sidewalk too constrictive to celebratory movement. Jeremy pauses where a streetlight has gone dark and pisses against a wall.

  “She was a pretty girl,” Red says.

  “I’ve got a girl.”

  “Doesn’t make the other one any less pretty. And a decent shot if the video machine means anything. You slept with other women, right? I never . . . You know your mother was the first woman I ever slept with.” Red shakes his head, a forlorn dog trying to disengage a cobweb from his nose.

  “Dad,” Jeremy says.

  “You weren’t a mistake. But it was a mistake to marry her. Tell your son to live boldly.”

  “You can tell him.” Jeremy zips his pants up and shakes cooling urine from his fingertips.

  “Tell him . . . decisions don’t constrict you. Marrying your mom wasn’t a decision, it was me avoiding a decision. Just the next thing to do. You got a whole life to spend. He does and tell him so.”

  The Snake and Dove has changed owners. The fat man behind the bar promises violence against Jeremy if he doesn’t drag his father from the bar. The fat man won’t even look at Red.

  “Get that freeloading drunk vandal fuck out of my territorial area,” the fat man says, getting more eloquently nonsensical every time he says it.

  Red tries to throw a bicycle through the Snake and Dove’s plate-glass window, but the bicycle is chained to a fence and only swings around to tangle Red’s feet, bark his shins, and send him cursing and laughing to the ground. He shouts, “Run!” even though there is nobody there to chase them and father and son stumble laughing through the empty streets.

  At ten minutes past nine o’clock in the morning the sheriff knocks on the window glass and Jeremy rises blind, moist, and confused like some miscarried fetal ape. The sheriff knocks again and as the bleach seeps out of Jeremy’s vision he sees the sheriff turning a loosely balled fist in the air, as if masturbating an improbably tall invisible man. Jeremy complies, rolling down his window.

  “God dammit Sheriff,” Red says from the driver’s seat, without opening his eyes.

  “I’ve told you you can’t sleep like this out here,” the sheriff says, recoiling from the stink of liquor and men that rolls out at him.

  “You sure as shit didn’t want either of us driving.”

  “You need to get your father home,” the sheriff says to Jeremy.

  “We’ll be along in a second. Nancy must have a cup of coffee for us,” Red says.

  “I think you better go along and get him home.” The sheriff addresses Jeremy again.

  “You can tell it to him, he’s right there,” Jeremy says.

  “I’ve tried talking to him. It’s like telling a dead mule to pull.”

  “I’ve known you drunker’n I’ve ever been, Sheriff,” Red says.

  “Take him home.” The sheriff stares hard at Jeremy. “You oughta be ashamed enough already.”

  “Tell it to him.”

  “Take him home.”

  “You want to get some coffee, Dad?”

  “Absolutely. Can we get you a chocolate milk or anything, Sheriff?”

  Red shoves open the door and tries to disengage himself from the bucket seat, flailing and lurching. The sheriff mutters something, it seems to involve “shit” and “damnation,” and runs around the car with his hands holding steady his too-loose belt of keys and arms. He falls against the door, slamming it shut against Red, who reacts to the violence with a half-hearted shrug.

  Jeremy only then notices the amused storekeepers, diners, and retirees standing bundled on the sidewalks to watch, or peering from behind the glass of the Snake and Dove, turned over for its breakfast hours. He smiles, fights the temptation to wave, waits to hear what his father will say to the sheriff.

  Red starts the car and, without so much as a glance through the window, slowly trundles down the street. The sheriff pats the back of the car as it passes.

  “I wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee,” Jeremy says.

  “We’ll make coffee at home.”

  “Fuck him,” Jeremy says.

  Red shakes his head, looks ten years older than Jeremy’s ever been able to remember. Jeremy’s shivering in the cold, but he leaves the window open on account of the smell. The October air rings his bloodshot eyes with tears.

  Red drives the wrong side out of town, and they take the parkway loop around instead of driving back the way they came, avoiding another pass through the onlookers. The route takes them by the Wal-Mart and its terrible signs.

  “Let’s stop at the Wal-Mart,” Jeremy says. “I want to get some shotgun shells and some beer.”

  They pass silently through the half-emptied aisles of the dying sup
erstore. Even in its death throes, there are more people here than on Main Street.

  Behind a faded “BACK TO SCHOOL” sign, Jeremy pulls the last glue stick from a rack and tosses it into his father’s wobbly cart. Jeremy refuses to return Red’s gaze. Red smiles. They buy plastic drinking straws. Kerosene. A box cutter.

  They each pull a plastic bottle of Dr Pepper from the refrigerator by the register to drink on the ride home.

  “I guess we better get your truck fixed,” Jeremy says.

  “Why’s ’at?”

  “To carry it back once we kill it.”

  “Hmm.” Red finishes his Dr Pepper.

  It takes eighty dollars at the AutoZone and two days’ work to get Red’s truck running well enough to make it up the mountain and back.

  At the pawnshop, Jeremy talks Red into buying solid gold earrings instead of the larger, shinier gold-plated cufflinks. Red meticulously files them to dust with the attachment on his fingernail clipper. Jeremy mixes the dust into buckshot and then reassembles the shells.

  They eat cans of soup and peanut-butter or cheese packaged crackers and start to build the air candles at dusk. It’s three in the morning when they finish, sober as deacons, and decide that sleep would be brief enough to be crueler than kind.

  A capful each finishes the bottle of Jim Beam and they load the air candles into the truck and drive up the mountain. Camo stands with uncanny balance in the back, uncomplaining despite the noisy plastic blue tarp covering him entirely.

  The girl at the gas station recently passed twenty-one years and two hundred and fifty pounds, she’ll never see less than either again. She flirts with them both, Red more receptive, asks them conspiratorially what they’re doing up the mountain at this hour. She laughs too much when Red says, “Communing with nature.”

  Up the mountain, smearing goat’s blood on their faces and hands, Red asks his son if he intends to marry the girl.

  “The big girl at the Seven Eleven?”

  “You know damn well who I’m talking about.” Red has forgotten her name.

  “Gillian.”

  “You gonna marry Gillian?”

  “I dunno. We already live together, she’s having my baby. The rest just seems like taxes.”