The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (53 page)

Harvey smiles, pleased with her analogy. “So,” he asks, “you find anything interesting?”

“On the kids, you mean? No, nothing. I think Ronnie Walters was kind of hoping they had autographed their graffiti, but no such luck.”

Harvey wonders how deeply he should probe, whether any of it matters anyway.

“Apparently we're not the only ones Kenny rubs the wrong way,” she tells him.

“How's that?”

“Those kids planted a stack of porno magazines in Kenny's desk. Kiddie porn.”

“Seriously?”

“Whoever they are, those kids must really have it out for him.”

“I guess so.” Harvey stands there looking in at Lacy. He feels so much affection for her, his brother's wife. He wishes he could climb in beside her and sit with her and tell her everything. Wishes he had had the good sense to marry a woman like Lacy, wishes he could fall asleep every night with a woman like Lacy in his arms. Knows it would change everything. Knows he would be a different man.

“So who's to say those aren't really Kenny's magazines?” he asks. “What I mean is, how do you know for sure the kids put them there?”

“It was just too obvious, is all. They even left the drawer hanging open so we'd be able to see inside. They just weren't very smart about it. I mean, if they were, they never would have broken in in the first place, am I right?”

“I've never known you to be wrong,” he tells her. He would like to throw up again, would welcome the relief, but he knows he is too empty for that now, there is nothing left inside.

“You get some pictures of them, too?” he asks, trying to sound offhanded about it. “The magazines, I mean.”

“And give the kids what they want? Naw, Ronnie confiscated them. Said there might be some way to track them down, find out who put them there.”

Harvey nods, a vague smile on his lips, a twist of gathering pain.

“So you want a ride home or what?” Lacy asks.

“Thanks anyway,” he tells her, and pulls back from the window. “I had a couple beers with Will and now I feel half sick to my stomach. I'm going to try to walk it off.”

“It's a good night for walking, I guess. Better than for sleeping, anyway.”

“That's what I figure,” he says.

When she pulls away he feels like crying, though he isn't sure why. Something about the way the red taillights look as they shrink smaller and smaller. Something about the vast darkness ahead.

 

Will sits alone in the darkened bar with the doors locked and the television off. He is ashamed of his stupidity and ashamed that he has involved Stevie and Harvey in it. Ashamed of wanting something that could never be his. He would settle now for having things the way they used to be, back when his mother and father were still alive. Back in the innocent times. The first day of buck season, for example, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, one of the holiest of days.

Because hunting had never been about violence, not as far as Will was concerned. It had been about the tenderness of the woods and of walking tenderly through them with his brothers and father, the way the sun rose on naked trees limned with ice or hoary with frost, of black branches looking diamond-encrusted, the sunlight as soft as candlelight, the woods as hushed as a murmured prayer. And it had been about that almost sacred moment of coming upon a magnificent animal in the heart of those woods bathed in shafted sunlight and shadow, the breathless stillness of seeing one another in that sudden sanctified moment, hunter and hunted, the two connected by the invisible thread of the bullet about to fly.

Nor had he ever felt violence in the ritual of gutting and skinning, nor later around the camp stove with their bellies full, mouths pleasantly numbed by the whiskey they sipped. All this had never seemed violent to him but an ancestral ceremony that strengthened and cleansed him for the other part of his life, the tedium and labor.

But to Will all that seems a long time ago now. The woods are smaller now, and there are more hunters in them. Even deep in the woods, eighteen-wheelers rumbling along the highway can be heard. The stillness and the tenderness are gone now, Will thinks. The world is not a tender place.

 

Harvey has to pound on the door of his brother's trailer for three solid minutes before Stevie finally appears behind a curtained window, peeking out. Then the door comes open and Stevie whispers, “Jeezus. I thought you were the police.”

Harvey pushes past him and goes inside. The place looks fairly clean for a change, not the way it usually looks, as if a couple of suitcases and a refrigerator had exploded. Harvey goes straight to the computer on the kitchen table, says before he gets there, “I want that CD you have.”

