by Otto Penzler
“You? Scared? Hah!” She was young and beautiful and healthy; she was an athlete, a woman who could pick and choose among men much younger, more available, better-looking, and richer than he. What did she have to be scared of? Not him, that’s for sure. “Man, you are one screwed-up broad, let me tell you.” He shook his head slowly in frustration and disgust. “Look, I don’t give a shit if you don’t want to join me in a whaddyacallit, a tête-à-tête. Suit yourself. But I’m gonna eat me some lobster anyhow. Alone!” he said, and he sailed through the door into the dining room.
Stacy slowly crossed the kitchen to the back door, last used by the LaPierre brothers on their way to the parking lot and road beyond. It was a screen door, and moths and mosquitoes batted against it and swarmed around the yellow bulb on the wall outside. On this side of the restaurant, it was already dark. Out back, where the building faced west to the mountains, the sky was pale orange, with long, silver-gray clouds tinged with purple floating up high and blood-red strips of cloud near the horizon. She decided she’d better return to the bar. There would be a few diners, she knew, who would want to take an after-dinner drink onto the deck and watch the sunset.
Before she could get out the door, Noonan, his face dark with confused anger, strode back into the kitchen, carrying the last lobster in his dripping-wet hand. The lobster feebly waved its claws in the air, and its thick, armored tail curled in on itself and snapped back in a weak, hopeless attempt to push Noonan away. “Here, you do the honors!” Noonan said to Stacy, holding the lobster up to her face. With his free hand, he flipped the gas jet below the slow-boiling lobster pot to high. “Have you ever boiled a live lobster, Stacy? Oh, it’s a real turn-on.” He leered, but it was an angry leer. “You’re gonna love it, Stacy, especially the way it turns bright-red as soon as you drop it into the boiling water. It won’t sink right away, of course, because it’s still alive and will struggle to climb out of the pot, just like you would. But even while it’s trying to get out of the boiling water, it’ll be turning red, and you’ll see it give up, and when that happens, it’s cooked and ready to be eaten. Yummm!”
He pushed the lobster at her, and it flailed its claws in her face, as if it were her hand clamped onto its back, not Noonan’s. She didn’t flinch or back away. She held her ground and looked into what passed for the animal’s face, searching for an expression, some indicator of feeling or thought that would guide her own feelings and thoughts. But there was none, and when she realized there could be none, this pleased her and she smiled.
“It’s getting to you, right?” Noonan said. “I can tell, it’s a turn-on for you, right?” He smiled back, almost forgiving her for having judged him so unfairly, and held the lobster over the pot of boiling water. Steam billowed around the creature’s twisting body, and Stacy stared, transfixed, when from the dining room she heard the rising voices of the diners, their loud exclamations and calls to one another to come and see, hurry up, come and see the bear!
Stacy and Noonan looked at each other, she in puzzlement, he with irritated resignation. “Shit,” he said. “This has got to be the worst goddamn night of my life.” He dropped the lobster into the empty sink and disappeared into the pantry, returning to the kitchen a few seconds later with a rifle cradled in his arm. “Sonofabitch, this is the last time that bastard gets into my trash!” he declared, and made for the dining room, with Stacy following close behind.
She had never seen a black bear close-up, although it was not uncommon to come upon one in the neighborhood, especially in midsummer, when the mountain streams ran dry and sent the normally shy creatures to the lower slopes and valleys, where the humans lived. Once, when driving back to college after summer vacation, she thought she spotted a large bear crossing the road a hundred yards ahead of her and at first had assumed it couldn’t be a bear, it must be a huge dog, a Newfoundland, maybe, moving slowly, until it heard her car coming and broke into a swift, forward-tilted lope and disappeared into the brush as she passed. She stopped the car and backed up to where the animal had entered the brush, but there was no sign of its ever having been there, no broken weeds or freshly fallen leaves, even.
