The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

  What Elgin couldn’t abide was that there was something in Perkin that protected him from consequence. Something that made him look down on people who paid for their sins, who fell without a safety net to catch them.

  It had happened more than once that Elgin had found himself thrusting in and out of Perkin’s wife and thinking, Take that, Perkin. Take that.

  But this afternoon, Perkin didn’t have his salesman’s smile or aloof glance. When Elgin stopped by him and said, “Hey, Perkin, how you?” Perkin looked up at him with eyes so wild they seemed about to jump out of their sockets.

  “I’m not good, Elgin. Not good.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  Perkin nodded to himself several times, looked over Elgin’s shoulder. “I’m fixing to do something about that.”

  “About what?”

  “About that.” Perkin’s jaw gestured over Elgin’s shoulder.

  Elgin turned around, looked across Main and through the windows of Miller’s Laundromat, saw Jewel Lut pulling her clothes from the dryer, saw Blue standing beside her, taking a pair of jeans from the pile and starting to fold. If either of them had looked up and over, they’d have seen Elgin and Perkin Lut easily enough, but Elgin knew they wouldn’t. There was an air to the two of them that seemed to block out the rest of the world in that bright Laundromat as easily as it would in a dark bedroom. Blue’s lips moved and Jewel laughed, flipped a T-shirt on his head.

  “I’m fixing to do something right now,” Perkin said.

  Elgin looked at him, could see that was a lie, something Perkin was repeating to himself in hopes it would come true. Perkin was successful in business, and for more reasons than just his daddy’s money, but he wasn’t the kind of man who did things; he was the kind of man who had things done.

  Elgin looked across the street again. Blue still had the T-shirt sitting atop his head. He said something else and Jewel covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed.

  “Don’t you have a washer and dryer at your house, Perkin?”

  Perkin rocked back on his heels. “Washer broke. Jewel decides to come in town.” He looked at Elgin. “We ain’t getting along so well these days. She keeps reading those magazines, Elgin. You know the ones? Talking about liberation, leaving your bra at home, shit like that.” He pointed across the street. “Your friend’s a problem.”

  Your friend.

  Elgin looked at Perkin, felt a sudden anger he couldn’t completely understand, and with it a desire to say, That’s my friend and he’s talking to my fuck-buddy. Get it, Perkin?

  Instead, he just shook his head and left Perkin there, walked across the street to the Laundromat.

  Blue took the T-shirt off his head when he saw Elgin enter. A smile, half frozen on his pitted face, died as he blinked into the sunlight blaring through the windows.

  Jewel said, “Hey, we got another helper!” She tossed a pair of men’s briefs over Blue’s head, hit Elgin in the chest with them.

  “Hey, Jewel.”

  “Hey, Elgin. Long time.” Her eyes dropped from his, settled on a towel.

  Didn’t seem like it at the moment to Elgin. Seemed almost as if he’d been out at the lake with her as recently as last night. He could taste her in his mouth, smell her skin damp with a light sweat.

  And standing there with Blue, it also seemed like they were all three back in that trailer park, and Jewel hadn’t aged a bit. Still wore her red hair long and messy, still dressed in clothes seemed to have been picked up, wrinkled, off her closet floor and nothing fancy about them in the first place, but draped over her body, they were sexier than clothes other rich women bought in New York once a year.

  This afternoon, she wore a crinkly, paisley dress that might have been on the pink side once but had faded to a pasty newspaper color after years of washing. Nothing special about it, not too high up her thigh or down her chest, and loose—but something about her body made it appear like she might just ripen right out of it any second.

  Elgin handed the briefs to Blue as he joined them at the folding table. For a while, none of them said anything. They picked clothes from the large pile and folded, and the only sound was Jewel whistling.

  Then Jewel laughed.

  “What?” Blue said.

  “Aw, nothing.” She shook her head. “Seems like we’re just one happy family here, though, don’t it?”

  Blue looked stunned. He looked at Elgin. He looked at Jewel. He looked at the pair of small, light-blue socks he held in his hands, the monogram JL stitched in the cotton. He looked at Jewel again.

