The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 Read online

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  She had lived on a lake when she first came to New York, after Iowa and her divorce, before she met her new husband and moved into his sprawling farmhouse. Her rented cabin, the upper half of a duplex, had been set into the side of a hill and surrounded by tall reaching trees, elms and oaks and the like, creating a fringed green awning that cast everything into a perpetual dense shade. Every morning she woke to the sound of Round Lake slapping the legs of the dock down below; it was like cold astringent in the face, the loneliness of that sound after her busy chattering life in Iowa. Nothing to keep her company but her own self, and the soothing, flapping-moth feeling inside her skull that she registered not as depression, or as anxiety, but as a balance of both states—a kind of stasis that led to endless hours of sitting at a desk or standing on the varnished porch, staring down at the mossy path and the wavering blue lake.

  She had never stood around like that before, just looking; in Iowa everything had been visible, exposed to the elements, there was no subtext, nothing to break the furrowed monotony but subtle geographical undulations, all the rows of corn suddenly banking in unison like a flock of birds, a DeKalb sign at distant intervals, the occasional yellow cat furtively walking along a ditch. Here in upstate New York there were the endless shadows, the low ceilings, the gloomy stone fences full of snake holes, trees bending over roadways, everything grown into everything else, warrenlike and confining.

  One day the landlord’s henchman had shown up to take out a tree and some brush. He spent half the morning sitting on a stump sharpening a scythe blade and then oiling, link by link, the chain in his chain saw, all the while listening to his earphones and drinking out of a huge, dirty cup with a snap-on lid. Maybe it wasn’t coffee in the cup, or maybe it was coffee and something else, because he managed to make an error in his tree-cutting calculations. The tree, instead of falling directly down the hill, along a narrow unforested trough between the cabin and the water, fell on a slant, hitting the trunk of a neighboring oak with a resounding thunderous smack. That second tree had fallen against the trunk of a third tree, which landed with a crack against the trunk of another tree, until four trees in all had crashed to the ground with an enormous rustling noise, like big girls in petticoats tripping each other.

  So when she hit the stranger in her kitchen, that’s how she brought him down, like a felled tree. The ringing blow to the side of the head, the flat of the shovel against the temple, and he went over sideways, between the refrigerator and the counter, which was covered with the makings of that day’s pathetic lunch, a leftover dish made with pale slabs of tofu. It had wobbled unattractively on the way to the table, but Joan had eaten it without paying much attention, absorbed in the newspaper. It had almost turned out to be her last meal; they would have found it in her stomach at the autopsy, tofu helper. A vegetarian from beginning to end.

  As a Midwestern child, she had gotten to know food in its sentient state right in her grandparents’ chicken-scratched yard. Joan had loved the white hens with their meditative clucking, red combs and yellow legs, rhythmic bobbing way of walking. Twenty feet beyond the chickens began the dirt field where the hogs were kept, the pink rubbery noses poked through the fence, the tiny wicked eyes, the little lean-tos they called home. The pigs had babies that Joan’s grandfather would hold for her to pet, which she did, panicked and sorry, as they squealed in abject terror, the same syllable over and over, while their mothers snuffled and bit each other. In the next enclosure were the cows, standing on low mountains of manure, staring between the chewed planks of the fence, bright metal tags stapled into their ears. The color of the tags indicated at what future date the cow would be evicted from its body.

  Joan’s grandfather was a part-time butcher who drove a panel truck to people’s farms and killed their animals for pay. It wasn’t told to Joan, who had a hard enough time petting a baby pig who didn’t want to be petted, but once she had glimpsed something strange, either at the grandparents’ house or elsewhere: a group of blood-smeared shaved sheep in a dejected clump; a lost calf, tall with rickety legs and twine around its neck; and then a lamb on its side in the dirt, woolly legs bound together. The lamb had lifted its head and stared at Joan as she walked toward it, but right at that moment her grandmother began calling her, urgently, in a false lilting voice, the way you might call a puppy away from a busy road.

