The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (22 page)

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In our room that evening, after the fishing, we could hear people out by the pool talking loudly and laughing. We heard the splashes of people hitting the water and the thumping of the diving board, on its fulcrum, in the splashes’ wake. A woman cried out, Stop! Oh, stop it! Laughter rose and drowned in the humid salty darkness, and I lay in bed and listened long into the night to the sound of cars cruising past on the cooling white-slab highway along the beach. My father snored lightly, while my mother, next to him, and Hal in the bunk above me lay in their beds as still as the dead. The Gulf breezes puffed against the windows, slipped between seams, and drifted through the chilled air of the room like coastal ghosts released from their tight invisibility, sustained for a while by the softly exhaled breath of the living.

My brother met another boy and began going off with him, around the Alamo’s grounds or at the pool or, when I’d followed them to the highway, across to the beach, where I wasn’t allowed without an adult. He became more of an absence, and so I drifted into the same safe quietude where I spent most of my time anyway, where most middle children spend their time.

At some point in my childhood I began to feel emotionally estranged from my family, although I loved my mother and father and tolerated my brothers as well as anyone else. I had fantasies of belonging to other families instead of my own—families of friends or even families I hardly knew, such as the missionary family from our church that spent part of every year in Pakistan. Or an imaginary family. When you are quiet, you are different, which makes everyone a little nervous and suspicious. It seems a small thing, unless you’re the child who’s aware of it. I was at ease if left alone in my room to read comics, comfortable alone in the large tract of woods bordering our cul-de-sac street. I loved spying on others walking in the woods when I was hidden and could see them without their seeing me. Sometimes I looked into windows
at night, but only at ordinary things. People eating supper, or watching television. No undressing or showers or such. I only wanted to experience the mystery of seeing things as they were when I essentially did not exist to alter them. If you were quiet and still, it was almost as if you weren’t there. It was like being a ghost, curious about the visible world and the creatures in it. As if you were dreaming it, and not a part of the dream but there somehow, unquestioned or unknown.

One day Hal asked permission to go out with his new friend’s family on a charter fishing boat. They would have to leave very early, before dawn. I determined to rise then, too, and see him off. But I wasn’t able to, and no one woke me, so I didn’t get up until light was seeping into the sky over the Sound. I rushed outside onto the motel lawn, stood there barefoot in the dew and the cool heavy breeze, and looked out across the water. On the horizon I could see the gray silhouette of a big ship, which in my memory’s surviving image appears to be a tanker of some kind, an oceangoing vessel. But at that moment, on the lawn, I thought it must be the boat Hal had gone on with his new friend and family—these people I’d never spoken to, whom I’d only watched from across the lawn, complete strangers to me and already fast friends with Hal. Watching the ghostly ship far out in the Sound, I had the strongest feeling that he’d gone away and would never return. It was something I couldn’t quite grasp just yet, someone going so far out in the water on a boat that you can’t see him anymore, and then coming back in. I was very sad, thinking that he was gone forever. And I have lost the memory of his returning from the fishing trip to the motel. I’ve often wondered why I felt so much sadder then than I did when he died. Anticipation is expansive in the imagination. Memory is reductive, selective. And any great moment must be too much to absorb in that moment, without the power of genius or mental illness. When Hal died, years later,
it seemed like the completion of something I’d been watching and waiting for all that time.

His last words, as the other car tumbled toward them out of control, were a blurted “Look out!” A driver’s warning to his friends in the car. I doubt that alone saved anyone, but the survivors told me they remembered him shouting this just before they blacked out.

My father’s last words, as he pressed his hand to the base of his neck, were “Something’s wrong.”

If my mother had any last words, they are a secret, as she was old and alone. And if any words formed in her mind as she lay unconscious and slowly dying on her bedroom floor, no one will ever know what they were.

