The Best American Short Stories 2013

KARL TARO GREENFELD Horned Men

BOB WAS IN THE DARK. He was looking down at his new home through the gap in the ceiling near the edge of the crawlspace, seeking where he could drop a coaxial line into his living room. His jeans and T-shirt were caked in dust, his Nikes were discolored, and he realized, as he squirmed between beams closer to the corner, that he had misjudged the location of the living room wall and was now above his thirteen-year-old daughter’s bedroom. He could make out a sliver of her stuff—a red plastic lampshade, a pair of old Converses—through the loose seals around an HVAC duct. There was also a sixteenth-inch hole he found drilled near the smoke alarm. From here, through an imperfect semicircle, as if he were staring through pinpricked cardboard at a solar eclipse, he could discern the area above his daughter’s bed where he had put up a wall-mount Ikea shelf. He had imagined that Becca would set out her crystals or KidRobots or some other colorful, youthful collectibles. But Becca hadn’t even bothered to unpack her boxes; his wife, Minnie, had been in several arguments with Becca over that subject. If he cocked his head, he could just make out the base of the monolithic pile of books and linen boxes with the moving company’s red-and-white logo on them. They stood in the center of her room, a monument to family discord.

What he had initially chosen to interpret as a sign of Becca’s inner strength—her indifference to moving to a new city and school even though she was in a phase of early adolescence her pediatrician labeled “the first change o’ life”—was actually confirmation of what Bob had silently suspected all along: Becca didn’t have any friends. Bob, who didn’t have many friends himself but tried to be an optimist, told her she would make plenty of friends at her new school. Becca just nodded and said, “Really? REALLY? That school, just a hundred miles away from my old school, will be so completely and totally different, in terms of people, personalities, demographics, THE WHOLE ECOSYSTEM, that my whole, entire life will be MAGICALLY transformed?”

Bob had smiled and done an exaggerated shrug. Like, who knows? Like this was one of those crazy adventures that will be fun for the whole family.

Now, gazing again through the gap around the HVAC, he saw a flash of movement, the faded brown-blue of old, dirty denim, as Becca entered her room, her recently more protuberant rear end framed perfectly in the gap for an instant. He froze, suddenly ashamed. But this wasn’t spying, he assured himself. He tried to silently wiggle back through the attic, his thighs pressing down into old coaxial lines, perhaps staying too low in order to overcompensate for the occasional roofing nails that protruded down from the sloped ceiling, and then he felt something bite into his arm. Dropping his flashlight, he turned his elbow up, craned his neck, and saw two little pinpricks, as if he had backed his arm into the exposed prongs of a staple. Then he noticed, passing through the beam of the fallen light, scurrying away, a brown and orange, half-dollar-sized spider.

He crawled backward, not worrying as much about keeping his butt down, and swung out of the attic, down the ladder, and into the bathroom, where he checked his arm in the mirror to see if it was already swelling.

It was.

Bob would do it himself, goddammit, yes, he would. Prove that the years spent behind a desk, selling Alt-As, 7+1s, 5+1s, 3+1s, liar loans, subprimes, and refis, hadn’t rendered him soft and incapable. He may have been a desk jockey, a mortgage broker, but that career had evaporated and now he was going to make the best of what he had left, in terms of money and time.

In the past, he would have hired guys to do all this, the installations and the wiring, the climbing and crawling and drilling, but now he had the time, so why pay the hundreds to have guys no more capable than he was—less capable, probably—do shit that he could do himself. So he bought the dish, mounted it on the shingle roof—that was easy, a matter of finding the beams, aiming the dish, and drilling holes for brackets, and then anchoring the gray metal plate, which sat in its brace like an auction paddle in a bidder’s hand—and then ran the coaxial cable down the beam and along the doorframe, and threaded it through a hole he drilled, sleeved, and collared in the TGB paneling by the door. He regarded this little bit of handiwork and compared it to the vast yardage of co-ax that he had found strung over his roof, up and down rain gutters, tossed over attic joists, and hung from nails in crawlspaces, carpet tacked and staple-gunned into beams and over doorframes, and marveled at how crappily it had all been done. We are a nation drowning in coaxial cable, Bob decided, each house on this block suffocating in unused vines of dead co-ax. Phone companies, cable companies, Internet companies, broadband companies, all of them unspooling miles of the stuff and leaving it behind them, a fiber-optic breadcrumb trail leading nowhere. A million such houses, ten million, twenty million; every time a house was sold, remodeled, flipped, foreclosed, that meant more co-ax: badly strung, high-speed tumbleweed. Nobody gave a fuck anymore, and he knew that firsthand, having been one of those well paid for not giving a fuck, for not caring about who made how much and was borrowing how much for how much house. Not that anyone ever asked. They all wanted as much house as possible—and all that co-ax—as he had, at one point, before he walked away from his last house.

