The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

  “Once. When I was seventeen. I kept it up for a while—two years, as a matter of fact. Till I busted up my leg and had to quit college.” He knew the story of her accident; everyone knew it. She’d been a local hero before the break and had become a celebrity afterward. “It’s hard to keep being a vegetarian in the hospital, though. That’s what got me off it.”

  “No shit. What got you on it?”

  That’s when she told him. “I was struck by lightning.”

  He looked at her. “Lightning! Jesus! Are you kidding me? How the hell did that happen?”

  “The way it always happens, I guess. I was doing something else at the time. Going up the stairs to bed, actually, in my parents’ house. It was in a thunderstorm, and I reached for the light switch on the wall and bam! Just like they say, a bolt out of the blue.”

  “But it didn’t kill you,” Noonan tenderly observed.

  “No. But it sure could’ve. You could say it almost killed me, though.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  “Right. But it almost killed me. That’s not the same as ‘It didn’t kill me.’ If you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, but you’re OK now, right? No lingering aftereffects, I mean. Except, of course, for your brief flirtation with the veg world.” He squeezed the meat of her shoulder and smiled warmly.

  She sighed. Then smiled back—she liked his touch—and tried again: “No, it really changed me. It did. A bolt of lightning went through my body and my brain, and I almost died from it, even though it lasted only a fraction of a second and then was over. It changes you, Noonan. That’s all.”

  “But you’re OK now, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “So what was it like, getting hit by lightning?”

  She hesitated a moment before answering. “Well, I thought I was shot. With a gun. Seriously. There was this loud noise, like an explosion, and when I woke up, I was lying at the bottom of the stairs, and Daddy and Mom were standing over me like I was dead, and I said, ‘Who shot me, Daddy?’ It really messed with my mind for a long time. I tried to find out if anybody else I knew had been struck by lightning, but nobody had. Although a few people said they knew someone or heard of someone who’d been hit and survived it. But nobody I ever met myself had been through it. I was the only person I knew who’d had this particular experience. Still am. It’s strange, but when you’re the only person you know who’s gone through something that’s changed you into a completely different person, for a while it’s like you’re on your own planet, like if you’re a Vietnam vet and don’t know anyone else who was in Vietnam, too.”

  “I can dig it,” Noonan said somberly, although he himself had not been in Vietnam.

  “You get used to it, though. And then it turns out to be like life. I mean, there’s you, and there’s everybody else. Only, unlike the way it is for everybody else, this happened to me in a flash, not over years and so slow you don’t even realize how true it is. Know what I mean?”

  “How true what is?”

  “Well, just that there’s you, and there’s everybody else. And that’s life.”

  “Sure, I can understand that.” He turned away from the tank and looked into Stacy’s blue eyes. “It’s the same for me. Only with me it was on account of this goddamned bear. Did I ever tell you about the bear that tore my camp down?”

  She said, “No, Noonan. You didn’t.”

  “It’s the same thing, like getting struck by lightning and afterward feeling like you’re a changed man.” It was years ago, he explained, when he was between marriages and drinking way too much and living in his hunting camp up on Baxter Mountain because his first wife had got the house in the divorce. He got drunk every night in town at the Spread Eagle or the Elm Tree or the old Dew Drop Inn, and afterward, when he drove back to Baxter Mountain, he’d park his truck at the side of the road, because the trail was too rough even for a four-by-four, and walk the two miles through the woods to his camp. It was a windblown, one-room cabin with a sleeping loft and a woodstove, and one night, after stumbling back from the village, he found the place had been trashed by a bear. “An adolescent male, I figured, it being springtime, who’d been kicked out of his own house and home. Not unlike myself. I had a certain sympathy for him, therefore. But he’d wrecked my cabin looking for food and had busted a window getting in, and I knew he’d come back, so I had to take him down.”

