The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

They also took care. At the clubs or in business they worried about men.

When they met male clients at isolated houses or ranch property they went as a team, a caution against unwanted sexual advances. They vowed to watch out for each other, figuring they lived in a masculine ethos: beer and barbeque, football and bullshit, kisses and violence.

Boomer Smith, of course, had a shy, goofy, awkward way about him and wouldn’t even meet their gaze. Carla felt motherly toward him because his Stetson was somehow tilted wrong and he moved clumsily, bumping chairs and desks with his hip, fumbling, grinning, and getting out of sync even in his best moments.

“How can he go around making deals? He hardly talks!” Mary Beth observed while they waited to show him the first property.

“Maybe he does all right with the guys,” Carla offered. “He was probably the nerdy valedictorian in high school. Straight A’s and a member, you know, of the model airplane club.”

He arrived an hour late after their part-time secretary, Maria, had gone home for the day. Held up at the Driskill Hotel, he told them, and very sorry. He brought them each a single rose and offered to take them to dinner as compensation, but still wouldn’t look directly at either of them.

They drove out to a small ranch near Driftwood. On the way Mary Beth asked if he meant to raise cattle and he said, “No, maybe horses,” yet he admitted he didn’t ride. Carla asked if he had a family and he said, “No, I’m single and mean to stay that way.” He snapped off that last reply, so that five minutes of silence ensued. Later, the little ranch looked overgrown and wrong.

“Maybe if you could give us an idea of how much you intend to spend,” Carla ventured cautiously. “I mean, if this place is just too small, what do you have in mind?”

“I mean to impress,” he instructed them, and that cryptic reply — as they later discussed with one another — was curiously worded and spoken. His voice actually changed when he said it. The drawl vanished. He seemed more out of place than ever, a lost outsider employing a strangely arch diction.

At the Salt Lick, though, a big barbecue hangout on a nearby farm road, they relaxed. Boomer bought a case of Budweiser, laughed for the first time, and began to tell stories: one about his mother, who lived near Alpine and owned a pet kangaroo, and another about an uncle who lived in a maze of trailers in the middle of nowhere near Amarillo. In such tales his drawl returned and he became an affable and earnest country boy.

“Six trailers.” he said about his uncle’s place. “Two of ‘em big double-wides. Lashed together with cable, so they won’t blow off in a dust storm! “ In their accompanying laughter they forgave him his peculiarities and he fit, clearly, Carla’s view of him as a former high school nerd, the one with the nutty family, the one who never knew what to do with his hands. While they ate peach cobbler and pecan pie with their coffee, later, Mary Beth went on about her little boy, Luke, who didn’t fit in at school and who occasionally whined that he wanted to live with his drunken daddy. Boomer offered that Mary Beth seemed practical and sure of herself and that she could undoubtedly accomplish more with him than any man. When she smiled at this flattery he went on, saying that a young boy needs his mother, ask any psychologist, and if the teenager, later, needed a stronger hand, then maybe the father. “But for now, Mary Beth, have confidence in your intuitions,” and he placed a big red hand over hers as big, moist, inebriated tears appeared in her eyes.