This time, however, she intended to see the bear up close, if possible, and to know for sure that she had not imagined it. When she got to the dining room, everyone, Gail and the regulars from the bar included, was standing at the windows, gazing down at the yard in back where the land sloped away from the building, pointing and murmuring small noises of appreciation—except for the children, who were stilled by the sight, not so much frightened by the bear as in awe of it. The adults seemed to be mainly pleased by their good luck, for now they would have something novel to report to their friends and family when they returned home. This would become the night they saw the bear at Noonan’s.
Then Stacy saw Noonan and several other diners, all of them men, out on the deck. They, too, stared down into the yard below the dining room and in the direction of the basement door, where Noonan stashed his garbage and trash barrels in a locked wooden latticework cage. The men were somber and intent, taut and almost trembling, like hunting dogs on point.
Stacy edged up to the window. Behind the distant mountains, the sun was gloriously setting. Its last golden rays splashed across the neatly mowed yard behind the restaurant and shone like a soft spotlight upon the thick, black-pelted body of the bear. It was a large adult male, over six feet tall on his hind legs, methodically, calmly ripping away the sides and top of the lattice cage, sending torn boards into the air like kindling sticks, working efficiently but at his own placid pace, as if he were utterly alone and there were no audience of men, women, and children staring down at him from the dining room windows overhead, no small gang of men out on the deck watching him like a hunting party gathered on a cliff above a watering hole, and as if Noonan were not lifting his rifle to his shoulder, aiming it, and firing.
He shot once, and he missed the bear altogether. He fired a second time.
The bear was struck high in the back and a tuft of black hair flew away from his chest where the bullet emerged. The crowd in the dining room groaned and cried out, “He’s shooting it! Oh, God, he’s shooting it!” A woman screeched, “Tell him to stop!” and children began to bawl. A man yelled, “For God’s sake, is he nuts?” Gail looked beseechingly at Stacy, who simply shook her head slowly from side to side, for she could do nothing to stop him now. No one could. People shouted and cried, a few sobbed, and children wailed, and Noonan fired a third time. He hit the bear in the shoulder and the animal spun around, still standing, searching for the source of this terrible pain, not understanding that he should look up, that the man with the rifle, barely fifty yards away, was positioned out of sight above him and, because of his extreme anger, because of his refusal to be impersonal in this grisly business, was unable to kill him, and so he wounded the poor creature again and again, in the chest, in a paw, and shot him through the muzzle, until finally the bear dropped to all fours and, unsure in which direction to flee, tumbled first away from the restaurant downhill toward the woods, and then, hit in the back, turned and came lumbering, bleeding and in pain, straight toward the deck, where Noonan fired one last shot, hitting the bear this time in the center of his forehead, and the bear rolled forward, as if he had accidentally tripped, and died.
Rifle in hand, Noonan stomped in silence past the departing crowd, his gaze fixed rigidly on something inside, a target in his mind of a silhouetted bear. No one spoke to him or caught his eye as he passed; no one looked at his back, even, when he strode into the kitchen and the door swung shut behind him. The men who had stood with him on the deck outside were ashamed now to have been there. Making as little of it as possible, they joined their wives and friends, all of whom were lined up at the cash register paying Gail, leaving cash on the table, or paying Stacy at the bar, and quickly headed for the parking lot and their cars. There were a few stunned, silent exceptions, older kids too shocked to cry or too proud, but most of the children were weeping, an
d some wailed, while the parents tried vainly to comfort them, to assure them that bears don’t feel pain the same way humans do, that the man who shot the bear had to shoot it because it was damaging his property, and not to worry, we will never come to this restaurant again, no matter what.
When everyone had left, Gail walked slowly from the dining room to the bar, where she took off her apron, folded it carefully, and set it on a barstool. “That’s it for me,” she said to Stacy. With trembling hands, she knocked a cigarette loose from the pack, lit it, and inhaled deeply. “Tell him he can mail me my pay,” she said. “The fucker.” She started for the door and then abruptly stopped. Without turning around, she said, “Stacy? Why the hell are you staying?”
“I’m not.”
In a voice so low she seemed to be talking to herself, Gail said, “Yes, girl, you are.” Then she was gone.
