The Best American Short Stories 2018 Read online

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. “She ran. She was trying to get away from the thing. I saw it.” But I did believe him.

  Jenny looked in his mailbox. There was nothing inside but a few crumpled papers. Someone miles away was burning trash.

  He pulled his rattail over his shoulder and arranged it in the middle of his chest. “I’ve been feeding him,” he said. “The cougar.”

  He told me he’d been setting out meat for him for a while now. “I know he killed Koda, and I’m sorry, but being hungry’s no one’s fault. Everyone’s hungry, everyone’s got to eat.”

  I could taste the burning garbage on my tongue.

  “I’d like you to keep feeding him for me, when I’m not around,” Jenny continued. “That’s one thing I need you to do for me.”

  He got me a cold beer with a soggy label, which I took but did not drink.

  Jenny told me I reminded him of a son he once dreamed he had. He squeezed my armpit. It was horrible, standing there, listening to him. I remembered an old man I’d seen in the restaurant trying to get the plastic wrapper off his straw. You could tell it was important to him to get the wrapper off, and he kept trying. Finally, he set the straw down, and the waitress came over and undid it for him.

  Jenny pulled open his mailbox again, and still nothing was there but those crumpled papers.

  A few nights later I saw the cougar again. He was walking about twenty feet from my living room toward Jenny’s trailer. His eyes were the size of clementines—big, black clementines. He was moving slowly, swinging his head low to the ground, looking toward my trailer and away and back again. I didn’t want the cougar to have killed Koda, to have given my dog a scary, painful death. But there it was. I couldn’t believe the way this lone thing walked, placing each foot heavily down, shifting one shoulder bone, then the other. His fur was gray in the dark. His tail was as big around as a bull snake. I could make out a pink smear on his flank where a wound might have healed. He made his way to Jenny’s trailer, paused outside, and continued on into the trees.

  Jamel Brinkley

  A Family

  from Gulf Coast

  Curtis Smith watched from across the street as the boy argued with Lena Johnson in front of the movie theater. She had probably bought tickets for the wrong movie. Or maybe Andre didn’t want to see any movie with his mother on a Friday night. Her expression went from pleading to irate. The boy said nothing more. With his head taking on weight, hung as though his neck couldn’t hold it, he followed as she went inside.

  It was a chilly evening in November, the sky threatened by rain. Curtis blew warm breath into his cupped hands. Obedience, he thought, he could talk to the boy about that. He’d been making a list of topics they could discuss. The question of obedience was right for a boy of fifteen, when the man he would become was beginning to erupt out of him like horns. Though sometimes it was important to disobey. Curtis had known this since he was younger than the boy was now. Twelve years in prison hadn’t changed that, and so Curtis was here, doing what his mother had asked him that morning not to do anymore. He’d been seen watching Andre and Lena, and his mother’s friends were gossiping about what they saw. Maybe Curtis still had a grudge against Lena, they said, or maybe he simply couldn’t let go of the past. He didn’t care what his mother or her friends said. A man decided his own way, and there came a time when a boy growing into his manhood had to as well. Unless your balls haven’t dropped yet. Curtis could say that to the boy, teasing him the way he and the boy’s father, Marvin Caldwell, used to tease each other when they were young. Marvin dreamed most vividly of everything he would do for his mother one day, but even he knew to disobey her.

  Curtis took a last look at the names of the movies and tried to guess which one Andre might have wanted to see, which one Lena would have chosen instead. He counted his money. He’d only spent twelve of the forty dollars his mother had left for him, so he decided to get a bite to eat while he waited for the movie to end. At the Downtown Bar and Grill, an old favorite, he ordered a hamburger and soda. Refills were no longer free, so Curtis kept asking for glasses of water. From where he sat he could still see the brilliance of the marquee.

  The rain began before Andre and Lena came out of the theater, but they took a walk anyway. Curtis followed them. Lena opened an umbrella that was large enough for two, but as they strolled along the promenade Andre kept drifting away from her, exposing his body to the cold drizzle. Lena stopped at a bench and used a piece of newspaper to wipe it dry. Andre maintained a distance from her when they sat. Curtis stalled for a few moments, and then settled near the middle of the next bench. A large trash can partially blocked his view of them, but he could hear their conversation.

