The Best American Mystery Stories 2002
- Автор: Грейди Джеймс, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2002
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-12494-7
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2002». Краткое содержание книги:
“What the hell kind of name is ‘Amp,’ anyways?”
“Huh?” I nearly dropped the bread. Jake came and stood beside me, his head near my waist. “Uh... they’re my initials,” I said.
“Hmm. Got names for any of them banties?”
“Huh?”
“Names. Chickens like names.”
“Uh-uh,” I said. “Not these. They’re way too dumb.”
“Don’t kid yourself.” Jake reached for the top board and climbed up beside me. “They know how the world works. ’Specially the banties.”
“The little ones?” I tossed a balled up piece of bread at one. Several of the other chickens raced toward it but the banty charged them and they scattered like marbles dropped on a tile floor. Jake laughed.
“See that? That’s what I’m talking about.” Jake elbowed me. “Look at all the others. How they cower to that little banty. Know why?” Jake waited for my answer, but I didn’t offer one. “ ’Cause he just thinks he’s tough. Look at him, chest all punched out like a bullfrog on a hot night.”
I did have a name for the one bird Jake admired. But, I didn’t say so.
“People’s the same way.” Jake spat between his knees, a mean spit, not the kind men squirt between puckered lips when they’re just chatting an afternoon away. “My old man was a banty rooster. Cock of the walk.”
I shifted my weight, slid an inch away from Jake, pretending to scratch an itch on my side. Jake kept his eye on the chickens.
“ ‘Only room enough for one rooster in this barn,’ that old shit told me.” Jake spat again. “That was the last thing he said to me as I was packing up.”
“How long ago was that?” I asked, as I flipped more seed into the corral.
“Too long to remember, boy.”
Jake got quiet. His hands gripped the rail as he leaned forward and stared at the scrambling chickens. “See how fast that one is?” He jutted his pointy chin at the one Uncle Keven and I had secretly named Jake Jr. “You gotta be fast in this world, boy. Just like that banty. Walk tough. Look ’em in the eye. Keep movin’. Always keep moving.” Jake spat at the chickens. “They can’t hurt you as long as you’re moving.” He shook his head.
The chickens continued their squabbling. Jake Jr., however, stood stock still, broadside to Jake and me. His yellow beak sat half open and his black, glassy eye blinked calmly. Watching him made me think of Jake — as if the both of them had only one good eye.
“See the spurs on him?” Jake asked.
I looked at the scaly heels on the rooster. “Yeah.”
“Them’s equalizers. Know what an equalizer is, boy?”
“No.”
“Something to even things out.” He leaned back and reached into his pants pocket. Out came what looked like a polished black handle with a raised silver button near the end. I must have frowned because Jake chuckled and said, “Never seen one, have you?”
I just shook my head.
“Here. Get a closer look for yourself.” His hand floated up to my face and his thumb slid down toward the button.
FLICK!
I jerked back as a flash of silver exploded out the side of the handle. It was like snapping fingers — the thumb stopping ahead of the sound — it was so fast. It took me a second to realize what I’d just seen.
“Wow!”
“Wow’s right. With this,” Jake said, chuckling, “I can be the banty rooster of any goddamned barn I want.”
My eyes stayed fixed on the shining blade. My tingling fingers drifted toward the knife.
“Don’t even think about it, boy,” Jake said. “It’ll cut your gizzard out ’fore you can yell ‘Daddy!’.” He folded the knife and slipped it back into his pants pocket. Jake spat again, this time with less meanness.
“Who’s doing all the yellin’ at night?”
“Huh?” I was still thinking about the switchblade, what it’d take to get my hands on one. “Oh,” I said as I looked up at the house and shifted my weight. “Uncle Keven... he has real bad dreams some nights. Says it’s the war.”
“Hmm. Hates them Japs, I bet.”
“He... he doesn’t talk to me about it. Says he can’t.”
“Well, what the hell do you two talk about all day? I seen you out there on the front porch. Him whittling away. You smilin’ like a kid on Christmas morning.”
“Baseball. Uncle Keven was good.” I could feel the excitement building in me. It always started when I talked baseball. “Real good.”
“Could swing the stick, huh?”
“Boy, could he. And catch, too.”
“Shit,” Jake said as he hopped down from the fence. The chickens scattered, wings flapping, throats clucking at one another. Jake turned around, leaned against the fence with his arms crossed, and stared at the house. He worked up a hard spit, the kind that puffed his cheeks out and growled as it came up. He coughed it out, then kicked at it with his boot. “Baseball,” he said as he walked off, “is for sissies.”
June sprinted by us as if we were standing still. During the hot days, I’d walk the fields pulling rye, getting rid of it to avoid dockage come harvest. On other days, my job was to clean out the trucks, check the oil, the radiators, and get them ready for the beginning of harvest in mid-July. When Uncle Keven wasn’t looking, I’d climb the red International Harvester combine, grab the huge black steering wheel, and pretend I was driving. Nearly every morning I begged him to let me start up the green John Deere just to hear it. I thought the smell of gasoline would forever be my cologne.
Jake helped Uncle Keven replace sickle blades. From there, they’d move to the discs, always thinking ahead, even though some years Uncle Keven didn’t disc the fields because the soil was already turning into brown talcum powder. Harvesting Uncle Keven’s four thousand acres would take the last half of July and nearly all of August. Jake did nothing but complain about how hot and dry the Pa-louse was. I tried to stay away from him as much as possible. I even looked forward to the hotter days of late August, when Uncle Keven would be sending me out into the fallow fields with nothing but a hoe and a canteen to pull up the thistle and the tumbleweeds. Jake always said he had some other place to be. Somewhere else more important.
My father tended to his own crew, his own five thousand acres of rolling, undulating dream wheat. Mother didn’t see him from before dawn to after dusk, so she visited with Uncle Keven and me every other day around lunchtime. She’d pile out of the Pontiac with crunchy fried chicken, cold mashed potatoes with a slab of butter punched into the center, and coleslaw. She and her brother mostly talked about the weather — and me.
“As long as the boy’s eating,” she said as she nodded toward me.
“He is, Katie,” Uncle Keven answered. “Just look at him.”
“I just wish you’d get yourself a phone, Keven,” she said as she started the car.
“Haven’t the need for one, Katie. I got Amp.”
Sarah, I saw little of that summer. She’d come by on occasion — mostly in the evenings on her way into town — with mother’s car. “Two more years, Uncle Keven,” she’d remind him. “Just two more and I’m out of here.”
That one Friday, that one nearly all of Endicott would remember as being the hottest Friday they could ever remember, Sarah drove down the gravel driveway to find Uncle Keven listening to the radio on the front porch. He was bent over, whittling away at time and a crooked pine bough, shaking his head at the Yankees’ latest home run. I was trotting his roan mare between the house and the corrals when Jake came out of the barn all duded up. Payday made him walk taller than he really was. A slicked up banty rooster.
Sarah pulled to a stop when Jake walked in front of the car. He moved to the driver’s side, opened the door, and offered her a hand. Sarah didn’t get out. I trotted over.