When the firm went belly-up, causing an entire Orange County business park to go vacant in just sixty days and stranding Bob in too much house with too much debt, he didn’t hesitate to drive away, his wife and daughter in the Caravan and Bob in his Explorer. That’s what all the TV news segments vilifying mortgage brokers never mentioned: that the brokers had drunk the Kool-Aid as well, most of them, and were leveraged and ARMED to the teeth, so when the bubble burst, Bob and his fellow brokers had been among the first to bust. He would have been a gentleman and dropped the keys off with whomever held his note, but he couldn’t figure out who had taken that over, so he just left the keys inside the front door. He was lucky, he knew, that he had somewhere to go. Left all that damn cable behind.

But here he was, stringing more of it. He would need to drill a hole through part of the chimney brickwork. He set off for the hardware store, thinking a half-inch bit would do it. On the way, he stopped at the post office to inquire about his mail. Since moving in, there’d been nothing addressed to his family, just unforwarded mail for the previous tenant and the sort of shopping fliers and local retail coupons that every house gets. At the post office, the Asian lady who worked there told him that he’d asked for his mail to be forwarded to an address in Montana.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Someone filled in and signed a change of address for you,” she said, looking at a monitor. “Your mail has been going to Jericho, Montana.”

She slid him a new form.

When his mother died of emphysema six years earlier, he did a quick and cheap remodel of Gam’s old house and rented it out, starting with a one-year lease but after that letting the Wagonsellers go month to month. He should have sold the old place years ago, but he held on, despite his wife’s urging, and by the time he was committed to selling there were open houses on either side and across the street, so he figured he would keep the Wagonsellers, who seemed happy in the old place and anyway never bothered him, even with a plumbing system that Bob knew required regular rooting and a kitchen range with old valves that had to be wired shut manually or they’d leak gas. For five years the Wagonsellers had stayed on, the heavyset father with a broad forehead and his plain-looking wife with bangs. They had two homeschooled children, twin boys.

When Bob called them up to tell them he would be needing the place back, the father, Matthew Wagonseller, reacted angrily.

“Just like that?” he had asked. “No notice? Nothing?”

“This is the notice,” Bob explained. “I’m giving you ninety days.”

“But after all these years?” Wagonseller said. “We had an arrangement.”

Bob tried to be patient. “We didn’t have a lease. I haven’t raised your rent in six years. You never asked for a lease.”

Wagonseller didn’t believe he needed one. “My wife is going be very upset.”

“You can find a house,” Bob reasoned. “There must be plenty of houses for rent now.”

“We feel at home here,” Wagonseller said. “Our church is here. And now we’ve been betrayed.”

Bob felt that was too strong a word for the situation but wasn’t interested in any further debate on the subject. “I’m sorry, Matthew, but I need the place for my family.”

“What about my family?”

“Well, you’re the renter and I’m the owner, so I guess that’s that.”

“We’ll see,” said Wagonseller. “Meanwhile, I’ll be praying for you.”

But in the end, Wagonseller hadn’t put up much of a fight. Bob drove up to take possession, finding Mrs. Wagonseller and the twins on their knees in the front yard, eyes closed in a final prayer before they moved on. He waited on the sidewalk until they stood up, dusted off their khakis, and filed past him in silence.

The place was left a shambles, the walls marked up with crayon, the carpets stained, the linoleum buckling, the already-mentioned surplus of co-ax, but that was to be expected from six years of occupancy, and Bob didn’t mind all the little projects. While his wife put away the dishes, slid the DVDs into the bookcases, and piled towels into their dressers, Bob found his tools, augmented the modest selection with a few trips to the hardware store and expeditions to Home Depot, and began to get his house in order.

First in the establishment of the American hearth, of course, was the stringing of cable, for that holy consumer trinity of telephone, Internet, and television, and so Bob found himself back in the attic, swollen arm and all, wearing kneepads this time, flashlight in hand, poking around the chimney to see how far out the chimney bricks extended and if he could drill through that to get into the built-in bookcases in the living room. It was no problem running the cable from the dish, into the attic through another collared sleeve, and then along the joists, but how to drop it down? He had purchased a telescoping guide from Home Depot, a nifty device like a car antenna that could lock into place to push cable through a tight fit, but first he needed to find the right place to drill.

He shone the light around him, the yellow beam catching the constellations of motes he’d roused, the darkened space smelling like the hot dust.