  “Your daddy liked to come out here,” Lena was saying.

  “You told me that before,” Andre said. Curtis had been following them for weeks, but had rarely been this close. He’d never heard them talk about Marvin.

  “Well, it’s nice, isn’t it? Look at that view.”

  Andre gestured at the rain. “I can’t see nothing.”

  Curtis had been out on the promenade several times since he’d been released from prison. There was plenty to see, he thought. A great, unseen hand depressed the keys of the city, sounding notes held constant in the many windows, a thousand little squares of humming light. These seemed to float independently, since the tall buildings themselves, their outlines obscured, were indistinguishable from the black enamel seal of the sky. The night grew more thickly clouded by storm, but in the shifting bands of reflected light from the bridge and the city, Curtis could see the surface of the river alive and puckered like so many restless mouths. Given all the nights he’d spent here since getting out, it felt like a triumph that he no longer thought of feeding himself to the water.

  “Why we out here, Ma?” Andre asked. “It’s wet. I’m cold.”

  “It’s not so bad under the umbrella.”

  “Can we go?”

  “I just thought you’d like to stay out a while longer. Might as well enjoy it now. I need you to be at home tomorrow.”

  “For what?”

  “You know how the girls from work go out to Temptations after our shift,” Lena said. “Well, this time they finally invited me.”

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday, Ma.”

  “I know what day it is. And I need you to be at home. For my peace of mind.”

  “While you out shaking your ass at the club.”

  “What’d you say, boy?”

  “Nothing,” Andre said. “I’m cold.” He stood and started walking back the way they’d come.

  Lena chased after him, sounding pathetic as she called his name.

  Curtis didn’t follow. After a while, he got up and strolled along the promenade in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. The only other person he saw was a man with an unsettling face. The man’s bouts of muttering formed clouds that flowered like visible emblems of his secret language before being pulled apart by the wind. But it was the way this man’s hands jumped within his dirty coat as he shuffled along that marked him as dangerous and insane. Curtis had been both of these things, in those months after Marvin died in the fire. Those months before Curtis went to prison. It was danger lurking in the man’s left pocket, he suspected, and insanity leaping around in the right. He liked the feeling of their passing him by.

  Curtis huffed the name of his long departed friend—my dead friend, he told himself soberly—so he could see the wind take it, imagining that it too, along with the words steaming from the man’s mouth, drifted off and seeded the East River. The river was badly polluted, but he liked it anyway. It flowed in either direction, reaching both ways until it licked the sea. As the man prattled on, now some distance away, Curtis again said Marvin’s name, which rose from his lips and hovered there for a moment, clean as an unstrung bone.

  He might have also said the name of the dead woman, the one he had struck with his car, the one who intruded on his dreams. But his life was for other
things now, he’d been desperately telling himself, beautiful and wondrous things.

  The rain began turning to sleet, the sound of it an exhalation steadily hushing the world. Curtis indulged his sense of feeling contained but not trapped. Under the capacious dome of sky he was free, but bounded, so his newly freed limbs wouldn’t fly apart. As much as he wanted to stay there on the promenade—often he stayed until the spell of night began to break—the sleet was penetrating his slicker and the thin coat he wore underneath. His hands and feet were already numb. Curtis shivered. It wouldn’t make any damn sense to get out of the clink just to turn around and catch his death of cold. He walked quickly to keep the chill from settling into his muscle and marrow.

  The next night, Curtis walked along Atlantic Avenue, not far from the movie theater and the Downtown Bar and Grill. It was eleven o’clock and he was enjoying the bustle and breadth of the thoroughfare. He was still amazed at how much had changed: the number of fancy restaurants and wine stores now. Then again, many of the old bars remained. And the new nightclubs were just the old nightclubs with different names.

