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
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The master bedroom was on the ground floor — cloistered like a bomb shelter two stories below Antietam’s and my own. I had some trouble opening the safe (was Sumter 1860? ‘62?), and when finally its tumblers fell with a satisfying clap, I found it empty. Or not quite: there was a lowball glass — with a desiccated lime in it, and lipstick on the rim — which I opted not to take. It was the sort of night that makes you want to crawl in bed and sleep for several years.
When I came upstairs, the front door hung open. Truck was loading objects through the smashed side window of the car, which he’d backed against the steps. Gwen’s arms were full of antique guns.
“Look at him,” Truck said after a while. “It’s like he’s foreman or something.” And as they passed me on their way back upstairs, he nodded and called me “Sir.”
I walked outside and peered into the car. It had become a traveling museum, full of glinting metal shapes, field maps and military drums, a faded Choctaw headdress, a portrait of Ulysses Grant. Truck installed a couple of globes in the trunk and emerged with a can of beer, which he cracked and sipped and then emptied on the grass. Gwen came out with an object clasped like a baby at her breast.
“Jesus H.,” Truck said. “I could sell snow to a Puerto Rican. But no way in hell is anybody paying us for that thing.” It was my father’s prized bobcat. Gwen set it on the gravel drive and the two of them plunged back into the light of the house.
What a strange and sad reunion. I touched the hole I’d gouged thirteen years earlier. It was rough and dry. Had the club returned the trophy after Sid’s death? As always, the animal was frozen in attack, tongue curled between painted teeth, fusty paw outstretched. A taxidermist’s lie. Sid had shot it at a game park, in a pen; for all I knew the cat had been asleep. The miserable thing never stood a chance. I felt a wave of pity — for the bobcat, for Antietam, and even for Sid. He’d been a drunk and a tyrant, but also a man, and a father of sons who had failed him.
Truck urged me out of the way. Apparently, he’d tired of antiques: there was a widescreen television in his arms, and Gwen stood behind him, clutching the cord as if it were a wedding train. I watched him struggle to fit it in the car.
“Hang on a second,” I said.
Truck set the TV on the ground and began hastily to unload the back seat, handing objects to Gwen more quickly than she could take them. She stacked Sid’s life on the roof of the car.
“We need to put it all back,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ve made a mistake.”
Truck had hefted the television onto his knees, and he labored under its weight.
“Move that puma,” he said to Gwen. She slid the bobcat out of his way.
The week I’d left school, Sid rewarded me with dinner at his club. He maintained an eerie poise through three courses and dessert. Afterward, through a curtain of smoke, he told me, “Rest assured, I saw it coming long before you did.” This wasn’t quite true: since boyhood. I’d felt failure in my bones, a dull, constant ache. I had always been predictable, above all to myself. It came as a surprise, though, when I saw Gwen’s bag on the passenger seat, reached in, and took her gun. I leveled it at Truck.
“Put it back,” I said. “All of it.”
“Oh, honey,” said Gwen.
Truck watched me for a long moment. Slowly, he bent and put down the television. He squinted, as though performing long division in his head. Then he nodded and spread his arms, palms open, inviting me to shoot.
“I’ll do it,” I said. And I wanted to. My hand wavered. We stood there talking with our eyes.
Truck moved carefully toward me, and took the weapon from my hand. He lowered it and fired. There was a barking sound and a fierce blazing pressure in my thigh. Tears rushed to my eyes and I folded, almost gracefully, to an Indian position on the ground.
“Get in the car,” Truck ordered Gwen.
She looked into my eyes with a lovely mournful calm. She had killed a man, and her bird was dead. She kissed my head and opened the passenger door.
The car tore away in a storm of Union relics, and I sat there in the inky silence, bleeding. The bobcat stared with its one good eye. Soon enough, I would limp inside and find a phone. For the moment, though, I held my leg and counted — breaths and heartbeats, birches, aircraft in the sky. They would get at least a small head start.
Oz Spies
The Love of a Strong Man
From The Ontario Review
This is a story that does not begin and end; it simply crept up on those involved, without warning, and will continue to haunt us, to hang over us after the trial is over, after he has died. We will remember. How can it be told? It started, perhaps, when we met: I, fourteen, new white sneakers, tight jeans, and long brown hair to the middle of my back, chewing gum; he, seventeen, shaggy blond hair brushing his chin, tight white T-shirt stretched over his muscular chest, torn jeans, and a posed cigarette drooping out of his mouth. He said, “Nice weather we’re having,” in a low, grim growl, and of course I had to respond to that, the bold contrast of the everyday phrase and the tough-guy voice straight out of the movies. Then, I loved his strength, loved the way his huge arm draped around my thin shoulders, the fact that everyone knew that he could have rubbed their boyfriends’ faces in the dirt had he wanted to, yet he didn’t, and had never been in a fight. He still hasn’t so much as been punched. Later, when we married, his strength seemed to be a mirage, like the muscle builders who do nothing more with their muscles than rub oil on them and pose, and I wondered when the strength, the dominance, the love I always wanted had slipped away.
But that can’t be where it started, because I knew nothing at fourteen, and he had done nothing. I don’t believe that the snatched packs of gum slipped into his pocket at the grocery store, or the school suspension that resulted because his teacher said his constant habit of falling asleep in class was insubordination, were related to the things that happened later. I did not find out until a couple months ago, when it had been going on for years, and we lived on a cul-de-sac with wide open manicured lawns, and a strange, grainy suspect drawing appeared in the papers and all over town, and the wide chin and long nose looked uncannily like him, and of course the arrest several days later confirmed my suspicions. In some moments I wonder if it is all a horrible coincidence, or if a disgruntled patient framed him, and we will soon be on CNN talking about the incompetence of our local police force. But I have no proof of this. I refuse to go to the trial; I cannot be one of those pitiable wives who stands by her husband professing his innocence, crying and winging her hands in court, wearing a nice blue skirt suit and borrowed pearls, whining, “He’s such a good man; he’s innocent, dentists don’t do these things!”
Only if I start with the arrest, then you will never understand how I came to be his wife, the way that there can be a marriage in which so much is unknown, and unknowable. I will never know much of it, much of him. Aren’t all marriages like that? After years of breaking up and making up, we eloped just as he entered school to become a dentist, a job he chose because I mentioned that it pays well, and it comes with none of the life-or-death decisions of being a doctor, just thoughts about cavities and crowns. A low-stress occupation, just as my job at the makeup counter is low-stress. We went to work, we took vacations to Hawaii, shopped for antique furniture in flea markets.
How can someone live with another and not see things, you will wonder, how could anyone marry, or love, such a person? Maybe I should back up and start earlier, perhaps even to his childhood, and show how he was the victim, the abuses that he suffered from his father, and let those make him less of a monster. But he did not speak to me of the nature of those abuses, other than the cold sweats of his nightmares, and I did not discover the details about them any sooner than any other regular, newspaper-reading citizen: “Accused Was Victim of Child Abuse,” the papers claimed in bold 30-point font on the Local Interests page. I am married to a local interest.