The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (34 page)

The bathroom was small, a sink with a little glass shelf and smeared mirror above it, a standing shower stall and the toilet with the lid up. “Would you like to sit then, Mister Lafferty? You might be needing to.”

Lafferty shook his head. His voice had deserted him.

“You wouldn't have an apron in your bag, would you, love?” said Ray, looking down at his undershirt.

Eena bit her lip and shook her head, the tips of her ears going red.

“Pity,” said Ray. “Hold his hand there, love, tight to the side of the sink.”

“Wait,” said Eena. “Let me try.”

“You'd like to carve?”

“Let me try to get it off. I used to be able to get the things off my own finger when they were stuck.”

Ray nodded.

She came to Lafferty, her brown eyes big and close. She took his hand in both her own, raising it up to her face, taking his pinkie into her mouth.

“Easy, love,” said Ray. “You're getting me all up.”

She didn't hear him. Lafferty watched her eyes that never left his own, feeling his pinkie in her mouth so warm and moist it nearly stopped him trembling. Nearly. He watched her lips at their work, lips he'd never seen so skillful before, watched her cheeks suck in, felt her tongue laboring every bit as hard, the ears of her going redder and redder, his pinkie wanting to disappear down her throat. He felt the ring loosen. Felt it loosen then come free, sliding quickly away down his finger, too fast, away from his finger and into her throat, too deep, into her throat where it caught.

She drew away quickly, coughing, choking. Ray clapped her on the back, hard, once, twice, a third time, and the ring came shooting up out of her, lifting through the air, arching straight toward the toilet, where it landed with a neat little splash. Settling down to the bottom, lying there gleaming in all its golden splendor, beneath the foul water on the stained and dirty porcelain.

The three of them stared at the thing. “Get it,” said Ray.

“You get it,” Eena said.

“I'm not putting my hand in that,” Ray said. “Mister Lafferty, you do it.”

Reaching over, Lafferty flushed the toilet.

The ring disappeared, sucked down a different throat. Lafferty looked at Ray. Eena stepped back. Ray trembled, the tremble going to quaking proportions, red all over with the boiling blood, and he sputtered unintelligible syllables, and the gun in his hand came up, pointing at Lafferty, his finger on the trigger twitching. Lafferty felt his knees buckle and go under, and he was falling toward the floor.

“No!” said Eena, stepping in to knock it away, but doesn't the bloody thing discharge with a bang that shook the shower curtain. Lafferty, concussed by the sound and the shock, took a moment to divine what was happening, for it was the oddest dance they were doing, Ray and Eena, clutched together there swaying, Ray's little-boy face over her shoulder all white and grim and pulled back tight, and the head of Eena flopping loose and lolling.

And the red splash of blood coming down.

“God!” said Ray. “God, help me—Lafferty! Help me! Get something!”

Lafferty reached up, handing him a cheap scrap of a towel that Ray pressed to her chest. He lowered her to the floor, her eyelids fluttering, looking up from one of them to the other. “Get help,” Ray said. “Hurry—get help!”

Lafferty arose, riding his rubbery legs.

Eena, surprise lingering on her face, stared up past Ray, straight into the eyes of Lafferty.
“Hurry,”
said Ray. “Get help.”

Snatching the car keys from the rickety table, Lafferty galloped out the door, pulling it shut behind him. The car park was empty, no one out from the office, nor from the room near the Fiat, no one roused by the gunshot, no one wondering as to the mortal goings-on in the room at the end of the court. The morning was sleepy, motionless, as if he'd stepped into a painting, a still life, a landscape, all the trees arranged alongside the road, the house across the way with the tidy blue shutters, the clean gleaming glass of the petrol station next door, the letters on the sign so bold and red. The Audi started up in a fine, smooth purr, hitting on all cylinders, unlike his mind, for hadn't he been sleepless the whole of the night, engaged in the most desperate of physical labors, thumped about the head, his finger nearly cut off him, his very life in mortal jeopardy. He squealed away out of the car park, heading west, west across the island, the countryside sweeping by, the rock walls and hedgerows, the tumbledown cottages, leaving it all behind him, the cold awful touch of the dead woman, the porcelain white face of Ray, the blast of the gun and the blood.