  “Yeah,” he said eventually, and Elgin heard a tremor in his voice he’d never heard before. “Yeah, it does.”

  Elgin looked up at one of the upper dryer doors. It had been swung out at eye level when the dryer had been emptied. The center of the door was a circle of glass, and Elgin could see Main Street reflected in it, the white posts that supported the wood awning over the Five & Dime, Perkin Lut walking in circles, his head down, heat shimmering in waves up and down Main.

  The dog was green.

  Blue had used some of the money Big Bobby’d paid him over the past few weeks to upgrade his target scope. The new scope was huge, twice the width of the rifle barrel, and because the days were getting shorter, it was outfitted with a light-amplification device. Elgin had used similar scopes in the jungle, and he’d never liked them, even when they’d saved his life and those of his platoon, picked up Charlie coming through the dense flora like icy gray ghosts. Night scopes—or LADs as they’d called them over there—were just plain unnatural, and Elgin always felt like he was looking through a telescope from the bottom of a lake. He had no idea where Blue would have gotten one, but hunters in Eden had been showing up with all sorts of weird Marine or army surplus shit these last few years; Elgin had even heard of a hunting party using grenades to scare up fish—blowing ’em up into the boat already half cooked, all you had to do was scale ’em.

  The dog was green, the highway was beige, the top of the tree line was yellow, and the trunks were the color of army fatigues.

  Blue said, “What you think?”

  They were up in the tree house Blue’d built. Nice wood, two lawn chairs, a tarp hanging from the branch overhead, a cooler filled with Coors. Blue’d built a railing across the front, perfect for resting your elbows when you took aim. Along the tree trunk, he’d mounted a huge klieg light plugged to a portable generator, because while it was illegal to “shine” deer, nobody’d ever said anything about shining wild dogs. Blue was definitely home.

  Elgin shrugged. Just like in the jungle, he wasn’t sure he was meant to see the world this way—faded to the shades and textures of old photographs. The dog, too, seemed to sense that it had stepped out of time somehow, into this seaweed circle punched through the landscape. It sniffed the air with a misshapen snout, but the rest of its body was tensed into one tight muscle, leaning forward as if it smelled prey.

  Blue said, “You wanna do it?”

  The stock felt hard against Elgin’s shoulder. The trigger, curled under his index finger, was cold and thick, something about it that itched his finger and the back of his head simultaneously, a voice back there with the itch in his head saying, “Fire.”

  What you could never talk about down at the bar to people who hadn’t been there, to people who wanted to know, was what it had been like firing on human beings, on those icy gray ghosts in the dark jungle. Elgin had been in fourteen battles over the course of his twelve-month tour, and he couldn’t say with certainty that he’d ever killed anyone. He’d shot some of those shapes, seen them go down, but never the blood, never their eyes when the bullets hit. It had all been a cluster-fuck of swift and sudden noise and color, an explosion of white lights and tracers, green bush, red fire, screams in the night. And afterward, if it was clear, you walked into the jungle and saw the corpses, wondered if you’d hit this body or that one or any at all.

  And the only thing you were sure of was that you were too fucking
hot and still—this was the terrible thing, but oddly exhilarating too—deeply afraid.

  Elgin lowered Blue’s rifle, stared across the interstate, now the color of seashell, at the dark mint tree line. The dog was barely noticeable, a soft dark shape amid other soft dark shapes.

  He said, “No, Blue, thanks,” and handed him the rifle.

  Blue said, “Suit yourself, buddy.” He reached behind them and pulled the beaded string on the klieg light. As the white light erupted across the highway and the dog froze, blinking in the brightness, Elgin found himself wondering what the fucking point of a LAD scope was when you were just going to shine the animal anyway.

  Blue swung the rifle around, leaned into the railing, and put a round in the center of the animal, right by its rib cage. The dog jerked inward, as if someone had whacked it with a bat, and as it teetered on wobbly legs, Blue pulled back on the bolt, drove it home again, and shot the dog in the head. The dog flipped over on its side, most of its skull gone, back leg kicking at the road like it was trying to ride a bicycle.

