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:
“I don’t drink,” I said.
“That’s right,” said Gwen, as if I’d answered a question that had plagued her all week.
I rolled and lit a joint. Truck watched it hungrily as I smoked, but he never asked and I didn’t offer. We all lay down on the bed, Gwen in the middle. The two of them drank and talked about old friends who had come into money or disappeared or suffered unexpected injury. As far as I could tell, half their friends were either locked in jail or on their way. It was all surprise and reversal. Presumably there were others, friends who persisted stubbornly in their same dull orbits, but Gwen and Truck neglected to mention them. Time passed and the two of them grew louder and happier.
I suggested that we get on the road.
“The room’s paid,” Gwen said.
“That may be true,” I said. “Still, I’ll be tired in the morning.”
“Then Truck can drive.”
She leaned over as if to embrace me. Instead she collected my cup from the floor and passed it to Truck.
“Tell Smokey to relax,” he said. And then, buoyant, “Relax, Smokey.”
I told Gwen I had to speak with her privately, and we left the room and walked to the rear of the motel. Overhead a harsh yellow bulb flashed to life, and suddenly we were exposed among beer runs and other flotsam.
“Truck can drive?”
She blinked. “It’s his car.”
“You’re saying that Truck is coming with us. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? Jesus.”
“Hey,” she said, touching my chest.
“And for another thing, it’s clear he’s not your cousin.”
“Of course he’s my cousin,” she said. “He’s my favorite cousin, and the only one I’ve got.”
“If this gets strange, I’ll kill him,” I said, and let this sink in. “That’s what I am, a murderer, same as you.”
She moved in close and clasped her hands on my sides. Together, we managed a lurching backward dance step.
“Trust me,” she said.
She wore that beatific white smile of hers under which, ordinarily, I was defenseless as a fawn in a poacher’s beams. But some change in the timbre of the night — the dogfight of moths around our heads — cleared my mind of love and sex, and perhaps because I sensed that my anger could not possibly survive the ordeal of her holding me for even fifteen seconds more, I shook her off.
“This whole ornithology deal,” I heard myself say. “You know what it is, don’t you? It’s a joke. It’s fucked. First off, you don’t have a bachelor’s degree.”
Gwen didn’t flinch.
“I mean — let me ask you this. Did you finish high school even?”
“And you’re supposed to be some kind of role model? So the point of life is wearing your robe all day like a schizo patient. Well excuse me for trying to improve myself. There’s more to life than weed and Cinemax.”
Back in the room, Truck had removed his shirt. He was muscular in a Byzantine, plated way that made me think of lobsters in a tank. He spread out on the floor, with his pants and shoes on. Gwen gave him the bedspread and a pillow, and shut off the light. I undressed and inched carefully into bed, listening to the faint oceanic sounds we made. Gwen lay very still. I would have liked to hear her voice.
Some time later there was a cry of sirens in the distance, and cold fingers probed the flap of my shorts. All I could think of was Truck, three feet away. I turned over and fought my way to sleep.
In the morning sun fell on the lot in golden sheets. Gwen and Truck were sleeping, and I sat on the hood of my car.
Inside, the bird was dead. You could tell by the way she lay there on the seat, sideways like a tiny person, her wings askew. I didn’t care. I had a new plan, and I was silently mulling it.
If I was going to live in Mexico, which apparently I was, and with Guinevere, and also temporarily with Truck, I would need money. And something else, something more elusive, like authority. And both of these were readily available, not three hundred miles east.
We would drive to Prospect, to the Chateau Syphilis — where my mother lived alone, or with some callow tennis coach or gardener from the third world. In the master bedroom, there was a safe that contained, among antique coins and articles of jewelry, a stack of bonds as thick as a phone book. I would borrow against the trust that was rightfully mine. It wouldn’t be theft, only a form of accounting.
Gwen emerged from the room wearing her gauzy yellow blouse, through which her bosom showed clear as a Christmas present wrapped in cellophane. I was so transfixed that I forgot to prepare her for the spectacle waiting in the car. She held her stomach and bent as if she might be sick.
“Take it slow,” I said.
The doors were still locked, and when I offered her the keys she looked at me with such utter desolation you’d have thought it was her infant laid dead across a bier of accordion-fold state roadmaps. For a long minute, she didn’t move. She clambered across the seat and lay down awkwardly next to her bird. When she touched it, I half expected the thing to shudder into flight. She was talking, but not to me. It was the sort of voice TV parents adopt when they’re tucking their kids into bed. Then she climbed back out, and it was just as if the channel had been switched. She cradled Cheyenne in her arms and said some terrible things about God, the world, me and Truck, and also herself. “Human love is fucked,” she said, poisoned with self-centeredness, jealousy, and doubt. “But an innocent bird loves with its whole heart.” It struck me that the organ in question is roughly as large as a cashew, but I reserved this thought for myself. Truck stood shirtless in the doorway, looking lost. We were no comfort to Gwen in the least.
Truck drove with one hand and smoked with the other, and I watched through a gray window as houses reeled by and receded. It seemed incredible that each of these structures was someone’s home.
After an hour or so, I said to the horizon, “We’re going to make a detour not too far ahead. You’ll both have to trust me.”
Truck whistled. “He’s your mess,” he said to Gwen. “You clean it up.”
When I turned and looked, her eyes were red from crying.
“Whatever he says,” she told Truck. “Getty and me are in it together.”
When the highway split, we proceeded east, toward Prospect and a house I hadn’t seen in seven years.
When you’re wanted for murder, and you’re high on Humboldt Gold, even teenage girls in Saturns look like undercover cops. We were nearly home. Truck lay sprawled across the back seat, asleep with a hand thrust down his pants. He looked almost childlike, except for the lightning bolt tattooed across his neck.
Hours had passed since Guinevere had opened her mouth. She just sat there pulling loose hairs from her scalp and holding them up to the light. My brain ran hot and dry imagining the many trials ahead. As if conjured out of thin air by my dread, a convoy of sleek, malignant eighteen-wheelers bloomed in the rearview and overtook us. The trucks were full of cattie — lean, pathetic things. They crowded at a line of portholes, angling their noses like dogs on a Sunday pleasure drive. Did they know, in their dusky bovine skulls, about the holocaust to come? It seemed a glimpse into my own future. A road sign promised gas and food in half a mile; there were sure to be police. Nothing would be simpler than to turn myself in. But to do so would mean parting ways with Gwen. In spite of everything, she filled me with the kind of grievous longing I hadn’t felt since seventh grade. She was all I had left.
“Look,” I said. “Cows.”
She unbuckled her seatbelt and hugged her knees to her chest.
“I wish I hadn’t done it,” she said. There was a perfect freckle at the corner of her mouth. The sight of it gave me a feeling of hope.