The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  Sixteen, thinks Tom. Eighteen if I’m lucky.

  School is a three-room shed aswarm with the offspring of salt workers, coal workers, ironworkers. Irish kids, Polish kids, Armenian kids. Don’t run, don’t fight, whispers Mother. No games. For Tom the schoolyard seems a thousand acres of sizzling pandemonium. His first day, he lasts an hour. Mother finds him beneath a tablecloth with his fist in his mouth. Shhh, she says, and crawls under there with him and wraps her arms around his like ropes.

  He seesaws in and out of the early grades. By the time he’s ten, he’s in remedial everything. I’m trying, he mumbles, but letters spin off pages and hang themselves in the branches outside. Dunce, the other boys declare, and to Tom that seems about right.

  Tom sweeps, scrubs, scours the stoop with pumice one square inch at a time. Slow as molasses in January, says Mr. Weems, but he winks at Tom when he says it.

  Every day, all day, the salt finds its way in. It encrusts washbasins, settles on the rims of baseboards. It spills out of the boarders, too: from ears, boots, handkerchiefs. Furrows of glitter gather in the bedsheets; a daily lesson in insidiousness.

  Start at the center, then scrub out to the edges. Linens on Thursdays. Toilets on Fridays.

  He’s twelve when Ms. Fredericks asks the children to give reports. Ruby Hornaday goes sixth. Ruby has flames for hair, Christmas for a birthday, and a drunk for a daddy. She’s one of two girls to make it to fourth grade.

  She reads from notes in controlled terror. If you think the lake is big you should see the sea. It’s three-quarters of Earth. And that’s just the surface. Someone throws a pencil. The creases in Ruby’s forehead deepen. Land animals live on ground or in trees rats and worms and gulls and such. But sea animals they live everywhere they live in the waves and they live in mid water and they live in canyons six and a half miles down.

  She passes around a thick, red book. Inside are blocks of text and full-color photographic plates that make Tom’s heart boom in his ears. A blizzard of green fish. A kingdom of purple corals. Five orange starfish cemented to a rock.

  Ruby says, Detroit used to have palm trees and corals and seashells. Detroit used to be a sea three miles deep.

  Ms. Fredericks says, Ruby, where did you get that book? but by then Tom is hardly breathing. See-through flowers with poison tentacles and fields of clams and pink monsters with kingdoms of whirling needles on their backs. He tries to say, Are these real? but quicksilver bubbles rise from his mouth and float up to the ceiling. When he goes over, the desk goes over with him.

  The doctor says it’s best if Tom stays out of school. Keep indoors, the doctor says. If you get excited, think of something blue. Mother lets him come downstairs for meals and chores only. Otherwise he’s to stay in his closet. We have to be more careful, Tomcat, she whispers, and sets her palm on his forehead.

  Tom spends long hours on the floor beside his cot, assembling and reassembling the same jigsaw puzzle: a Swiss village. Five hundred pieces, nine of them missing. Sometimes Mr. Weems sits and reads to Tom from adventure novels. They’re blasting a new vein down in the mines and little cascades of plaster sift from the ceiling. In the lulls between Mr. Weems’s words, Tom can feel explosions reverberate up through a thousand feet of rock and shake the fragile pump in his chest.

  He misses school. He misses the sky. He misses everything. When Mr. Weems is in the mine and Mother is downstairs, Tom often slips to the end of the hall and lifts aside the curtains and presses his forehead to the glass. Children run the snowy lanes and lights glow in the foundry windows and train cars trundle beneath elevated conduits. First-shift miners emerge from the mouth of the hauling elevator in groups of six and bring out cigarette cases from their overalls and strike matches and spill like little salt-dusted insects out into the night, while the darker figures of the second-shift miners stamp their feet in the cold, waiting outside the cages for their turn in the pit.

  In dreams he sees waving sea fans and milling schools of grouper and underwater shafts of light. He sees Ruby Hornaday push open the door of his closet. She’s wearing a copper diving helmet; she leans over his cot and puts the window of her helmet an inch from his face.

  He wakes with a shock and heat pooled in his groin. He thinks, Blue, blue, blue.

