The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (55 page)

He has been sweeping for ten minutes or so when he hears the low growl of a motorcycle, sees it coming toward him down the street. He does not recognize Deputy Landers until the man is just a block away; he looks too tall for the machine, all elbows and knees. A few seconds later the deputy pulls to the curb in front of Will, he shuts off the motorcycle, he takes the key from the ignition. He climbs off finally, nods to himself, crosses to Will, holds out the key.

“Sheriff thought it would be safer here with you than in Kenny's garage. Somebody broke a window out of the house last night. Kids, probably.”

Will stares at the key.

“I know it's only been a couple of weeks, but... sheriff asked me to remind you that you need to hire somebody to get your brother's place cleaned up. And he says he hopes you don't mind, but you oughta take care of Kenny's place, too. The way the sheriff figures it, you're going to end up with both places more than likely. Jennilee being the beneficiary, and her married to your brother and all. It's all fairly convoluted from what I hear, but the lawyers will straighten it out, I wouldn't worry if I was you. You're going to end up with Kenny's place, too, when it's all said and done, just you wait and see. One house for you and one for Stevie, that's the way I figure it. Get him out of that trailer of his finally. I'll bet he won't be complaining about that.”

The deputy continues on like this for a while, none of it registering with Will except as a kind of buzzing drone, a drill in his ear.
This is the deputy who never shuts up
, he tells himself.
The other one... who's the other one? What's his name? It's Ronnie Walters
, he reminds himself, though he has known both men all their lives. Ronnie Walters. A man as close-mouthed as God himself.

Finally Deputy Landers starts to walk away. But as he does so he crosses once more to the motorcycle, runs his hand over the gas tank, trails his hand over the leather seat. “Somebody sure did a great job of restoring this beauty,” he says. “Still rides good, too. Be sure and let me know if you decide to sell it.”

Will isn't aware of when the deputy stops talking and moves away. His next awareness of the deputy is when Will looks up and sees him walking briskly toward the center of town, already maybe fifty feet away, as if time has moved in a fragmented leap, lurching over moments irretrievable.

This is what it's like
, Will tells himself,
when everything is broken
.

He feels the key in one hand and the broom handle in the other. He doesn't know what to do with either one of them. He should go inside, maybe. Except that he doesn't want to go inside. He doesn't want to go or be anywhere.

He looks at the motorcycle parked at the curb, its chrome and painted surfaces waxed and buffed to a glassy sheen, and reflected on the side of the shiny gas tank is the image of an odd-looking man looking back at Will, a man reduced to the size of a bird, his body bent to fit the curve of the tank, warped and shrunken and compacted by the weight of his own weariness, a weariness that glitters in his eyes like splinters of chrome, eyes that are asking for something, forgiveness maybe, redemption, or maybe just begging for an answer now and then, each man pleading to the other but neither having anything to offer, nothing but a key clutched invisibly in the fist, and in the other hand a broom good for cleaning nothing for very long, man and broom alike no bigger than a toothpick in the face of life's storm.

And because Will does not want to think of all that, because as long as he has a daughter or wife or brother he cannot allow himself to be crushed by what he knows, cannot grant himself the gift of oblivion, he lifts his eyes to the horizon and thinks of autumn coming and of what it will be like in the woods this year. He thinks maybe he will not hunt anymore, because nothing will ever be the same. The fine powdered snow on the dry leaves will not be the same, and neither will the wind through bare branches or the shafted sunlight or the sharp crackling of ice-encrusted limbs. But Molly is old enough to go into the woods this year, and he does not want to disappoint her. Stevie will be looking forward to it, too. So maybe even though nothing will be the same, Will should take them hunting after all. But no, nothing will ever be the same. Nothing ever is.

And with this thought Will pauses for a moment in his sweeping. Only then does he realize that without even knowing when he started again, he has swept thirty feet of the sidewalk clean. The motorcycle key is still in his hand, pressed against the broom handle now and biting into his palm, leaving an impression on his skin. But it is Harvey's key, and Will grips it tightly as he resumes his sweeping. The bristles make a rhythmic sound as they scrape the concrete,
chhhhh, chhhhh, chhhhh, chhhhh
. And before long he is thinking of Portugal again, that fantasy impossibly serene. Maybe Molly will get there someday. Maybe now she can.

