The Best American Short Stories 2014 (15 page)

“Long Tom. Affirmative.”

“Everything OK, Long Tom?”

“We've got a storm blowing in.”

“Copy that. Is there lightning?”

“Affirmative.”

“Is it close?”

“It's getting closer.”

“You know what to do. Turn off the propane and get off the radio.”

Lauren takes a deep breath to keep from crying.

Daniel says, “You're going to be all right, Long Tom.”

She wishes he would say her name. Rain lashes the windows. The boy begins to whimper. “Copy,” she says. “Clear.”

 

All night thunderstorms pass overhead, one after another, like the ghosts of a recurring dream. Lauren wakes after midnight to the air charged with electricity, her hair on end, something like a whisper at the nape of her neck. The forest shudders into view, collapses into darkness. The boy is jolted awake by thunder. Lauren holds him on one hip, whispers
one-potato-two
under her breath. She knows to account one mile for every five seconds between flash and thunder, knows it's getting closer. She thinks of the story the instructor told in training, how lightning once struck a chimney, coursed down the flue, jumped through the damper, and killed a lookout in his sleep.

Lauren extinguishes the lantern, turns off the propane, and drags the glass-insulated stool to the center of the room. She sits with her feet on the bottom rung, the boy on her lap. Together they wait. It is the waiting, she knows, that will kill her in the end. The hours upon hours of contemplation, of looking out the window for smoke, her thoughts knitting back to Keller. She is eight thousand feet above sea level and has never felt so alone. She thinks back to their last night together, and how, when he touched her hip beneath the sheets, she said, “How can you want to be with me when I am so far away?”

All at once the room fills with white light and the simultaneous boom of a thunderclap—the sound of an enormous whip being snapped—and she knows the lookout has been hit by lightning. The boy screams, and Lauren screams. He wants nothing more than to escape, and she wants nothing more than to let him go. She places her hands over his ears and forces him to stay put through the worst of it.

“We're OK,” she sings, her voice shaking.

 

The days press forward. Cloudbursts blow out the road and cut new creek channels. Wildflowers bloom without worry. Lauren checks in with dispatch and Stormy Peak Lookout twice a day. She suffers headaches from eyestrain, struggles to stay awake through the long northern days. It is a slow start to the fire season. Some days she listens to radio traffic if only to hear a voice that isn't hers, or the echo of the boy, who has taken to repeating her every word. At night, coyotes call from ridge to ridge. The sky is a graveyard of lights. She tells the boy there is a star for every ship lost at sea.

Three times a week Lauren ties one end of a rope around the boy's waist, the other around her own, and like two mountain climbers they make their way to the spring and back. It's a three-mile round trip with Lauren hauling buckets of water, and the boy tugging as he runs ahead. They bathe from a bucket of spring water warmed on the stove. So intent is the boy on examining the flecks of pyrite that shimmer and shift that he tips headfirst into the bucket, comes out spitting like a cat. Lauren stops shaving her legs, then her armpits. She wears sunscreen instead of makeup, pulls her hair into a ball cap, longs for a manicure, a grocery store, air conditioning.

Five days in a row they see the same domestic goat roping up the trail, a Nubian goat with a golden coat and a bell around its neck. It climbs the stairs of the lookout, rattles along the catwalk, bleating at the windows. Lauren radios dispatch, and they ask the few residents along the river if anyone has lost a pet. No one claims the goat. When at last the goat wanders off, the boy says only
goat
for two days. How about some lunch, Jonah?
Goat
. Are you tired, Jonah?
Goat
. Finally, they go out looking for the goat. Lauren tethers it to a twenty-foot rope and it mows everything from balsamroot to cheatgrass to Canada thistle around the lookout's perimeter. The boy feeds it snowberries from the palm of his hand.

In the evenings, the boy studies the road atlas, turning the pages, state after state, the way another child might study a picture book. Lauren takes his finger and traces their route from Texas to Idaho by way of Louisiana. She draws a little boat in the Gulf of Mexico. That night the boy begins tracing roadways in the atlas. He pencils over Interstate 80, from Cheyenne to Rock Springs, the road now a silver river on the map. He lies propped on his elbows, his hand curiously steady. His hair is fine and fair as a dandelion gone to seed, so unlike her husband's, which is thick and dark. And yet they resemble each other in many ways—the boy's dominant left hand, his cleft chin, the apples of his cheeks. Lauren reaches down and touches him on the head.

