The Best American Short Stories 2013

  “Well—”

  By then Becca was gone, back to her room.

  He found himself now standing in Becca’s room, next to the pile of unpacked boxes. She was at school; Minnie was at Costco. Even with most of her stuff still packed, the room was a mess of discarded clothes and scraps of partially filled notebook paper. He picked up a sheet, studied where Becca had scribbled some letters and symbols he couldn’t make out, and then let it flutter to the floor.

  Should he feel guilty about glimpsing his daughter from the crawlspace or spending this time in her room without her? He was already worried at what he might see or find. The parental mind reeled at the possibilities. The small glimpses he’d had of her were already confusing enough.

  His elbow had swollen up to the size of a grapefruit and Bob couldn’t get over how alien it looked, as if someone else’s joint had ended up on his arm. It was sore and the two red fang marks had emanated disconcerting red ripples. Bob worked his arm open and closed and found his movement restricted so that he couldn’t even clench his upper arm into a muscle. He iced it and then applied some antihistamine cream, but that wasn’t offering much relief.

  He didn’t remember walking back to the living room, but he discovered that a pile of mail had finally been pushed through the door slot. There were two plain white envelopes with the State of California seal on them, each containing an identical subpoena to appear in court to answer questions regarding his old firm’s policy of nondisclosure during the lending process.

  He sat down on the sofa, a masonry bit in the fully charged power drill in his hand, and looked outside at the pomegranate tree that was now ripe and bearing an abundance of red fruit. He hadn’t told anyone that he could see his daughter’s room from up in the attic, or what he had found up there, or the scripture verse. He had his reasons for keeping quiet: he didn’t want to creep out his daughter, he didn’t want to frighten his family. Minnie seemed busy enough, ferrying Becca to school and trying to fashion a little charm from their limited budget. And Becca, who had returned from her first day of school with a one-word description—SUCKS—she was struggling to adjust.

  Bob liked to see his memory as a collection of index cards with names and dates on them, but the names and dates were hazy and growing hazier. But now, as he was trying to settle into Gam’s old house, he felt memories seeping in. He had been busy for so many years, selling those loans, that now, now that he had time—the subpoena had also jogged his memory—he was finally able to think back on that period and was uncomfortable with some of the details he recalled. It had been so easy; nobody seemed very concerned about the terms, just worried about the monthlies. As long as the next month’s payment was affordable, they signed.

  Then he flashed on those Wagonseller kids, the two of them bowed down in prayer right out there beneath that pomegranate tree, blond heads shining in the sunlight, their lips moving silently.

  For the first time, he found himself reluctant to head back up to the crawlspace, but the job needed to be done.

  He was up there again, drilling into a corner of the chimney brick, the flashlight beam hitting the spot where the bit was kicking up red dust. He bent down and blew into the hole, pushing a finger into the heat caused by the friction, and then resumed drilling. When he had punched through and into the wood, he replaced the masonry bit with a longer wood bit, but before resuming his drilling, he shone the flashlight around the crawlspace, the yellow beam sliding over the orderly descent of the shingles, the reddish brown of their undersides. In the corner where he had found the horned man, the sweeping glow passed over a white pizza box. Confused, he quickly swung his flashlight back to where he had tossed the box yesterday and found it wasn’t there—of course it wasn’t; he had taken that down to the recycling bin, hadn’t he? Was it possible there had been two pizza boxes and he had tossed only one? He crawled over, his swollen arm making his progress slow, and gathered this box and tossed it behind him. There was the horned man, on the side of its face, where he had left it.

  He heard Becca shouting from below. “OHMYGOD. What IS THIS?”

  Becca had finally begun to unpack her boxes and was putting her clothes away in a closet with slatted doors. There, in the back of the closet, where a six-by-two-foot plank painted white held a half-dozen screw-in clothes hooks, was another horned man, in the same soft clay, mounted on another stick with runic lettering: “Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: As he has caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again.”