As for me, he tells himself, you weren't made for traveling, you weren't made for big ideas. You were made for sweeping. For frying wings and making daiquiris. For opening bottles of beer. For keeping a room clean and relatively quiet and as dim as an old cathedral. For maintaining the coward's refuge from a sun-bruised sky.

PATRICIA SMITH

FROM
Staten Island Noir

 

Port Richmond

 

Maury's eyes were crazy wide, staring right into the camera, just like they were on yesterday's show and the show before that. His hand rested on the shoulder of some blubbering white girl, Keisha or Kiara something, her hair all hard-curled and greased up into those stiff-sprayed rings, smeared black circling her eyes, greening gold Nefertitis swinging from her ears, more faux preciousness twinkling from her left nostril. Seems like K or K's baby daddy could be any one of the fidgeting young black men and—surprise!—she kinda didn't know which one.

The contestants were all sloe-eyed, corkscrew braids, double negative, mad for no reason except that they had been identified on national television as fools who didn't give a damn where their dicks went.

It was time, once again, for the paternity test and Maury's dramatic slicing open of that manila envelope. For some reason, the prospect of finally knowing whose seed had taken hold reduced Kiara or Keisha to unbridled bawling and a snorting of snot.

Jo had the show on more for background than anything, but she stopped for a closer look at the little nasty who'd opened her legs and been done in. It amazed her how anybody, let alone a white girl, could look at any one of those sad sacks and feel bad enough about herself to fuck him. “I ain't never been, or ain't never gonna be, that damned horny,” she said out loud, just as Tyrell, sloe-eyed and corkscrewed, was revealed to be the father of the squirming little bastard in question.

“I'm gon' take care of my 'sponsibility,” he monotoned, a semiearnest declaration which was greeted by wild hooting and hand-clapping from Maury's drama-drunk studio audience. Even after receiving the sudden blessing of papahood, Tyrell avoided looking at or touching the mother of his child. Kiara or Keisha stood, shivering in a whorish skirt and halter top, in dire need of at least an orchestrated hug. She continued to keen.

I cannot watch this shit
, Jo thought, just after thinking,
Where did she find an actual halter top in 2010?
Although she made a move to punch the television off, she didn't do it. Instead she lowered the volume so the string of skewed urban vignettes could still distract her from what she really needed to be doing. Maybe the next segment would feature some tooth-challenged redneck hurling a chair across the stage upon discovering, after a week or so of sweaty carnal acrobatics, that the he he thought was a she was really a he fervently embracing his she-ness.

Jo revisited her mental to-do. Last night's crusted dishes, still “soaking.” A mountain of undies and towels, waiting to be lugged to the Bright Star laundromat, where the guy who guarded the dollar changers—to make damned sure that no “nonlaunderers” used them—never missed an opportunity to converse with her tits. Oh, and she'd skipped breakfast again. After her last tangle with an oil-slick omelet at the New Dinette, a succession of Dunkin's dry toasted things, and her own ambitious attempts to get healthy and choke down oatmeal, the idea of a morning meal had lost its appeal. By 3
P.M
. she'd be trolling Port Richmond Avenue, inhaling a loaded slice or two at Denino's or resigning herself to the New's lunch menu and one of their huge, dizzying burgers.

There wasn't much in the fridge—various leftover pastas curling in Tupperware and cold cuts she could practically hear expiring. Ravenous, she spotted the pack of Luckies on the edge of the dinette table, and her whole mouth tingled with crave. Although the pack was half empty, she didn't remember buying it.
Just one
, she thought. Just one, and maybe a little drinkie to follow. Instead she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, shutting it out, and did what Katie had told her to do. She said the word
poem
out loud.

That's it
, she thought, scrambling for her wire-bound notebook and new pen.
I'm going to write me a poem
. From the flickering Panasonic, Maury asked, “When did you first suspect that Aurelio was sleeping with your mother?”