But even as he crested the hill and flew toward the next, the eyes stayed with him, the lying eyes of Eena, full of hope and truth at last, going bigger and browner as the color leached from her face. The eyes stayed with him, and the ring, the dreadful, awful, never-ending ring.

MICAH NATHAN

FROM
Glimmer Train

 

Sam saw the owl a day earlier, resting in the eaves of the barn. Their father had left for market, and so Henry got the Browning and stood on a hay bale, stock set against his bony shoulder; he squeezed the trigger between breaths like his father had shown him. The owl fell in a storm of feathers and Henry set down the gun. He grabbed the bird by its tiny, curled feet.

“It didn't hurt anybody,” Sam said. He stared up at the motes swirling in stalks of morning light.

“We lost eight chickens last month,” Henry said. “And it wasn't from a fox.”

“How do you know?”

“Dad said a fox leaves a trail, but a bird of prey takes the whole damn thing.”

“You said damn.”

“So. You just said it, too.”

Henry inspected the owl. The twenty-gauge had made holes in the rump and neck, but the face was unspoiled; he would clean and stuff it, and have it ready for his father.

Sam smoothed the tail feathers. They were soft as velvet and left a dusty sheen on his fingers.

“Maybe Dad will let you have it, when I'm done,” Henry said.

“I'd put it over my door.”

“That would look good,” Henry said.

“Can I help?”

“No. There's other things that need finishing.”

“But you—”

“But nothing. Fetch me the arsenic soap, if you want.”

Sam crossed his arms. “Fetch it yourself.”

Henry shrugged and left the barn, owl in hand, shotgun propped against his shoulder. Sam glared at his brother's back, and shivered even though he tried not to; the morning was bitter cold.

 

Henry set the bird on his desk. Through his bedroom window he could see the field where Sam now worked, digging out rocks from the ground softened by Indian summer and carrying them to the well near the forest's edge. The well was dry, and they'd been dumping rocks in it for as long as they could remember. Years before, peering over the edge with Sam, his brother had asked him if the well had a bottom, or if it just kept going.

Henry watched Sam kneel on the dirt and figured he was playing with the sluggish beetles he'd uncovered, using his finger to make them crawl in circles around the sockets of earth. Henry wanted to start work on the owl, but it would have to wait. First a cup of coffee, and then he'd lift the heavy rocks his brother could not.

Henry frowned and set the water to boil; he sighed as he sat at the kitchen table with a steaming mug. He was fourteen and believed this ritual set him on the correct path to adulthood, because his father did the same thing every morning, preparing his coffee with great seriousness. Sometimes his father talked about common cattle diseases, sitting at the table with the mug held in both hands under his chin. Multiple abortions in the breeding herd usually meant lepto. Lameness and spongy swellings along the shoulders and hips often indicated blackleg. Henry kept quiet during his father's lectures; his sonorous voice and the thick smell of coffee were conversation enough.

Sam banged through the front door and ran into the living room, shouting Henry's name. Henry set down his mug and whistled for him.

“There's a man,” Sam said, breathing hard. “In the forest. I think he's dead.”

 

They found the man in a shallow trench along a stand of bare maples. He was missing one shoe and his toenails were dirty. Henry saw a dark hole in the man's thigh, black trails snaking down to the bottom of his blood-stiffened cuff. His brown hair was mashed to his forehead, and bits of dirt stuck to the tips of his eyelashes. His lips were almost white.

Sam picked up a stick and poked the man's shoulder. “Is he dead?”

Henry put his ear to the man's chest. “He's alive. Stop poking him.”

“I'm just trying to wake him up.”

“You can't. He's hurt bad. We need to bring him inside.”

“Why?”

“Because he'll freeze out here. Now hold his arms, and I'll grab his feet.”

“What happened to his leg?”

“Doesn't matter.”

Sam sniffled. “It's from a bullet. Don't tell me it isn't.”

“So what. He was hunting and had an accident.”

“He doesn't look like a hunter.”

“You don't know a damn thing about anything.” Henry grabbed the man's ankles. “If you won't help, I'll do it myself.”