  She was pointing at it the way a frightened housewife would point to a mouse. “LOOK AT THAT!”

  Bob took the totem by the stick and inspected it. The work of the same hand.

  He drove himself to testify at the law firm in Century City. An attorney from the state representatives’ office was there, as was an attorney from the firm that had bought out the remnants of his old firm. While Bob was waiting in a brown leather chair with wooden arms, he saw one of his old coworkers departing. They did not acknowledge each other. When Bob’s turn came, he spoke honestly, recalled as best he could his former pitch, patter, and close. But when it came to specific loans and terms, he struggled. There had been so many mortgages, and even when he was shown the loan applications, the small print with circumlocutory explanations about adjustments, penalties, resets, and readjustments, the hundreds of pages of forms that clients hurriedly signed on closing day. He flipped through the sheafs of contracts, dutifully read aloud those portions he was told to, and then answered as best he could, rubbing his throbbing elbow as he spoke. There were hundreds, thousands of such agreements in legal-file boxes all around the conference room. All of them homes, probably lost now.

  Mostly the lawyers talked among themselves, occasionally asking Bob for clarification of a term or if he recalled anything about a specific loan. He shook his head. He couldn’t remember anything, but he was sorry. He repeated that, as if his apology might make it okay.

  The doctor agreed to see him for half her usual fee; he had delayed as long as he could since he no longer had health insurance. His muscles and joints in both arms were aching, his range of motion on the bitten arm had decreased to the point where he couldn’t cock his elbow at a right angle, and the skin around the swollen area was numb. She asked when it happened, and where, and he explained, remembering, as he did so, that first day he had discovered he could watch his daughter. He didn’t tell the doctor about that.

  She prescribed steroids and a strong antibiotic; he would have to pay out of pocket for the medications at CVS.

  The old house was going to be fine. It was smaller than the mansion they had left behind, but after those first hard weeks of shaking down—all that time in the crawlspace—it had begun to seem like a decent, functional machine for living, all the house they needed.

  He had finally succeeded in dropping that cable through to the living room, set it with carpet tacks, backed out of the crawlspace, and then pulled the access panel shut behind him.

  His wife had been panicked by the horned men, speculating the house was cursed: Bob immediately mentioned the Wagonsellers. They had been a strange family; the father had even, sort of, implied revenge. Maybe this was a born-again curse, Christian voodoo.

  They condemned the Wagonsellers, wondered whether they should call the police, press charges, or file some sort of complaint. What kind of people would do something like this? Bob listened as Minnie unloaded her concerns before pointing out that, really, they couldn’t prove anything and was it, technically, illegal to leave little clay carvings behind? He didn’t seem as spooked as his wife.

  Bob never told Minnie, or Becca, that while he was up there in the attic, he had inadvertently spied on his daughter in her room. He planned to go back up there just once more. He had with him some spackle and a palette knife, and he slithered along the boards, his elbow still sore—it would ache the rest of his days—to the gap above his daughter’s room. He told himself he was going to seal the cracks around the HVA
C duct and the hole near the fixture, to make it so he could no longer watch his daughter. This would be the final glimpse, he reassured himself.

  In hindsight, the tumult of this period, the little change o’ life, all the changes in their lives, would seem almost exciting. Bob would wonder how he ever had the energy for all of this, the foreclosing, the moving, the stringing of cable. He would take a job as a loan officer at the local branch of a national bank; Minnie would soon be back at work herself, doing the books part-time for an interior decorating firm. The family would never again have the means that it had during the great mortgage boom, those years of feeling wealthy, of being flush consumers caught in the profligate mainstream, and Bob would wonder at that, at how he might regain that feeling.

  In the late evening, he would walk out into the front garden, to the dry, yellowed grass where the Wagonseller twins had been praying the day he moved in, and from that spot reach up—the muscles around his elbow would never again allow his arm to reach full extension—and pluck a pomegranate, which he would split with his bare hands and then bite into its flesh and seed, sucking the red juice out and shaking at its bitterness.