He told himself he was going to check whether there was space to slide a cable through. But now Bob crawled back over Becca’s room and gazed through the sliver next to the HVAC duct, peeking through the slot into his daughter’s room. She was lying on her bed, listening to music through earphones. He could see the top of her, as if she’d been sliced in half horizontally: Becca’s blank, round face that was hard to call beautiful—her neck wasn’t visible—her chest in a blue T-shirt with some sort of red logo on it, her flabby belly hanging a little to her left. Her legs were just below his sightline. Next to her was the pile of unpacked boxes.

He found his daughter unfathomable. And he hated to admit it, but she had become disappointing to him. Not in a way he could verbalize or explain; it had to do with her getting older, bigger, thicker, less attractive. She wasn’t a pretty girl, and he knew it was wrong for a father to hold that against his daughter, so he never mentioned it, never discussed it with Minnie. And he treated Becca, he believed, exactly as he had before, back when he found her to be as cute as a button. He’d never had any sisters, just a brother a decade older and about as mysterious as a picnic bench; Gus had ended up owning a pair of Five Guys franchises in Atlanta before he died of a heart attack at fifty-six. So Bob was left guessing at what Becca might be going through. Minnie seemed to believe that Becca’s struggles had to do with her appearance, and had Becca fitted with contact lenses and a kicky new haircut that did little to alter Becca’s perpetual doleful frown. She always looked mad about something, Bob reflected, disappointed, as if she woke up every morning already let down.

They’d been close when Becca was a girl, and Bob struggled to recall when, exactly, they had drifted apart. He’d had a few busy years, with the mortgage business booming and commissions pouring in, but he’d always tried to make time for Becca, to take her to Panda Express on Saturdays for the greasy Chinese food she liked, to the store where they sold those plastic robots she collected. But then, probably around the start of junior high school, Becca had turned inward, or at least retreated from Bob. She had lately, troublingly, also turned destructive, making Sharpie squiggles and shapes—she drew pentagrams and the kind of lettering Bob remembered from heavy metal albums—on the Explorer’s leather interior; she jammed wadded, wet paper into the bathtub drain and had burned a bunch of leaves and twigs in the shower stall. Worrying little acts of vandalism that Bob had trouble fitting into any pattern of behavior he could recognize.

Minnie urged patience, describing what Becca was going through as an “ugly duckling phase.”

He pulled his eye away from the gap. This wasn’t really spying, he reasoned; he was up here working, trying to solve a problem, lay some cable.

He took another look and she was gone.

He backed away, now careful to slide his kneepads slowly so that the roof beams wouldn’t creak. This space had never been used for storage, but as he shone the light around the attic, he saw that various cable and phone companies had left their detritus behind: empty router boxes, cable spools, cellophane wrappers, and over in the corner, for some reason, an old delivery pizza box. This fast-food refuse offended him, so he crawled over and grabbed it and Frisbeed it toward the attic door. As he was about to start backing away, his light caught something in the far corner, near where the roof sloped down at a thirty-degree angle to the external wall. He struggled forward again, uncomfortable as the roof drew lower above him, and reached for the object and yanked it from where it was wedged between ceiling boards. He set the light down so that its beam aimed forward, and he held this discovery in both hands. It was a small brown clay bust, still soft, no larger than a golf ball, mounted on a Popsicle stick. It was exquisitely carved: curly hair, horns, androgynous features, villainous grin, a goatee. Some kind of satyr or devil. Written on the stick, in tiny penciled letters: “And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of the teeth.”

Bob was suddenly aware of the rushing of air past his ears. The attic felt momentarily strange, as if it were concealing something from him.

He was tempted to crush the little sculpture, but instead he laid it down so that its cheek rested on one of the beams, and he backed away.

Becca once asked her father if he felt guilty about all the people who had lost their homes. She knew what Bob did for a living, and the daily coverage of the foreclosure crisis coincided with her beginning to take an interest in the news, in the larger world around her. She asked this as if she already knew the answer; she was at the age when she was eager to confirm her suspicion that her father was eminently fallible.

Bob had told her no, he didn’t feel guilty, not at all. He said he had been making people’s dreams come true, but as soon as that platitude came out of his mouth, he regretted it, because he could see by Becca’s smug smile and nodding head that he had just incriminated himself.

“We were loaning people money, to buy houses,” Bob began again, “and these people wanted to buy the houses, of course they did. And because maybe they hadn’t been good with their money in the past, they could only get certain kinds of loans, with certain kinds of payment terms and interest rates—it’s a little complicated.”

“So you made them repay way more than they were borrowing,” Becca said.