  The next evening, Noonan blew out his kerosene lantern, climbed into the sleeping loft with a bottle of Jim Beam, his Winchester .30-06, and his flashlight, and waited. Around midnight, as if brushing away a cobweb, the bear tore off the sheet of polyurethane that Noonan had tacked over the broken window, crawled into the cabin, and made for the same cupboard he’d emptied the night before. Noonan, half drunk by now, clicked on his flashlight, caught the startled bear in its beam, and fired, but only wounded him. Maddened with pain, the bear roared and stood on his hind legs, flinging his forelegs in the air right and left, and before Noonan could fire again, the animal had grabbed on to a timber that held up the loft and ripped it from its place, tearing out several other supporting timbers with it, until the entire cabin was collapsing around Noonan and the wounded bear. The structure was feeble anyhow, made of old, cast-off boards tacked together in a hurry twenty years before, never rebuilt, never renovated, and it came down upon Noonan’s head with ease. The bear escaped into the night, but Noonan lay trapped under the fallen roof of the cabin, unable to move, his right arm broken, he assumed, and possibly several ribs. “That’s when it happened,” he said.

  “What?” Stacy dipped a dozen beer mugs two at a time into cold water, pulled them out, and stuck them into the freezer to frost for later on.

  “That’s when I knew there was me, and there was everybody else. Just like you said. It changed my life.”

  “No kidding. How?” She refilled the salt shakers on the bar.

  “Well. I stopped drinking for one thing. That was a few years later, though. But I lay there all that night and most of the next day. Until this beautiful young woman out looking for her lost dog came wandering by. And, Stace,” he said, his voice suddenly lowered, “I married her.”

  She put her fists on her hips and checked him out. “Seriously?”

  He smiled. “Well, yeah, sort of. I’d actually known her a long time beforehand, and she’d visited me a few times at my camp, let us say. But, yeah, I did marry her . . . eventually. And we were very happy. For a while.”

  “Uh-huh. For a while.”

  Noonan nodded, smiled, winked. Then he bumped her hip with his and said, “I gotta get the kitchen set up. We can pursue this later, Stace. If you want.”

  She didn’t answer. She started slinging bottles of beer into the darkness of the cooler, and when she next looked up, he was gone and a pair of road workers were coming through the door, hot and sunburned and thirsty.

  The day had been clear, with wispy fantails of clouds in the east, promising a soft, late-summer sunset over the mountains for the folks dining out at Noonan’s Family Restaurant. It was unusually busy that evening, even for Lobster Night. Depressed by an earlier quarrel with her pregnant daughter over money, Gail fell quickly behind in her orders and, after being yelled at, first by her hungry customers in the dining room and then by Noonan in the kitchen, where seven or eight bright-red lobsters on their platters awaited pickup, she broke down and ran sobbing into the ladies’ room. She came out, but only after Stacy went after her and promised to help in the dining room, where fifteen kids from three unrelated French-Canadian families were banging their silverware rhythmically against their glasses. Back in the kitchen, halfway into the supper hour, Donny LaPierre threw down his dish towel and told Noonan to take his job and shove it—he didn’t graduate high school to get treated like an idiot for minimum wage. His younger brother, Timmy, who would graduate the following year, high-fived Donny and said, “Whoa! Way cool, D.L.,” and the two walked out together.

  Noonan stood at the door and bellowed
, “Don’t even think about gettin’ paid for this week!” and the boys gave him the finger from the parking lot and laughed and started hitching to Lake Placid.

  Eventually, Gail and Stacy, between them, got everyone satisfactorily served, the diners and their children quieted down, and order was restored—even in the kitchen, where Noonan, almost grateful for the chance to do it right, took over the dishwasher’s job himself. At the bar, four bored, lonely regulars, men of habit, were drinking and smoking cigarettes and watching Montreal lose to the Mets on television. Stacy gave them a round on the house for their patience, and all four smiled and thanked her and resumed watching the game.

