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 sonofabitch,” she cried, in her grim baritone. To which, for reasons I still can’t fathom, Guinevere lifted the rifle she had somehow neglected to drop, drew a bead on the woman, thought better of this, and fired a shot in the air. Mrs. Haynes loosed the colander and darted into her house.
We drove first to Guinevere’s trailer, to collect some personal items and to think. As soon as we passed into its beery gloom, she thrust a stack of hardcover library books into my arms. The volume on top was called Parrots of the World. It must have weighed five pounds.
“I’m keeping these,” she said. “It’s wrong, I know, but I am.”
I set the books by the door, then sat in the kitchen on the scuffed Formica counter while she filled a suitcase with clothes. Her faucet was busted, and a weak stream of water murmured in the sink. It was the bleakest sound I’d ever heard.
“What are we doing?” I asked her.
Through a half-opened door, I could see her standing over the suitcase. She held a sheer yellow blouse at arm’s length as though contemplating a purchase. I took this opportunity to finish a roach I’d stowed in my wallet.
“Gwen? What are we doing, really?”
“I’m packing,” she said, breathless, “and you’re — I don’t know what. Panicking.”
“I’m not,” I said. “Listen, you and I both know what happens next. We drive into town and straighten this thing out. Think for a second and you’ll see I’m right.”
“Getty, don’t,” she said.
“We’ve done nothing wrong, when you get down to it,” I said, exhaling blue smoke.
She gave me a long, incredulous look. “See what you can find in the fridge,” she said. “We’re driving to Mexico.”
Or rather I was driving — Gwen was unlicensed. What can be said about this plan? It sounded reasonable at the time. We piled into my Volvo, the two of us plus the bird.
Guinevere had acquired Cheyenne the prior Christmas from a war veteran in Sausalito. She was a cockatoo, an enormous creature with glistening feathers and imperious black eyes and an unsettling habit of turning her head 180 degrees to regard you over her shoulder — if a bird can be said to have shoulders. It was bad judgment, I thought. Exotic pets attract attention, and a getaway car ought properly to blend in. And there was the border crossing to consider: certainly the bird would not be welcome in Mexico.
“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,” Guinevere said. “I’ll let her go if I have to. Who knows — could be she’ll find us on the other side.”
“She’ll die,” I said, and immediately I regretted this.
We didn’t speak until we’d reached the highway. Everywhere, billboards. She put her hand on my leg, kneaded my thigh, and suddenly, exuberantly, I was erect.
“Look who’s awake,” she said.
Gwen had a special animal confidence, like she’d invented the concept of sex. We kissed there in the car, at eighty miles an hour, under a hemorrhaging sky.
I’d been stuck in a kind of emotional holding pattern for going on seven years. Not that things were desperate. I wasn’t about to do myself in, for example, though I’d threatened it once in a letter to Sid. But I was looking down the barrel of turning thirty and there were days when I never put on pants, and nearly everything I ate emerged futile and gray from the maw of a George Foreman Grill. I’d moved to Port Wescott in ‘97, with the project of ruining my life. The place fairly reeked of disappointment. Everyone you met wore the same dazed look, as if the shovel of life had caught them square in the face. They were all former somethings: grounded pilots and injured farm-league phenoms, failed actors and businessmen, the disbarred, displaced, and dispossessed. As for me, I was a former son, doing everything I could think of to avoid becoming Sid. He’d built a pharmaceutical empire by the age of thirty-five; I look potshots at rodents from a half-collapsed porch. I was ready for a change.
One thing about flight: the sex is incredible. I’ve done breakup sex and makeup sex, sex with strangers, sex with old friends, sex in public, sex in closets, sex with several partners, sex with none; believe me when I tell you that there is nothing in the world like fugitive-from-justice sex.
We stopped for the night at a motel designed to resemble an African village: stucco office, empty kidney-shaped pool, and a corridor of suites with artificial thatching on the roof. I gave a false name and plate number to the desk attendant, a squirrelly Asian guy who might himself have been a wanted man. I was tense and depleted, and Guinevere fell on me as soon as we’d reached the room.
We screwed intermittently throughout the night. She pulled at my hair, bit my ear, cried and cursed, came like thunder. At dawn, swaddled in bedclothes, I told her that I loved her. She held me in a kind of wrestling lock with her legs and kissed my neck. I had said the words before. To Astrud Faison, dressed in her whites and smelling of tennis; to that French lifeguard, 1989; to Colleen, the night I left Antioch, not to return. Things have a way of ending.
“Have you been to Central America?” Gwen asked.
“No,” I lied.
I lit a joint. The rotors of the ceiling fan did interesting things with the smoke.
“There are mangoes you eat right off the tree,” she said. “And birds that you wouldn’t believe. Serious birds. Everybody freaks over raptors, like the bald eagle is the greatest thing since bread. Try the resplendent quetzal. Emerald green with a three-foot tail.”
As it happened, I had seen one in the wild. Guatemala, with Sid and Phyllis — or Syphilis, as I called my parents even then. As usual, they had spent the week indoors, shellacked on rum and cokes. I’d spotted the bird on an afternoon hike. The half-dozen tourists in our group, whose T-shirts attested to other vacations they’d enjoyed (“Pura Vida Costa Rica,” “Oahu Nights”) all clutched at their chests and swooned. Perched on a high branch, the resplendent quetzal looked to me like something you’d use to dust a chandelier.
‘“What I meant is, I love this,” I said.
“I know,” said Gwen.
She stood up and walked to the bathroom, perfectly naked and unashamed, urinated with the door open, then climbed back into bed.
“What’s that?” I said.
“What?”
“On your back. ESP.” I traced the letters with my finger.
“Extrasensory perception,” she said. “I’ve got it like crazy. Think of a number between one and fifty.”
“The E is darker,” I said.
She put my hand on her breast.
“Because it’s new.”
I thought about this.
“Who’s SP?”
“Just someone,” she said.
She was undoubtedly the most beautiful person I ever knew.
“Guess where I’m heading once we get down south,” she said. “Veracruz. Guess why.”
“Have a swim?”
“I’m going to get my degree and become an ornithologist. They’ve got a very good program. Maybe the best.”
“Hey. Hey.” My finger was in her mouth. “We really killed that guy.”
She laid my hand on the bed and sat upright.
We were back on the highway, then, traveling south. The car was a wreck, bird shit on the seats, snags and holes pecked in the dash-board upholstery. It was exhilarating in a way: we rode with the windows down, air howling in our ears so that we had to shout to make ourselves heard; Gwen held Cheyenne in her lap, smoothed her leathered head; I played the radio like an instrument, tuning gospel and swing and roiling Spanish talk.