“Well, every mortgage requires that you repay more than you borrow. And, well, no, I didn’t make them repay anything. I showed them what kind of loan they could get.” Bob was finding it difficult to defend himself while also having to oversimplify his argument so that Becca would understand. “And, well, they wanted the houses. And the houses were appreciating in value—going up—so it seemed like, why shouldn’t they borrow the money, at whatever terms, because houses only go—”

“But they didn’t go up.” Becca jumped in. “They didn’t. So they all had to leave those houses. And now they’re all, like, broke and homeless and living in meth labs.”

“Well, I don’t think they’re living in—”

“Whatever,” Becca said. “They lost their homes. Like we did.”

“Well, now, who’s they?”

“Only they didn’t have Gam’s old house to go live in.”

“Well, we’re lucky, but—”

“And you guys KNEW they couldn’t pay this money back. Because after like a month, the money they had to pay back would go up like a THOUSAND percent.”

“Well—”

By then Becca was gone, back to her room.

He found himself now standing in Becca’s room, next to the pile of unpacked boxes. She was at school; Minnie was at Costco. Even with most of her stuff still packed, the room was a mess of discarded clothes and scraps of partially filled notebook paper. He picked up a sheet, studied where Becca had scribbled some letters and symbols he couldn’t make out, and then let it flutter to the floor.

Should he feel guilty about glimpsing his daughter from the crawlspace or spending this time in her room without her? He was already worried at what he might see or find. The parental mind reeled at the possibilities. The small glimpses he’d had of her were already confusing enough.

His elbow had swollen up to the size of a grapefruit and Bob couldn’t get over how alien it looked, as if someone else’s joint had ended up on his arm. It was sore and the two red fang marks had emanated disconcerting red ripples. Bob worked his arm open and closed and found his movement restricted so that he couldn’t even clench his upper arm into a muscle. He iced it and then applied some antihistamine cream, but that wasn’t offering much relief.

He didn’t remember walking back to the living room, but he discovered that a pile of mail had finally been pushed through the door slot. There were two plain white envelopes with the State of California seal on them, each containing an identical subpoena to appear in court to answer questions regarding his old firm’s policy of nondisclosure during the lending process.

He sat down on the sofa, a masonry bit in the fully charged power drill in his hand, and looked outside at the pomegranate tree that was now ripe and bearing an abundance of red fruit. He hadn’t told anyone that he could see his daughter’s room from up in the attic, or what he had found up there, or the scripture verse. He had his reasons for keeping quiet: he didn’t want to creep out his daughter, he didn’t want to frighten his family. Minnie seemed busy enough, ferrying Becca to school and trying to fashion a little charm from their limited budget. And Becca, who had returned from her first day of school with a one-word description—SUCKS—she was struggling to adjust.

Bob liked to see his memory as a collection of index cards with names and dates on them, but the names and dates were hazy and growing hazier. But now, as he was trying to settle into Gam’s old house, he felt memories seeping in. He had been busy for so many years, selling those loans, that now, now that he had time—the subpoena had also jogged his memory—he was finally able to think back on that period and was uncomfortable with some of the details he recalled. It had been so easy; nobody seemed very concerned about the terms, just worried about the monthlies. As long as the next month’s payment was affordable, they signed.

Then he flashed on those Wagonseller kids, the two of them bowed down in prayer right out there beneath that pomegranate tree, blond heads shining in the sunlight, their lips moving silently.

For the first time, he found himself reluctant to head back up to the crawlspace, but the job needed to be done.

He was up there again, drilling into a corner of the chimney brick, the flashlight beam hitting the spot where the bit was kicking up red dust. He bent down and blew into the hole, pushing a finger into the heat caused by the friction, and then resumed drilling. When he had punched through and into the wood, he replaced the masonry bit with a longer wood bit, but before resuming his drilling, he shone the flashlight around the crawlspace, the yellow beam sliding over the orderly descent of the shingles, the reddish brown of their undersides. In the corner where he had found the horned man, the sweeping glow passed over a white pizza box. Confused, he quickly swung his flashlight back to where he had tossed the box yesterday and found it wasn’t there—of course it wasn’t; he had taken that down to the recycling bin, hadn’t he? Was it possible there had been two pizza boxes and he had tossed only one? He crawled over, his swollen arm making his progress slow, and gathered this box and tossed it behind him. There was the horned man, on the side of its face, where he had left it.

He heard Becca shouting from below. “OHMYGOD. What IS THIS?”