Other days are a fight. The boy resists eye contact and any recognition of Lauren's presence, her voice. He empties a bag of rice on the floor, feeds their cache of chocolate bars to the goat. He has taken to collecting rocks—nothing special by her eye, but to the boy they are gems—and arranging them into winding paths across the floor. If, and when, Lauren disrupts his roadway of rocks, the boy beats his head against the floor. He will take any map she leaves within reach. He will refuse to eat for no discernible reason. She must keep one eye on the horizon, one eye on the boy. She comes back from the outhouse and finds him flying the fire shelter like a kite. It catches in an updraft, snags in a pine bough, glinting like a three-hundred-dollar Christmas ornament.

Then it's July, bordering on hot after so many days of rain, the sun drawing slats of light across the concrete floor. Crickets sing, welcoming the heat. The boy sleeps red-faced and sweating, both arms above his head. Daniel arrives in a white Forest Service truck, a cloud of dust winding up the road. Lauren puts on deodorant and a clean shirt and helps him unload a roll of woven wire, a dozen lodgepole fence posts, and two bales of hay. “I figure I better get a pen built for that goat,” he says. “I don't want to scare you, but I've seen what a wolf can do to a calf. Believe me, it ain't pretty.”

He holds up a paper bag. “My wife made me bring these. I don't know if Jonah needs clothes, but I tried to take out everything pink.”

Lauren says, “He does, thank you. And thank Carol for thinking of us.”

They walk to the east side of the lookout where the goat works a sunflower between its teeth, root and all. The sky is stained lavender and coral and soon it will be dusk. Daniel reaches into his pocket, hands her a piece of folded paper. “It's from your mother,” he says. “If you need to go home, I can send up a replacement.”

Lauren reads the message once, then a second time. Her mother explains in perfect cursive that Keller is coming for the boy. Lauren looks across the valley and wonders if she didn't have the boy, would Keller come for her? She remembers an afternoon they spent on South Padre Island when she and Keller were newlyweds. A surf fisherman had hooked a seagull by mistake. The more the gull fought, the more it became entangled in the line, and soon the flock had moved down the beach without it. Eventually, the fisherman cut his line. The gull lifted, flew a few feet, and crashed back into the water. It carried on like that until Lauren couldn't watch anymore.

She asks Daniel, “Did you read this?”

He looks at his shoes. “We've all got our troubles.”

 

On the third of July, Lauren and the boy leave Long Tom Mountain for town. Lauren's sister, Desiree, and brother-in-law, Ted, and their four children are visiting from Coeur d'Alene. They're all camped in the backyard as Ted does something he calls grilling, but it smells a lot like burning. They've mowed a clearing in the grass, and the children have laid out a slat of plywood and an arsenal of illegal fireworks they picked up in Missoula. The two older boys light firecrackers in the chicken coop, cover their ears, and run.

Desiree is eight months pregnant. She has named her children after places she has never been: Branson, Lincoln, Trenton, and Madison. Lauren suggests Houston as a joke, and Desiree says it with different middle names: “Houston Lee? Houston Hope? Houston Marie?” No one says Keller's name, but Ted puts an extra burger on the grill. The women share looks of anticipation, simultaneously turning when a car door slams.

After dinner the children scatter, playing a game of hide-and-seek. The yard backs up to a calm stretch of river, but to either side the property is littered with junk cars, tires, broken bee boxes, a shed, and the chicken coop. They are waiting for true dark, for fireworks to pop and explode over Old Dump Hill. Desiree props her swollen feet on a stump. Lauren's mother brings out a transistor radio and tunes in the only station in town, and they listen to songs with “America” in the title. Ted struggles with the campfire, eventually dousing logs with lighter fluid and throwing in a match.

Desiree raises a hand to the flames, says, “Lordy, Ted. You trying to burn the place down?”

