Sweet Talk (18 page)

“I haven’t decided yet,” Sparky said.

We had a party. We sat on the front steps of our quarters, Sparky, MacArthur, the dog, and I, and we ate all the chocolates at eight o’clock in the morning. We sat shoulder to shoulder, the four of us, and looked across the street through the trees at the river, and we talked about what we might be doing a year from then. Finally, we finished the chocolates and stopped talking and allowed the brilliant light of that morning to enter us.

Miss Bintz is the one who sent me the news about Sparky four months later.
BOY DROWNS IN SWIFT CURRENT
. In the newspaper story, Sparky takes the bus to Niagara Falls with two friends from Lewiston-Porter. It’s a searing July day, a hundred degrees in the city, so the boys climb down the gorge into the river and swim in a place where it’s illegal to swim, two miles downstream from the Falls. The boys Sparky is tagging along with—they’re both student-council members as well as football players, just the kind of boys Sparky himself wants to be—have sneaked down to this swimming place many times: a cove in the bank of the river, where the water is still and glassy on a hot
July day, not like the water raging in the middle of the river. But the current is a wild invisible thing, unreliable, whipping out with a looping arm to pull you in. “He was only three feet in front of me,” one of the boys said. “He took one more stroke and then he was gone.”

We were living in civilian housing not far from the post. When we had the windows open, we could hear the bugle calls and the sound of the cannon firing retreat at sunset. A month after I got the newspaper clipping about Sparky, the dog died. He was killed, along with every other dog on our block, when a stranger drove down our street one evening and threw poisoned hamburger into our front yards.

All that week I had trouble getting to sleep at night. One night I was still awake when the recorded bugle sounded taps, the sound drifting across the Army fences and into our bedrooms. Day is done, gone the sun. It was the sound of my childhood in sleep. The bugler played it beautifully, mournfully, holding fast to the long, high notes. That night I listened to the cadence of it, to the yearning of it. I thought of the dog again, only this time I suddenly saw him rising like a missile into the air, the red glory of his fur flying, his nose pointed heavenward. I remembered the dog leaping high, prancing on his hind legs the day he came back from Charlie Battery, the dog rocking back and forth, from front legs to hind legs, dancing, sliding across the ice of the post rink later that day, as Sparky,
MacArthur, and I played crack-the-whip, holding tight to each other, our skates careening and singing. “You’re AWOL! You’re AWOL!” we cried at the dog. “No school!” the dog barked back. “No school!” We skated across the darkening ice into the sunset, skated faster and faster, until we seemed to rise together into the cold, bright air. It was a good day, it was a good day, it was a good day.

Grateful thanks to the writers and other friends who made this book possible: John L’Heureux, D. R. MacDonald, Tobias Wolff, Ron Hansen, Neil McMahon, Jim Brown, Jan Freeman, James M. Siddens, Andrea Lunsford, Pamela Erbe, Georges Borchardt, Charles McGrath, Kate Medina, John Sterling, Daniel Halpern, Robert Morgan, Lamar Herrin, Barbara Vaughn, Stan Taft, Samantha Shea, Corinna Barsan, Marjorie DeWitt and, most of all, Michael Koch.

S
TEPHANIE
V
AUGHN
was born in Ohio and raised in Ohio, New York, Texas, Oklahoma, the Philippines, and Italy. She attended The Ohio State University, the University of Iowa and Stanford University. Her stories have appeared in
The New Yorker
as well as in a number of anthologies, including
American Short Stories Since 1945
, A Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction: Fifty North American Stories Since 1970
, and
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories
. She is a two-time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship and has received a Southern Review Award for Short Fiction. She is a professor of English at Cornell University.

T
OBIAS
W
OLFF
’s books include the memoirs
This Boy’s Life
and
In Pharaoh’s Army
; the short novel
The Barracks Thief
; four collections of stories,
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
,
Back in the World
,
The Night in Question
, and
Our Story Begins
, which received the Story Prize in 2009; and a novel,
Old School
. He has also edited several anthologies, among them
Best American Short Stories 1994
,
A Doctor’s Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov
, and
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories
. He teaches at Stanford University.