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:
It was a mistake, I knew, but I couldn’t help worrying over Haynes. Probably laid out on a gurney somewhere on a paper sheet, and cruisers parked outside the house, hounds pursuing odors through the grass. I hadn’t packed. So many objects I would never see again: my brother Antietam’s trophy from the state geography bee, my journals, a Fender telecaster that had once belonged to Jeff Beck. And the eye, prized from the stony head of a bobcat at Pasquaney, when I was fourteen. Sid had shot the thing himself and presented it to the club as a monument. It was worthless, as far as I could tell. But of all his many treasures — all the asinine curios he’d found to throw his fortune at — the bobcat stood closest to his heart. Whenever he saw it he stopped and raised his glass as if toasting the honor of some great storied rival he had smote on the fields of war. I’d replaced the milky ball with a backgammon chip. Five minutes with a penknife while my parents drank cordials in the trophy room.
In spite of all that, it was good to be driving. From time to time, I would look over at Gwen and see the way she tended to her bird, and I’d want to pull over and stretch out in the back seat — not to make love, even, but to hold her and to feel the shockwave of passing trucks. It was as if I’d been granted a second chance. Now that Haynes was dead, I felt duty-bound to love and be loved, to build something real and true from the pieces of our three wrecked lives.
We lunched at a truck stop, in a fast-food place flanked by gray, skeletal hedges. I waited in a line of bedraggled kids and parents while Gwen made calls in the lot. Behind the counter, women in striped shirts dispensed hamburgers and vapid, lipsticked smiles. Unplugged pinball and arcade machines lined the wall like monuments in an antebellum graveyard. I was contemplating the plate glass windows when a hand touched my leg. It was attached to a boy in flannel pajamas.
“You’re in the water,” he said.
The floor was a vastness of blue tiles breached at intervals by islands of white. He leaped from one to the next, arms extended comically.
“I like a swim,” I told him.
“There are sharks,” he said soberly, and a woman seized his arm and dragged him off.
Gwen returned, dug her hand into my back pocket, and kissed my cheek.
“Everything all right?” I asked. She frowned in a way that suggested my question had endangered us both. All at once, I felt very anxious and not at all hungry. We ate without pleasure in a narrow booth.
Outside, she said, ‘We stop tonight in Arizona. Truck is going to meet us with money and a fresh car.”
‘Wait,” I said. “What happened to Mexico?”
“Nothing happened,” she said. “Except they’ll be looking for your plates. And as far as money, Truck’s got two thousand dollars, maybe more. We need every dollar we can get.”
“I have money. I can get us — I don’t know — five or six hundred, plus another thousand on the first of the month.” Those were the provisions of my trust fund — a slow intravenous drip, interest from a principal I couldn’t touch.
“Not enough,” she said, and shook her head disgustedly.
“Enough for what, sunscreen? The whole point of Mexico is it’s cheap.”
“It’s called tuition,” she said. “Ornithology, remember?”
“The thing about grad school, you don’t just drive up at orientation with a suitcase full of cash. There are tests. You need transcripts and letters.”
We got back in the car. Cheyenne cried out in salutation or complaint.
“And who or what is Truck?”
“Truck’s my cousin,” she said. “He’s a genius at getaways. An escape artist practically.”
Gwen was fishing in her bag, laying makeup compacts and emery hoards on the dash. There was something else in there, among her women’s things — a little revolver with a pearl handle.
“What’s that for?” I said.
“In case something happens.”
“In case what happens, exactly?”
She weighed it on her palm. “Something unforeseeable.”
“If it’s unforeseeable, you can’t plan for it.”
“Later,” she said, “you may thank me.”
It was dark when we left the highway. We drove a while on desolate back roads before reaching our destination, a whitewashed motel on the rubbled lunar plain. Our headlights caught the fender of a station wagon, and Gwen shot upright in her seat.
“That’s him,” she said. “That’s Truck’s car.”
It was an old model Chevy, taupe-colored with polyps of rust on the side and cardboard in lieu of a window. The night air had a vague chemical taste, and it was clear that I had made a serious mistake.
I parked behind a Dumpster, then followed Gwen across the lot toward a half-opened door. All I could see of the room was the corner of a bed and a pair of large, vegetably feet. My stomach was doing a particular stock car maneuver I remembered from my glory days on the junior tennis circuit. Once, on a grass court in Flagstaff, I’d rallied with Ilie Nastase. It was a pristine day: high wind, and planes crossing overhead, contrails etched against a soft blue sky. The careering in my gut was such that I could barely execute a serve. Now with every step I took, the idea of return seemed more remote. As if sensing my doubt, Gwen hooked a finger in my belt loop and gave it a tug.
Truck wore a hunting cap and a suede jacket with tassled arms, and his eyes never strayed from the television screen, not even when you asked him a question. For the most part, he spoke to me through Gwen, as if I were immaterial, a phantom she alone could see. As for Gwen herself, she seemed positively enraptured by his company. She took off her shoes, sat on the dusty carpet, and laughed at all his comments, none of which were funny in the least. When she asked me to pick up whiskey, sandwiches, and corn nuts (“for baby Cheyenne”), I felt something close to gratitude.
It was twenty minutes to the store and back, and the bird flapped plaintively all the way.
Truck took so long with the door that I wondered momentarily if I’d knocked at the wrong room. I could hear the shower running in the bathroom, and Gwen’s things were piled on a chair. Truck lay across the bed. On TV a couple of old-fashioned pugilists boxed primly in black and white.
“Getty,” Truck said to the screen, testing the sound of it. “What kind of a name is Getty anyway?”
“You’d have to take it up with my father,” I said.
“I don’t like it much.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” I told him. Why was I defending myself to a person called “Truck”?
After a while, I said, “That’s an interesting car you’ve got.”
“You expected a PT Cruiser?” he asked.
I said that I hadn’t. Still, his Chevy wasn’t worth the speakers in my Volvo, and I told him so. He frowned at me and looked away. His fists were balled, and he tensed now and then as if to deflect televised blows.
“Actually, you’re a help,” I said. “Otherwise we’d have to steal something. And I wouldn’t know how to begin.”
“Thought you were outlaws,” Truck said, glancing vaguely in my direction.
“That’s Gwen’s thing,” I said. “Honestly, I’m not built for it.”
“You said it, not me,” Truck said, and snorted.
The bathroom door opened, loosing generous clouds of steam. Gwen appeared, her hair wrapped in an elegant nautilus-curl of towel, and briefly the room was an alpine spa. She had changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt, which read: IF YOU LOVE SOMETHING, SET IT FREE. IF IT DOESN’T COME BACK, HUNT IT DOWN AND KILL IT.
We ate our sandwiches on the double bed, with a fresh towel for a picnic blanket. Truck took the whiskey bottle and poured tall drinks into plastic cups provided gratis by the motel staff. I held mine for a minute or two, then set it down on the floor. Truck regarded me warily.