100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  “Sure enough, I don’t want to drink it.”

  “You drink it. It doesn’t taste bad.”

  Inside, in the dim saloon, two men with black spurred cocks under their arms had appeared. Without noise they each set a muddy boot on the rail and drank, the cocks hypnotically still. They got off the barge on the island side, where they disappeared in the hot blur of willow branches. They might never be seen again.

  The heat trembled on the water and on the other side wavered the edges of the old white buildings and concrete slabbed bluffs. From the barge, Vicksburg looked like an image of itself in a tarnished mirror—like its portrait at a sad time of life.

  A short cowboy in boots and his girl came in, walking alike. They dropped a nickel in the nickelodeon, and came together.

  The canal had no visible waves, yet trembled slightly beneath us; I was aware of it like the sound of a winter fire in the room.

  “You don’t ever dance, do you?” Maideen said.

  It was a long time before we left. All kinds of people had come out to the barge, and the white side and the nigger side filled up. When we left it was good-dark.

  The lights twinkled sparsely on the shore—old sheds and warehouses, long dark walls. High up on the ramparts of town some old iron bells were ringing.

  “Are you a Catholic?” I asked her suddenly, and I bent my head to hear her answer.

  “No.”

  I looked at her—I made it plain she had disappointed some hope of mine—for she had; I could not tell you now what hope.

  “We’re all Baptists. Why, are you a Catholic?” Oh, nobody was a Catholic in Sabina.

  “No.”

  Without touching her except momently with my knee I walked her ahead of me up the steep uneven way, to where my car was parked listing sharply downhill. Inside, she could not shut her door. I stood outside and looked, it hung heavily and she had drunk three or four drinks, all I had made her take. Now she could not shut her door. “I’ll fall out, I’ll fall in your arms. I’ll fall, catch me.”

  “No you won’t. Shut it hard. Shut it. All your might.”

  At last. I leaned against her shut door, spent for a moment.

  I grated up the steep cobbles, turned and followed the river road high along the bluff, turned again off into a deep rutted dirt way under shaggy banks, dark and circling and down-rushing.

  “Don’t lean against my arm,” I said. “Sit up and get some air.”

  “I don’t want to,” she said in her soft voice that I could hardly understand any more.

  “You want to lie down?”

  “No. I don’t want to lie down.”

  “Get some air.”

  “Don’t make me lie down. I don’t want to do anything, anything at all.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “I don’t want to do a thing from now and on till evermore.”

  We circled down. The sounds of the river tossing and dizzying and teasing its great trash could be heard through the dark now. It made the noise of a moving wall, and up it fishes and reptiles and uprooted trees and man’s throwaways played and climbed all alike in a splashing like innocence. A great wave of smell beat at my face. The track had come down deep as a tunnel. We were on the floor of the world. The trees met and matted overhead, the cedars came together, and through them the stars of Vicksburg looked sifted and fine as seed, so high and so far. There was the sound of a shot, somewhere, somewhere.

  “Yonder’s the river,” she said. “I see it—the Mississippi River.”

  “You don’t see it. We’re not that close.”

  “I see it, I see it.”

  “Haven’t you ever seen it before? You baby.”

  “Before? No, I never have seen the Mississippi River before. I thought we were on it on the boat.”

  “Look, the road has ended.”

  “Why does it come this far and stop?”

  “How should I know? What do they come down here for?”

  “Why do they?”

  “There are all kinds of people in the world.” Far away somebody was burning something.

  “Do you mean bad people and niggers and all? Ones that hide? Moonshiners?”

  “Oh, fishermen. River men. Cock fighters. You’re waked up.”

  “I think we’re lost,” she said.

  Mother said, if I thought you’d ever go back to that Jinny Stark, I couldn’t hold up my head.—No, mother, I’ll never go back.—The whole world knows what she did to you.

  “You dreamed we’re lost. We’ll go somewhere where you can lie down a little.”

  “You can’t get lost in Sabina.”

  “After you lie down a little you’ll be all right again, you can get up. We’ll go somewhere where you can lie down.”

  “I don’t want to lie down.”

  “Did you know a car would back up a hill as steep as this?”

  “You’ll be killed.”

  “I bet nobody ever saw such a crazy thing. Do you think anybody ever saw such a crazy thing?”

  We were almost straight up and down, hanging on the bluff and the tail end bumping and lifting us and swaying from side to side. At last we were up. If I had not drunk that last drink maybe I would not have made such startling maneuvers and would not have bragged so loud. The car had leaned straight over that glimpse of the river, over the brink as sweetly as you ever saw a hummingbird over a flower.

  We drove a long way. All among the statues in the dark park, the repeating stances, the stone rifles again and again on lost hills, the spiral-staired and condemned towers.

  I looked for the moon, which would be in the last quarter. There she was. The air was not darkness but faint light, and floating sound—the breath of all the people in the world who were breathing out into the night looking at the moon, knowing her quarter.

  We rode in wilderness under the lifting moon, Maideen keeping very still, sighing faintly as if she longed for something herself, for sleep—for going the other way. A coon, white as a ghost, crossed the road, passed a gypsy camp—all sleeping.