  “Dearie, come here!” she cried gaily. “Come to Grandma!”

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  —

  There had to be a rope around somewhere. Where? Joan was starting to feel the adrenaline leave her body. He had tried to kill her. For a second she almost swooned—her grandmother had called her dearie, she had been a little girl in a ruffled midriff top, somewhere she had a picture of herself in it squinting at the ground while someone in baggy trousers held a long fish up next to her. The fish was being held by the gills, and its tail was flexed just enough to show it was still alive; it was the same height as Joan. On the back, her mother had written Keepers.

  She needed to immobilize him before he came around, if he came around. Rope, rope, rope. She was too afraid to leave the kitchen to go to the toolshed to look for rope, what if he woke up, what if she came back and he wasn’t here. She’d seen it, everyone had: the blank span of linoleum, the moment of sick realization, the grab from behind, hands around the neck, the woman lifted from the floor, gasping like a fish. Joan raised the shovel and hit him again, this time a soggy, glancing blow to the shoulder.

  He stirred and collapsed deeper onto the linoleum, like he was filled with sand. It reminded her of the old Friday night fights, dramas in which men in satin shorts alternated between pummeling each other in the stomach and hugging. Her father had been a fan, watching from a green armchair with the family’s white terrier on his lap, eating ice cream from a mixing bowl, using one set of toes to scratch the top of the other foot. If Joan or her siblings wandered into the room and stood staring at the television he would describe what was happening as the guy fell backward onto a milking stool, or stood swaying, swollen head hanging down on his chest, or when the guy’s spaghetti arm was lifted in its heavy glove by the referee. “He clocked him,” her father would explain.

  Joan had loved her father, a tender, hopeless drunk who stayed off the booze for long periods of time, confusing everyone and causing her mother to switch back and forth with him, between cheerfulness and relentless bitching tirades. It was a tumultuous household, as many were in those days, but it had the white terrier and a blue parakeet and Joan’s mother not only made flannel nightgowns for her daughters but also made matching flannel nightgowns for their dolls, baked pies every Sunday morning, and put a plywood Santa in the front yard each December. Joan’s father, when he was sober, was a classic backyard putterer; he knocked together bird feeders, staked tomatoes, hung buckets neatly from spigots, and sang to the children and anyone else who would listen, songs about paper dolls and drinking. Once, he got annoyed at Joan for bugging him while he was shaving and he took the towel from around his neck, gave it a twirl, and flicked it at her. It was so out of character he might as well have donned a hockey mask and taken after her with a carving knife; she sobbed until she was ill, and had to stay home from school that day, huddled on the couch in the darkened living room, watching reruns.

  It seemed entirely possible she may have clocked this man to death; there was something too settled about the way he was arranged on the floor. He had cornered her upstairs, in her study, just walked in and said something offhand and expectant. “Here I am,” or “Hey, I’m here,” or “Okay, I’m here.” For a good number of seconds she had been utterly confused, embarrassed that she couldn’t remember who he was or what business he was there on.

  “I’m sorry,” she had said, haltingly. “I can’t remember what we said.” As though there had been an arrangement made earlier, for a man to come stand over her and grin as she sat in her soft chair
with manuscript pages on her lap. When she started to stand, he stepped forward and gave her a gentle push backward, the tips of his fingers on her breastbone, and she sank back down, confused. Who was he, again?

  And then, with a sudden zooming clarity, she realized he was a stranger who had come into her house and up her stairs and was now addressing her, pushing her down when she went to stand up. With the clarity came a tight, compressing panic. She made a noise and tried to scramble out of the chair, kicking at his legs. He took her by the back of the head and ran her into the wall; she lifted her hand to shield her nose, which nevertheless broke on impact. It was a totally visual experience, she didn’t feel a thing—the sight of the forty-year-old wallpaper coming toward her, rows of parasols and roses followed by a bright yellow explosion, her own innocent knees for a second, then she was crouched before him, one hand holding her nose in place, the other raised in front of her, like a student asking a question in class.