  One drizzly Saturday when Tom is thirteen, the bell rings. He’s scrubbing behind the stove, Mother is changing linens upstairs, and Mr. Weems is in the armchair reading the newspaper. When Tom opens the door, Ruby Hornaday is standing on the stoop in the rain.

  Hello. Tom blinks a dozen times. Raindrops set a thousand intersecting circles upon the puddles in the road. Ruby holds up a jar: six black tadpoles squirm in an inch of water.

  Seemed like you were interested in water creatures.

  Tom tries to answer, but the whole sky is rushing through the open door into his mouth.

  You’re not going to faint again, are you?

  Mr. Weems stumps into the foyer. Jesus, boy, she’s damp as a church, you got to invite a lady in.

  Ruby stands on the tiles and drips. Mr. Weems grins. Tom mumbles, My heart.

  Ruby holds up the jar. Keep ’em if you want. They’ll be frogs before long. Drops shine in her eyelashes. Rain glues her shirt to her clavicles. Well, that’s something, says Mr. Weems. He nudges Tom in the back. Ain’t it, Tom?

  Tom is opening his mouth. He’s saying, Maybe I could—when Mother comes down the stairs in her big, black shoes. Trouble, hisses Mr. Weems. Heat crashes over Tom like a wave.

  Mother dumps the tadpoles in a ditch. Her face says she’s composing herself but her eyes say she’s going to wipe all this away. Mr. Weems leans over the dominoes and whispers, Mother’s as hard as a cobblestone, but we’ll crack her, Tom, you wait.

  Tom whispers, Ruby Hornaday, into the space above his cot. Ruby Hornaday. Ruby Hornaday. A strange and uncontainable joy inflates dangerously in his chest.

  Mr. Weems has long conversations with Mother in the kitchen. Tom overhears scraps: Boy needs to move his legs. Boy should get some air.

  Mother’s voice is a whip. He’s sick.

  He’s alive! What’re you saving him for? How much time he got left?

  Mother consents to let Tom retrieve coal from the depot and tinned goods from the commissary. Tuesdays he’ll be allowed to walk to the butcher’s in Dearborn. Careful, Tomcat, don’t hurry.

  Tom moves through the colony that first Tuesday with something close to rapture in his veins. Down the long gravel lanes, past pit cottages and surface mountains of blue and white salt, the warehouses like dark cathedrals, the hauling machines like demonic armatures. All around him the monumental industry of Detroit pounds and clangs. The boy tells himself he is a treasure hunter, a hero from one of Mr. Weems’s adventure stories, a knight on important errands, a spy behind enemy lines. He keeps his hands in his pockets and his head down and his gait slow, but his soul charges ahead, sparking through the gloom.

  In May of that year, 1929, fourteen-year-old Tom is walking along the lane thinking spring happens beneath the snow, beyond the walls—spring happens in the dark while you dream—when Ruby Hornaday steps out of the weeds. She has a shriveled rubber hose coiled over her shoulder and a swim mask in one hand and a tire pump in the other. Need your help. Tom’s pulse soars.

  I got to go to the butcher’s.

  Your choice. Ruby turns to go. But really there’s no choice at all.

  She leads him west, away from the mine, through mounds of rusting machines. They hop a fence, cross a field gone to seed, and walk a quarter mile through pitch pines to a marsh where cattle egrets stand in the cattails like white flowers.

  In my mouth, she says, and starts picking up rocks. Out my nose. You pump, Tom. You understand? In the green water two feet down Tom can make out the dim shapes of fish gliding through weedy enclaves.

  Ruby pitches the far end of the hose into the water. With waxed cord she binds the other end to the pump. Then she fills her pockets with rocks. She wades out, looks back, says, You
pump, and puts the hose into her mouth. The swim mask goes over her eyes; her face goes into the water.

  The marsh closes over Ruby’s back, and the hose trends away from the bank. Tom begins to pump. The sky slides along overhead. Loops of garden hose float under the light out there, shifting now and then. Occasional bubbles rise, moving gradually farther out.

  One minute, two minutes. Tom pumps. His heart does its fragile work. He should not be here. He should not be here while this skinny, spellbinding girl drowns herself in a marsh. If that’s what she’s doing. One of Mr. Weems’s similes comes back to him from some dingy corner of memory: You’re trembling like a needle to the pole.