Becca had finally begun to unpack her boxes and was putting her clothes away in a closet with slatted doors. There, in the back of the closet, where a six-by-two-foot plank painted white held a half-dozen screw-in clothes hooks, was another horned man, in the same soft clay, mounted on another stick with runic lettering: “Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: As he has caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again.”

She was pointing at it the way a frightened housewife would point to a mouse. “LOOK AT THAT!”

Bob took the totem by the stick and inspected it. The work of the same hand.

He drove himself to testify at the law firm in Century City. An attorney from the state representatives’ office was there, as was an attorney from the firm that had bought out the remnants of his old firm. While Bob was waiting in a brown leather chair with wooden arms, he saw one of his old coworkers departing. They did not acknowledge each other. When Bob’s turn came, he spoke honestly, recalled as best he could his former pitch, patter, and close. But when it came to specific loans and terms, he struggled. There had been so many mortgages, and even when he was shown the loan applications, the small print with circumlocutory explanations about adjustments, penalties, resets, and readjustments, the hundreds of pages of forms that clients hurriedly signed on closing day. He flipped through the sheafs of contracts, dutifully read aloud those portions he was told to, and then answered as best he could, rubbing his throbbing elbow as he spoke. There were hundreds, thousands of such agreements in legal-file boxes all around the conference room. All of them homes, probably lost now.

Mostly the lawyers talked among themselves, occasionally asking Bob for clarification of a term or if he recalled anything about a specific loan. He shook his head. He couldn’t remember anything, but he was sorry. He repeated that, as if his apology might make it okay.

The doctor agreed to see him for half her usual fee; he had delayed as long as he could since he no longer had health insurance. His muscles and joints in both arms were aching, his range of motion on the bitten arm had decreased to the point where he couldn’t cock his elbow at a right angle, and the skin around the swollen area was numb. She asked when it happened, and where, and he explained, remembering, as he did so, that first day he had discovered he could watch his daughter. He didn’t tell the doctor about that.

She prescribed steroids and a strong antibiotic; he would have to pay out of pocket for the medications at CVS.

The old house was going to be fine. It was smaller than the mansion they had left behind, but after those first hard weeks of shaking down—all that time in the crawlspace—it had begun to seem like a decent, functional machine for living, all the house they needed.

He had finally succeeded in dropping that cable through to the living room, set it with carpet tacks, backed out of the crawlspace, and then pulled the access panel shut behind him.

His wife had been panicked by the horned men, speculating the house was cursed: Bob immediately mentioned the Wagonsellers. They had been a strange family; the father had even, sort of, implied revenge. Maybe this was a born-again curse, Christian voodoo.

They condemned the Wagonsellers, wondered whether they should call the police, press charges, or file some sort of complaint. What kind of people would do something like this? Bob listened as Minnie unloaded her concerns before pointing out that, really, they couldn’t prove anything and was it, technically, illegal to leave little clay carvings behind? He didn’t seem as spooked as his wife.

Bob never told Minnie, or Becca, that while he was up there in the attic, he had inadvertently spied on his daughter in her room. He planned to go back up there just once more. He had with him some spackle and a palette knife, and he slithered along the boards, his elbow still sore—it would ache the rest of his days—to the gap above his daughter’s room. He told himself he was going to seal the cracks around the HVAC duct and the hole near the fixture, to make it so he could no longer watch his daughter. This would be the final glimpse, he reassured himself.

In hindsight, the tumult of this period, the little change o’ life, all the changes in their lives, would seem almost exciting. Bob would wonder how he ever had the energy for all of this, the foreclosing, the moving, the stringing of cable. He would take a job as a loan officer at the local branch of a national bank; Minnie would soon be back at work herself, doing the books part-time for an interior decorating firm. The family would never again have the means that it had during the great mortgage boom, those years of feeling wealthy, of being flush consumers caught in the profligate mainstream, and Bob would wonder at that, at how he might regain that feeling.

In the late evening, he would walk out into the front garden, to the dry, yellowed grass where the Wagonseller twins had been praying the day he moved in, and from that spot reach up—the muscles around his elbow would never again allow his arm to reach full extension—and pluck a pomegranate, which he would split with his bare hands and then bite into its flesh and seed, sucking the red juice out and shaking at its bitterness.

It wasn’t a curse, he would tell himself; the Wagonsellers hadn’t cursed them. He didn’t believe in such things. A little modeling clay, some stylus work—it was as if they bequeathed him the product of an arts-and-crafts project. He kept the little horned men, found a niche in the attic where he could admire them. And he didn’t feel cursed, hexed, whatever.

Not at all, he thought, as he went back into the house, to the attic, to the crawlspace above his daughter’s room, where he watched her sleep.