Poetry was Jo's new medicine. During her last trip to the university hospital's emergency room, her vague complaint that she had been “sleeping too long and smoking too much and maybe drinking a little harder and my kid is driving me crazy” earned her a useless nicotine patch and the advice of Katie McMahon, a perky community counselor, who suggested she put little bits of her life into lines. Rhyme or not, no matter. About anything she wanted it to be about. “If you call it a poem, then it is,” Katie had said.

Surprisingly, the little scrawlings helped. She'd written more than a few choice lines about Al, the ex-cop who showed up with his monthly hard-on to pound her into the mattress with something he called love. She wasted whole pages on Charlie, who'd inhabited her womb for nine months and now had no patience for her “stupid fuckin' rules.” He dropped by occasionally to pilfer weed money from her wallet, gobble the contents of the refrigerator, or sleep off an encounter with too many shots of Jäger. On good days—or when she needed to remember that there had actually
been
good days—she wrote all pretty about a moment when she was full of light, strolling over the Bayonne Bridge like she was walking on water. From up there the island magically shed its dingy and became more than gossip, stench, and regret. The key to happiness on Staten Island, she decided, was to get as close as you could to the sky and make the assholes as small as possible.

Flipping to a fresh page in the notebook, she clicked the top of her pen and licked the point the way she'd seen real writers do before they—

A key rattled in the lock and the front door was flung open with such force that it banged into the wall, knocking more mint-green chips from the plaster. Jo felt her heart go large and stone.

“Hey, what the hell is up, Jo?”

He refused to call her Mom. Or Mother. Sixteen years old, six feet, two inches of swaggering explosive. Her son.

“It's hot as shit out there. What's in this place to eat?”

“I think there's some ham in the—”

“The same ham as last time? That shit's old. Ain't nuthin' cooked in this bitch?”

Jo steeled herself. “Charlie, I told you not to come in here—”

“Cursing? Hungry? And you gon' do
what
?”

Jo knew the answer. Nothing. She had never not been terrified of her son. Charlie had ripped her open at birth, glared at her as he bit her breast to demand milk, pinched and pummeled his kindergarten classmates, set fire to wastebaskets in school restrooms, been suspended from sixth grade for showing up plastered on a vile mix of Kool-Aid and vodka, and greeted all attempts to control and educate with a raised middle finger. He strutted and primped in Day-Glo Jordans, a too-big Yankees cap twisted sideways on his head, pants two sizes too wrong pulled down so far the waistband backed his ass. He adopted the lyric swagger of black boys, taking on their nuance and rhythms while hissing about “niggers” in the circle of his crew. While Jo watched in horror, Charlie grew as wide and high as a wall. He arced over her when she dared make mama noises, and huffed in her face with dead breath, which stank of cheap tobacco.

His eyes looked like someone had died behind them.

She wasn't sure what he did during the day. It wasn't school. She'd gotten letters and phone calls from Port Richmond High attesting to his continued absence. “He's a dropout,” she finally blurted to one well-meaning guidance counselor, before hanging up the phone.

There were even rumors that Charlie had managed to father a child. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, Jo could see him snarling, fully erect, a gum-cracking girl laid wide and waiting. His lovemaking would be thrust and spit. When she thought of a child built of Charlie and air, a thick shudder ripped through her.

“Did you hear me? Food! I'm fuckin' hungry! I swear, Jo, don't make me have to—”

She sprang from her chair and bolted for the kitchen with no idea what she would do once she got there.

He'd only hit her once.

One clouded August night, a week after Charlie turned sixteen, Jo saw him on the street just after finishing her part-time job at Bloomy Rose, a florist in Midland Beach. She'd worked late that night, helping with a huge order for the funeral of a local politician. As she wound her way toward her bus stop, a fierce rain needled her cheeks. Assuming the rain had driven everyone inside, she was surprised to see a dark human huddle on Father Capodanno Boulevard just before Midland Avenue, and even more surprised to see her son at its edges.