  After four or five minutes underwater, Ruby comes up. A neon mat of algae clings to her hair, and her bare feet are great boots of mud. She pushes through the cattails. Strings of saliva hang off her chin. Her lips are blue. Tom feels dizzy. The sky turns to liquid.

  Incredible, pants Ruby. Fucking incredible. She holds up her wet, rock-filled trousers with both hands, and looks at Tom through the wavy lens of her swim mask. His blood storms through its lightless tunnels.

  He has to trot to make the butcher’s by noon. It is the first time Tom can remember permitting himself to run, and his legs feel like glass and his breath like quicksand. At the end of the lane, a hundred yards from home, he stops and pants with the basket of meat in his arms and spits a pat of blood into the dandelions. Sweat soaks his shirt. Dragonflies dart and hover. Swallows inscribe letters across the sky. The lane seems to ripple and fold and straighten itself out again.

  Just a hundred yards more. He forces his heart to settle. Everything, Tom thinks, follows a path worn by those who have gone before: egrets, clouds, tadpoles. Everything.

  The following Tuesday Ruby meets him at the end of the lane. And the Tuesday after that. They hop the fence, cross the field; she leads him places he’s never dreamed existed. Places where the structures of the saltworks become white mirages on the horizon. Places where sunlight washes through groves of maples and makes the ground quiver with leaf-shadow. They peer into a foundry where shirtless men in masks pour molten iron from one vat into another; they climb a tailings pile where a lone sapling grows like a single hand thrust up from the underworld. Tom knows he’s risking everything, but how can he stop? How can he say no? To say no to Ruby Hornaday would be to say no to the world.

  Some Tuesdays Ruby brings along her red book, with its images of corals and jellies and underwater men breathing from hoses. She tells him that when she grows up she’ll go to parties where hostesses row guests offshore and everyone puts on special helmets and goes for strolls along the sea bottom. She tells him she’ll be a diver who sinks herself a half mile into the sea in a steel ball with one window. In the basement of the ocean she’ll find a world of lights: schools of fish glittering green, whole galaxies wheeling through the black.

  In the ocean, says Ruby, the rocks are alive and half the plants are animals.

  They hold hands; they chew Indian gum. She stuffs his mind full of kelp forests and seascapes and dolphins. When I grow up, thinks Tom. When I grow up …

  Four more times Ruby walks around beneath the surface of a River Rouge marsh while Tom stands on the bank working the pump. Four more times he watches her rise back out like a fever. Amphibian. She laughs. It means two lives.

  Then Tom runs to the butcher’s and runs home, and his heart races, and spots spread like inkblots in front of his eyes. Blue, blue blue. But how does he know the blue he sees is the right color? Sometimes in the afternoons, when he stands up from his chores, his vision slides away in violet streaks and is a long while returning. Other colors spiral through his mind’s eye, too: the glowing white of the salt tunnels, the red of Ruby’s book, the orange of her hair—he imagines her all grown up, standing on the bow of a ship, and feels a core of lemon yellow light flaring brighter and brighter within him. It spills from the slats between his ribs, from between his teeth, from the pupils of his eyes. He thinks: It is so much! So much!

  • • •

  So now you’re fifteen. And the doctor says sixteen?

  Eighteen if I’m lucky.

  Ruby turns her book over and over in her hands. What’s it like? To know you won’t get all the years you should?

  I don’t feel so shortchanged when I’m with you, he says, but his voice breaks at short- and the sentence falls apart.

  They kiss only that one time. It is clumsy. He shuts his eyes and leans in, but something shifts and Ruby is not where he expects her to be. Their teeth clash. When he opens his eyes, she is looking off to her left, smiling slightly, smelling of mud, and the thousand tiny blonde hairs on her upper lip catch the light.

  The second-to-last time Tom and Ruby are together, on the last Tuesday of October, 1929, everything is strange. The hose leaks, Ruby is upset, a curtain has fallen somehow between them.

  Go back, Ruby says. It’s probably noon already. You’ll be late. But she sounds as if she’s talking to him through a tunnel. Freckles flow and bloom across her face. The light goes out of the marsh.