  Second grade, unable to raise her hand to ask Mrs. Darnell if she could go to the bathroom. Endless lessons, the opening of desks, lifting of books, rustling pages, chalk and eraser. The replacing of math book with language book, the stark impossibility of making it to the lunch bell. Unable to hold it and unable to ask, a drowning person in a warm, insistent river, eventually Joan just let go. As she stared fixedly at the blackboard, a hideous amber current moved steadily up the aisle past her desk, past the desk in front of hers, and then into the territory of the desk beyond that one.

  That afternoon, after lunch at home, the ruined Brownie uniform stuffed into a laundry basket, the silent diplomatic companionship of her little girlfriends on the playground, she returned to find the floor around her desk miraculously cleaned up. Later, during art class, when everyone was milling about, tearing paper and mishandling paste, Mrs. Darnell crouched next to her and whispered, “Don’t ever be afraid to raise your hand.”

  He took her outstretched arm and twisted it behind her, lifted it upward until she cried out and then held it there, stepping on her right foot with his thick boot, holding her in place. She tried to resist the impulse to wrestle her way out of it; his arms and hands were iron; it was like straining against the bars of a cell. But he was tearing the muscles in her upper arm and cracking the delicate bones of her instep—if he would just let her arm go, if he would just pick up his boot! She writhed frantically, panting, and then she went still.

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  When Joan was with her first husband, they liked to get high, eat candy, and challenge each other to competitive games—say, jumping over the sofa from a standstill, pitching dirt clods onto a tin roof, or holding afternoon-long wrestling bouts in the tableless dining room of their farmhouse. This was during a time when her husband wore patched overalls and no shirt, and Joan wore cutoffs and a famous halter top made from two bandanna handkerchiefs tied together; they had a willow tree that looked like a big hula skirt, a collie dog, and a blue bong. Life was fresh and new, and they were learning everything: that dill pickles were actually small cucumbers, that oregano started out as a leaf, that going back to the land meant you should remove your top if somebody needed a hanky.

  She and that husband were so perfectly matched in spirit and sensibility that they were like littermates, tripping each other, rolling around, hopping on each other’s backs, getting rug burns. Sometimes, depending on the quality and quantity of the dope, they forgot themselves during their wrestling matches—Joan yanking on vulnerable areas and scratching, him clamping her head under his arm, poking a finger up her nostrils. Then they struggled in earnest, tugging and swearing, worrying the dog, until finally Joan’s husband got fed up and pinned her. Just like that. Pressed to the floor and straddled, her wrists manacled in one of his hands.

  It was always shocking, that utter helplessness, as though she were one of her own childhood dolls being laid to rest after a session of playing. When that happened, just for a moment fear would bloom inside Joan, dark and frantic, uncontainable, at the sight of her husband rising above her, foreshortened and monumental, like a tree growing out of her chest.

  Years later in that marriage, they had grown so bored they went back to school instead of back to the land—he studied horticulture and Joan studied art history. Him in a greenhouse, pruning shears in his back pocket, folding back the petals of a flower. Her in a darkened auditorium, chin in hand, making thumbnail sketches of paintings in a notebook: clocks draped over trees; crutches holding up broken noses; a woman with bureau drawers set into her chest, knobs shaped like nipples. A single knotty carrot, a pipe hovering over the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe. She drew her husband’s face, with their little brass pot pipe. Ceci n’est pas un mariage. In the black auditorium, a new slide clicked into place and Joan stared, pen suspended over her notes. Another Magritte metaphor: a room filled up with a huge garish rose, its petals bent back against the ceiling, walls, and floor. Le tombeau des lutteurs.

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  The stranger kicked her legs out from under her, flipped her onto her back, and sat on her chest, pressing her arms to the floor with his knees. He looked around.

  The bookshelf, the table next to her armchair, the lamp, the cord to the lamp.

