The Best American Mystery Stories 2005
- Автор: Хиггинс Джордж, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2005
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51744-2
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2005». Краткое содержание книги:
You sit in the blue-wash flicker of ESPN and eat peanuts from a plastic bag you got out of a vending machine and drink plastic cupfuls of Jim Beam from a bottle your father presented when you reached the motel parking lot. You think of the time you’ve lost, and how nice it is to sit alone on a double bed and watch TV, and you think of Gwen, can taste her tongue for just a moment, and you think about the road that’s led you here to this motel room on this night after forty-seven months in prison, and how a lot of people would say it was a twisted road, a weird one, filled with curves, but you just think of it as a road like any other. You drive down it on faith, or because you have no other choice, and you find out what it ‘s like by the driving of it, find out what the end looks like only by reaching it.
Late the next morning your father wakes you, tells you he drove Mandy home and you’ve got things to do, people to see.
Here’s what you know about your father above all else: people have a way of vanishing in his company.
He’s a professional thief, a consummate con man, an expert in his field — and yet something far beyond professionalism is at his core, something unreasonably arbitrary. Something he keeps within himself like a story he heard once, laughed at maybe, yet swore never to repeat.
“She was with you last night?” you say.
“You didn’t want her. Somebody had to prop her ego back up. Poor girl like that.”
“But you drove her home,” you say.
“I’m speaking Czech?”
You hold his eyes for a bit. They’re big and bland, with the heartless innocence of a newborn’s. Nothing moves in them, nothing breathes, and after a while you say, “Let me take a shower.”
“Fuck the shower,” he says. “Throw on a baseball cap and let’s get.”
You take the shower anyway, just to feel it, another of those things you would have realized you’d miss if you’d given it any thought ahead of time — standing under the spray, no one near you, all the hot water you want for as long as you want it, shampoo that doesn’t smell like factory smoke.
Drying your hair and brushing your teeth, you can hear the old man flicking through channels, never pausing on one for more than thirty seconds: Home Shopping Network — zap. Springer — zap. Oprah — zap. Soap-opera voices, soap-opera music — zap. Monster-truck show — pause. Commercial — zap, zap, zap.
You come back into the room, steam trailing you, pick your jeans up off the bed, and put them on.
The old man says, “Afraid you’d drowned. Worried I’d have to take a plunger to the drain, suck you back up.”
You say, “Where we going?”
“Take a drive.” Your father shrugs, flicking past a cartoon.
“Last time you said that, I got shot twice.”
Your father looks back over his shoulder at you, eyes big and soft. “Wasn’t the car that shot you, was it?”
You go out to Gwen’s place, but she isn’t there anymore. A couple of black kids are playing in the front yard, black mother coming out on the porch to look at the strange car idling in front of her house.
“You didn’t leave it here?” your father says.
“Not that I recall.”
“Think.”
“I’m thinking.”
“So you didn’t?”
“I told you — not that I recall.”
“So you’re sure.”
“Pretty much.”
“You had a bullet in your head.”
“Two.”
“I thought one glanced off.”
You say, “Two bullets hit your fucking head, old man, you don’t get hung up on the particulars.”
“That how it works?” Your father pulls away from the curb as the woman comes down the steps.
The first shot came through the back window, and Gentleman Pete flinched. He jammed the wheel to the right and drove the car straight into the highway exit barrier, air bags exploding, water barrels exploding, something in the back of your head exploding, glass pebbles filling your shirt, Gwen going, “What happened? Jesus. What happened?”
You pulled her with you out the back door — Gwen, your Gwen — and you crossed the exit ramp and ran into the woods and the second shot hit you there but you kept going, not sure how, not sure why, the blood pouring down your face, your head on fire, burning so bright and so hard that not even the rain could cool it off.
“And you don’t remember nothing else?” your father says. You’ve driven all over town, every street, every dirt road, every hollow you can stumble across in Sumner, West Virginia.
“Not till she dropped me off at the hospital.”
“Dumb goddamn move if ever there was one.”
“I seem to remember I was puking blood by that point, talking all funny.”
“Oh, you remember that. Sure.”
“You’re telling me in all this time you never talked to Gwen?”
“Like I told you three years back, that girl got gone.”
You know Gwen. You love Gwen. This part of it is hard to take. You remember Gwen in your car and Gwen in the cornstalks and Gwen in her mother’s bed in the hour just before noon, naked and soft. You watched a drop of sweat appear from her hairline and slide down the side of her neck as she snored against your shoulder blade, and the arch of her foot was pressed over the top of yours, and you watched her sleep, and you were so awake.
“So it’s with her,” you say.
“No,” the old man says, a bit of anger creeping into his puppy-fur voice. “You called me. That night.”
“I did?”
“Shit, boy. You called me from the pay phone outside the hospital.”
“What’d I say?”
“You said, ‘I hid it. It’s safe. No one knows where but me.’”
“Wow,” you say. “I said all that? Then what’d I say?”
The old man shakes his head. “Cops were pulling up by then, calling you ‘motherfucker,’ telling you to drop the phone. You hung up.”
The old man pulls up outside a low red-brick building behind a tire dealership on Oak Street. He kills the engine and gets out of the car, and you follow. The building is two stories. Facing the street are the office of a bail bondsman, a hardware store, a Chinese takeout place with greasy walls the color of an old dog’s teeth, and a hair salon called Girlfriend Hooked Me Up that’s filled with black women. Around the back, past the whitewashed windows of what was once a dry cleaner, is a small black door with the words true-line efficiency experts Corp. stenciled on the frosted glass.
The old man unlocks the door and leads you into a ten-by-ten room that smells of roast chicken and varnish. He pulls the string of a bare light bulb, and you look around at a floor strewn with envelopes and paper, the only piece of furniture a broken-down desk probably left behind by the previous tenant.
Your father crab-walks across the floor, picking up envelopes that have come through the mail slot, kicking his way through the paper. You pick up one of the pieces of paper and read it.
Dear Sirs,
Please find enclosed my check for $50. I look forward to receiving the information packet we discussed as well as the sample test. I have enclosed a SASE to help facilitate this process. I hope to see you someday at the airport!
Sincerely,