  An empty bus made its way past, the driver lit against its dark frame like an insect stuck in amber. On the corner stood a white woman trying in vain to hail a medallion cab, and Curtis stood beside her, as though waiting to cross the street. She wasn’t dressed for the weather, wearing only a trim jacket and a scarf over her short dress. Her uncovered head twitched, shaking her cropped hair from her lips; her legs were thin but shapely, the color of rich cream. She was what Marvin used to call a “slim goody.” Curtis imagined how soft the inside of her thighs would be. He imagined her open mouth.

  It had been a long time since he’d had sex with anyone but himself, with his own clutching hand. In those first years in prison, he kept an old black-and-white picture of the actress Marpessa Dawn taped to the wall. Following those first years of her smiling in the swimming pool came explicit pictures of women opening their shiny, hairless bodies to the camera. When he first got out of prison he bought a couple of magazines with centerfolds, but then he discovered how easily videos could be found on his mother’s computer. He still liked that picture of the actress in the pool most of all.

  The white woman’s phone began ringing, and she greeted the caller, apparently her mother, the simple words strained by her tone of heavy familiarity. The second Curtis heard her speak, a feeling of exhaustion overcame him; she reminded him, for some reason, of the woman he had struck with his car. But if that woman had been white, Curtis knew, he would still be in prison, with many more years there ahead of him. To get away from the voice now whining into the phone, he jogged across the street.

  In front of Temptations, three men were lined up behind a black velvet rope. The bouncer wore dark glasses and appeared to have no intention of letting the three in. Curtis took his place in line as the first man began to complain.

  “Come on now, chief. We been waiting out here for a minute.”

  “Damn near a half hour,” another said. “Say it straight.”

  “And the hawk is out, big man. Come on.”

  The bouncer said nothing. Another man got in line behind Curtis as a livery taxi pulled up. Three women got out and were followed by Lena Johnson, an afterthought. The bouncer wasted no time letting them in.

  Waiting with the other men in line gave Curtis plenty of time to reconsider going in, even after Lena’s arrival. In fact, he tried to change his mind, calling up reasons he should—images of the promenade, of the white woman on the corner—but it was Lena’s nyloned legs emerging from the taxi that were lit up on the stage of his mind. Moving slowly in a sapphire dress, she trailed the other women. The shock of seeing her dolled up was slight, but after she vanished through the door, every scene that proceeded on the stage of his mind featured the nylons and the sapphire dress and ended in foolishness. He kept thinking about Andre imagining these scenes unfold or trying to decipher his mother’s face tomorrow during the broadcasts of Sunday afternoon football. The boy needed to be spared his mother’s small tragedies.

  About fifteen minutes later, the bouncer announced to the men that it would be a ten-dollar cover to get in, speaking as if they had only just arrived. He examined Curtis’s clothes doubtfully before admitting him. Curtis wore jeans, but they weren’t that dirty; the real problem was that he had on work boots instead of what Marvin would have called “slippery earls.” This outfit wouldn’t have gotten him into the places they used to frequent, back in the days when they used fake IDs.

  “Good luck, playboy,” the bouncer said. He stepped aside to let Curtis through the curtains. “Your broke ass gonna need it.”

  The nightclub had two floors. Curtis didn’t spot Lena on the ground level, so he went down to the basement. He took a seat at the bar that gave him a good view of the room and recognized certain features: the low ceiling with its copper tiles, the four pillars that marked the boundary of the dance floor. He and Marvin had been here before, when there was only a basement level. The place used to be called Nelson’s.

  Curtis had extra money from an odd job helping his mother’s neighbor move some boxes, plus what was left of yesterday’s forty dollars. It was easier than he thought it would be to order a bourbon. The words didn’t get stuck; the bartender didn’t stare. The taste of the drink closed his eyes and warmed him from his throat to his navel.

  The music blasting in the club sounded like pure racket, but this wasn’t new. While he liked some of the rap other boys listened to when they were growing up, Curtis was always drawn to older music, songs from the 1960s and ’70s. All right, old man. Marvin had a great time teasing him about this. Look at the old head tryna get his groove! He’d mock Curtis by bending over and holding his lower back, two-stepping with an imaginary cane.

