The PEN,O Henry Prize Stories 2011 Part 13

"Show me where you live," Rado said as they shared a cigarette.

She drew a map of France in the air with her finger and pointed to the center. "It's not much of a town, more like a village."

"I thought you taught in the city."

She wondered if he knew what it was like for black men in the small villages. "Yes," she said. "It is only a short ride by train."

"I've always wanted to see it. The grave of Baudelaire."

Was that the beginning? The opening? Would he bring up not having enough for a ticket? Could she lend him the money? Was that how this kind of thing went? In the hospital she had interrupted her husband's deathbed confession and said, "You're cruel." He thought she meant the affair he was revealing, but she meant his telling her so many years later. If she had known at the time, when she was a young woman, perhaps she would have stayed with him. Perhaps she would have had her own affair. She did not know. But he had robbed her of the choice.

Rado looked up at the coconut tree over their heads. "Do you want one?"

She nodded. And then he was gone. Feet flat on the trunk, he climbed toward the fronds. His pink heels looked tender against the leathered trunk, and she felt a twinge of pity. Here, or in France, he would rise to become head of a school district. He would wear bow ties. A coconut thumped down beside her. "Too close?" he yelled.

She picked up the coconut and handed it to him when, breathing heavily, he returned to the ground. "You looked smaller from up there," he said. He husked the coconut, then slammed the point of a pocket knife into its eyes. He pressed the coconut to Bernadette's mouth, and the water spilled over her chin. She pushed the coconut away. He kissed her neck.

"Don't," she said.

He put the coconut to his own mouth and drank.

"I'm sorry," he said when he was done. "It's too soon for you. My father has been gone ten years, but my mother still can't look at his picture without weeping."

Bernadette was surprised by how his words stung. "It's not that," she said. "I'm not thirsty."

"So let's not drink." He threw the coconut down the beach and leaned into her again. She imagined how he would write about this moment: the crashing waves, the fluttering palms. But her heart was thumping. She unb.u.t.toned her shirt.

Bernadette and Rado were seen walking back from the beach, without bags or towels, her hair down, her hand in his. That evening, at dinner, the women couldn't look down the table without imagining that elegant mouth on Bernadette's. Rado, too big for his chair, seemed to them dangerous and fragile. In Bernadette, as she pa.s.sed the bowl of salad and salted her fish, the women watched for some sign of regret, but she was straight shouldered and quiet, her hair back in its chignon. Each of the women, for her own reasons, was resolute. They went to bed having decided what they must do.

The next morning as Bernadette left cla.s.s, the Director called her into his office. When he was done talking, Bernadette said, "You patronize him. Is it his youth or his color?"

"It is the abuse of power," the Director said. "You are his instructor."

"We did nothing wrong," she said. That was all she would give him. She had decided so at dinner the previous night as she and Rado were bathed in sidelong stares. Or perhaps the preparation started earlier, when she walked away from her roommate without answering the woman's question. "I'll go," she said. "Leave him be."

Outside, she pa.s.sed students reading under a baobab tree, playing a game of checkers on the gra.s.s. She thought of the papers being stacked, the blackboards being wiped, behind the cloudy cla.s.sroom windows. What would they talk about now? She sat in her room, bags by the door, and read for a while, then looked out the window to watch the sky drift down into the trees. She recalled the softness of Rado's hand as they walked back from the beach. He started to let go as the trees thinned for the buildings, but she held on tighter. For the first time since his death, she felt tenderness toward her husband. He thought he was seeking her forgiveness, but he also wanted her rage.

"You shouldn't have come," she said after opening the door for Rado.

"They're too busy toasting their victory to notice." He sat on the edge of the bed. "I know you took the blame. Your roommate told me."

"She saw it coming," Bernadette said.

"What will happen to you?"

"Nothing of consequence."

"You threw yourself on the sword," he said. "Why?"

It was the first time he'd asked a real question, and for a moment she believed that they were what he seemed to think they were: tragic lovers. But then he smiled, and she wasn't sure what he thought. "I leave that to you," she said.

Some of the women sought the book. Others stumbled on it. He looked mostly the same despite the time that had pa.s.sed, but there was less fierceness in his jaw. He was the first man from the island to win such a prestigious award. They flipped through the pages in bookstores, in bed, on the couch, looking for something they recognized. They didn't know where truth ended and poetry began. They didn't know if he climbed a tree to pick a coconut or if she punctured the eyes with her thumbs. Did she undress him like a mother? Did a thicket of palm fronds grow over the sky? They didn't know if the ocean claimed the empty sh.e.l.l, which floated around the Horn of Africa and past the icebergs of the north. They didn't know if the coconut still traveled, studded with barnacles and bleached by salt. There was so much they didn't know.