It’s hard to remember Hal in very specific ways. He was a small boy, and then a small man. I did not remember him that way, since he was four years older, and so until I was into my later teens he was larger than I was. I remember how shocking it was when, a couple of years after his death, I went into his room and tried on one of his shirts. It was tight across the shoulders, too short in the sleeves. I had thought he was at least as tall as I was and stockier, but he was not. He had just always carried himself like a larger boy and man.

A second child will always feel displaced by the first. People say it’s the other way around but it’s not. Later in life there are the photographs you discover of your older sibling, before you were born, with one or both of your parents. It’s then, after you’ve had children yourself and know the experience in your own life, that you understand the bond between the new, young parents and their first child. You understand how miraculous and illuminating it is. You know how the experience has remade the whole world for the parents, and how the only child’s world, entirely new in the magnificent, solipsistic way only an only child’s world can be,
eclipses all else, and when the second child comes along it is only as if the eclipsing body has moved aside, moved along in its path. The parents’ sense of wonder has passed, leaving behind a washed-out and dazed sense of deep and cathartic change, a knowledge that such an experience will never be repeated for anyone in that little world, which leaves them somehow diminished. And as the second child you realize this when you are older and your memories have been informed, in a slow infusion of understanding, by the old photographs taken before you were even conceived.

Hal was a prodigy, in many ways a typical first child in that he was precocious, gregarious, fearless, bestowed at birth with the grandest, most natural sense of entitlement. Every first child is a king or queen. A prince or princess, an enfant terrible of privilege and favor. And Hal was talented. When he was three, he learned the words to the popular song “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier” and sang it so adorably that our parents secured a recording session for him down at a downtown radio station.

He was introduced by George Shannon, a local radio and television personality. I imagine Hal wearing his cowboy outfit: a black hat, black sequined shirt, black pants, black filigreed cowboy boots, a toy six-shooter in a toy holster on his belt. He probably wasn’t wearing this outfit, since it had nothing to do with Davy Crockett, but there’s a framed photo of Hal at about that age, wearing that outfit, which hung for decades on our mother’s living room wall, and so that’s how I see him then. A musical cousin, Doc Taylor, strummed the song’s tune on a guitar, and Hal sang the song in his piping voice.

Weeld
—that was how he pronounced “wild,” like some kind of flamboyant elf.

In the background on the recording, toward the end of the song, you can hear a baby crying a little fitfully, fussing. That was me, only a few weeks old, trying, as would become usual, to assert myself, to little avail.

This recording was of course a precious possession, always, but it became all the more so after Hal’s early death, when he was a young man only recently married. It disappeared after the accident, and my mother bitterly accused Hal’s widow of having taken it for herself. I took this for the truth. And then, many years later, after my mother’s death, I found the record beneath a stack of papers and documents in a dresser drawer in her bedroom.

Well, no, said one of my cousins. It was never lost, not that I know of.

She never told you that Sophie had taken it?

No, my cousin said. She never said that to me.

I could have sworn she’d told me the recording was missing, stolen, possibly destroyed out of spite. But even the memory of her telling me that comes from so long ago now that I can no longer be sure.

The day after Hal’s fishing trip there were a few people out at the pool, a woman with two toddlers down in the shallow end, a few grown-ups in loungers along the apron. The big fat man who must have been the one jumping and doing cannonballs the night before was again on the diving board, leisurely bouncing and looking around, as if this were simply his place. He bounced easily, the board bending beneath his great weight and bringing him slow as an elevator back up again. His toes hung over the end, his arms at his sides, and he nodded to the four of us as we walked up.

Two men holding cans of beer stood on the pool’s apron, watching the big man on the board, and Hal sat at the edge of the pool in front of them, his legs over the edge and his feet in the
water. He, too, watched the man, with a rapt expression, as if he expected something either wondrous or entertaining to happen. Across the highway the beach was empty. The Sound lay flat and brown in the sun’s glare.

