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’s plain shoddy luck is all,” I said. “One of those wrong time wrong place deals. Think of it this way. The night you were conceived, if your parents had gone to see Rocky instead, or if they’d ordered in Chinese. If your father wore a different pair of slacks, whatever, you could be skiing down the Alps right now. You could be a world-famous tennis champ. You could be chauffeuring those cows around. Blame the stars.” I took her hand in mine. It was utterly dead in my grip. “Accidents happen,” I said. “Everyone’s a victim in this thing.”
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t though. Not really I just — wondered if I could.”
I looked straight ahead through the windshield. The sky was a rusty wash. Through an aperture the size of a volleyball, two gaunt Herefords peered back at me. One opened its mouth, disclosing a pink slab of tongue. Eventually I risked a glance at Gwen. She looked like somebody’s daughter, perched there in the passenger seat. I gave her fingers an exploratory squeeze.
“OK, but my point is, you regret it, right?”
She squeezed back then, twice, as if signaling in code. A giddy warmth settled over me.
“We’ll make up for it in Mexico,” I said. “Plant a tree or something. It’s going to be a whole different deal down there.” I meant it. I could see the whole thing, with the vividness of recollection: sand in the sleeping bags and afternoon dips and the tang of grilling fish on the air.
“I wish I could take it back,” she said.
“So do I,” I told her. And as soon as I’d said it, I knew it was a lie.
We waited until nightfall, then made for the house. It stood atop a low ridge, a grand stone structure with wings that embraced the sculpted grounds, though coldly. We stopped at the gate. I directed my instructions to Truck. Kill the radio and headlights. Relax for a while. Then I got out and eased the door shut.
The night was electric with that wide-open amphitheater sound of insects chirring in grass. Right then, I knew that Gwen and Truck would be gone when I returned to the car. I stopped and held both hands open in the air. Ten minutes. The red point of Truck’s cigarette bobbed a little, but if either of them waved I couldn’t tell. The chalky driveway shone like a river in the dark. There was a wind, and I could hear the knell of cords lashing the flagpole in the yard.
In the 1980s, Sid had hosted lavish dinners at the house, big raucous affairs attended by some of Arizona’s wealthiest and most influential drunks, people who filled our house with cigarette smoke and braying laughter. Those evenings followed a time-honored protococlass="underline" after an hour of cocktails in the foyer, the peal of an antique bell summoned all present to the dining room where, through the addition of leaves, a table would be set for as many as thirty guests. An hour later Sid would charge his glass and deliver an interminable toast, thanking Phyllis and God and the GOP. Then he’d call out to his children. We came in from the hall. Antietam led the way, beating a slow somber march on a drum, and under die rheumy watch of my parents’ guests, I would sing all five verses of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” On a good night I was allowed to leave without fanfare. Usually, though, there were compulsory handshakes and kisses, and occasionally I had to sing it twice. Then in junior high, a girl I knew vaguely from school accompanied her parents to one of Sid’s soirees, and the sight of her leering through the bit about “the beauty of the lilies” so riled me that afterward I kicked a six-inch hole in my bedroom wall. It was the first shot fired in a war I’d been fighting ever since.
There were no cars at the house, and no lighted windows, which came as a relief but no surprise. My mother lived her life on an outpatient basis, dividing time between bridge, church, and her philanthropies. Often she was gone for weeks at a time, to places like Antigua or Palm Springs, for symposiums, concerts, or luncheons. Anything to save her from the house and its photographic memory, its clutter and familiar smells.
I found the front door locked, so I stole back to the greenhouse where we’d kept a key in a rusted watering can. To my great satisfaction, I found it with ease. I walked back to the door and unlocked it and stood for a minute, breathing. Then I crossed the threshold and shut the door behind me.
The house was mausoleum still. You could almost hear dust motes falling. I moved across the floor in small, uncertain steps, hands extended as if I were blind — which, temporarily, I was.
On the second floor, tall windows surveyed the grounds. My mother’s topiary, once a skyline of Platonic forms, had assumed a kind of gothic disarray. Moonlight skipped across the parquet floor. I crossed the threshold into my father’s office. The room was crowded with furniture under painter’s tarps, so that it appeared as if I were standing among the ghosts of tables, chairs, and lamps. I sat down on a long sofa. Time passed, and I spread out so that my face touched the plastic sheet.
Then the lights were on, and I lay there stiffly.
“Don’t even breathe,” came a voice from behind me. “I’m heavily armed.” Unmistakably, this was Antietam, my brother.
There was the sound of a lamp overturned.
“Hey,” I said from the sofa. “Ant, it’s Getty. It’s me.”
“The hell it is,” he said. And there he was, white and disheveled, his hair so long and unruly that I took it, at first, for a wig. He wore a jersey with a picture of Che Guevara on it, and his arms were full of what appeared to be a Confederate infantry rifle, complete with bayonet.
“Unbelievable,” he said, with something like a smile on his face, but he didn’t lower the gun. “You’re the spitting image of Sid, do you know that?”
“That’s very funny,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be at school?”
“Hung up the gloves. Same as you.”
“Same nothing,” I said. “I was twenty. You’re what, seventeen?”
“I’m a regular prodigy,” he said.
I thought if I moved to embrace him he might be inclined to put down the rifle; instead, I found myself holding its barrel, the bayonet’s point grazing my chest. What ensued was a kind of reverse tug of war, with each of us gently thrusting the weapon toward the other. This exercise was cut short by a clamor from the doorway.
“Drop it,” Truck said, presumably to my brother.
Antietam did as he was told, and so did I. The rifle met the floor with a regrettable crack. Truck picked it up and admired the stock while Gwen considered etchings on the walls. I made sheepish introductions.
“This is your place?” Truck wondered. “Who burgles his own damn house?”
“It’s not burglary,” I said. “I was going to leave a note.”
“Where’s your room?” Gwen asked me.
“He doesn’t have a room,” Antietam said. “Sid turned it into a den. Anyway, take what you like. I don’t give a shit.”
Feeling inexplicably tired, I sat back down on the shrouded sofa.
Gwen had discovered Sid’s collection. One by one, she lifted the plastic tarps, and the bounty took shape: threadbare Union flags, bugles and blue velvet petticoats, sabers, firearms, pulpy documents, medals, and daguerreotypes, all in somber glass vitrines.
“God,” she said. “What is all this?”
“Our father had a thing about the Civil War,” said Antietam.
Truck picked up a silk top hat and set it on his head. “What’s this shit worth, anyway?” he asked.
“More than me and Getty,” my brother said, and coughed up a single dry laugh. “Probably more than the house, but a bitch and a half to sell. Anyway, I’ve got a lady guest upstairs. Try to keep it down.” And he left us to manage on our own. 1 invited Gwen and Truck to make themselves at home while I conducted some business downstairs.