  Off the road, under the hanging moss, a light burned in a whitewashed tree. It showed a circle of whitewashed cabins, dark, and all around and keeping the trees back, a fence of white palings. Sunset Oaks. A little nigger boy leaned on the gate this late at night, wearing an engineer’s cap.

  Yet it did not seem far. I pulled in, and paid.

  “One step up,” I told her at the door.

  I sat on the bed, the old iron bed with rods. I think I said, “Get your dress off.”

  She had her head turned away. The naked light hung far down in the room—a long cord that looked as if something had stretched it. She turned, then, with tender shoulders bent toward the chair, as if in confidence toward that, the old wreck of a thing that tonight held her little white dress.

  I turned out the light that hung down, and the room filled with the pale night like a bucket let down a well. It was never dark enough, the enormous sky flashing with its August light rushing into the emptiest rooms, the loneliest windows. The month of falling stars. I hate the time of year this is.

  If we lay together any on the bed, almost immediately I was propped up against the hard rods with my back pressing them, and sighing—deep sigh after deep sigh. I heard myself.

  “Get up,” I said. “I want the whole bed. You don’t need to be here.” And I showed I had the pistol. I lay back holding it toward me and trying to frown her away, the way I used to lie still cherishing a dream in the morning and Jinny would pull me out of it.

  Maideen had been pulling or caressing my arm, but she had no strength in her hands at all. She rose up and stood in the space before my eyes, so plain there in the lighted night. She was disarrayed. There was blood on her, blood and disgrace. Or perhaps there wasn’t. I did not remember anything about it. For a moment I saw her double.

  “Get away from me,” I said.

  While she was speaking to me I could hear only the noises of the place we were in—of frogs and n
ightbirds, a booted step in the heavy tangle all around, and the little idiot nigger running up and down the fence, up and down, as far as it went and back, sounding the palings with his stick.

  “This is my grandfather’s dueling pistol—one of a pair. Very valuable.”

  “Don’t, Ran. Don’t do that, Ran. Don’t do it. Please don’t do it.”

  I knew I had spoken to her again in order to lie. It was my father’s pistol he’d never cared for. When she spoke, I didn’t hear what she said; I was reading her lips, the way people being told good-by do conscientiously through train windows. I had the pistol pointing toward my face and did not swerve it. Outside, it sounded as though the little nigger at the gate was keeping that up forever—running a stick along the fence, up and down, to the end and back again.

  Poor Bella, it was so hot for her. She lay that day with shut eyes, her narrow little forehead creased. Her nose was dry as a thrown-away rind. The weather was only making her suffer more. She never had a long thick coat, was the one good thing. She was just any kind of a dog. The kind I liked best.

  I tried to think. What had happened? No—what had not happened? Something had not happened. The world was not going on. Or, you understand, it went on but somewhere it had stopped being real, and I had walked on, like a tight-rope walker without any rope. How far? Where should I have fallen? Hate. Discovery and hate. Then, right after . . . Destruction was not real, disgrace not real, nor death. They all got up again, Jinny and Dugan got up . . .

  Up and down, the little idiot nigger. He was having a good time at that. I wondered, when would that stop? Then that stopped.

  I put the pistol’s mouth in my own. It tasted, the taste of the whole machinery of it. And then instead it was my own mouth put to the pistol’s, quick as a little baby’s maybe, whose hunger goes on every minute—who can’t be reassured or gratified, ever, quite in time enough. There was Maideen still, white in her petticoat.

  “Don’t do it, Ran. Please don’t do it.”

  Urgently I made it—made the awful sound.

  And immediately she said, “Now, you see. It didn’t work. Now you see. Hand that old thing to me, I’ll keep that.”

  She took it from me. She took it over to the chair, as if she were possessed of some long-tried way to deal with it, and disposed of it in the fold of her clothes. She came back and sat down on the edge of the bed. In a minute she put her hand out again, differently—and touched my shoulder. Then I met it, hard, with my face, the small, bony, freckled (I knew) hand that I hated (I knew), and kissed it and bit it until my lips and tongue tasted salt tears and salt blood—that the hand was not Jinny’s. Then I lay back in the bed a long time, up against the rods.

  “You’re so stuck up,” she said.

  I lay there and after a while my eyes began to close and I saw her again. She lay there plain as the day by the side of me, quietly weeping for herself. The kind of soft, restful, meditative sobs a child will venture long after punishment.

  So I slept.

  How was I to know she would hurt herself like this?

  Now—where is Jinny?

  1948

  JOHN CHEEVER

  The Enormous Radio

  from The New Yorker

  JOHN CHEEVER (1912–1982) was born in Quincy, Massachusetts. He was expelled from Thayer Academy and described the event in his first published story, which was bought by Malcolm Cowley, an editor of the New Republic.

  Cheever moved to New York City during the Depression and continued to write, publishing stories in The New Yorker and Story. One day he walked a manuscript into the Story office. He had until then spelled his first name Jon. Series editor Martha Foley looked at the cover of his story and told him, “You are going to spend the rest of your life correcting proofs,” so he changed it to John.