Adam Foulds.

The Rules Are the Rules.

He would have to begin any minute now; everyone else was there: the half-dozen dads on each sideline, the boys shoaling up and down the pitch with a couple of practice b.a.l.l.s. They were getting boisterous. He stood up tall and scanned beyond the field of play to the edges of the park. To his left, the low autumn sun shone heavily into his eyes. Elsewhere it made the colors rich, pulled long shadows from the trees. Nothing. Walkers with dogs. Mothers with pushchairs. A cyclist zoomed silently along a path, spokes glittering, and disappeared for an instant behind the back of one of the fathers, who held a baby astride his right hip. Maybe eighteen months old. It narrowed its eyes in the breeze, soft hair lifted from its forehead. It held one arm up and tried to grasp with its curling fingers the moving air.

"Rev, are we gonna start?"

"Yes, we are. I was just waiting for Jack. Let's get those b.a.l.l.s off the pitch."

When Reverend Peter blew his whistle he saw a few shoulders in Jack's team drop with disappointment. The boys moved slowly into position. Peter carried the match ball to the spot on his fingertips and just as he placed it, rolling it precisely with his boot, he heard a shout. It was Jack running toward them. He had sprinted ahead of his father, whose tiny, bag-carrying form rose and fell far away, laboriously shrugging off the distance.

Peter didn't particularly like Jack. The boy had one of those innocent, insolent faces with an upturned nose and styled brown hair. He was ten and he had a hairstyle. He looked too much like the cinema's idea of a boy, too much like everybody's idea of a boy, and this made him vain. He was vain of his footballing skills in particular. Moreover, he had a professional's tendency to foul, to fake, and to celebrate his goals with excessive displays, running with his arms outstretched, his shirt pulled up over his head to reveal his white, muscled body, his blind mauve nipples. He was strong and pretty and cruel, at least in his careless mastery. Peter's sympathy was elsewhere. It was his natural Christianity perhaps; he felt himself with the boys who weren't as fit or as sure of themselves, the frightened ones. Those boys, however, lit up when Jack joined them.

"You're late."

"It was traffic. My dad ..."

"People are getting annoyed. Just get into position. Right." He pulled a fifty-pence piece from his pocket and pointed at the opposing captain. "You."

"Heads."

He flipped it up in a spin, swatted it down onto the back of his hand. "Heads it is." He raised his arm, blew his whistle, and the game began.

The low sun was awkward, flashing uncomfortably whenever the game turned in its direction and heating one side of him. His neck sweated as he ran between the shouting fathers. With sharp blasts of his whistle he cut the game into sections until there was a long period of fluid play when it found its rhythm, the boys in midfield bustling back and forth quietly, the defense lines pulled forward, pushed back. After minutes of this the boys tired and the game degraded into a series of pointless long kicks, the ball lofted practically from goal mouth to goal mouth. At the end of one run up the pitch, at the end of the tether of his breath, Peter slowed to a standstill. He turned when he heard a baby crying. He saw the child rearing up on its father's hip, its face red and mouth wide. Clear globes of tears stood on its cheeks. Its small fists trembled. The man was doing a poor job of comforting the child. Surely if he spoke soothingly to it and stroked that soft hair it would quieten. Frustrated at his powerlessness to intervene and take the child, he heard another yelp on the pitch, turned again, and saw the game halted, a knot of arguing boys around one boy lying flat on his back, rocking from side to side, his forearm over his eyes. Peter blew again and ran over. Blood: a long streak of it down one boy's shin. It poured from a flap of startled white skin just below the knee. Jack was protesting. Of course he was. He reached for his cards. "Right, you, off." The boys swarmed around him when he pulled out the red card, tossing their heads and flinging their arms down in despair. Jack shouted at him, "It wasn't me! It wasn't me!" Peter bent down and asked the injured boy, grave-faced and silent amid the uproar. "Was it him?" The boy said nothing, nodded. "Thought so." He stood up again and felt a brief, cold dizziness of blood draining from his head. He saw Jack's father running on.

"He didn't do it."

"Off the field."

"But he didn't." Jack's father's ears were small, pink, and tightly curled.

Peter avoided his eyes. "He didn't."

"He did do it. The rules are the rules. He's off."

"You didn't even see it. You were looking at Mike's Janey. I saw you."

"You and your son, off now."

"But ..."

"Off. Now!"

He raised the red card for everyone to see and blew as loudly as he could.