“It's in here,” Stevie tells him, and opens the hallway closet, bends down, reaches inside one of his work boots. He takes the disk in its jewel case to Harvey, who is seated at the kitchen table now, facing Stevie's computer, a six-year-old IBM he bought at a yard sale for $75.

Harvey sits there staring at the jewel case for half a minute. Then he hands it back to his brother. “Plug this thing in for me.”

“Ahh, I don't know if I oughta be looking at those again—”

“Who asked you to look at them in the first place? Just plug it in and get it started for me.”

Stevie inserts the disk and opens the untitled folder. Icons for fourteen consecutively numbered files appear. Stevie explains how to open each of the files separately, how to line them up like playing cards across the screen.

Then he turns toward the living room before Harvey can open the first file, and he stands there at the window, looking out into the darkness. Harvey knows that this modesty is a farce, that Stevie has certainly looked at each of the photos already, has probably made a secret copy of the CD for himself. Harvey knows all this, but he doesn't care. He is very nearly beyond all caring now, except for one last thing.

Harvey opens a half-dozen files in a row, studies each one carefully. He tells himself that he is cold to them, he doesn't care anymore. He gazes more intently at one photo in particular, leans closer to the screen. He asks, “Is there any way to make this picture bigger?”

Stevie wants to turn away from the window but doesn't. “You mean the whole thing?”

“The whole thing, parts of it, I don't care. I just need it bigger.”

“There's a little icon up in the toolbar, up along the top of the screen, looks like a magnifying glass. You see it?”

“Okay. Now what?”

“Click on that once. Now go down to the picture and click on it.”

Harvey clicks on Jennilee's hand. He clicks a second time, makes the image larger still. Finally he can see her wedding band in the enlargement, not just a golden glow on her finger anymore, not a trick of the light.

Calmly, too calmly, he asks, “How do I turn this thing off?”

“Just click on the little
X
in the corner of each picture.”

Harvey closes each picture. His hands are off the mouse now, palms flat on his knees. He knows that if he lets his eyes close now, as they want to, he could drift away on the emptiness he feels, undulate down into the center of it like a leaf falling from a high branch, a leaf yellow and dead, a wasted thing.

Stevie comes over to the computer and ejects the disk. Quietly he places it in the jewel case and quietly closes the lid. Harvey looks up at him and holds out his hand.

 

Harvey comes quietly into his bedroom. It is at once familiar and foreign to him, as if he has been away a very long time. The room seems smaller than he remembers it, and parts of it are ugly now. Jennilee has fallen asleep with the reading light on, a magazine face-down on the bedspread, the television on with the volume turned low. A part of him wonders what magazine it is, what she might have chosen to divert her thoughts at a time like this. On the back cover is an advertisement for Absolut vodka. He thinks about coming forward off the threshold and turning the magazine over, but he does not move.

Jennilee sleeps on her side, her knees drawn up. She is wearing only panties and a matching teddy, eggshell white. The ceiling fan turns. He can feel the slightest of breezes across his face. He can smell the refrigerated air from the vents in the walls.

She awakes with a start, though he has made not a sound. Her head jerks up off the pillow, legs straighten. For a moment she lies there blinking at the wall. Then she turns her head slightly, sees him there in the doorway. She says nothing. She tries out a smile.

Harvey tells her, “There was a break-in at the school tonight.”

She tries to make her voice sound sleepy, though she is wide awake. “I know, Kenny called me. A bunch of kids, apparently.”

“He sure didn't waste any time letting you know.”

She isn't sure how to respond to this, decides that the best answer is none at all. She reaches for the sheet, draws a corner of it over her thighs.

He says, “If you're cold, why do you have the fan and air conditioning on?”

She rubs a hand over the goose bumps on her arm. “I'm just keyed up, is all. Kenny was all worked up when he called and, I don't know...”

“Like brother, like sister,” Harvey says, and he immediately regrets it, regrets that the emptiness he had felt is slipping away with those words, regrets that silence as he now understands it is impossible, the silence of not thinking or feeling, of not doing or being.