  From that angle, her first husband had looked like Tom Petty, droopy haired and stoned, restored to affection for the pink-faced girl pinned beneath him—but this was a stranger, his hair dark and lusterless, flopped down over his forehead. He was hurting her, compressing her lungs, swinging his head back and forth, scanning the room in an exaggerated manner. For what? What was he looking for?

  He leaned back to grope for something, shinbones pressing like rebar into her upper arms, and she realized she could shout.

  Crazy. To make her last word be a dog’s name.

  P I L G R I M !

  The stranger took the yardstick, leaning against the wall, and laid it across her windpipe.

  Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

  Outside, Pilgrim pulled his head, shoulders, forepaws, and torso from a groundhog hole out by the back fence. He stood listening intently to the summer evening, nose lifted, and then turned his dirty face like a radar dish toward the house.

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  It was the same yardstick she had used earlier in the day to measure her stocking feet, each one in turn, to see if they were exactly the same size. She was more of a scholar than a mathematician—every time she measured she got something different—and managed to occupy herself for a pretty long time. The dogs were with her and she had measured their tails; the big black dog with a long nose and the intelligent brown eyes of a chimpanzee, and little Spock, thickset and amiable, with a triangular head that he could force like a wedge into all kinds of spots.

  He had just that morning captured a chipmunk in the daylilies and carried it, squeaking, around the front yard. Joan had thrown open the window and leaned out, calling to the dog in a high, insistent, flattering voice. He looked around in alarm, and then up to where she was. He began wagging his hindquarters, lifting his ears high off his scalp, trying to figure out what she wanted.

  “Come here, Spock!” she cried coaxingly. “Come here, boy!”

  That long-ago lamb, lifting its head from the ground, had bleated at her, a drawn-out pleading, lonely sound. She only just remembered it. “Spockeeee!” she cried in a singsong, and then made as though she were running away from the window.

  Spock dropped his prize and ran to meet her at the front door, panting.

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  Joan thrashed, arching like a fish tossed on the bank, and then quieted, focusing on getting air past the obstruction on her throat. She concentrated, gasping, staring past the stranger, who seemed impatient, almost bored. He bounced a little, pressing on the yardstick, when he thought she wasn’t suffocating fast enough.

  Pilgrim trotted around the house, no
se to the ground, past the limestone wall, the lilac bush, a mound of disturbed dirt, the faint heady cologne of a cat. The bed of smooth river pebbles, a clump of hyacinths, and suddenly he ran into it, like a thick pane of glass—STRANGER—and followed it around to the front door, snorting frantically against the frame of the flimsy screen. STRANGER.

  He sounded the alarm.

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  While Pilgrim was excavating the groundhog tunnel, Spock had been napping in the fern bed behind the outhouse, an unused shed with tattered flower-sprigged wallpaper and a worn plank with two sad holes in it. A garter snake lived in there, and some tiny large-eyed mice. Earlier, unbelievably, a possum had gotten up on the roof of it, via a little tree that could barely support its weight. Spock had been so invigorated by this he had taken down all the trumpet vines. The possum was still up there, inert and pink, and Spock was sprawled on his back asleep, large paws retracted against his chest, delicate fronds smashed flat beneath him.

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  The stranger exerted the required pressure without even glancing down at her, as though he could more or less do it by feel, like gliding underneath a chassis and tightening a bolt, gliding out again.

  If the yardstick had been wood it might have broken, but instead it was metal with a cork backing. Flexible and inefficient, suffocating her, but slowly. It was as though her windpipe were a thin blue tube being wound tightly in gauze, layer after layer.

  Let the yardstick work for you.

  Roy and Joan in that long-ago art gallery, after hours, moonlight washing across a grove of pedestals on which they placed metal sculptures. Roy made up names for the amorphous polished blobs: “Underpants I, II, and III,” or “I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up.” He and Joan wore cotton museum gloves and listened to new wave music on the radio. They were lingering in the gloom, putting off going home to their respective spouses. A song by Elvis Costello came on, a ballad, irresistible. They danced in the dark gallery, white hands on each other’s backs, singing along: I see you’ve got a husband now.