The Best American Short Stories 2018 Read online

  Skeet hasn’t ever been to school.

  Agaju hasn’t left the house in seven years.

  “You know he is.”

  Leonel’s eyes are already wetting up from staring at the tattoos. He finally draws a breath, sharp and sudden, and tears himself away from his little brother. When he speaks again, it’s with a voice that shouldn’t be his yet, weary and haggard and worn threadbare.

  “It’s just going to be worse for everyone if you don’t come with.”

  Skeet turns and cuts another few symbols into the ground—still, time, death—then throws the stick into the dried-up crick. Smiles at his brother.

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. You first.”

  “Okay.”

  They climb the hill single file, hop the fence, and disappear from the little wild for the edge of town. They don’t talk as they go. They don’t talk at all, unless they have to.

  Down the VA they call Agaju Threefer, or at least they used to, back when he went. Shorthand for Three-for-Four on account of his no legs and one arm. Blame Vietnam. Still enough life left in his ruined mutilation to fuck two sons into two different beer hall cheaps, though. Even married one of them for almost a year. Long enough to saddle him with one of the boys. Nobody remembers which one, though. Doesn’t exactly matter. Bastards. All fucking bastards.

  Around town, most people butcher his name, pronounce it Aggie-you or Aggie-jew, else they just call him the priest. They don’t come out to the house ’less they have to. They don’t know what he does the rest of the time inside the shitty clapboard trailer-and-a-half just outside the city limits, they’re content to clank and drink and fuck their lives away, whispering rumors to each other and living in fear of his boys, the marked one and the one with the serial killer stare. Something wrong with the whole genetic line, half-buried out there in the dust.

  Still, they need them. Don’t mean they have to like it.

  The boys pretend not to notice.

  Agaju’s hunched at the altar when they walk in, folded over in his chair and grunting and cranking on himself among the candles and incense. Skeet and Leonel wait quietly in the kitchen until he’s finished. The hot smell of it, sour and musky, stains the air and he yells for fucko to bring him the rag.

  Always fucko. Never Leonel.

  Fucko forever.

  The older boy stalks through the house, looking for the embroidered handkerchief that his dad calls the rag, stained and blackened from dozens of rituals past. When he brings it, his father snatches it out of his hand, then waves him off. He can do the cleaning himself. Soaks up the filth with the silk, then folds it and sets it on the altar. Pulls on his stitched-shut pants with his one arm, hard as oiled ship rope from years of solo work, then glowers at his older son from behind his patchy scrub of beard.

  “You bring him?”

  Leonel nods. Knows better than to actually try and speak to the old man.

  “Then go get him. Bring him in here. Fuck you waiting for?”

  Leonel shuffles off. Whispers from the kitchen. Skeet wanders in, hands deep in his pockets.

  “Fuck you been, huh?”

  Skeet stares at his shoes, still caked in muck. “Down the crick.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Just, I don’t know. Drawing. Stuff.”

  “Drawing and stuff? What the fuck is drawing and stuff?”

  “Like drawing in the mud and stuff. Throwing rocks. Just stuff.”

  “Drawing what?”

  “Just pictures.”

  “Pictures like what?”

  “Just pictures.”

  “Pictures like the old language?”

  “No. No. Promise.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, boy?”

  “No, Dad.”

  “Shit’s not to be fucked with. S’bad old magic, you hear?”

  “I hear.”

  “What?”

  “I said I hear.”

  “Good. You know what happened?”

  “The mayor?”

  “Good. Yeah. Look at me, boy. Said look at me.”

  Skeet looks. The sight of his gnarled stumps and raw, home-done tattoos makes his stomach twist and crawl in living tangles, a basket of pregnant snakes. Agaju sticks a Marlboro between his bloody, chapped lips and lights it, the Bic so buried in his knotty paw that it almost looks as if he’s summoning the fire from nothing. Skeet’s pretty sure that his dad can’t actually do that, but he’s not a hundred percent. Agaju blows a grubby cloud in his son’s face. It stings his lungs with a familiar buzzing that he’s almost learned to enjoy.

