The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

  “Perkin Lut?” Elgin said. “He deserve to die?”

  “Not just Perkin,” Blue said. “Not just. Lots of people. I mean, how many you kill over in the war?”

  Elgin shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “But some. Some. Right? Had to. I mean, that’s war—someone gets on your bad side, you kill them and all their friends till they stop bothering you.” His eyelids drooped again, and he yawned so deeply he shuddered when he finished.

  “Maybe you should get some sleep.”

  Blue looked over his shoulder at him. “You think? It’s been a while.”

  A breeze rattled the thin walls at the back of the house, pushed that thick dank smell into the kitchen again, a rotting stench that found the back of Elgin’s throat and stuck there. He said, “When’s the last time?”

  “I slept? Hell, a while. Days maybe.” Blue twisted his body so he was facing Elgin. “You ever feel like you spend your whole life waiting for it to get going?”

  Elgin nodded, not positive what Blue was saying, but knowing he should agree with him. “Sure.”

  “It’s hard,” Blue said. “Hard.” He leaned back on the table, stared at the brown water marks in his ceiling.

  Elgin took in a long stream of that stench through his nostrils. He kept his eyes open, felt that air entering his nostrils creep past into his corneas, tear at them. The urge to close his eyes and wish it all away was as strong an urge as he’d ever felt, but he knew now was that time he’d always known was coming.

  He leaned in toward Blue, reached across him, and pulled the rifle off his lap.

  Blue turned his head, looked at him.

  “Go to sleep,” Elgin said. “I’ll take care of this a while. We’ll go see Shelley tomorrow. Perkin Lut, too.”

  Blue blinked. “What if I can’t sleep? Huh? I’ve been having that problem, you know. I put my head on the pillow and I try to sleep and it won’t come and soon I’m just bawling like a fucking child till I got to get up and do something.”

  Elgin looked at the tears that had just then sprung into Blue’s eyes, the red veins split across the whites, the desperate, savage need in his face that had always been there if anyone had looked close enough, and would never, Elgin knew, be satisfied.

  “I’ll stick right here, buddy. I’ll sit here in the kitchen and you go in and sleep.”

  Blue turned his head and stared up at the ceiling again. Then he slid off the table, peeled off his T-shirt, and tossed it on top of the fridge. “All right. All right. I’m gonna try.” He stopped at the bedroom doorway. “’Member—there’s beer in the fridge. You be here when I wake up?”

  Elgin looked at him. He was still so small, probably so thin you could still wrap your hand around his biceps, meet the fingers on the other side. He was still ugly and stupid-looking, still dying right in front of Elgin’s eyes.

  “I’ll be here, Blue. Don’t you worry.”

  “Good enough. Yes, sir.”

  Blue shut the door and Elgin heard the bedsprings grind, the rustle of pillows being arranged. He sat in the chair, with the smell of whatever decayed in the back of the house swirling around his head. The sun had hit the cheap tin roof now, heating the small house, and after a while he realized the buzzing he’d thought was in his head came from somewhere back in the house too.

  He wondered if he had the strength to open the fridge. He wondered if he should call Perkin Lut’s and tell Perkin to get the hell out of Eden for a bit. Maybe he’d just ask for Shelley, tell her to meet him tonight with her suitcases. They’d drive down 95 where the dogs wouldn’t disturb them, drive clear to Jacksonville, Florida, before the sun came up again. See if they could outrun Blue and his tiny, dangerous wants, his dog corpses, and his smell; outrun people who took two parking spaces and telephone solicitors and Jane Fonda.

  Jewel flashed through his mind then, an image of her sitting atop him, arching her back and shaking that long red hair, a look in her green eyes that said this was it, this was why we live.

  He could stand up right now with this rifle in his hands, scratch the itch in the back of his head, and fire straight through the door, end what should never have been started.

  He sat there staring at the door for quite a while, until he knew the exact number of places the paint had peeled in teardrop spots, and eventually he stood, went to the phone on the wall by the fridge, and dialed Perkin Lut’s.

