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:
My legs felt like icicles. I thought they’d snap if I tried to stand on them.
“Damn, boy. You’re shakin’ like a dog shittin’ a peach seed.” He snickered, slapped me on the arm again and said, “You ain’t afraid of the dark, are you? Now, go on, boy.” He turned and glared at me with his one good eye. “I’m tellin’ you, you don’t want to be around here while I visit with your sister.”
Tears welled up in my eyes. The dashboard, the windshield, the house — everything — went blurry. I blinked and blinked but I did not make a sound. I refused to make a sound.
I bolted through the open door and sprinted toward the barn.
“That’s right, gingerbread boy!” Jake shouted at me. “Run, run as fast as you can.”
I collapsed into a ball when I reached the side of the barn. I squeezed my fists and pressed them into my cheeks. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t breathe. My mind swirled and spun and coiled back in on itself. Don’t you dare cry, I thought. Don V you dare cry. I crawled my way back onto my feet and slid along the barn until I made it to the corner. I leaned my head back against the wall, drew in a deep breath, and then eased my nose around to see Jake stop on the front porch. He reached for the doorknob. Will and Bill howled furiously.
Jake twisted the knob, calling, “S-a-r-a-h.” He kicked the door open. The dogs fell silent. I held my breath. Just as Jake stepped through the doorway, it hit.
The baseball bat struck mid-thigh. I heard the big bone snap. Jake squealed. He hunched over, frantically groping at the bent leg. The bat fell again, this time across his back.
“He’s got a knife, Uncle Keven!” I shouted, racing toward the house. “A knife!”
By the time I jumped onto the porch, Jake lay face-down on the doorstep. Uncle Keven didn’t take his eyes off him. He lifted Jake’s right shoulder with the toe of his boot and rolled Jake onto his back, like flipping over a rusted sheet of tin. Jake’s hands rose and fluttered in front of his face. They moved back and forth as if trying to shoo invisible demons.
Uncle Keven stood above Jake’s head. He watched the hands tremble, stared at the broken, bent leg, then frowned at Jake’s hands.
“Hold ’em down, Amp,” Uncle Keven said, still not looking at me. “You have to hold his hands down.”
“He’s... he’s got a—”
“I don’t want them touching my face.” The icy words just fell from my uncle’s mouth, like they weren’t his own.
I looked down at Jake. His head was tilted back as if he were trying to see inside the house, past Uncle Keven, but his eyes were pinched shut. His mouth opened and closed like a suffocating fish on land, sucking at the air. But the mouth made no sounds. His coarse Adam’s apple bobbed beneath the stretched skin.
Uncle Keven stepped to the side of Jake. He propped the baseball bat against the door, knelt alongside the trembling hands, then grabbed the left wrist and slammed it to the floor. Jake’s right hand still fluttered, as if unaware of what the other was doing.
“There can’t be any blood.”
“Wh... what?”
“Here. Step right here.” I placed my boot heel on Jake’s left wrist. It felt rubbery. I reached and held the doorjamb tight with both hands.
“Now, this one.” Uncle Keven moved my other foot into place.
I obeyed, trapping Jake’s right wrist under my other boot. Jake started to moan. I kept looking forward, down the hall, into the kitchen. My eyes searched my own home as if I’d never seen it before. I stared at the fireplace. The pink plastic flowers decorating the mantel. The white candles standing like frozen fingers. I counted them, over and over, and then started again. I saw the wood-framed photos of Sarah. Of me. My mother. Of Uncle Keven in his Marine uniform.
“There can’t be,” Uncle Keven whispered, “any blood.”
I couldn’t speak. I stood in the doorway like some cocky cowboy with his legs spread wide, towering over two grown men. My feet burned. My uncle moved silently, as if under water.
I glanced down just as Uncle Keven lay the wooden baseball bat across Jake’s throat. He shifted his weight on his knees and slid both hands down to the ends of the bat. He looked like a hunched-over baker with a huge, misshapen rolling pin getting ready to knead dough.
I closed my eyes, tilted my head back, and squeezed the doorjamb with all my might, trying to hold on to a world that couldn’t stop spinning. I kept counting.
Jake’s mouth made no noise.
The seconds twisted into years as my Uncle Keven bore down. He finally stopped. But the crackling, the crunching, never have.
The Palouse snow slants across Highway 16, tossing shadows into an already gray January afternoon. My windshield wipers cake up with ice and screech across the glass. I pull off the highway, head up the gravel driveway, and stop at the top of the hill. There they are. The Holy Trinity sitting one, two, three. Pointed heads. Wide silver bellies.
I’m cold. Colder than I can ever remember being.
Uncle Keven’s house is hollow. Empty. The bantam chickens are long gone.
I sit in the car with the engine idling. The wipers rest. I count the years since I saw Jake walk down this road. Thirteen. Still counting, I think, after all these years. My hands curl up into fists.
Sarah and my parents never visited this house, the one over the rise, sitting beneath the Holy Trinity. None of them could ever forgive Uncle Keven for disappearing off the front porch that evening. Sarah would turn her head at the sight of her uncle, my uncle. She’d call him “him.” “Are you going over to visit ‘him,’ again?” she’d ask me. “I saw ‘him’ in town today.” But, she never heard “him” asking her teachers how she was doing in school, if her grades were good, if she needed anything. She never saw “him” sneak out at her wedding after she said “I do” to some pig farmer’s fat son who muttered the same words but didn’t mean them. But I saw “him.”
After that summer, Uncle Keven and I rarely discussed my “ticket” out of Endicott — baseball. I lost every ounce of interest I’d ever had in baseball. I helped him seed his winter wheat each fall but never stayed the night with him again. That year, Mother moved my bedroom downstairs, complaining, “You moan too much at night.”
Uncle Keven never uttered a word about what took place that evening after Jake’s fingers-quit twitching beneath my boot heels. “Get on back to Sarah, Amp,” is all he said. His voice never sounded the same to me after that.
I got my boyhood wish. Uncle Keven willed me the farm.
And I’ve never emptied the Holy Mother of God — and I never will.
Annette Meyers
You Don’t Know Me
From Flesh and Blood
“Hear them moving around?” She presses her ear to the door.
He doesn’t hear anything, and standing in the dark outside her parents’ bedroom scares him. What if they come out and catch him and her listening? And they don’t know him, don’t even know he’s in their place. He gets anxious, like he always does when he’s scared. He can’t help it.
“You’re afraid. What are you fuckin’ afraid about? They’re my parents, not yours.”
“I gotta go,” he says. The sweat is dripping off him, and his glasses slide down his nose. He has to pee.
She’s disgusted with him. “You gotta do better than this or you can’t hang out with me.” She drags him back down the hall to the other side of the apartment. It’s this huge place that goes a whole floor with their own elevator stop. She has her own bathroom.