  Lena and her friends were already out there shaking their bodies, each with a drink in hand. Some new dances must have caught on from the music videos. As he watched, Curtis felt he was a man true to better times. He returned to the problem of Andre, how he’d manage to talk to the boy and what his first words would be. After a while, a tall man in a suit came up behind Lena and began to whisper in her ear. She laughed. Soon she had backed herself into him and they were fused in body and time. She pursed her lips and slapped her thigh with her free hand as they danced. Although he and Lena were the same age, thirty-five, Curtis was upset to see her carrying on like this. Feeling sorry for the boy and, somehow, for Marvin, he wished he had just gone to the promenade. He ordered another bourbon.

  Lena and the man in the suit talked for a while at a different side of the bar. He had bought her another drink, but the smile was gone from her eyes. She seemed much less engaged now that they weren’t dancing. The man must have noticed this too. He tried to pull her back onto the dance floor, but she refused. The man tried a few more times and then his mouth turned cruel. He appeared to curse at Lena before he walked away.

  She stood at the bar for a while, staring into her drink. Then she tossed it back, the entire pour, and drew from her purse a thin cigarette that looked cold in her brown fingers. She said something to one of the women she’d come in with and went past Curtis upstairs. For a moment it seemed that her gaze had fallen on him, but in places like this people’s eyes darted everywhere. He followed her. From the entrance, he saw her smoking out near the curb. Her coat was still checked inside and with her purse pinned under her arm she held herself, trembling against the cold. She dropped her cigarette and watched it smolder and die on the ground. She could have been some kind of bird staring down from a high perch, wings pinched against her blue body, refusing to fly.

  “Hey playboy,” the bouncer said. “You leaving or what? It’s in or out, my man.”

  As Lena took out another cigarette and began the drama of lighting it, Curtis walked back into the club. He stayed on the ground floor this time, where the music seemed not quite as loud. Sipping from his third bourbon, he thought about how easy it had been to go from his first to his third, and beyon
d, on the night the girl was struck by his car. Dismissing this, he wondered instead about what Andre was doing, if he too was taking advantage of his freedom or compounding the little tragedies of the night by sitting timidly at home. A boy his age should be in the world, seeing as much as he could claim or aspire to. He should be terrified by the new sensation of a girl’s modest breasts in his hands, by the new sensation of her hands in his jeans, not by thoughts of his mother in a short dress playing at youth out here in the drunkenness of night. They were thirty-five, yes, but they were old. The boy was still young and he had his father’s face. Curtis had gotten close enough to see that. His face was the same, but his fate wouldn’t be.

  Curtis smelled the tobacco on her breath before he felt her cold hand on his shoulder.

  “You might as well come on,” Lena said.

  When he spun around on his barstool to look at her, she grabbed his drink and finished it in one swift motion. “Come on and dance with me,” she said.

  He allowed her to lead him to the dance floor, less crowded than the one downstairs. He bent his knees, searching for their bodies’ fit—it turned out he hadn’t forgotten this, how to accommodate the body of a woman. They danced to old lovers’ rock. Her breasts were crushed against his ribs, his leg planted between hers. She held his shoulder and rode his hip. He touched a hand to her back and found skin there, exposed and sweaty.

  She was clearly drunk, and he, with the bourbon at work in his blood, had the impression that he was anonymous to her. He wished he could vanish on the spot and leave her to her phantom, but something begged him to stay. It didn’t seem sexual—his body had yet to respond in that way to hers—so, he told himself, it had to be his obligation to the boy. But it felt like something more bewildering than an obligation. The yearning didn’t belong to him, and it didn’t belong to her either. It was beyond either of them, he felt, so it claimed them both. It was as though a bright delicate object they couldn’t see, some filament, were held between them, along the length of her sapphire dress stretched taut by his thigh, the spark of it hot where he carried her on his hip, moving her in the rhythm of his stationary stride, and they had no choice but to pull each other close, to preserve the object between them, otherwise it would drift free and fall and lose its light. The exhilaration of her breathing and her slim clutching thighs and her hand pulling on his shoulder were the forces she exerted on him, and he carried her with his hip and his knees bent and his back dimly aching, but all that mattered was the fragile wire pressed between them, lit by something they could neither face nor abandon.