  “You know this one’s important.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “Can’t have anybody fuckin’ it up for us.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “Not you, not anybody out there, and ’specially not that fucktard brother of yours.”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “We pull this one off, we get to eat for the next few years. This isn’t parlor trick shit, a few bucks here and there from strangers. This is real work, and real work means we eat. You wanna eat, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So don’t fuck up. And keep that retard far out of it. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Good. Go wash up and get ready. Imma prep the altar. Gonna give these hicks a hell of a show. That’s what they’re expecting, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You’re motherfuckin’ right, right. Go.”

  Skeet goes. Agaju stays. Sits still until he hears the rickety shower start up. Starts pulling together the rest of the ingredients he needs—fresh blood, mezcal, sage. A few bullets, a couple small amethyst daggers of scante. Teeth. Hair. A little glass phial of gasoline, another one of holy water. A straight razor, a box of matches. And the soppy rag.

  American magic is brutal, and ugly, and messy, but goddamn it fuckin’ works.

  Happy with the collected mojo, the old man slowly creaks to the garage, and his homebaked tattoo gun. Strips his pants off and picks out a bare spot on top of his left stump. Dips the sharp end of the rig in the ink and starts drawing. Rides the needle deep, ’til red seeps out around the wet black. He relishes the hurt, drinks it in. The ritual demands sacrifice. When it gets too much, he starts to groan and growl and then he’s coming again.

  Leonel’s out in the back lot breaking bottles against the rocks and fence when everything goes quiet. It’s not one of those strange moments when synchronicity descends on the world for a perfect breath of shared silence, nothing like that. More like all the noise gets sucked out of reality. He can’t even hear the ringing in his ears that sings him to sleep every night, a memento from one of Agaju’s cerveza-and-meth-fueled hurricanes. The scar on the far side of his head tells the same story in a different language.

  The silence is perfect, absolute. Crushing. It presses the air out of him, throbs the inside of his head in hot swells of blood. He tries to battle back the nothing, but he can’t even scream. He tries and tries, feeling his face turning red, sweat breaking out in thick lines across his forehead. Futility. Gives him the spins. Not long before he hits the dirt, but it doesn’t help. Just feels like he’s being pestled into the side of the planet. He throws up a little in his mouth.

  Then he rolls over and sees.

  There, behind the bathroom glass door. Skeet, staring at him from over those fucked-up, ratty X’s like drunk crosses. He doesn’t blink. Doesn’t move. He’s the one doing this. It’s him, it’s always him. Except when it’s not.

  Leonel grabs for one of the beer bottles and whips it at his brother. It cartwheels through the air and bursts against the glass, exploding the window inwards in a razor spray. The sound is catastrophic, a gale sucked through a pinhole. There’s a terrible wet ripping just beyond the inside of his eardrums and the first thing he hears when it stops is his own useless shrieking. Agaju’s impote
nt yawling from inside, mush-mouthed rage like fuckenshit’s wrong with you fucko. An insistent low-frequency hissing that he thinks is snakes until he remembers that Agaju made him kill all the snakes.

  What is that?

  He gets to his feet and follows the sound, shaky and a little bit painful still. There’s a raggy hole in the side of the house where the sliding glass door used to be. Beyond it, Agaju bellows, the sound carried on the back of the hissing. Blades of glass blanket the bathroom floor tile, some rimmed with thin red. Steam rolls across the tops of them and out into the sunlight and Leonel understands. His brother’s showering.

  Which means the ritual isn’t far off, now.

  I won’t watch this time. You can’t make me.

  He turns and runs deeper into the back lot, a maze of junked cars and corrugated metal, wire and bone and oil. He runs until he can’t breathe and his legs quake and threaten collapse from beating against the earth. His face boils hot under his skin and his eyes well and blink.