  “Auto Emporium,” Shelley said, and Elgin thanked God that in his present mood he hadn’t gotten Glynnis Verdon, who snapped her gum and always placed him on hold, left him listening to Muzak versions of The Shirelles.

  “Shelley?”

  “People gonna talk, you keep calling me at work, boy.”

  He smiled, cradled the rifle like a baby, leaned against the wall. “How you doing?”

  “Just fine, handsome. How ’bout yourself?”

  Elgin turned his head, looked at the bedroom door. “I’m okay.”

  “Still like me?”

  Elgin heard the springs creak in the bedroom, heard weight drop on the old floorboards. “Still like you.”

  “Well, then, it’s all fine then, isn’t it?”

  Blue’s footfalls crossed toward the bedroom door, and Elgin used his hip to push himself off the wall.

  “It’s all fine,” he said. “I gotta go. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  He hung up and stepped away from the wall.

  “Elgin,” Blue said from the other side of the door.

  “Yeah, Blue?”

  “I can’t sleep. I just can’t.”

  Elgin saw Woodson sloshing through the paddy, the top of his head gone. He saw the pink panties curling up from underneath Blue’s bed and a shaft of sunlight hitting Shelley’s face as she looked up from behind her desk at Perkin Lut’s and smiled. He saw Jewel Lut dancing in the night rain by the lake and that dog lying dead on the shoulder of the interstate, kicking its leg like it was trying to ride a bicycle.

  “Elgin,” Blue said. “I just can’t sleep. I got to do something.”

  “Try,” Elgin said and cleared his throat.

  “I just can’t. I got to . . . do something. I got to go . . .” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. “I can’t sleep.”

  The doorknob turned and Elgin raised the rifle, stared down the barrel.

  “Sure, you can, Blue.” He curled his finger around the trigger as the door opened. “Sure you can,” he repeated and took a breath, held it in.

  The skeleton of Eden Falls still sits on twenty-two acres of land just east of Brimmer’s Point, covered in rust thick as flesh. Some say it was the levels of iodine an environmental inspector found in the groundwater that scared off the original investors. Others said it was the downswing of the state economy or the governor’s failed reelection bid. Some say Eden Falls was just plain a dumb name, too Biblical. And then, of course, there were plenty who claimed it was Jewel Lut’s ghost scared off all the workers.

  They found her body hanging from the scaffolding they’d erected by the shell of the roller coaster. She was naked and hung upside down from a rope tied around her ankles. Her throat had been cut so deep the coroner said it was a miracle her head was still attached when they found her. The coroner’s assistant, man by the name of Chris Gleason, would claim when he was in his cups that the head had fallen off in the hearse as they drove down Main toward the morgue. Said he heard it cry out.

  This was the same day Elgin Bern called the sheriff’s office, told them he’d shot his buddy Blue, fired two rounds into him at close range, the little guy dead before he hit his kitchen floor. Elgin told the deputy he was still sitting in the kitchen, right where he’d done it a few hours before. Said to send the hearse.

  Due to the fact that Perkin Lut had no real alibi for his whereabouts when Jewel passed on and owing even more to the fact there’d been some very recent and very public discord in their marriage, Perkin was arrested and brought before a grand jury, but that jury decided not to indict. Perkin and Jew
el had been patching things up, after all; he’d bought her a car (at cost, but still . . .).

  Besides, we all knew it was Blue had killed Jewel. Hell, the Simmons boy, a retard ate paint and tree bark, could have told you that. Once all that stuff came out about what Blue and Big Bobby’d been doing with the dogs around here, well, that just sealed it. And everyone remembered how that week she’d been separated from Perkin, you could see the dream come alive in Blue’s eyes, see him allow hope into his heart for the first time in his sorry life.

  And when hope comes late to a man, it’s quite a dangerous thing. Hope is for the young, the children. Hope in a full-grown man—particularly one with as little acquaintanceship with it or prospect for it as Blue—well, that kind of hope burns as it dies, boils blood white, and leaves something mean behind when it’s done.

  Blue killed Jewel Lut.