  It wasn’t a curse, he would tell himself; the Wagonsellers hadn’t cursed them. He didn’t believe in such things. A little modeling clay, some stylus work—it was as if they bequeathed him the product of an arts-and-crafts project. He kept the little horned men, found a niche in the attic where he could admire them. And he didn’t feel cursed, hexed, whatever.

  Not at all, he thought, as he went back into the house, to the attic, to the crawlspace above his daughter’s room, where he watched her sleep.

  GISH JEN

  The Third Dumpster

  FROM Granta

  GOODWIN LEE AND his brother, Morehouse, had bought it at auction, for nothing. Even the local housing shark had looked down at his list and frowned and pinched or maybe itched his nose, but then waved his hand to clarify: no bid. The house was a dog. However, it had a bedroom on the first floor and was located in the same town as Goodwin and Morehouse.

  They were therefore fixing it up for their parents. Goodwin and Morehouse were good with fixer-uppers, after all; they were, in fact, when they were working, contractors. And their parents were Chinese, end of story, as Morehouse liked to say. Meaning that though they had been Americans for fifty years and could no longer belay themselves hand over hand up their apartment stair rail to get to their bedroom, they nonetheless could not go into assisted living because of the food. Western food every day? Cannot eat, they said.

  Goodwin had brought them to a top-notch facility anyway, just to visit. He had pointed out the smooth smooth paths, so wonderful for walking. He had pointed out the wide wide doorways, so open and inviting. And the elevators! Didn’t they make you want to go up? He had pointed out the mah-jong. The karaoke. The six-handed pinochle. The senior tai qi. The lobby was full of plants, fake and alive. Always something in bloom! he said, hopefully.

  But, distracted as they could be, his parents had frowned undistractedly and replied, Lamb chops! Salad! And that was that. His brother, Morehouse, of course, did not entirely comprehend their refusal to eat salad, believing as he did in raw foods. He began every day with a green shake whirled in a blender with an engine like a lawnmower’s; the drink looked like a blended lawn, perfect for cows. But never mind. Morehouse accepted, as Goodwin did not quite, that their parents were fundamentally different; their Chineseness was inalienable. Morehouse and Goodwin, on the other hand, would never be American, end of story, which was why their parents had never been at a loss for words in their prime. You are finally learn how to act! You are finally learn how to talk! You are finally learn how to think! they had said in their kinder moods. Now, though, setting their children straight had at last given way to keeping their medications straight. They also had their sodium levels to think of. One might not think the maintenance of a low-salt diet could be a contribution to intergenerational peace, but, in truth, Goodwin found it made his parents easier to love—more like the diffuse-focus old people of fairy tales, and less like people who had above all held steadfast against the irresponsible fanning of their children’s self-regard.

  The house, however, was a challenge. See these walls? Morehouse had said. And he was right. They were like the walls of a refrigerator box that had been left out in the rain. The bathroom was veined a deep penicillin green; its formerly mauve ceiling was purpuric. Which was why Goodwin was out scouting for dumpsters. Because this was what the recession meant in their neck of the woods: old people moving into purpuric ranch homes unless their unemployed children could do something about it. He did not, of course, like the idea of illicit trash disposal; he would have preferred to do this, as all things, in an aboveboard manner. But Morehouse had pushed up his sun visor, flashing a Taoist ba gua tattoo, and then held this position as if in a yoga class.

  Tell me, he said patiently. Tell me—what choice do we have? Tell me.

  The gist of his patience being: Sure it was illegal to use other people’s dumpsters, but it was going to save him and Goodwin eight hundred dollars! Eight hundred dollars they didn’t have between them, four hundred they didn’t have each. It was about dignity for their parents, said Morehouse. It was about doing what they were able to do. It was about doing what sons were bound to do, which was not to pussyfoot around. Morehouse said he would do the actual dumping. Goodwin just had to figure out where other people were having work done, and whether their dumpsters were nighttime accessible. As for why Goodwin should do the scouting, that was because Morehouse was good with a sledgehammer and could get the demo started. Goodwin was dangerous with a sledgehammer, especially to himself.