The bathroom was warm and heavy from Steve's use, the air scented with shower cream and deodorant and aftershave. Peter arrived trembling from the exercise, his mind marked with the argument. The shower cubicle was warmer and heavier still. A remnant of foam still stood over the plughole, whispering away to nothing. Steve wasn't always very tidy when he was excited to be going out on sermon night. After Peter had showered, watching the soil spiral away, he stood wrapped in a towel, pink and soft, and saw the gunpowder of Steve's beard still in the sink. The lid of his hair gel was off, its contents lashed up into a crest by his delving fingers. Peter dried himself, added his own blasts of deodorant to the funk, then dressed, stabbed the plastic of a ready meal, and put it in the microwave.

He ate in front of the television. He told himself it was to find a neat quirk of topicality to add to his sermon, something to remind the congregation that he lived in their world, but he watched quite mindlessly the celebrity dancers in their camp little outfits, taking their turns then awaiting judgment, chests throbbing, smiling crazily, sweating through their makeup. He thought of Steve, perfumed and pristine, sitting on the Tube or already at a bar chatting to someone. Steve, who had arrived like the spring, painfully, changing everything with his provoking warmth, his beauty, who stepped in and out of Peter's cage like it didn't exist, who argued that it didn't exist: Half the b.l.o.o.d.y church, Peter. All that. Steve who was getting bored, who was elsewhere.

Peter felt his rice and meat settling, looked down at his belly. He'd put on black jeans and a black top. Even when he wasn't working, that's what he would put on. He noticed that these two blacks didn't match. The jeans were older than the top; their dye had grayed in the wash. It made him think something, about dailiness, about time spent. The sadness of laundry. Clothes laboring through the wash week after week. The sadness of laundry! Listen to yourself. Just write your sermon, pray, and go to bed.

The phone rang, stalling him in his seat. He let it bleat and bleat until the answerphone came on. After his own voice apologizing for his absence: "h.e.l.lo, this is Steve ..." No, it wasn't. It was the wrong Steve, a non-Steve. "I'm Jack's father, from football. I thought I'd ring you because I'm not happy, really, with the way things went this afternoon. What you did wasn't ... it just wasn't the right call. Jack wasn't guilty and I think you know that, more than you could let on at the time anyway. I sort of wanted to clear the air and just get things straight with you. I've got a very upset lad here and it'd be nice to tell him it'll be all right next time. Maybe you can call-" the machine cut him off with a long beep. In the silence afterward Peter said out loud, "Now go away."

Perhaps he had made his decision quickly and perhaps the evidence had been circ.u.mstantial, but a decision had to be made and he was the referee. Also, he'd sensed Jack's guilt; he knew it was there. If he hadn't been guilty at that precise moment, he had been at others and would be again. He was selfish and superb, a greedy player. The boy needed punishing.

Toilet, toothbrushing, prayers, and in. He read for a bit before turning the light out and wondered when he would feel the bed sink under Steve's satisfied weight-alcohol in his bloodstream, s.e.m.e.n in his belly-if he would feel it or whether by then he'd be too far gone.

He woke with Steve's arm over him, Steve's mouth against the back of his neck, breathing warmly onto his spine. The back of Steve's hand was blotched with the stamp of a nightclub. He lifted the arm and exited as through a door. Steve rolled onto his back, chewing and murmuring in his sleep.

Peter left early. He liked to be the first person at his church. This was hard to do: his verger, Bill, also liked to be first with his keys, round-shouldered, busy, in possession of the place. Peter walked through a glorious autumn morning. The trees and cars were radiant, their edges haloed with soft sunlight. The fallen leaves were dry, skittering along the pavement in the breeze. Pigeons called from bright aerials, tw.a.n.ging them as they took flight.

St. John the Evangelist's was a thick-looking Edwardian church of polychrome brick. It was homely, not beautiful, heavy and earnest and suburban. If he could have chosen his parish church, Peter would have preferred something medieval, something with the ghost of its Catholic past hovering just under the whitewash, something with a hint of the monastic, maybe a preserved anchorite's cell. Still, St. John's greeted him with its solid familiarity as he approached.

Someone must have forgotten to put out the sand bucket for the alcoholics last night; the doorway was littered with cigarette b.u.t.ts. He knelt to pick them up. That felt good: a mild abas.e.m.e.nt. The b.u.t.ts were bent, dingy, sadly human. He filled his left palm with them and unlocked the door. First the bin in the vestry to throw them away, then to wash the ash and odor from his hands. Stepping into the church proper, he received the unfailing shock of the sight of the cross over the altar, that jolt delivered by its strong bare shape, by its meaning. He repeated the shape onto his chest with his fingertips, sinking to his knees. In an empty pew at the front of the church, with the noise of occasional cars beyond the glowing windows, he prayed. When Bill arrived, brisk and muttering, a crinkling carrier bag in his hand, banging on the lights, he heard him fall satisfyingly silent out of respect. He gave it a minute more then stood up, smiling. "Good morning, William."

