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:
I rushed from the house and pedaled my bike to Nick’s. We sat inside the canebrake at the end of our old street, while the day cooled and the evening star twinkled in the west. There was a bitter taste in my mouth, like the taste of zinc pennies.
“You miss your dad?” Nick asked.
“I don’t think about it much anymore. It was an accident. Why go around feeling bad about an accident?” I replied, turning my face from his, looking at the turquoise rim along the bottom of the sky.
“My old man always says your dad was stand-up.”
“Benny Siegel treated us like jerks, Nick,” I said.
“Who cares about Benny Siegel?”
I didn’t have an answer for him, nor could I explain why I felt the way I did.
I rode my bike home in the dusk, then found a heavy rock in the alley and threw it against the side of the Dunlops’s house. It struck the wood so hard the glass in the windows rattled. Vernon came out on the back porch, eating a piece of fried chicken, his body silhouetted in the kitchen light. He wore a strap undershirt and his belt was unbuckled, hanging loosely over his fly.
“You’re lucky, dick wipe. I got a date tonight. But wait till tomorrow,” he said. He shook his chicken bone at me.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I had terrible dreams about facing Vernon in the morning. How could I have been so foolish as to actually assault his house? I wished I had taken the pounding right then, when I was in hot blood and not trembling with fear. I woke at 2 A.M. and threw up in the toilet, then went into the dry heaves. I lay in bed, my head under the pillow. I prayed an asteroid would crash into our neighborhood so I wouldn’t have to see the sunrise.
At around five o’clock I fell asleep. Later I heard wind rattle the roof, then a loud knocking sound like a door slamming repeatedly on a doorjamb. When I looked out my window screen I could see fog on the street and a maroon convertible with whitewall tires parked in front of the Dunlops’s house. An olive-skinned man with patent leather hair parted down the middle, wearing a clip-on bow tie and crinkling white shirt, sat in the passenger seat. I rubbed my eyes. It was the Cheerio man Mr. Dunlop had run off from the parking lot in front of Costen’s Drug Store. Then I heard Benny’s voice on the Dunlops’s porch.
“See, you can’t treat people like that. This is the United States, not Mussoliniville. So we need to walk out here and apologize to this guy and invite him back to the corner by the school. You’re good with that, aren’t you?”
There was a gap in the monologue. Then Benny’s voice resumed. “You’re not? You’re gonna deny kids the right to enter Cheerio yo-yo contests? You think all those soldiers died in the war for nothing? That’s what you’re saying? You some kind of Nazi pushing around little people? Look at me when I’m talking, here.”
Then Benny and Mr. Dunlop walked out to the convertible and talked to the Cheerio man. A moment later Benny got behind the wheel and the convertible disappeared in the fog.
I fell sound asleep in the deep blue coolness of the room, with a sense of confidence in the world I had not felt since the day the war ended and Kate Smith’s voice sang “God Bless America” from every radio in the neighborhood.
When I woke, it was hot and bright outside, the wind touched with dust and the stench of melted tar. I told my mother of Benny Siegel’s visit to the Dunlops.
“You must have had a dream, Charlie. I was up early. I would have heard,” she said.
“No, it was Benny. His girlfriend wasn’t with him, but the Cheerio man was.”
She smiled wanly, her eyes full of pity. “You’ve starved yourself and you break my heart. Nobody was out there, Charlie. Nobody,” she said.
I went out to the curb. No one ever parked in front of the Dunlops’s house, and because the sewer drain was clogged, a patina of mud always dried along the edge of the gutter after each rain. I walked out in the street so I wouldn’t be on the Dunlops’s property, my eyes searching along the seam between the asphalt and the gutter. But I could see no tire imprint in the gray film left over from the last rain. I knelt down and touched the dust with my fingers.
Vernon opened his front door and held it back on the spring. He was bare-chested, a pair of sweatpants hanging below his navel. “Losing your marbles, frump?” he asked.
By noon my skin was crawling with anxiety and fear. Worse, I felt an abiding shame that once again I had been betrayed by my own vanity and foolish trust in others. I didn’t care anymore whether Vernon beat me up or not. In fact, I wanted to see myself injured. Through the kitchen window I could see him pounding dust out of a rug on the clothesline with a broken tennis racquet. I walked down the back steps and crossed into his yard. “Vernon?” I said.
“Your butt-kicking appointment is after lunch. I’m busy right now. In the meantime, entertain yourself by giving a blowjob to a doorknob,” he replied.
“This won’t take long,” I said.
He turned around, exasperated. I hit him, hard, on the corner of the mouth, with a right cross that Nick Hauser would have been proud of. It broke Vernon’s lip against his teeth, whipping his face sideways, causing him to drop the racquet. He stared at me in disbelief, a string of spittle and blood on his cheek. Before he could raise his hands, I hit him again, this time square on the nose. I felt it flatten and blood fly under my knuckles, then I caught him in the eye and throat. I took one in the side of the head and felt another slide off my shoulder, but I was under his reach now and I got him again in the mouth, this time hurting him more than he was willing to live with.
He stepped back from me, blood draining from his split lip, his teeth red, his face twitching with shock. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his father appear on the back porch.
“Get in here, boy, before I whup your ass worse than it already is,” Mr. Dunlop said.
That afternoon Nick Hauser and I went to a baseball game at Buffalo Stadium. When I came home my mother told me I had received a long-distance telephone call. This was in an era when people only called long-distance to inform family members that a loved one had died. I called the operator and was soon connected to Sister Felicie. She told me she was back at Our Lady of the Lake, the college in San Antonio where she had trained to become a teacher.
“I appreciate what your friend has tried to do, but would you tell him everything is fine now, that he doesn’t need to act on my behalf anymore?” she said.
“Which friend?” I asked.
“Mr. Siegel. He’s called the archdiocese twice.” I heard her laugh, then clear her throat. “Can you do that for me, Charlie?”
But I never saw Benny or his girlfriend again. In late June I read in the newspaper that Benny had been at her cottage in Beverly Hills, reading the L. A. Times, when someone outside propped an M-1 carbine across the fork of a tree and fired directly into Benny’s face, blowing one eye fifteen feet from his head.
Years later I would read a news story about his girlfriend, whose nickname was the Flamingo, and how she died by suicide in a snowbank in Austria. I sometimes wondered if in those last moments of her life she tried to return to that wintertime photograph of her and Benny building a snowman in west Montana.
Vernon Dunlop never bothered me again. In fact, I came to have a sad kind of respect for the type of life that had been imposed upon him. Vernon was killed at the Battle of Inchon during the Korean War. Nick Hauser and I became schoolteachers. The era in which we grew up was a poem and Bugsy Siegel was a friend of mine.
Jeffery Deaver
Born Bad