  In the fish tank, the one last lobster bumped lazily against the glass. Stacy wiped down the bar and came to a slow stop by the tank. She leaned down and gazed into what she believed was one of the lobster’s eyes—more of a greenish knob than an eyeball, anatomically absurd to her—and tried to imagine what the world of Noonan’s Family Restaurant looked like through that knob and the thirty-gallon cell of cloudy water surrounding it and, beyond that, the lens of the algae-stained glass wall. It probably looks like an alien planet out here, she thought. Or incomprehensibly foreign, like some old-time Chinese movie, so you don’t even know what the story’s about, who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy. Or maybe, instead of an actual place or thing, to a lobster it looks like only an idea out here. That scared her.

  There must be some kind of tradeoff among the senses, she reasoned, like with blind and deaf people. If one sense is weak, another must be strong, and vice versa. Lobsters, she figured, probably can’t see very well, living as they do way at the dark bottom of the sea. To distinguish food from friend and friend from foe, they would need powerful senses of smell and hearing. She brought her face up close to the glass and almost touched it with her nose. The lobster bobbled and jiggled just beyond, as if struggling to use its weak eyes and tank-impaired hearing and olfactory senses to determine if Stacy was a thing that could eat it or breed with it or be eaten by it. So much in the life of any creature depends upon being able to identify the other creatures accurately, Stacy thought. In the tank and out of it, too. And this poor beast, with only its ridiculous eyes to depend upon, was lost, was wholly, utterly lost. She reached toward the lobster, as if to pat it, to comfort and reassure.

  Noonan’s large hand dropped unseen from above, as if through dark water, and came to rest upon hers. She turned, startled, and there was his face a bare few inches away, his large, bloodshot brown eyes and his porous peach-colored skin with black whiskers popping through like lopped-off stalks, soft caves of nostrils, red lips, tobacco-stained teeth, wet tongue. She yanked her hand away and stepped back, bringing him into a more appropriate and safe focus, with the bar between them like a fence, keeping him out or her in, she wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter, as long as they were on opposite sides of it.

  “You scared me!” she said.

  He leaned across the bar and smiled indulgently. Behind her, the men drank beer and watched baseball. She heard the crowd at the ballpark chitter in anticipation of the pitch. From the dining room came the low rumble of families distributing food among themselves and their hushed commentaries as they evaluated its quality and the size of their portions, praise and disappointment voiced equally low, as if both were gossip, and the clink of their forks and knives, gulps, chomps, an old man’s sudden laugh, the snap of lobster claws and legs breaking.

  “Stace, soon’s you get the chance, c’mon out to the kitchen. There’s something I want to tell you.” He turned and abruptly strode to the dining room, spoke a moment to Gail, sympathetically offering to let her go home early, Stacy guessed, getting rid of witnesses, and gathered up a tub of dirty dishes left behind by Donny LaPierre. As Noonan disappeared into the kitchen, he glanced over at Stacy, and though a stranger would have thought him expressionless, she saw him practically speaking with his face, saw him using it to say in a low, cold voice, “Stace, as soon as we’re alone here tonight, I’m going to take you down.”

  She decided to force the issue, to go back to the kitchen right now, before Gail left, while there was still a fairly large number of people in the dining room and the four guys at the bar, and if Noonan said what she expected him to say and did what she expected him to do, then she would walk out the door just like the LaPierre boys had, take off in her car, the doors locked and windows up, the wheels spinning, kicking gravel and squealing rubber as she left the parking lot and hit the road to Lake Placid.

  Who the hell did he think he was anyhow, coming on to her like that, him a married man, middle-aged, practically? Sure, she had been attracted to him from the first time she saw him, when he interviewed her for the job and made her turn and turn again, while he sat there on the barstool and looked her over with genuine interest, almost with innocence, as if she were a bouquet of wildflowers he’d ordered for his wife. “Turn around, Stace. Let me see the other side.” She had actually liked his suddenness, his fearless, impersonal way of telling her exactly what he wanted from her, instructing her to wear a tight white T-shirt and black jeans or shorts to work in and to be friendly with the customers, especially the males, because he wanted return business, not one-night stands, and men will come back and stay late again and again if they think the pretty girl behind the bar likes them personally. She had smiled like a coconspirator when he told her that and said, “No problema, Mr. Noonan.”