The boy darts across the yard in a red sweatshirt with
RODEO PRINCESS
spelled in rhinestone studs, a hand-me-down from Daniel's daughter. Lauren knows he isn't playing along so much as hiding from the other children, and she's surprised when Madison, Desiree's youngest, takes him by the hand. They crawl into an old drift boat, Lauren's father's boat, now overgrown with skeletonweed. Their small heads peek over the bow, and in that moment Lauren's life carries the semblance of normalcy. A calm before the storm, she thinks. Before she loses Keller to the boy, and the boy to Keller.

No, she thinks, they were never mine in the first place.

Ted retrieves a beer from the cooler and hands it to Lauren. “So your mother tells us you've been working at a lookout tower. Long John—”

“Long
Tom
,” Lauren says. “It was named after a miner that drowned.”

Desiree shudders. “I think I drowned in a previous life. That's why I'm scared of water. Ted doesn't believe in past lives, do you, Ted?”

“It's fire that scares me,” Ted says. “Burning to death.”

“Actually,” Lauren says, “the miner's real name was Joe Lockland. They packed his body upriver and ordered a coffin from town, but when it arrived it was too short.”

“A child's coffin?” Desiree says. “Oh, that's the worst. Remember the time we caught all those baby moles and put them in a shoebox and they died in the night? Remember, Lauren? And Daddy held a funeral in the backyard. Oh, bless his heart.”

“No, not a child's coffin. It's just that Tom was too long.”

“
Long
Tom,” Ted says. He looks to Desiree. “Get it, honey?”

“I get it,” Desiree says. “Why wouldn't I get it?”

Lauren makes slits of her eyes. It's after nine o'clock and twilight lingers. She scans the yard, searching for the boy's red sweatshirt. The children are hiding. It's eerily quiet. She thinks it's too late for them to play so close to the river.

Ted says, “So what'd they do with the body?”

Lauren stands, both hands on her hips. “They cut the tendons under the dead man's knees, bent his calves over his thighs, and nailed the coffin shut.”

Desiree gasps. Their mother says, “That's a terrible story. Just awful.”

Lauren doesn't see the boy anywhere. She walks into the yard. Trenton and Madison appear from behind a pile of tractor tires. Trenton holds Madison's hands behind her back like a caught criminal. The other two boys wait for the game to begin again. Lauren nearly yells when she says, “Where's Jonah?”

The children look at Lauren and then each other. Madison points. “He's in the tires,” she says. “He won! Jonah won the game!”

The adults clap and cheer. The boy runs out from behind the tires, keeps running across the yard, and Lauren chases after him, pretending he's too fast.

 

After everyone has gone to bed, Lauren turns on the television for any news about skimming vessels off the coast of Louisiana. It's Day 73 of the Deepwater Horizon disaster: over 140 million gallons of crude oil along 423 miles of coastline. Cleanup workers in Louisiana have reported symptoms from exposure to oil chemicals. CNN loops images of ruined beaches. There's a message drawn in the sand:
Spill, baby, spill
. Last week a charter-boat captain in Alabama put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

Lauren begins to worry. Four days ago Hurricane Alex forced boats to port in the Gulf of Mexico. Four days ago Keller called Lauren's mother, but nobody's heard from him since. For the first time Lauren admits that leaving Keller wasn't so much about leaving, but wanting him to acknowledge her absence, and now she feels like a child. She doesn't know if Keller is traveling by car, or by plane and then by car. The closest airports—Idaho Falls and Missoula—are both three hours away. Her mother gets up for a glass of water and says what Lauren is thinking: “What if something happened?”

Lauren steals a pack of cigarettes from Ted's coat pocket, smokes, pacing the dark garage. She raises the glowing ember to her father's ghost, says, “Would you look at us now?” Then she does what she promised herself she wouldn't do. She calls Keller.

His voice sounds small and far away. “Where are you?” she asks.

“Laurie?” A pause. He clears his throat. “I'm in New Orleans. Where are you?”

Lauren cups her hand around the phone and yells in a whisper: “I'm in
Idaho
at my goddamn
mother's
with your
son
, which you know perfectly well.”

She can hear Keller breathing, wheezing. He discharges the inhaler, takes a deep breath. His asthma has worsened over the years and it's easier to imagine him on the deck of a trawler clutching his chest than as a high school athlete setting pole-vault records. “Are you OK?” she says. “My mother said you were coming.”