  Now he scouted carefully, in his old Corolla wagon, eating Oreos. One dumpster was maybe too close, he thought. Might not its change of fill level be linked with their dumpsterless job right around the corner? Another possibility was farther away. That was a small dumpster, though—too small for the job, really. Someone was being cheap. Also, it was close to a number of houses. People might wake up and hear them.

  The third dumpster was a little farther away yet. No houses nearby; that was because it was for the repurposing of a bowling alley. Who knew what the alley was being repurposed for, but an enormous bowling-pin-shaped sign lay on the ground, leaning horizontally against the cinder-block building. It looked as if the pin had been knocked down for eternity and would never be reset. The dumpster in front of it, by contrast, was fresh and empty, apparently brand-new. Bright mailbox-blue, it looked so much more like the Platonic ideal of a dumpster than the real-world item itself that Goodwin found it strangely heartening. Not that he would ever have said so to Morehouse, of course. And, in fact, its pristine state posed a kind of problem, as dumping things into an empty dumpster made noise; the truly ideal dumpster was at least one-quarter full. Goodwin had faith, though, that this one would soon attain that condition. The bowling alley was closed; a construction company had put its sign up by the street. There would be trash. It was true that there were streetlights nearby, one of them in working order. That meant Goodwin and Morehouse would not have the cover of darkness. On the other hand, they themselves would be able to see. That was a plus.

  At the house, Goodwin found Morehouse out back, receiving black plastic bags full of debris from some workers. The workers lifted them up to him like offerings; he heaved them, in turn, into a truck. Of course, the workers were illegal, as Goodwin well knew. He knew too that Morehouse knew Goodwin to be against the use of illegals, and that Morehouse knew Goodwin knew Morehouse knew that. There was probably no point in even taking him aside. Still, Goodwin took him aside.

  Did you really expect me to demo this place all by my friggin’ self? asked Morehouse. Anyway, they need the work.

  The workers were Guatemalan—open-miened men who nonetheless looked at each other before they said or did anything. Their names were Jose and Ovidio. They shared a water bottle. As Morehouse did not speak Spanish, and the Guatemalans did n
ot speak English, they called him Señor Morehouse and saved their swearing for each other. Goodwin remembered enough from his Vista teaching days to pick up ¡serote! and ¡hijo de la gran puta! and ¡que vaina! Still, the demo was apparently going fine. Goodwin watched as they delivered another half-dozen bags of debris to Morehouse.

  And that’s not even the end of the asbestos, said Morehouse.

  Asbestos? cried Goodwin.

  You can’t be surprised there’s asbestos, said Morehouse.

  And indeed, Goodwin was not surprised, when he thought about it. How, though, could Morehouse have asked Jose and Ovidio to remove it? Their lungs! Goodwin objected.

  They want to do it, Morehouse shrugged. We paid them extra. They’ve got it half in the bags already.

  But it’s illegal!

  We have no choice, said Morehouse. And: They have a choice. They don’t have to say yes. They can say no.

  Are you saying that they are better off than we are? That they have choices where we have none? That is a gross distortion of the situation! argued Goodwin.

  Morehouse looked at his watch: time for his seitan burger.

  Dumping asbestos is like putting melamine in milk, Goodwin went on. It’s like rinsing off IV needles and selling them back to hospitals. It bespeaks the sort of total disregard for public safety that makes one thankful for lawsuits, as Jeannie used to say.

  Jeannie was Goodwin’s prosecutor ex-wife—a woman of such standards that she’d been through some two or three marriages since theirs. Morehouse smirked with extra zest at the sound of her name.

  You seem to think we have no choice, but we absolutely do have a choice, declared Goodwin then. We could, for example, take Mom and Dad in to live with one of us.