His standard Sunday congregation was decent, about forty souls, including the three African ladies who sat in a row under their hats, smiling, and the Davises who sat at the front, either side of young Natalie. She remained placid and bored and pleased with herself, quite still under the arch of her Alice band and long, thoroughly brushed hair. Only her feet swung back and forth impatiently, counting the minutes away.

Peter had honestly tried for a while not to have a church voice but it proved impossible. His normal voice wouldn't carry. To be audible and dignified he needed that slow ceremonial sound. He heard himself go into it at the beginning of the liturgy and it ran like a machine. He could let it function, could feel the motions of his mouth, while up behind his eyes he looked around and thought. It was thus, entering the ch.o.r.eography of the service and delivering solid, meaningful words, that he watched the new couple enter. The man was nervous, tiptoeing with his hands raised, in a pink polo shirt and jacket. He grimaced, baring his teeth as he maneuvered into place. His wife looked pretty and was, as Peter's mother would have put it, "in full sail," decidedly pregnant, her face soft and round, tan with makeup. So that was why they were here. They'd be wanting to make use of Reverend Peter's services, arriving late enough in her pregnancy not to have to suffer too much church and soon enough to seem willing. They settled slowly at the back.

Peter spoke and sang. The rhythm of the ritual took hold, appeased him. He saw it take hold of the congregation also. Shaking hands with them at the door afterward they were clean and light, not quite tired, glazed with smiles as they were let out into the Sunday quiet. The new couple, having watched everything including the exit of all the others, were the last out.

"New faces. I'm delighted you joined us. I'm Reverend Peter."

The man smiled, but differently to the regulars, as though amused at the thought of meeting a vicar at all, as though this too were part of a show. His fingers were short and heavy, his grip tight. A builder, maybe. His head was set low over high, muscular shoulders. A small gold stud, caught by the sun, shone in one ear-lobe.

"Nice to meet you. I'm Rob. This is my wife, Ca.s.sie."

Ca.s.sie reached her small hand forward and smiled with a little scrunch of her nose. "Lovely to meet you, Vicar."

"I see you're expecting a happy event, the happiest event."

"That's right," Rob replied. "Fact, that's sort of why we came."

"Yes, I rather thought it might be."

"We want to get her started right. And we are local. We live just down by the Peugeot garage."

"Well, just call the number on the sign and we'll arrange to meet and talk about it. There are things to discuss for a christening."

"Ah, that's terrific. Thanks, Father."

"It is, indeed. Another soul saved."

Rob smiled, his head swaying slightly. "Exactly."

Peter watched them walk away. Rob hadn't gone five yards before he pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit up, his smoke a lovely blue rising over his shoulder.

Peter stretched across the bed to turn the radio down. Rolling on his back, he shucked off both shoes and settled his hands behind his head to watch Steve dress.

"I've got a new congregant."

"Oh yes?"

"Think you'd like him, actually. Terribly butch."

"Is she now?"

Peter would never mention this, but sometimes Steve reminded him of his grandfather. It was the length and flatness of his back, perhaps stiffening now with middle age. That long plane made his proportions strange when he leaned forward from his waist to look through the drawer: it was straight all the way up the back of his neck.

"Are you trying to make me jealous?"

"Would I ever do that to you?"

Steve dropped his towel: brief, matter-of-fact nudity, determinedly unarousing. He kept his back to Peter. His b.u.t.tocks twitched together, hollowing at their sides, when he pulled up his Y-fronts. He sat on the edge of the bed to put on his socks. Now, standing again in his underwear, he looked childish, like a s.e.xy little boy.

"Do you have to go out tonight?"

"And what are you doing?"

"Youth mission."

"So you're out?"

"I'll be back by nine."

Steve raised his eyebrows, disbelieving.

"All right, nine-thirty. It shouldn't be later than that."

"Oh, I'm sure. So you want me to sit here and wait for you?"

"You know what I mean."

Steve chose a shirt from the wardrobe, unb.u.t.toned the top, and angled it carefully off the hanger. He slid his arms into it.

"Fine, fine." Peter gave up. "Not tonight then. But we should do something one of these nights. I should come with you."