Stacy flipped off the lights in the bar and dining room one by one, unplugged the roadside sign, and locked the front entrance. When she pushed open the door to the kitchen, Noonan, standing at the far end of the long stainless-steel counter, looked up and scowled at her. He had cooked the last lobster and was eating it, eating it off the counter with his hands; broken shells and the remains of its shattered carcass lay scattered in front of him. He poked a forefinger into the thick, muscular tail and shoved a chunk of white meat out the other end, snatched it up, and popped it into his mouth. “Eight fucking shots it took me!” he said, chewing. “That’s what I get for stashing that goddamn pissant .22 here instead of laying in a real gun.” He waved contemptuously with the back of his hand at the rifle propped against the counter, and with his other hand he pushed more lobster meat into his mouth. His face was red, and he was breathing rapidly and heavily. “I missed the first shot, y’know, only because I was so pissed off I didn’t concentrate. But if I’d had a real gun, that second shot would’ve done the job fine. By God, tomorrow I’m bringing in my .30-06!” he declared.
Stacy picked up the .22 rifle and looked it over. She slid it into shooting position against her right shoulder and aimed along the barrel through the screen door and the fluttering cluster of moths to the outside lamp.
“Is it still loaded?” she asked.
“There’s four rounds left, so don’t fuck with it.” He yanked the spindly legs off the underbelly of the lobster and sucked the meat from each and dropped the emptied tubes, one by one, onto the counter in front of him.
Slowly, Stacy brought the rifle around and aimed it at Noonan’s skull. “Noonan,” she said, and he turned.
“Yeah, sure.”
She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger and heard the explosion, and when she opened her eyes, she saw in the middle of Noonan’s broad, white forehead a dark hole the size of a dime, which instantly expanded to a quarter, and his large body jerked once as if electrocuted and flipped backward, his astonished face gone from her sight altogether now, and she saw instead the back of his head, and a hole in it the size of a silver dollar. His body, like a large, rubberized sack of water, fell to the floor, spinning away from her as it descended, ending flat on its back, with Noonan’s wide-open eyes staring at the pot rack above the counter. Blood pumped from the hole in the rear of his skull onto the pale-green linoleum and spread in a thickening, dark-red puddle slowly toward her feet.
She laid the rifle on the counter beside the broken remains of the lobster, crossed to the stove, where the pot of water was still boiling, and shut off the gas flame. Slowly, as if unsure of where she was, she looked around the room, then seemed to make a decision, and perched herself on a stool next to the walk-in refrigerator. She leaned her head back against the cool stainless-steel door and closed her eyes. Never in her life, never, had Stacy known the relief she felt at that moment. And not since the moment before she was struck by lightning had she known the freedom.
A rattling Ford pickup truck stopped beside the darkened roadside sign, and the LaPierre brothers, Donny and Timmy, leaped from the truck bed to the side of the road. “Hey, good luck with ol’ Noonan, you little assholes!” the driver said, and he and a male passenger in the cab cackled with laughter. Two beery, expansive carpenters, they were cousins of the LaPierres, heading home to their wives and kids late from the bars of Lake Placid. They waved cheerfully to the boys and pulled away.
Donny and Timmy crunched across the gravel parking lot. The kitchen light and the lamp outside were still on, and when the boys were halfway across the lot, they saw Stacy through the screen door, seated on the stool by the big walk-in fridge. She was asleep, it looked like, or maybe just bored out of her mind listening to one of Noonan’s dumb hunting stories.
“You think he’s screwing Stacy?” Timmy asked.
“C’mon, man. Stacy’s a babe. And he’s ancient, man,” Donny said. “It’s cool she’s still here, though,” he added. “She likes us, and he’ll hire us back just to look good.”
“I wouldn’t mind a little of that myself.”
“A little of what?”
“Stacy, man!”
Donny punched his younger brother on the shoulder. “Yeah, well, you’ll hafta wait your turn, little fella!” he laughed. He waved away the swarming cloud of moths and pulled the screen door open. Timmy entered first, and Donny, hiding his fading grin behind his hand, followed.