  Cheever said in an interview, “I don’t work with plots. I work with intuition, apprehension, dreams, concepts. Characters and events come simultaneously to me. Plot implies narrative and a lot of crap. It is a calculated attempt to hold the reader’s interest at the sacrifice of moral conviction.”

  Cheever met the woman who would become his wife while riding in an elevator. “We went together for a couple of years before we got married,” he said. “Nobody got married in those years, then there was a period where everybody got married, then nobody got married again.” Cheever is known for his insightful portrayals of marriage and suburban life as well as for depicting the tension between a character’s inner and outer worlds.

  In 1958 Cheever won the National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle. The Stories of John Cheever won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won the 1981 National Book Award. Shortly before he died of cancer, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  ★

  JIM AND IRENE Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house in the East Seventies between Fifth and Madison Avenues, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester. Irene Westcott was a pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written, and in the cold weather she wore a coat of fitch skins dyed to resemble mink. You could not say that Jim Westcott, at thirty-seven, looked younger than he was, but you could at least say of him that he seemed to feel younger. He wore his graying hair cut very short, he dressed in the kind of clothes his class had worn at Andover, and his manner was earnest, vehement, and intentionally naïve. The Westcotts differed from their friends, their classmates, and their neighbors only in an interest they shared in serious music. They went to a great many concerts—although they seldom mentioned this to anyone—and they spent a good deal of time listening to music on the radio.

  Their radio was an old instrument, sensitive, unpredictable, and beyond repair. Neither of them understood the mechanics of radio—or of any of the other appliances that surrounded them—and when the instrument faltered, Jim would strike the side of the cabinet with his hand. This sometimes helped. One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a Schubert quartet, the music faded away altogether. Jim struck the cabinet repeatedly, but there was no response; the Schubert was lost to them forever. He promised to buy Irene a new radio, and on Monday when he came home from work he told her that he had got one. He refused to describe it, and said it would be a surprise for her when it came.

  The radio was delivered at the kitchen door the following afternoon, and with the assistance of her maid and the handyman Irene uncrated it and brought it into the living room. She was struck at once with the physical ugliness of the large gumwood cabinet. Irene was proud of her living room, she had chosen its furnishings and colors as carefully as she chose her clothes, and now it seemed to her that the new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder. She was confounded by the number of dials and switches on the instrument panel, and she studied them thoroughly before she put the plug into a wall socket and turned the radio on. The dials flooded with a malevolent green light, and in the distance she heard the music of a piano quintet. The quintet was in the distance for only an instant; it bore down upon her with a speed greater than light and filled the apartment with the noise of music amplified so mightily that it knocked a china ornament from a table to the floor. She rushed to the instrument and reduced the volume. The violent forces that were snared in the ugly gumwood cabinet made her uneasy. Her children came home from school then, and she took them to the Park. It was not until later in the afternoon that she was able to return to the radio.

  The maid had given the children their suppers and was supervising their baths when Irene turned on the radio, reduced the volum
e, and sat down to listen to a Mozart quintet that she knew and enjoyed. The music came through clearly. The new instrument had a much purer tone, she thought, than the old one. She decided that tone was most important and that she could conceal the cabinet behind a sofa. But as soon as she had made her peace with the radio, the interference began. A crackling sound like the noise of a burning powder fuse began to accompany the singing of the strings. Beyond the music, there was a rustling that reminded Irene unpleasantly of the sea, and as the quintet progressed, these noises were joined by many others. She tried all the dials and switches but nothing dimmed the interference, and she sat down, disappointed and bewildered, and tried to trace the flight of the melody. The elevator shaft in her building ran beside the living-room wall, and it was the noise of the elevator that gave her a clue to the character of the static. The rattling of the elevator cables and the opening and closing of the elevator doors were reproduced in her loudspeaker, and, realizing that the radio was sensitive to electrical currents of all sorts, she began to discern through the Mozart the ringing of telephone bells, the dialing of phones, and the lamentation of a vacuum cleaner. By listening more carefully, she was able to distinguish doorbells, elevator bells, electric razors, and Waring mixers, whose sounds had been picked up from the apartments that surrounded hers and transmitted through her loudspeaker. The powerful and ugly instrument, with its mistaken sensitivity to discord, was more than she could hope to master, so she turned the thing off and went into the nursery to see her children.

  When Jim Westcott came home that night, he went to the radio confidently and worked the controls. He had the same sort of experience Irene had had. A man was speaking on the station Jim had chosen, and his voice swung instantly from the distance into a force so powerful that it shook the apartment. Jim turned the volume control and reduced the voice. Then, a minute or two later, the interference began. The ringing of telephones and doorbells set in, joined by the rasp of the elevator doors and the whir of cooking appliances. The character of the noise had changed since Irene had tried the radio earlier; the last of the electric razors was being unplugged, the vacuum cleaners had all been returned to their closets, and the static reflected that change in pace that overtakes the city after the sun goes down. He fiddled with the knobs but couldn’t get rid of the noises, so he turned the radio off and told Irene that in the morning he’d call the people who had sold it to him and give them hell.