  Over ruined rusty sedans and towers of broken old TVs, he winds a path to his safe room, a gutted-out station wagon filled with books and a camp light and a sleeping bag and a couple porno magazines he swiped from Agaju’s collection. He tells himself that he likes the pictures, but the truth is they make him feel funny and uncomfortable inside. The women are all hairy and misshapen and stare at him from the glossy paper with something dead and gross in their eyes. Some of the girls have dicks.

  This is his real home, where he keeps his things, precious and obscene. His sanctuary from the strange hell that is his father’s home. Out here, he can be alone. Out here, he can be himself. With all of his stolen things.

  Under the hood of the station wagon, though. That’s where he keeps his real treasure.

  He vaults over the top of the station wagon and looks around, making sure no one’s spying. Satisfied, he pops the catch and lifts the hood. Inside, where there should be an engine is a half-rotted, splintery wooden box. Inside that, the treasure, wrapped in a towel. Leonel pulls it out, slams the hood, then climbs into the wagon. Nestles down on the bunched-up sleeping bag and lays the bundle across his knees. Unwraps it carefully, as if he were handling a sick infant. Feels his guts curl up with something almost like arousal once it’s in his hands.

  Sleek and heavy and cold, black-blued and cut with walnut. The Henry .45-70 Government. Lever action. Pretty much the most perfect weapon ever devised by man or god.

  One of Agaju’s, but he’s not good with rifles anymore. Obvious reasons. Still buys them, though. The old man buys all sorts of guns. Hides them around the house like he’s expecting a revolution or a siege. He didn’t even notice when this one went away. Leonel snuck it out of the house one night with a few boxes of bullets, kept it out here ever since.

  He practices shooting when Skeet’s away and the old man’s drunk himself entirely under. The gun barks like a dog trying to rupture its own throat, spits bullets bigger than his fingers. It kicks purple blotches into his shoulder, grinds the second knuckle of his first finger into callused sausage. He’s gotten a lot better at hitting all the targets.

  In the secret places deep away in his heart, he likes to call the gun Ochosi.

  He loads the weapon—four in—and snaps the lever shut. Slides the barrel out of one of the wagon’s windows, toward the house. Imagines putting holes in the walls until metal hits meat. Either of them, both. Let their holy wounds fill the house with blood and drown their attendants. He and Ochosi alchemizing living things into empty objects.

  Skeet and Agaju and their bullshit magic.

  This is real magic right here, motherfuckers.

  He sets the rifle down next to the bag and turns toward the other side of the car, face to the sun. The warmth is radiant and sets his insides glowing. He stares until the burned-out afterimage of the sun eclipses the real thing. He doesn’t think he’s blind, but still clenches his eyes and basks in the liquid, fluttering nothing dark until the pain dismounts.

  When he opens his eyes again, he sees the note.

  Hermano, written across the top in his brother’s clumsy script.

  He unfolds it, holds it up to read. Goes through it twice. He even signed with his real name. Not that bullshit nickname Agaju makes them use because he’s scared of the real one. Skeet. Agaju’s own personal joke, his sons little more than wasted cum-shots to him, outside the utility of the rituals.

  Leonel reads the note again, and again.

  He likes what he reads.

  Steam climbs the mirror and blurs out the blood, leaks out the hole in the wall. Through the churning fog, the marks under his eyes look different now. Like ampersands, or pound signs. Skeet can still hear his brother wailing when he climbs in the shower and starts rinsing off the blood. The water darkens as it licks along his new cuts. The heat stings. Makes it feel like his whole body’s on fire.

  Soap’s only gonna make it worse.

  Still, he reaches for the bar of dollar-store Kleenscrub and tries to get the thin, gritty pulp to lather. The hurt gets worse and worse. Alcohol in the soap. Makes him want to scream, but he doesn’t, saves it for later. Gonna need all that air, all that power for the ritual. So he soaks the pain and swipes a finger through the cheap suds. Starts writing on the Plexiglas with one finger.