  “Hey, you can call me Charlie, or you can call me Noonan. Just don’t call me at home, and never call me Mister. You’re hired, Stace. Go change the dress and be back here by six.” But all that was before she told him about having been struck by lightning. Until then, she had thought it was safe to flirt with him; he was married, after all, and he was so unlike the losers she usually hooked up with that she had decided it was harmless as well as interesting to be attracted to him, and nothing could come of it anyhow; and wasn’t it intelligent, after all, for a young woman to want a successful older man’s attention and approval? Wasn’t that how you learned about life and who you were?

  But somehow, this afternoon everything had changed. She couldn’t have said how it had changed or why, but everything was different now, especially between her and Noonan. It wasn’t what he had done or not done or even anything he had said. It was what she had said.

  A woman who has been struck by lightning is not like other people. Most of the time Stacy could forget that fact, could even forget what that horrible night had felt like, when she was only seventeen and thought that she had been shot in the head. But all she had to do was say the words, reestablish the fact, and the whole thing came back in full force—her astonishment, the physical and mental pain, and the long-lasting fear, even today, that it would happen to her again. The only people who say lightning never strikes twice in the same place have never been struck once. Which was why she was so reluctant to speak of it.

  But Noonan had charmed her into speaking of it, and all at once, there it was again, as if a glass wall had appeared between her and other people, Noonan especially. The man had no idea who she was. But that wasn’t his fault. It was hers. She had misled him. She had misled herself. She checked the drinks of the customers at the bar. Then, to show Gail where she was headed, she pointedly flipped a wave across the dining room and walked back to the kitchen.

  When she entered, Noonan was leaning against the edge of the sink, his large, bare arms folded across his chest, his head lowered: a man absorbing a sobering thought.

  Stacy said, “What’d you want to tell me?” She stayed by the door, propping it open with her foot.

  He shook his head as if waking from a nap. “What? Oh, Stace! Sorry, I was thinking. Actually, Stace, I was thinking about you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. Close the door. Come on in.” He peered around her into the dining room. “Is Gail OK? She’s not crying or anything anymore, is she?”

  “No.” Stacy let the door slide shut behind her. The exhaust fan chugged abo
ve the stove, and the dishwasher sloshed quietly next to the sink, tinkling the glasses and silverware inside and jiggling the plates. On a shelf by the rear door, a portable radio played country and western music at low volume—sweetly melancholic background music. There was a calming order and peacefulness to the kitchen, a low-key domesticity about it that, even though the room was as familiar to her as the kitchen of her rented A-frame, surprised Stacy. For a moment, she felt guilty for having been so suspicious of Noonan and so quick to judge and condemn him. She liked his boyish good looks, didn’t she? She enjoyed his smoky baritone voice and unapologetic north-country accent, and she was pleased and flattered by his sudden flashes of intimacy. “What did you want to tell me, Noonan?” she repeated, softly this time.

  He leaned forward, eyes twinkling, mischief on his mind, and looked right and left, as if not wishing to be overheard. “What do you say we cook that last lobster and split it between ourselves?” He gave her a broad smile and rubbed his hands together. “Don’t tell Gail. I’ll boil and chill the sucker and break out the meat and squeeze a little lime juice over it, and we’ll eat it later, after we close up, just the two of us. Maybe open a bottle of wine. Whaddya say?” He came up to her and put his arm around her shoulder and steered her toward the door. “You go liberate the animal from its tank, and I’ll bring the kettle to a roiling boil, as they say.”

  “No.” She shrugged out from under his arm.

  “Huh? What d’you mean, ‘No’?”

  “Just that. No. I don’t want a quiet little tête-à-tête out here with you after we close. I don’t want to make it with you, Noonan. You’re married, and I resent the way you act like it doesn’t matter to you. Or worse, me! You act like your being married doesn’t matter to me.”

  Noonan was confused. “What the fuck? Who said anything about making it? Jesus!”

  She exhaled heavily. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. I don’t know what you’ve got in mind, Noonan. Really. I don’t know why I said all that. I’m just . . . I’m scared, I guess.”