The Best American Short Stories 2013

BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON Encounters with Unexpected Animals

LAMBRIGHT HAD SURPRISED everyone by offering to drive his son’s girlfriend home. The girl was three months shy of seventeen, two years older than Robbie. She’d been held back in school. Her driver’s license was currently suspended. She had a reputation, a body, and a bar code tattooed on the back of her neck. Lambright sometimes glimpsed it when her green hair was ponytailed. She’d come over for supper this evening, and though she volunteered to help Robbie and his mother with the dishes, Lambright had said he’d best deliver her home, it being a school night. He knew this pleased his wife and Robbie, the notion of him giving the girl another chance.

Driving, Lambright thought the moon looked like a fingerprint of chalk. They headed south on Airline Road. A couple of miles and he’d turn right on Saratoga, then left onto Everhart, and eventually they’d enter Kings Crossing, the subdivision with pools and sprinkler systems. At supper, Robbie and the girl had told, in tandem, a story about playing hide-and-seek on the abandoned country club golf course. Hide-and-seek, Lambright thought, is that what y’all call it now? Then they started talking about wildlife. The girl had once seen a blue-and-gold macaw riding on the headrest of a man’s passenger seat, and another time, in a pasture in the Rio Grande Valley, she’d spotted zebras grazing among cattle. Robbie’s mother recalled finding goats in the tops of peach trees in her youth. Robbie told the story of visiting the strange neighborhood in San Antonio where the muster of peacocks lived, and it led the girl to confess her desire to get a fan of peacock feathers tattooed on her lower back. She also wanted a tattoo of a busted magnifying glass hovering over the words FIX ME.

Lambright couldn’t figure what she saw in his son. Until the girl started visiting, Robbie had superhero posters on his walls and a fleet of model airplanes suspended from the ceiling with fishing wire. Lambright had actually long been skeptical of the boy’s room, worrying it looked too childish, worrying it confirmed what might be called “softness” of character. But now the walls were stripped and all that remained of the fighter fleet was the fishing-wire stubble on the ceiling.

Two weeks ago, one of his wife’s necklaces disappeared. Last week, a bottle of her nerve pills. Then, over the weekend, he’d caught Robbie and the girl with a flask of whiskey in the backyard. She’d come to supper tonight to make amends.

Traffic was light. When he stopped at the intersection of Airline and Saratoga, the only headlights he saw were far off, like buoys in the bay. The turn signal dinged. He debated, then clicked it off. He accelerated straight across Saratoga.

“We were supposed to turn—”

“Scenic route,” he said. “We’ll visit a little.”

But they didn’t. There was only the low hum of the tires on the road, the noise of the truck pushing against the wind. Lambright hadn’t contributed anything to the animal discussion earlier, but now he considered mentioning what he’d read a while back, how bald-eagle nests are often girded with cat collars, strung with the little bells and tags of lost pets. He stayed quiet, though. They were out near the horse stables now. The air smelled of alfalfa and manure. The streetlights had fallen away.

The girl said, “I didn’t know you could get to Kings Crossing like this.”

They crossed the narrow bridge over Oso Creek, then came into a clearing, a swath of clay and patchy brush, gnarled mesquite trees.

He pulled onto the road’s shoulder. Caliche pinged against the truck’s chassis. He doused his headlights, and the scrub around them silvered, turned to moonscape. They were outside the city limits, miles from where the girl lived. He killed the engine.

“I know you have doubts about me. I know I’m not—”

“Cut him loose,” Lambright said.

“Do what?”

“Give it a week, then tell him you’ve got someone else.”

Her eyes scanned the night through the windshield. Maybe she was getting her bearings, calculating how far out they were. Cows lowed somewhere in the darkness. She said, “I love Rob—”

“You’re a pretty girl. You’ve been to the rodeo a few times. You’ll do all right. But not with him.”

The chalky moon was in and out of clouds. A wind buffeted the truck and kicked up the odor of the brackish creek. The girl was picking at her cuticles, which made her look docile.

“Is there anything I can say here? Is there something you’re wanting to hear?”

“You can say you’ll quit him,” Lambright said. “I’d like to have your word on that subject.”

“And if I don’t, you’ll leave me on the side of the road?”

“We’re just talking. We’re sorting out a problem.”

“Or you’ll beat me up and throw me in the creek?”

“You’re too much for him. He’s overmatched.”

“And so if I don’t dump him, you’ll, what, rape me? Murder me? Bury me in the dunes?”

“Lisa,” he said, his tone pleasingly superior. He liked how much he sounded like a father.

Another wind blew, stiff and parched, rustling the trees. To Lambright, they appeared to shiver, like they’d gotten cold. A low cloud unspooled on the horizon. The cows were quiet.

“I see how you look at me, you know,” she said, shifting toward him. She unbuckled her seat belt, the noise startlingly loud in the truck. Lambright’s eyes went to the rearview mirror: no one around. She scooted an inch closer. Two inches. Three. He smelled lavender, her hair or cool skin. She said, “Everyone sees it. Nobody’ll be surprised you drove me out here.”

“I’m telling you to stay away from my son.”

“In the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere.”

“There’s no mystery here,” Lambright said.

“Silly,” she said.

“Do what?”

“I said you’re silly. There’s mystery all around us. Goats in trees. Macaws in cars.”

Enough, Lambright thought. He cranked the ignition, switched on his headlights.

“A man who drives his son’s underage girl into remote areas, that’s awfully mysterious.”

“Just turn him loose,” he said.

“A girl who flees the truck and comes home dirty and crying. What will she tell her parents? Her boyfriend? The man’s depressed wife?”

“Just leave him be,” he said. “That’s the takeaway tonight.”

“Will the police be called? Will they match the clay on her shoes to his tires?”

“Lisa—”

“Or will she keep it to herself? Will it be something she and the man always remember when they see each other? When she marries his son, when she bears his grandbabies? These are bona fide mysteries, Mr. Lambright.”

“Lisa,” he said. “Lisa, let’s be clear.”

But she was already out of the truck, sprinting toward the creek. She flashed through the brush and descended the bank, and Lambright was shocked by the languid swiftness with which she crossed the earth. Blood was surging in his veins, like he’d swerved to miss something in the road and his truck had just skidded to a stop and he didn’t yet know if he was hurt, if the world was changed. The passenger door was open, the interior light burning, pooling. The girl jumped across the creek and bolted alongside it. She cut to and fro. He wanted to see her as an animal he’d managed to avoid, a rare and dangerous creature he’d describe for Robbie when he got home, but really her movement reminded him of a trickle of water tracking through pebbles. It stirred in him a floating sensation, the curious and scattered feeling of being born on waves or air or wings. He was disoriented, short of breath. He knew he was at the beginning of something, though just then he couldn’t say exactly what.