The Best American Mystery Stories 2006
- Автор: Дивер Джеффри, Хантер Эван
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51746-6
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
Smiling. I think I was smiling. Having to concede, when you’re in high school you can’t wait to get out, it’s like a prison you have come to hate, then when you’re out you look back, remembering.
I didn’t drop out of school, finally. Attended my graduation with the others. My last term was the worst in all my school years, not a single A. If I hadn’t broken his heart marrying a man my father considered low-life Adirondack trailer trash I’d have broken his heart getting such rotten grades.
Painting the bathroom ivory. Not hearing the phone ring.
The anonymous calls came in the evening or middle of the night when Pitman was out. Whoever it was knew Pitman’s schedule. Or knew from the driveway that Pitman’s car was gone.
Or it was Pitman. One of his games.
Sometimes I drifted to the phone waiting for it to ring. And it rang. And I saw UNAVAILABLE on caller ID and I smiled thinking You can’t. You have no power over me. I am not afraid of you.
I never answered. I erased the answering tape without listening.
Well, maybe I listened. Maybe once, twice. The voice was as I’d remembered it: husky, Canadian-sounding. I had to wonder if it belonged to one of Pitman’s fellow deputies. One of Pitman’s relatives. Someone Pitman had made an enemy of. Gotten under the skin of. It was no one from my life, I knew.
“Hey, I know you’re there, baby! Know you’re listening. Whyn’t you pick up, baby? Afraid?”
Pause. Breathing wetly into the mouthpiece.
“‘Lady of the house, Ms. Pitman.’ Pigman? Standin’ there all alone.”
Another pause. (He’s trying not to laugh?)
“Maybe not alone enough, eh? Baby?”
It wasn’t Pitman’s way of speech, I thought. The broad Canadian vowels, the quirky eh? Still, this might be a trick. Pitman might be there beside the caller, listening.
After the calls when Pitman came home there was a strangeness between us. I think this was so. I don’t think I was imagining it. Pitman was waiting for me to acknowledge the calls. (Was he?) But it was too late now. There had been too many. And if the calls were made by someone else, Pitman would be uncontrollable, so furious. I had to acknowledge, he might blame me.
I’d had boyfriends, a few. In school. But only just boys. And nothing sexual. Pitman knew this but possibly he’d forgotten. He was likely to be jealous. Suspicious. Why hadn’t I told him after the first call? I could not tell him But maybe it was you.
He’d snag on a word sometimes. A word would snag on him. I wondered was this a thing that happened to drinkers.
Face, for instance.
Baby-face, he’d call me. Angel-face.
Or, “Just don’t get in my face, Lucretia.”
Or, “Want me to break your fucking face?”
Burdock had been a relative, in fact. He’d garroted his estranged wife, blew himself away with a shotgun. Not from Pitman did I learn this of course. Pitman never spoke of any of his relatives. His mother was still living, I think. He had an older half-brother in Attica serving a sentence of thirty years to life.
Like shrapnel working its way outward through tissue, Pitman’s fury was surfacing. Pitman! Crazy guy. That admiring way men have of speaking of a friend who’s cracking up. Bringing Pitman home falling-down drunk and the Chevy Malibu left behind as far away as Tupper Lake, in the morning I’d have to drive Pitman back to retrieve it. In June, Pitman pursued a drunk driver west out of Malvern on Route 3 resulting in the young man (twenty, from the Tuscarora reservation) crashing his vehicle into a bridge and shearing off part of his skull. The St. Lawrence County sheriff defended his deputy (publicly) but reprimanded him (privately). Pitman spoke of quitting his job. He spoke of reenlisting in the navy. He seemed, in his indignation, unaware that he’d become a man in his mid-thirties and was no longer a brash young kid of eighteen. A ring of flesh around his waist, his tar-colored hair streaking with gray and thinning. No longer could Pitman stay up much of the night drinking and rely upon three or four hours’ sleep to restore his strength, his clarity of mind, and his willingness to face the next day.
From the cruiser Pitman would call on his celclass="underline" “Hey, baby, this is a fucking long morning. It ain’t even noon?”
You could get addicted to it. The anger. The taste of it on his mouth like hot acid. I never believed that Pitman was crazy. He was too shrewd and methodical. Just this fury in him. It was more than Reed Loomis dying. Those little mountain towns dying. Pitman himself dying. He’d sweat through the bedclothes groaning and grinding his teeth after the boy died on Route 3, Pitman insisted he had done nothing wrong. He had followed procedure. He’d used his siren, his lights. The kid had outstanding warrants which was why probably he’d accelerated his speed to almost eighty miles an hour on that sharp-curving highway in the mountains, narrowing to a single-lane bridge. Drunk kid, thumbing his nose at the law. Pitman said fuck, he had no regrets, wasn’t going to lose sleep over this one. One Sunday afternoon lying with me on our bed gripping me in his arms as if we were drowning together. Not releasing me for forty-five minutes and only then when I begged him insisting I had to pee, did he want me to wet the bed?
“You would not ever betray me, Lucretia? Would you?”
In the cruiser calling on his cell. These were not UNAVAILABLE but WIRELESS CALLER so I could pick up if I wished. Calling me Baby, saying he loved me he did not ever mean to hurt me, I was the only thing he loved in this shitty life he hoped to Christ I knew that, he’d make it up to me. Saying it was a hard time for him right now, he was begging to be forgiven. Saying I was his princess, I was never off his radar.
Phone rings. Impulsively my hand lifts the receiver, “Yes? Hello?”
It’s like striking a match. That quick, UNAVAILABLE isn’t prepared for a living voice. I hear him draw breath. I’ve surprised him. Maybe I’ve shocked him. It takes him a moment to adjust.
That low, gravelly mock-courteous voice, “The lady of the house, Ms. Pitman?” and I hear myself say, “Who’s this?” and he pauses not expecting this, either; doesn’t expect a female voice that isn’t intimidated.
“Your friend, Lucretia. This is your friend.”
There’s excitement here. The way he pronounces Lu-cre-tia. It’s no way I have heard Pitman pronounce my name. These past few months Pitman has not called me by any name at all only Baby. Or you.
This is the first time I’ve heard my caller’s living voice since that pelting-rain night in April. And it’s late August now. And Pitman is away. I’ve been watching local TV news out of Canton, Watertown. Surfing the channels. It’s nearing midnight. Old movies, Law & Order reruns. Final ten minutes of a rebroadcast of a performance of Tosca, one of Daddy’s operas. Lying on the jiggly-jangly brass bed. The handmade quilt, fraying-soft from many washings, is neatly folded at the foot of the bed. I’m in a silky champagne-colored nightgown, also fraying-soft from many washings, Pitman bought me when we were married. Still warm, flushed-feeling from my bath. And still with some makeup on my face. Pitman doesn’t care for washed-out female faces, I know from remarks he’s made. I try to look good for Pitman, it’s a habit. Whether he sees or not. Whether he’s here or not. In my hand a juice glass of Parrot Bay Puerto Rican rum I stole out of Daddy’s teakwood cabinet last time I visited the house on Algonquin Avenue. The type of liquor Daddy never drinks, the near-full bottle pushed to the back of the cabinet.
I’m not drinking to get drunk, like Pitman. Only to make the sharp edges of things softer.