  “You think Jewel Lut might, I dunno, like me?” Blue said.

  Elgin cleared his throat. “Sure. She’s always liked you.”

  “But I mean . . .” Blue shrugged, seemed embarrassed suddenly, “How about this: You think a girl like that could take to Australia?”

  “Australia?”

  Blue smiled at Elgin. “Australia.”

  “Australia?” he said again.

  Blue reached back and shut off the light. “Australia. They got some wild dingoes there, buddy. Could make some real money. Jewel told me the other day how they got real nice beaches. But dingoes, too. Big Bobby said people’re starting to bitch about what’s happening here, asking where Rover is and such, and anyway, ain’t too many dogs left dumb enough to come this way anymore. Australia,” he said, “they never run out of dog. Sooner or later, here, I’m gonna run out of dog.”

  Elgin nodded. Sooner or later, Blue would run out of dog. He wondered if Big Bobby’d thought that one through, if he had a contingency plan, if he had access to the National Guard.

  “The boy’s just, what you call it, zealous,” Big Bobby told Elgin.

  They were sitting in Phil’s Barbershop on Main. Phil had gone to lunch, and Big Bobby’d drawn the shades so people’d think he was making some important decision of state.

  Elgin said, “He ain’t zealous, Big Bobby. He’s losing it. Thinks he’s in love with Jewel Lut.”

  “He’s always thought that.”

  “Yeah, but now maybe he’s thinking she might like him a bit, too.”

  Big Bobby said, “How come you never call me Mayor?”

  Elgin sighed.

  “All right, all right. Look,” Big Bobby said, picking up one of the hair-tonic bottles on Phil’s counter and sniffing it, “so Blue likes his job a little bit.”

  Elgin said, “There’s more to it and you know it.”

  Playing with combs now. “I do?”

  “Bobby, he’s got a taste for shooting things now.”

  “Wait.” He held up a pair of fat, stubby hands. “Blue always liked to shoot things. Everyone knows that. Shit, if he wasn’t so short and didn’t have six or seven million little health problems, he’d a been the first guy in this town to go to The ’Nam. ’Stead, he had to sit back here while you boys had all the fun.”

  Calling it The ’Nam. Like Big Bobby had any idea. Calling it fun. Shit.

  “Dingoes,” Elgin said.

  “Dingoes?”

  “Dingoes. He’s saying he’s going to Australia to shoot dingoes.”

  “Do him a world of good, too.” Big Bobby sat back down in the barber’s chair beside Elgin. “He can see the sights, that sort of thing.”

  “Bobby, he ain’t going to Australia and you know it. Hell, Blue ain’t never stepped over the county line in his life.”

  Big Bobby polished his belt buckle with the cuff of his sleeve. “Well, what you want me to do about it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just telling you. Next time you see him, Bobby, you look in his fucking eyes.”

  “Yeah, What’ll I see?”

  Elgin turned his head, looked at him. “Nothing.”

  Bobby said, “He’s your buddy.”

  Elgin thought of the small panties curling out of the dust under Blue’s bed. “Yeah, but he’s your problem.”

  Big Bobby put his hands behind his head, stretched in the chair. “Well, people getting suspicious about all the dogs disappearing, so I’m going to have to shut this operation down immediately anyway.”

  He wasn’t getting it. “Bobby, you shut this operation down, someone’s gonna get a world’s worth of that nothing in Blue’s eyes.”

  Big Bobby shrugged, a man who’d made a career out of knowing what was beyond him.

  The first time Perkin Lut struck Jewel in public was at Chuck’s Diner.

  Elgin and Shelley were sitting just three booths away when they heard a racket of falling glasses and plates, and by the time they came out of their booth, Jewel was lying on the tile floor with shattered glass and chunks of bone china by her elbows and Perkin standing over her, his arms shaking, a look in his eyes that said he’d surprised himself as much as anyone else.