  And Elgin Bern killed Blue. And ended up doing time. Not much, due to his war record and the circumstances of who Blue was, but time just the same. Everyone knew Blue probably had it coming, was probably on his way back into town to do to Perkin or some other poor soul what he’d done to Jewel. Once a man gets that look in his eyes—that boiled look, like a dog searching out a bone who’s not going to stop until he finds it—well, sometimes he has to be put down like a dog. Don’t he?

  And it was sad how Elgin came out of prison to find Shelley Briggs gone, moved up North with Perkin Lut of all people, who’d lost his heart for the car business after Jewel died, took to selling home electronics imported from Japan and Germany, made himself a fortune. Not long after he got out of prison, Elgin left too, no one knows where, just gone, drifting.

  See, the thing is—no one wanted to convict Elgin. We all understood. We did. Blue had to go. But he’d had no weapon in his hand when Elgin, standing just nine feet away, pulled that trigger. Twice. Once we might been able to overlook, but twice, that’s something else again. Elgin offered no defense, even refused a fancy lawyer’s attempt to get him to claim he’d suffered something called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which we’re hearing a lot more about these days.

  “I don’t have that,” Elgin said. “I shot a defenseless man. That’s the long and the short of it, and that’s a sin.”

  And he was right:

  In the world, ’case you haven’t noticed, you usually pay for your sins.

  And in the South, always.

  RUSSELL BANKS

  Lobster Night

  FROM Esquire

  STACY DIDN’T MEAN to tell Noonan that when she was seventeen she was struck by lightning. She rarely told anyone, and never a man she was attracted to or hoped soon to be sleeping with. Always, at the last second, an alarm in the center of her brain went off, and she changed the subject, asked a question like, “How’s your wife?” or “You ready for another?” She was a summertime bartender at Noonan’s, a sprawling log building with the main entrance and kitchen door facing the road and three large plate-glass dining room windows in back and a wide redwood deck cantilevered above the yard for taking in the great sunset views of the Adirondack Mountains. The sign said, NOONAN’S FAMILY RESTAURANT, but in fact it was a roadhouse, a bar that—except in ski season and on summer weekends when drive-by tourists with kids mistakenly pulled in for lunch or supper—catered mostly to heavy drinkers from the several nearby hamlets.

  The night that Stacy told Noonan about the lightning was also the night she shot and killed him. She had rented an A-frame at off-season rates in one of the hamlets and was working for Noonan only till the winter snows blew in from Quebec and Ontario. From May to November, she usually waited tables or tended bar in one or another of the area restaurants, and the rest of the year she taught alpine skiing at Whiteface Mountain. That was her real job, her profession. Stacy had the healthy, ash-blond good looks of a poster girl for women’s Nordic sports: tall, broad shouldered, flat muscled, with a square jaw and high cheekbones. But despite appearances, she viewed herself as a plain-faced twenty-eight-year-old ex-athlete, with the emphasis on ex. Eight years ago, she was captain of the nationally ranked St. Regis University downhill ski team, only a sophomore and already a star. Then in the eastern regionals she pushed her luck, took a spectacular, cartwheeling spill in the giant slalom, and shattered her left thigh. The video of her fall was still being shown at the front of the sports segment on the evening news from Plattsburgh.

  A year of physical therapy and she returned to college and the slopes, but she’d lost her fearlessness and, with it, her interest in college, and dropped out before fall break. Her parents had long since swapped their house for an RV and retired to a semipermanent campground outside Phoenix; her three older brothers had drifted downstate to Albany for work in construction; but Stacy came back to where she’d grown up. She had friends from high school there, mostiy women, who still thought of her as a star: “Stace was headed for the Olympics, y’know,” they told strangers. Over time, she lived briefly and serially with three local men in their early thirties, men she called losers even when she was living with them—slow-talking guys with beards and ponytails, rusted-out pickup trucks, and large dogs with bandannas tied around their necks. Otherwise and most of the time, she lived alone.