The boys worked quickly and quietly. They dragged him from the forest and across the bumpy field. They rested near the broken tractor, the man lying between their feet. Henry wiped his forehead with his sleeve and spat.

“Ready?” Henry said, and Sam nodded.

By the time they'd put the man on the living room couch, Henry thought he might throw up. He ran to the bathroom and waited by the toilet. Sam knocked on the door.

“Go away,” Henry said. “I'm sick.”

“Is it because of the man?”

“It's because I'm sick. Hurry up and fetch a hot compress for him, and make some tea.”

“Dad says that tea is for guests.”

“Well, he's a guest, isn't he?”

Henry waited until he heard Sam walk into the kitchen. Then he flushed the toilet, rinsed his face, and took the necessary tools from the medicine cabinet.

Cleaning the wound wasn't as hard as he'd expected; he plucked bits of pant cloth from the clotted hole and poured alcohol until the blood dissolved and soaked into the gauze like watered-down wine. The man moaned and shifted when Sam put the hot compress on his forehead, and Sam drew back.

“I bet you he's a criminal,” Sam said.

“He might be,” Henry said.

“Do you think he lost his shoe before he got shot, or after?”

“I don't know.”

“If it's before he got shot, then he's just a bum,” Sam said. “Walking around with one shoe. Dad won't care if we brought in a bum. Dad likes bums. Remember when we gave that smelly old man a ride to town?”

Henry probed with the tweezers; the man grunted and gripped the couch. His hands reminded Henry of his father's—large and rough, with fine black hairs.

“He looks kind of young for a bum,” Henry said, and he pointed to the man's scarred knuckles. “Those are boxer's lumps. Uncle Frank had them.”

They ate an early dinner in the kitchen while the man slept. Sam drank his milk and licked froth off his upper lip, then set the glass down with a bang.

“He's probably hungry,” Sam said.

Henry cut a piece of chop. “When he wakes up I'll give him some pork, if he wants. Whose turn is it to scrub?”

“Yours.”

“I hate scrubbing.”

“Me, too.”

Sam pushed his corn around on his plate, fork tines scraping.

“Henry?”

“What.”

“You think we should get the doctor?”

“Not tonight,” Henry said. “It's too cold, and I'm not leaving you here alone.”

The man cried out, and the boys ran into the living room to find him sitting upright, glassy-eyed, the front of his shirt soaked with sweat. His hair stuck up at odd angles. He was shivering.

The man dragged his gaze across the room and stopped at Henry.

“Did I yell something?” the man said.

Henry nodded.

“What'd I say?”

“Nothing. You just yelled.”

The man coughed. “Am I in a yellow farmhouse?”

“You are,” Henry said.

“Is your father home?”

“He's at market.”

“What's he doing there?”

“Selling cattle.”

Sam stood by Henry's side, holding his arm. The man smiled at Sam. His left eyetooth was missing.

“Hello. I'm Jacob.”

“I'm Sam Beasley.”

“You scared of me, Sam Beasley?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jacob slid back down, rested his head on a bolster pillow, and held his wounded leg.

“I couldn't find the bullet,” Henry said.

“You dressed it all right.” Jacob closed his eyes. “Will one of you boys fetch me something I left in the woods?”

Henry and Sam looked at each other.

“I might,” Henry said, but Jacob was asleep.

 

Cort sat in a booth, sipping coffee thick with sugar and cream. He dumped a handful of coins on the table and watched the diner's parking lot through the window. A week of Indian summer had melted all the snow; now the cold wind returned. The pavement glittered with frost, and car windows reflected the moon. Fields across the road were spiked with broken stalks.

He pondered what had gone wrong. He'd kept it simple, as always—stand in the middle of the road, wait for the bank truck, and level the sawed-off when the driver gets close. But Jacob hadn't frisked the guard properly, and the guard pulled a Chief's Special from his boot, popping off two shots before Cort leaped on him and plunged the blade into his eye. Jacob limped into the woods with the sack of money banging against his side. He moved fast despite being wounded; Cort tracked him until leaves swallowed the blood trail.