  On the long path through the pitch pines it begins to rain. Tom makes it to the butcher’s and back home with the basket and the ground veal, yet when he opens the door to Mother’s parlor the curtains seem to blow inward. The chairs seem to leave their places and come scraping toward him.

  The daylight thins to a pair of beams, waving back and forth. Mr. Weems passes in front of his eyes, but Tom hears no footsteps, no voices: only an internal rushing and the wet metronome of his exhalations. Suddenly he’s staring through a thick, foggy window into a world of immense pressure. Mother’s face disappears and reappears. Her lips say, Haven’t I given enough? Lord God, haven’t I tried? Then she’s gone.

  In something deeper than a dream Tom walks the salt roads a thousand feet beneath the house. At first it’s all darkness, but after what might be a minute or a day or a year, he sees little flashes of green light out there in distant galleries, hundreds of feet away. Each flash initiates a chain reaction of further flashes beyond it, so that if he turns in a slow circle he can perceive great flowing signals of light in all directions, tunnels of green arcing out into the blackness—each flash glowing for only a moment before fading, but in that moment repeating everything that came before, everything that will come next. Like days, like hours, like heartbeats.

  He wakes to a deflated world. The newspapers are full of suicides; the price of gas has tripled. The miners whisper that the saltworks is in trouble. The Ford plant is shedding men; the foundry shuts down.

  Quart milk bottles sell for a dollar apiece. There’s no butter, hardly any meat. Most nights Mother serves only cabbage and soda bread. Salt.

  No more trips to the butcher or the depot or the commissary. No more outside. He waits for Ruby to come to the door.

  By November, Mother’s boarders are vanishing. Mr. Beeson goes first, then Mr. Fackler. Still, Ruby doesn’t come. Her face doesn’t appear among the faces Tom watches from the upstairs window. Each morning he clambers out of his closet and carries his traitorous heart down to the kitchen like an egg. Images of Ruby climb the undersides of his eyelids, and he rubs them away.

  No addresses, mumbles Mr. Weems. The world is swallowing people like candy, boy. No one is leaving addresses.

  Mr. Hanson goes next, then Mr. Heathcock. By April the saltworks is operating only two days a week, and Mr. Weems, Mother, and Tom are alone at supper.

  Sixteen. Eighteen if he’s lucky. Tom moves his few things into one of the empty boarders’ rooms on the first floor, and Mother doesn’t say a word. He thinks of Ruby Hornaday: her pale blue eyes, her loose flames of hair. Is she out there in the city, somewhere, right now? Or is she three thousand miles away? Then he puts his questions aside.

  Mother catches a fever in 1931. It eats her from the inside. She still puts on her high-waisted dresses, ties on her apron. She still cooks every meal and presses Mr. Weems’s suit every Sunday. But within a month she has become somebo
dy else, an empty demon in Mother’s clothes—perfectly upright at the table, eyes smoldering, nothing on her plate.

  She has a way of putting her hand on Tom’s forehead while he works. Tom will be hauling coal or mending a pipe or sweeping the parlor, the sun glowing behind the curtains, and Mother will appear from nowhere and put her icy palm over his eyebrows, and he’ll close his eyes and feel his heart tear just a little more.

  Amphibian. It means two lives.

  Mr. Weems is let go. He puts on his suit, packs up his dominoes, and leaves an address downtown.

  I thought no one was leaving addresses.

  You’re true as a map, Tom. True as the magnet to the iron. And tears spill from the old miner’s eyes.

  One blue, icy morning not long after that, for the first time in Tom’s memory, Mother is not at the stove when he enters the kitchen. He finds her upstairs sitting on her bed, fully dressed in her coat and shoes and with her rosary clutched to her chest. The room is spotless, the house wadded with silence.

  Now remember, payments are due on the fifteenth. Her voice is ash. The flashing on the roof needs replacing. There’s ninety-one dollars in the dresser.

  Mother, Tom says.

  Shhh, Tomcat, she hisses. Don’t get yourself worked up.

  Tom manages two more payments. Then the saltworks closes and the bank comes for the house. He walks in a daze through blowing sleet to the end of the lane and turns right and staggers over the dry weeds awhile till he finds the old path and walks beneath the creaking pitch pines to Ruby’s marsh. Ice has interlocked in the shallows, but the water in the center is dark as molten pewter.