  Stacy had never tended bar for Noonan before this, and the place was a little rougher than she was used to. But she was experienced and had cultivated a set of open-faced, wiseguy ways and a laid-back manner that protected her from her male customers’ presumptions. Which, in spite of her ways and manner, she needed: She was a shy, north-country girl who, when it came to personal matters, volunteered very little about herself, not because she had secrets but because there was so much about herself that she did not yet understand. She did understand, however, that the last thing she wanted or needed was a love affair with a man like Noonan—married, twenty years older than she, and her boss. She was seriously attracted to him, though. And not just sexually. Which was why she got caught off guard.

  It was late August, a Thursday, the afternoon of Lobster Night. The place was empty, and she and Noonan were standing hip to hip behind the bar, studying the lobster tank. Back in June, Noonan, who did all the cooking himself, had decided that he could attract a better class of clientele and simplify the menu at the same time if, during the week, he offered nightly specials, which he advertised on a chalkboard hung from the FAMILY RESTAURANT sign outside. Monday became Mexican Night, with dollar margaritas and all the rice and refried beans you could eat. Tuesday was Liver ’n’ Onions Night. Wednesday was Fresh Local Corn Night, although until mid-August, the corn came not from Adirondack gardens but from southern New Jersey and Pennsylvania by way of the Grand Union supermarket in Lake Placid. And Thursday—when local folks rarely ate out and therefore needed something more than merely special—was designated Lobster Night. Weekends, he figured, took care of themselves.

  Noonan had set his teenage son’s unused tropical fish tank at the end of the bar, filled it with tap water, and arranged with the Albany wholesaler to stock the tank on his Monday runs to Lake Placid with a dozen live lobsters. All week, the lobsters rose and sank in the cloudy tank like dark thoughts. Usually, by Tuesday afternoon, the regulars at the bar had given the lobsters names like Marsh and Redeye and Honest Abe, after local drinking, hunting, and bar-brawling legends, and had handicapped the order of their execution. In the villages around, Thursday quickly became everyone’s favorite night for eating out, and soon Noonan was doubling his weekly order, jamming the fish tank and making Lobster Night an almost merciful event for the poor crowded creatures.

  “You ought to either get a bigger tank or else just don’t buy so many of them,” Stacy said.

  Noonan laughed. “Stace,” he said. “Compared to the cardboard boxes these guys’ve been in, the fish tank is lobster heaven. Four days of swimmin’ in this, they’re free-range, practically.” He draped a heavy hand across her shoulder and drummed her collarbone with a fingertip. “They don’t know the difference, anyhow. They’re dumber than fish, y’know.”r />
  “You don’t know what they feel or don’t feel. Maybe they spend the last few days before they die flipping out from being so confined. I sure would.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t go there, Stace. Trying to figure what lobsters feel, that’s the road to vegetarianism. The road to vegansville.”

  She smiled at that. Like most of the Adirondack men she knew, Noonan was a dedicated, lifelong hunter—mainly of deer, but also of game birds and rabbits, which he fed to his family and sometimes put on the restaurant menu as well. He also shot and trapped animals he didn’t eat—foxes, coyotes, lynxes, even bears—and sold their pelts. Normally, this would disgust Stacy or at least seriously test her acceptance of Noonan’s character. She wasn’t noticeably softhearted or sentimental when it came to animals, but shooting and trapping creatures you didn’t intend to eat made no sense to her. She was sure it was cruel and was almost ready to say it was sadistic.

  In Noonan, though, it oddly attracted her, this cruelty. He was a tall, good-looking man in an awkward, rough-hewn way, large in the shoulders and arms, with a clean-shaven face and a buzz-cut head one or two sizes too small for his body. It made him look boyish to her, and whenever he showed signs of cruelty—his relentless, not quite good-natured teasing of Gail, his regular waitress, and the LaPierre brothers, two high school kids he hired in summers to wash dishes and bus tables—to her, he seemed even more boyish than usual. It was all somehow innocent, she thought. It had the same strange, otherworldly innocence of the animals that he liked to kill. A man that manly, that different from a woman, can actually make you feel more womanly—as if you were of a different species. It freed you from having to compare yourself to him.

  “You ever try that? Vegetarianism?” Noonan asked. He tapped the glass of the tank with a knuckle, as if signaling one of the lobsters to come on over.