The Best American Mystery Stories 2006
- Автор: Дивер Джеффри, Хантер Эван
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51746-6
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
“He’s full of shit, kids,” his girlfriend said through the open bathroom door.
“Don’t listen to that. You’re looking at the guy who almost blew up Mussolini,” he said to us. Then he yelled through the French doors into the suite, “Tell me I’m full of shit one more time.”
“You’re full of shit,” she yelled back.
“That’s what you got to put up with,” he said to us. “Now, teach me the Atomic Bomb.”
Blue-black clouds were piled from the horizon all the way to the top of the sky, blooming with trees of lightning that made no sound. Across the street we could see oil rigs pumping in an emerald green pasture and a half dozen horses starting to spook at the weather. Benny’s girlfriend came out of the bathroom, dressed in new jeans and a black and maroon cowboy shirt with a silver stallion on the pocket. She drank from a vodka collins, and her mouth looked cold and hard and beautiful when she lowered the glass.
“Anybody hungry?” she said.
I felt myself swallow. Then, for reasons I didn’t understand, I told her and Benny what Mr. Dunlop had done to Sister Felicie. Benny listened attentively, his handsome face clouding, his fingers splaying his knotted yo-yo string in different directions. “Say all that again? This guy Dunlop ran off the Cheerio man?” he said.
It was almost Easter and at school that meant the Stations of the Cross and a daily catechism reminder about the nature of disloyalty and human failure. When he needed them most, Christ’s men bagged it down the road and let him take the weight on his own. I came to appreciate the meaning of betrayal a little better that spring.
I thought my account of Mr. Dunlop’s abuse of Sister Felicie and the Cheerio man had made Benny our ally. He’d said he would come by my house the next night and straighten out Mr. Dunlop and anyone else who was pushing around kids and nuns and yo-yo instructors. He said these kinds of guys were Nazis and should be boiled into lard and poured into soap molds. He said, “Don’t worry, kid. I owe you guys. You taught me the Atomic Bomb and the Chinese Star.”
The next day, after school, when I was raking leaves in the yard, Vernon used his slingshot to shoot me in the back with a marble. I felt the pain go into the bone like a cold chisel.
“Got a crick?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, mindlessly, squeezing my shoulders back, my eyes shut.
“How about some hair of the dog that bit you?” he said, fishing another marble out of his shirt pocket.
“You screwed with Benny Siegel, Vernon. He’s going to stuff you in a toilet bowl,” I said.
“Yeah? Who is Benny Sea Gull?”
“Ask your old man. Oh, I forgot. He can’t read, either.”
Vernon’s fist came out of the sky and knocked me to the ground. I felt the breath go out of my chest as though it were being sucked into a giant vacuum cleaner. Through the kitchen window, I could see my mother washing dishes, her face bent down toward the sink. Vernon unbuckled my belt, worked the top button loose on my jeans, and pulled them off my legs, dragging me through the dust. The clouds, trees, garage, alleyway, even the dog dumps, spun in circles around me. Vernon pulled one of my pants legs inside out and used it to blow his nose.
Benny and his girlfriend did not show up at my house that night. I called the Shamrock Hotel and asked for his room.
“There’s no one registered here by that name,” the clerk said.
“Has he checked out?”
There was a pause. “We have no record of a guest with that name. I’m sorry. Thank you for calling the Shamrock,” the clerk said, and hung up.
The next day at recess I saw Sister Felicie sitting on a stone bench under a live oak in a garden behind the church. Her black habit was spangled with sunlight, and her beads lay across her open palm as though the wind had robbed her of her concentration. Her face looked like ceramic, polished, faintly pink, not quite real. She smelled of soap or perhaps shampoo in her close-cropped hair, which was covered with a skullcap and veil that must have been unbearable in the summer months.
“You’re supposed to be on the playground, Charlie,” she said.
“I told Benny Siegel what Mr. Dunlop did to you. He promised to help. But he didn’t show up last night,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Benny is a gangster. Nick and I have been teaching him yo-yo tricks. He built a casino in Nevada.”
“I’m convinced you’ll be a great writer one day,” she said, and for the first time in weeks she smiled. “You’re a good boy, Charlie. I may not see you again, at least for a while. But you’ll be in my prayers.”
“Not see you?”
“Run along now. Don’t hang out with too many gangsters.”
She patted me on top of the head, then touched my cheek.
Benny had shown Nick and me color photographs of the resort hotel and gambling casino he had built in the desert. He also showed us a picture of him and his girlfriend building a snowman in front of a log cabin in west Montana. In the photograph she was smiling and looked much younger, somehow innocent among evergreens that rang with winter light. She wore a fluffy pink sweater and knee-length boots stitched with Christmas designs.
I kept wanting to believe Benny would call or come by, but he didn’t. I dreamed about a building in a desert, its exterior scrolled with neon, a grassy pond on one side of it where flamingos stood in the water, arching their necks, pecking at the insects in their feathers.
I put away my Cheerio yo-yo and no longer listened to ballgames at Buffalo Stadium. I refused to eat, without understanding why, threw my lunch in a garbage can on the way to school, and fantasized about hurting Vernon Dunlop.
“We’ll set fire to his house,” Nick said.
“Serious?” I said, looking up from the box of shoes we were shining in his garage.
“It’s a thought,” he replied.
“What if somebody gets killed?”
“That’s the breaks when you’re white trash,” Nick said. He grinned, his face full of play. He had a burr haircut and the overhead light reflected on his scalp. Nick was a good boxer, swallowed his blood in a fight, and never let anyone know when he was hurt. Secretly I always wished I was as tough as he was.
He and I had a shoeshine route. We collected shoes from all over the neighborhood and shined them for ten cents a pair, using only one color polish — brown; home delivery was free. Nick peeled open a Milky Way and bit into it. He chewed thoughtfully, then offered the candy bar to me. I shook my head.
“You got to eat,” he said.
“Who says?” I replied.
“You make me sad, Charlie,” he said.
My father was an old-time pipeline man whose best friend was killed by his side on the last day of World War I. He read classical literature, refused to mow the lawn under any circumstances, spent more days than he should have in the beer joint, attended church irregularly, and contended there were only two facts you had to remember about the nature of God: that He had a sense of humor and, as a gentleman, He never broke His word.
The last part always stuck with me.
Benny had proved himself a liar and a bum. My sense of having been used by him seemed to grow daily. My mother could not make me eat, even when my hunger was eating its way through my insides like a starving organism that had to consume its host in order to survive. I had bad spins when I woke in the morning and vertigo when I rode my bike to school, wobbling between automobiles while the sky, trees, and buildings around me dissolved into a vortex of atomic particles.
My mother tried to tempt me from my abstinence with a cake she baked and the following day with a codfish dinner she brought from the cafeteria, wrapped in foil, butter oozing from an Irish potato that was still hot from the oven.