  C

  H

  A

  N

  Two more letters and he’s done. Admires his name, clear against the steam, then wipes it away. Gonna need that for later, too. A quarter of a mile away, in the rusted depths of the lot, his brother should be finding the letter. No way to tell if it worked until later. But he believes. And that might be enough.

  The warmth in the water starts to gutter. Skeet turns it up as high as it will go and burns the chemical sting away. Lost in the steam.

  Agaju rolls the bottom of his lighter over another piece of glass. Relishes the brittle crunch of it, no other sound like that in the world. Empties the crumbles into the bulb of the pipe, fires up the lighter, the flame a steady blue dagger of heat. Rolls the pipe over the fire until little lizard tongues of smoke appear inside and tangle around themselves. Puts the other end to his raw, chappy lips and hits it.

  Chemical biters cut with sweet decay fill his mouth and lungs and spark hectic at his nerves and fillings. Like smoking wet garbage on fire. The rush is a demon whistling through his veins on a supersonic jet. For a moment, he forgets just how much of himself he’s missing. For a moment, he’s whole again. Restored masterfully by a loving god, the shine back on the apple here at the bottom of the world.

  Then it fades and the old familiar wells around the emptiness like blood from a wound. Useless, alone. A heart filled with rotting pink vapor.

  He’s still got time. He’s got plenty of time.

  He takes a heavy slug from the bottle of mezcal and fires up the pipe again.

  Come back. Please.

  For the love of god, please just come back.

  All around the house, there’s nothing.

  A grand empty washed in sand and mottled with vegetal scrub under the unchanging, unforgiving dome of the desert sky. Their house, a lone outpost built up against the edge of a wasteland, fortified with rust and steel and magic and blood and hate. Night falls in a heap and Leonel can see for miles. Lights stud the horizon, the town in the distance, a cluster of lives burning electric.

  Soon they’ll come, bearing the light as they wade through the darkness, draped in their strangest finery and all their desperate cruelties. Pressed under the cold livestock weight of the mayor on slab. Come to pay witness to the sermon, Agaju’s ritual. Come to see real magic.

  Leonel clutches Ochosi in both hands and nestles down in his tower of scrap and broken glass. Closes his eyes. Waits for the sounds of them to rusk and clatter up the empty miles between the house and the town. There’ll be no mistaking it—Leonel is the only one who walks the dirt road, and he’s already here. They only come for the ritual, and discourage the curious. Agaju shoots at the curiou
s from behind broken-out windows. You only have to kill someone once before they learn. Only a few townies bear the marks of Agaju’s education, treated as heretic plague. Examples of the priest’s wrath, for all to see. Hasn’t been a new one in years.

  Sleep tugs at him from beyond the walls of perception and he begins to sink. His eyes are still already closed. It’s so easy. He disappears, and he waits, and he listens, and in his dreams, he is not himself.

  Then, the parade. Leonel grinds the fuzz from his eyes and rises, watching them cross the glass eye of Ochosi’s scope. One by one by one by one. Men in tailcoats, women in ballgowns. They all wear masks, brutally rendered in exacting detail that turns his stomach. Wolves and coyotes with slavering jaws, birds with glassy, bloody eyes, insects with mandibles that click-click-clack in time with their steps. Some wear masks not of animals but of vile caricatures of human beings, faces Leonel knows from town, their features all mutant and obscene, artificial deformity.

  They wear these clothes to make the ritual auspicious. They wear the masks to hide their faces from the old man and each other. As if their supposed anonymity absolved them from colluding with the local necromancer. They hide in their masks, believing that they’re safe from Agaju and God and each other and themselves. Formality coupled with idiot superstition. As if they could keep him from seeing anything he wanted to. They listen to their fear and their confusion. They play futile coward. Agaju always laughs about it after they leave.