Two kinds of replacing: "The Sins of Others" by Hector Tobar

This is one of those stories where you can get to the end, think for all the world that you understood what happened, and still feel a little lost what the story was supposed to be about. Sometimes, it can be helpful to recount the bare facts, simplified from how they were relayed in the original narrative. While this can kill some of the organic joy that comes from the livelier telling, the more objective look at the raw materials of the story can sometimes help clue a reader into the meaning. The basics of the plot are:

1)  A man named Karl Segerstrom has hit his wife with a pickup truck, apparently in some kind of jealous rage.

2) However, there is a law, called the "Replacement Law," which allows him to find someone else to serve his sentence for the crime in his place.

3) The person he selects is Juan Ignacio Hernandez Perez, with whom he once worked in an auto mechanic's shop.

4) The provisions of the law are unclear, but it seems like they allow a citizen of the United States to nominate an illegal immigrant to serve the punishment for a crime in his or her place. Since Juan came to the U.S. illegally in 1996, he works for Karl.

5) Juan is not able to appeal this based on his productive life in the United States. However, since the government seems to be very half-assed about its enforcement, leaving most replacement convicts to wander around an old hotel that serves as a prison, Juan is able to escape fairly easily.

6) While escaped, he goes back to his old life, and he soon learns that charges against Karl were dropped, which means Juan is free to go.

7) However, Karl later attacks the man his wife had been sleeping with, earning him another charge, one that Juan again has to serve out.

8) Juan serves it out until Karl, beside himself that his wife has left him for real, kills himself. Juan is now free to go, as long as he keeps his nose clean and nobody else grabs him as a replacement for their crime.

9) While going on walks in his free-again life, he worries about the graffiti he sees on the wall, which includes a tag for one "Weedwolf." He worries that Weedwolf will get into some kind of trouble and make Juan pay for the crime. He thinks that if this happens, he will escape from prison, get a gun, and kill Weedwolf. 

That's the plot, more or less. I left out some stuff about his dead wife and kids, and there are some people along the way who treat him with unexpected kindness, but that's the essence of what happens. It's not too hard to follow, once you figure out what's going on, but a reader might wonder if there's some hidden layer to the story. If it's in Best American Short Stories, after all, shouldn't it have some brilliant second layer beneath the main layer? 

Different kinds of replacements

If there is a deeper layer, I think it's hidden in the many meanings of "replacement." On the one hand, there's the obvious meaning of one person doing something in place of another. Human history actually has a long track record of allowing one person to do something unpleasant in place of another. The rich have been able to bribe others to serve their sentences for crimes or to go to war in their place. "The Sins of Others," though, doesn't seem to be a story that's criticizing how the wealthy get away with things by exploiting the poor. If anything, Juan seems better off than Karl.

There's a more recent connotation to "replacement," though, and it's infusing this story with a hint of another kind of meaning. The "Great Replacement Theory," the notion that white people in America are intentionally being replaced by other races in order to subvert the political order, gained attention recently because it apparently motivated the shooter at a mass murder in a Buffalo grocery store. It had already been in circulation long before that event, though.

When I was first starting the story, I thought that maybe the "Replacement Law" had to do with this second meaning. I thought the law would be something like, "Every time a white person is taken out of society, a minority has to be taken out, too, in order to balance it out." That led to a whole different dystopian story in my head, which didn't turn out to be the actual story, but this second meaning of replacement never went away for me.

The Great Replacement Theory is an offshoot of something else that's been going on as long as there have been discriminated classes of minorities in the world. Scapegoating is where we take the evils of society and place the blame onto the discriminated class. It's yet another kind of replacement in which the minority group takes the blame by proxy for something that isn't really their fault. In America, immigrants are often blamed for crime or for high unemployment or other evils. 

The replacement that's operating in "The Sins of Others" is close to this kind of replacement. It's the old game of blaming the minority taken a step further. It's large-scale social scapegoating brought down to the individual level. The story dramatizes the effect of all kinds of conspiracy theories surrounding immigrants by taking it out of the abstract and social and moving it down to one person taking on the punishment of the sins of one other.

The ending is about to get a little bit strange.

Weedwolf

If that's how the story is working, then how to make sense of the enigmatic ending? What the hell is "Weedwolf" all about? If I'm to assume it wasn't meant to be a reference to the 2011 schlock horror film about a werewolf who kills stoners in a Texas town (which now I'm really interested in watching), then we as readers must be left to our own devices to try to understand what's going on here. I see two possible readings.

First, although Juan is paranoid about whether Weedwolf is out to get him by doing something unthinkable and then making Juan pay the penalty for it, perhaps Juan is himself Weedwolf. "Weedwolf" is awfully close to "werewolf," a sort of bugbear or bogeyman the community fears but which isn't real. How like the threats from immigrants in conspiracy theories! Especially when we mix in drugs with the werewolf. Juan is thinking he needs to destroy this imaginary foe, but in reality, the town is already preparing to destroy him, because it views him as the monster. This is why Juan imagines Weedwolf as being "about his age." He's imagining the version of himself that the community sees.

The second option is a little more depressing. Juan, tired of being the scapegoat for others, is now inventing a bogeyman of his own, a shadowy, sinister threat in the dark plotting evil. Juan has adapted well to society in America. He's living the American Dream, minus his short stint in prison. Has he, now, handed down the scapegoating to someone else? Is he now so protective of his own, hard-won place in the community that he is willing to join the majority in finding others to blame for what's wrong?

There have been a few stories in BASS this year that re-look at this age-old motif of the community and how it polices outcasts through informal enforcement of community codes. "The Little Widow from the Capital" did it, as did "Soon the Light," "Mbiu Dash," and, to a lesser degree, "Bears Among the Living." There must be something about this horror-adjacent theme that people find illustrative of current popular discourse. There's a reason Jordan Peele keeps cranking out horror movies as a way to talk about race in America.

The way you read the ending will determine which type of horror this is. If it's the first reading, then the real terror is that there is no reconciliation possible for the monster. Once someone is outside society, they will forever remain there, meaning their only choice is to become progressively more monstrous. If it's the second reading, then there is a chance for reconciliation, but only by joining the mob as it acts more monstrous than the bogeyman it fears.