WILLIAM GAY
The Paperhanger
FROM Harper’s Magazine
THE VANISHING of the doctor’s wife’s child in broad daylight was an event so cataclysmic that it forever divided time into the then and the now, the before and the after. In later years, fortified with a pitcher of silica-dry vodka martinis, she had cause to replay the events preceding the disappearance. They were tawdry and banal but in retrospect freighted with menace, a foreshadowing of what was to come, like a footman or a fool preceding a king into a room.
She had been quarreling with the paperhanger. Her four-year-old daughter, Zeineb, was standing directly behind the paperhanger where he knelt smoothing air bubbles out with a wide plastic trowel. Zeineb had her fingers in the paperhanger’s hair. The paperhanger’s hair was shoulder length and the color of flax and the child was delighted with it. The paperhanger was accustomed to her doing this and he did not even turn around. He just went on with his work. His arms were smooth and brown and corded with muscle and in the light that fell upon the paperhanger through stained-glass panels the doctor’s wife could see that they were lightly downed with fine golden hair. She studied these arms bemusedly while she formulated her thoughts.
You tell me so much a roll, she said. The doctor’s wife was from Pakistan and her speech was still heavily accented. I do not know single-bolt rolls and double-bolt rolls. You tell me double-bolt price but you are installing single-bolt rolls. My friend has told me. It is cost me perhaps twice as much.
The paperhanger, still on his knees, turned. He smiled up at her. He had pale blue eyes. I did tell you so much a roll, he said. You bought the rolls. The child, not yet vanished, was watching the paperhanger’s eyes. She was a scaled-down clone of the mother, the mother viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, and the paperhanger suspected that as she grew neither her features nor her expression would alter, she would just grow larger, like something being aired up with a hand pump.
And you are leave lumps, the doctor’s wife said, gesturing at the wall. I do not leave lumps, the paperhanger said. You’ve seen my work before. These are not lumps. The paper is wet. The paste is wet. Everything will shrink down and flatten out. He smiled again. He had clean even teeth. And besides, he said, I gave you my special cockteaser rate. I don’t know what you’re complaining about.
Her mouth worked convulsively. She looked for a moment as if he’d slapped her. When words did come they came in a fine spray of spit. You are trash, she said. You are scum.
Hands on knees, he was pushing erect, the girl’s dark fingers trailing out of his hair. Don’t call me trash, he said, as if it were perfectly all right to call him scum, but he was already talking
to her back. She had whirled on her heels and went twisting her hips through an arched doorway into the cathedraled living room. The paperhanger looked down at the child. Her face glowed with a strange constrained glee, as if she and the paperhanger shared some secret the rest of the world hadn’t caught on to yet.
In the living room the builder was supervising the installation of a chandelier that depended from the vaulted ceiling by a long golden chain. The builder was a short bearded man dancing about, showing her the features of the chandelier, smiling obsequiously. She gave him a flat angry look. She waved a dismissive hand toward the ceiling. Whatever, she said.
She went out the front door onto the porch and down a makeshift walkway of two-by-tens into the front yard where her car was parked. The car was a silver-gray Mercedes her husband had given her for their anniversary. When she cranked the engine its idle was scarcely perceptible.
She powered down the window. Zeineb, she called. Across the razed earth of the unlandscaped yard a man in a grease-stained T-shirt was booming down the chains securing a backhoe to a lowboy hooked to a gravel truck. The sun was low in the west and blood-red behind this tableau and man and tractor looked flat and dimensionless as something decorative stamped from tin. She blew the horn. The man turned, raised an arm as if she’d signaled him.
Zeineb, she called again.
She got out of the car and started impatiently up the walkway. Behind her the gravel truck started, and truck and backhoe pulled out of the drive and down toward the road.
The paperhanger was stowing away his T-square and trowels in his wooden toolbox. Where is Zeineb? the doctor’s wife asked. She followed you out, the paperhanger told her. He glanced about, as if the girl might be hiding somewhere. There was nowhere to hide.
