Stay Awake Stories by Dan Chaon

Author:Dan Chaon
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Literary, Psychological, Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction
ISBN: 9780345532305
Publisher: Random House LLC
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

St. Dismas

That summer, not long after he turned twenty-three, Pierce kidnapped his ex-girlfriend’s son, Jesse. Actually, Pierce thought, it wasn’t so much a kidnapping as it was a rescue—Jesse had come with him willingly enough—though there was also, Pierce had to admit, an element of sheer vindictiveness, a desire to wake her up and make her suffer. In any case, after a couple of weeks on the road with Jesse, Pierce had begun to realize that he had probably made a mistake.

They had been traveling west without any real plan in mind, and they had arrived at last at Pierce’s father’s house in St. Dismas, Nebraska. St. Dismas was one of those old dried-up prairie towns, not even worthy of being called a “town,” not even a settlement anymore. There were a few empty old houses and sheds, and a gas station, long closed, and an abandoned grain elevator alongside the railroad tracks, and a few straggling cottonwood trees sending their snowy seeds through the empty streets. Beyond the little cluster of buildings were long stretches of fields—wheat, sunflowers, alfalfa—and a two-lane highway that led off toward the rest of the world.

Pierce was dreaming of St. Dismas when he woke up that morning. He could picture the town as seen from above and the tangle of dirt roads that led away from it, and the highway. He was sleeping in his father’s old room, and Jesse was across the hall in the room that Pierce and his brother had once occupied when they were kids. Everything in the house was more or less as it had been since his father died, over a year before—couch and lamp and ashtray, dishes and canned goods in the cupboard and a refrigerator that he didn’t dare to open, dressers and pillows and blankets. A lot of dust and mildew.

Pierce opened his eyes and he could hear Jesse talking to himself.

—All right, he was saying. Thank you, thank you, you’re a great audience, he said, and Pierce knew that he was probably hopping around in front of the mirror, “capering,” as Pierce’s father would have said. Telling himself his little secret jokes, making faces and then laughing at the expressions he created. Pierce and Jesse had shared any number of motel rooms, and Pierce had often opened his eyes from a deep sleep to find Jesse deeply involved in one of these private performances.

In general, Pierce thought, Jesse wasn’t a bad kid, and there were a lot of things that he actually really liked about him. He was an entertaining liar and a natural-born thief, which had proved useful, and he was always eager to please. It hadn’t taken any persuasion at all to get him to turn on his mom, to show where she’d hidden her money and her drugs, and then he’d cheerfully climbed into the car with Pierce and driven away.

He was an impressive acrobat, too. He could walk on his hands just as naturally as if his palms were the

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