Jennilee lays a hand on the empty side of the bed. “You could come join me and help me get my mind off things. We could just lie here and talk a while. Remember when we used to do that?”

“I don't remember when you ever had the time to. Not with me, anyway.” The emptiness has left him quickly, rushed out of him like blood from a gaping wound.

“Come on,” she says, a supplicant now, seductively pleading. “Come get me warm.”

He puts a hand to the wall switch and shuts off the ceiling fan. Looks at her a last time before turning away.

She calls to him. “You want me to come down and watch TV with you a while?”

He squeezes his eyes shut, goes down the stairs with eyes closed, wanting blindness but shutting out nothing, all images clear inside his head as his fingers slide down the polished rail.

 

Harvey clings to the shadows as he walks close to the side of Kenny's house. He peers into one window after another, all rooms dark. He wonders which of the rooms belongs to Kenny, which to Kenny's mother. He acknowledges a kind of affection for Kenny's mother, Pauline, though he hasn't spoken to her for several months now, not since the homecoming game last fall when he and Jennilee sat with her in the bleachers. He has always liked Pauline, thought her very attractive when he was a boy, though she was always on the plump side and even more so now. He remembers all the late nights when he and Kenny had stumbled in, trying without success to conceal their drunkenness, and she would come padding into the kitchen in robe and slippers, chide them for their behavior even as she was pouring out a glass of wine for herself, and soon she would have a skillet full of eggs and sausages ready, a mountain of toast. On the other hand, he remembers, too, the disappointment on Pauline's face when he and Jennilee turned away from the minister at the front of the church, turned to face friends and family for the first time as husband and wife. Pauline's frown was fleeting, yes, a small pout of her lips. But Harvey had noticed it. He never resented her for it, though. He understood her disappointment. Understood that she wanted and deserved someone better for her daughter, her perfect flower of a child.

Eventually Harvey crosses to the rear of the house, and there he sees a soft light glowing at ground level, bends low and peers through the small window and into the basement game room. Kenny is sitting on the edge of the brown leather sofa, a drink in hand, the television on. With his free hand Kenny is bouncing a small blue ball, a racquetball, bouncing it up and down on the parquet tile floor. Too anxious to sit still. Haunted by possibilities. He takes a drink and then bounces the ball four or five times in a row, a few seconds between each bounce. Then another drink. Meanwhile he stares at the television.

Harvey lets himself into the house using the key from Jennilee's purse. The key doesn't work on the front door, but it works on the back. He enters into the pantry. Then three paces to the kitchen. Every creaking step makes him wince. He spots the knife block atop the refrigerator, is stopped by the sight of it, nine blades within easy reach. He thinks about wrapping his fingers around one of those black handles. It would be easy, just like a hunting knife. Though not the same at all.

Then Kenny's voice calls up through the open basement door. “I thought you were asleep already! You want me to get you something?”

Kenny waits for an answer, hears nothing. He takes another sip from his drink, half a glass of scotch and a few ice cubes that have nearly melted, but still the scotch burns pleasantly going down, single malt, the good stuff, he only drinks the good stuff.

He calls out again. “You looking for a Valium or what, Mom?”

A moment later Harvey comes down the last step and appears around the corner. Kenny sucks in a sudden breath at the sight of him, jerks back so abruptly that some of his drink splashes onto his slacks.

Harvey says, “Looks like maybe you're the one could use the Valium.”

“Harvey, geez, I thought you were...”

Harvey approaches him slowly. “You thought I was what—your friend? Is that what you thought?”

Kenny's smile is pale and thin. Even as he sits there smiling, he is casting about with his eyes, looking for something with which to defend himself. Harvey has the only exit blocked and Harvey is a strong man, a man who has used his muscles all his life, not like Kenny, who, though he has managed to keep his weight down, is soft inside and out, has always been soft, always needed somebody else to take the first risk, always needed to feed off somebody else's boldness and daring, a weak man on his own—this he knows about himself.