  Elgin looked at Jewel, on her knees, the hem of her dress getting stained by the spilled food, and he looked away before she caught his eye, because if that happened he just might do something stupid, fuck Perkin up a couple-three ways.

  “Aw, Perkin,” Chuck Blade said, coming from behind the counter to help Jewel up, wiping gravy off his hands against his apron.

  “We don’t respect that kind of behavior ’round here, Mr. Lut,” Clara Blade said. “Won’t have it neither.”

  Chuck Blade helped Jewel to her feet, his eyes cast down at his broken plates, the half a steak lying in a soup of beans by his shoe. Jewel had a welt growing on her right cheek, turning a bright red as she placed her hand on the table for support.

  “I didn’t mean it,” Perkin said.

  Clara Blade snorted and pulled the pen from behind her ear, began itemizing the damage on a cocktail napkin.

  “I didn’t.” Perkin noticed Elgin and Shelley. He locked eyes with Elgin, held out his hands. “I swear.”

  Elgin turned away and that’s when he saw Blue coming through the door. He had no idea where he’d come from, though it ran through his head that Blue could have just been standing outside looking in, could have been standing there for an hour.

  Like a lot of small guys, Blue had speed, and he never seemed to walk in a straight line. He moved as if he were constantly sidestepping tackles or land mines—with sudden, unpredictable pivots that left you watching the space where he’d been, instead of the place he’d ended up.

  Blue didn’t say anything, but Elgin could see the determination for homicide in his eyes and Perkin saw it too, backed up, and slipped on the mess on the floor and stumbled back, trying to regain his balance as Blue came past Shelley and tried to lunge past Elgin.

  Elgin caught him at the waist, lifted him off the ground, and held on tight because he knew how slippery Blue could be in these situations. You’d think you had him and he’d just squirm away from you, hit somebody with a glass.

  Elgin tucked his head down and headed for the door, Blue flopped over his shoulder like a bag of cement mix, Blue screaming, “You see me, Perkin? You see me? I’m a last face you see, Perkin! Real soon.”

  Elgin hit the open doorway, felt the night heat on his face as Blue screamed, “Jewel! You all right? Jewel?”

  Blue didn’t say much back at Elgin’s trailer.

  He tried to explain to Shelley how pure Jewel was, how hitting something that innocent was like spitting on the Bible.

  Shelley didn’t say anything, and after a while Blue shut up, too.

  Elgin just kept plying him with Beam, knowing Blue’s lack of tolerance for it, and pretty soon Blue passed out on the couch, his pitted face still red with rage.

  “He’s never be
en exactly right in the head, has he?” Shelley said.

  Elgin ran his hand down her bare arm, pulled her shoulder in tighter against his chest, heard Blue snoring from the front of the trailer. “No, ma’am.”

  She rose above him, her dark hair falling to his face, tickling the corners of his eyes. “But you’ve been his friend.”

  Elgin nodded.

  She touched his cheek with her hand. “Why?”

  Elgin thought about it a bit, started talking to her about the little, dirty kid and his cockroach flambés, of the animal sounds that came from his mother’s trailer. The way Blue used to sit by the drainage ditch, all pulled into himself, his body tight. Elgin thought of all those roaches and cats and rabbits and dogs, and he told Shelley that he’d always thought Blue was dying, ever since he’d met him, leaking away in front of his eyes.

  “Everyone dies,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He rose up on his elbow, rested his free hand on her warm hip. “Yeah, but with most of us it’s like we’re growing toward something and then we die. But with Blue, it’s like he ain’t never grown toward nothing. He’s just been dying real slowly since he was born.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not getting you.”

  He thought of the mildew that used to soak the walls in Blue’s mother’s trailer, of the mold and dust in Blue’s shack off Route 11, of the rotting smell that had grown out of the drainage ditch when they were kids. The way Blue looked at it all—seemed to be at one with it—as if he felt a bond.

  Shelley said, “Babe, what do you think about getting out of here?”

  “Where?”

  “I dunno. Florida. Georgia. Someplace else.”