My teeth did not feel clean.
Soon our father bought land from Lyman. Though we never seemed to have any extra money, apparently Dad and the dentist made some sort of deal and the land was going to become more valuable in six months, which of course it never did.
The land was tucked away on a rutted road near the Polish settlement of Panna Maria. For two months we spent time looking for it. My father carried a map drawn on a napkin from a Mexican café where he and Lyman had sealed the deal.
It was the ugliest land ever. Even the mesquites were twisted—the shade from their gnarled branches felt ominous. Holes where snakes lived, mysterious ditches, heaps of rotten wood. Our father stared at us. “Someday this will all be yours.”
One evening he took a deep breath. “I have bad news. Our friend Lyman has been arrested.”
“What?”
“A week ago. I just heard about it. He wants me to visit him at the jail.”
“For selling ugly land or for being a bad dentist? For what, Dad?”
“Cocaine.”
“Cocaine?” I had never heard my father say the word before. It did not seem right in his vocabulary—like quesadilla ortoreador. “What was he doing with it? Using or selling it?”
“Perhaps being a repository—storing it for others. He may not have known what he had.”
“Sure, that sounds likely.”
I had never smoked pot or taken an aspirin. Cocaine seemed like a ticket to the underworld for all I knew. My dad asked me to go to the jail with him. “Why, Dad? I don’t like Lyman. I’m sure he has no desire to see me.”
“Well, do it for me. I need your support.”
So we drove to the jail. Lyman could only have one visitor at a time.
“I’ll just wait on the sidewalk, Dad. Or take a walk.” Prisoners shouted through the grillwork. “Baby, bring me a burger!”
I could not imagine Lyman cooped up in such an environment. Despite his eccentricities, he was an optimist with geraniums growing in clay pots.
My father paused. He wore his blue guayabera shirt, tucked pockets and pearly buttons. “Honey, I need you to hold this for me while I go in. I’m shocked, really. I just reached for my ID at the security desk. Glad they didn’t notice. . . .”
My father handed me a bullet. He shrugged. “I’m not sure what this is.”
“Dad? Are you serious? You want me to sit in front of the jail, a raggedy teenager, holding a bullet? Dad, why do you have a bullet? Do you have a gun?”
“Not on me,” he said.
“But you have one?”
It stunned me that my gentle father, who once cried when he caught a mouse in a mousetrap (“I didn’t realize it would kill them”), could think of owning one. What was he doing with it?
Wild dogs. Those nuts who phoned Mom to say they had Dad tied up. Burglars. He never mentioned what surely was the real reason he owned a gun—he got a good deal on one. Possibly Lyman had sold it to him. Maybe it was the bonus for owning that hideous land. One day you would wake up and need to commit suicide. I said, “Dad, this is nuts.”
He shrugged again, sheepish. He knew something was a little “off” in the scene. And I strode down the block with a bullet in my pocket, through the baked streets of San Antonio summer, past the twenty-four-hour bail office, the sagging Cactus Hotel sign, the store for checkered western wear, the greasy Cadillac Bar. Not yet the bearer of a driver’s license, I felt the weight of undesirable things I would be forced to carry as an adult—tax receipts, mortgages, other people’s artillery accessories, etc. I weighed a thousand pounds. Lyman would be in jail a long time, then get out and die. The land he had sold us would become a smudge in a history of shaky transactions. My father would die. No gun of any kind would be found among his pitiful possessions at the time of his death. Even the building called Collins Garden would be crushed into rubble decades later during a sudden rainstorm, as diners at La Fonda up the block raced from patio tables into the restaurant proper, holding menus over their heads against the surprise.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my first readers, Madison & Michael Nye, and to the indefatigable Virginia Duncan, Barbara Trueson, and Tim Smith. Herzlichen Dank! to David Weinberger, Julia Tismer, Dr. Ulrich Schreiber, the Bleibtreu Hotel, Berlin, and the LiteraturRaum project.
About the Author
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE has received a Lannan Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and four Pushcart Prizes. Her collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her collection Honeybee was awarded the Arab-American Book Award. She is currently serving on the Board of Chancellors for the Academy of American Poets. Naomi Shihab Nye has edited several honored and popular poetry anthologies, including Time You Let Me In, What Have You Lost?, Salting the Ocean, and This Same Sky, and she is the author of the novels Habibi and Going, Going. She lives with her family in San Antonio, Texas.
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Credits
Jacket art © 2011 by Ryan O’Rourke
Jacket design by Sylvie Le Floc’h
Copyright
“Thud” will appear in Sudden Flash Youth: 65 Short-Short Stories, Persea Books, 2011.
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used to advance the fictional narrative. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
There Is No Long Distance Now: Very Short Stories
Copyright © 2011 by Naomi Shihab Nye
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nye, Naomi Shihab.
There is no long distance now : very short stories / by Naomi Shihab Nye.
p. cm.
“Greenwillow Books.”
Summary: Forty short stories by an award-winning author and poet.
ISBN 978-0-06-201965-3 (trade bdg.)
1. Children’s stories, American. [1. Short stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.N976Th 2011 [Fic]—dc22 2010025559
11 12 13 14 15 CG/RRDB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780062093462
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Naomi Shihab Nye, There Is No Long Distance Now
There Is No Long Distance Now Page 13