Morning, the man called out to our mother. She smiled and nodded back. Morning, sir, our father said in his clear baritone sales voice. From my spot at the three-foot mark, I called good morning to the man, too, and he called back with a little salute and a wave, Morning, young man.

Standing there bouncing.

A long, big-boned woman lying flat out on a lounger, with a big broad hat over her face, called to him. The voice came from her, but you couldn’t see her face. The hat didn’t move. Harry, she said to the man. Don’t go splashing all over creation.

The man looked at her, still bouncing, then looked at me and smiled and winked. He pivoted and walked back to the base end of the board and turned back around.

Harry, the woman said.

The big man rose on his toes. It looked comical, the action of a much lighter, fitter man. He spread his arms like a ballerina, ran tiptoeing down to the end of the board, and came down heavily. The board slowly flung him up. He descended in a cannonball, leaning in the woman’s direction, and sent up a high sheet of water that drenched her pretty good. She sat up and adjusted the wet floppy hat on her head. Harry swam to the pool’s edge, turned, and grinned at Hal and me. I turned around and looked at our mother. She was staring at the man and woman, her mouth cocked into a curious smile. She saw me looking and picked up a magazine and started reading it. Our father sat in a deck chair in his swim trunks, his elbows on his knees like a man watching a baseball game. A can of Jax beer rested on the concrete apron between his white feet.

I heard the board bend, release, and bounce against its fulcrum, and a broad shapeless shadow darted onto the dimpled surface of
the pool. There again was Harry suspended in all his bulk high in the air, a diving mule pushed off the circus platform. At the last second he tucked his head and rolled over onto his shoulders, sending an arc of water toward the mother with her two toddlers in the shallow end. They screwed up their faces, cringing. When the water settled they all three turned, dripping, to stare at Harry, the mother annoyed, the children bewildered.

That’s enough, Harry, the woman said. She’d snatched her hat off and I saw she was wearing a man’s heavy black sunglasses, like our father’s, and her wide mouth was painted bright red, her hair frizzled and graying.

All right, sorry, Harry said.

But as soon as the woman had pulled the hat brim back down over her eyes, Harry was up and tiptoeing back to the diving board. He made shushing gestures to all of us, a finger to his lips. At the shallow end, the mother hustled her toddlers from the pool, grabbed up their things, and headed for their room.

Harry was poised at the base of the board. He spread his arms, rose on his toes, and pranced down its length. He swung his arms above his head, scrunched his big body down like a compressed spring. The board bent almost to the surface of the water, seemed to hesitate there, then cracked and split down its length and tossed Harry awkwardly into the air.

He hit the water with a loud, flat smack. The fissured board bounced a couple of clackity times and lay still. Harry floated motionless as the rocking water lapped the edges of the pool. A little scarlet cloud bloomed around him. Then he jerked into a flurry of motion. His head rose up and he bellowed, then sank down again.

The big woman shouted and stood up from her lounger, her hat tumbling into the grass. The two men standing poolside leaped into the water. They managed to subdue Harry and pull him to the pool’s edge. The woman stood rigid, watching them, her mouth hanging open. Then she closed it with a clap and her
face took on what looked like a long-practiced expression of disgust. Other people came and helped drag Harry out onto the concrete apron. He made a groaning, desperate sound. Blood leaked from a wound on his foot. One of the men who’d helped rescue him pulled a car around, and he and the other man helped Harry into it. The woman got into the backseat beside Harry and they drove away, to the hospital, I suppose.

I walked over to the diving board, leaned down low, and looked at the split board, its two pieces splayed, blond splinters sticking out like bleached porcupine quills. Hanging there jammed tight in the divide was a small blunt wedge drained of color. It appeared to be Harry’s little toe.

It was fantastic. It made the whole trip.

Our mother was horrified, of course. One year, a drowning. The next, a dismembered toe. Not so disturbing as a death, but awful in its own way. I think it settled deeply into her subconscious, one more augury of vague misfortune looming.