Silver Bullets

by Douglas Greene et al.

  “A bad day’s play, I hear,” he said to Divekar. “What did you think about Bolkpur?”

  Divekar shook his head sadly.

  “A damn wrong decision, Inspectorji,” he said. “I was sitting right behind the bat, and I could see. Damn wrong.”

  He looked at them both with an expression of radiant guiltlessness. “That was where you also would have been sitting,” he added.

  You win, Ghote thought and turned grimly away. But on his way home he stopped for a moment at Headquarters to see if anything had turned up. His Deputy Superintendent was there.

  “Well, Inspector, they tell me you spotted Anil Divekar leaving the house.”

  “I am sorry, sir, but I do not think it was him now.”

  He recounted his meeting with the man at the stadium a few minutes earlier; but the Deputy Superintendent was unimpressed.

  “Nonsense, man, whatever the fellow says, this is Divekar’s type of crime, one hundred per cent.You just identify him as running off from the scene and we’ve got him.”

  For a moment Ghote was tempted. After all, Divekar was an inveterate thief: it would be justice of a sort. But then he knew that he had not really been sure who the running man had been.

  “No, sir,” he said. “I am sorry, but no.”

  The Deputy Superintendent’s eyes blazed, and it was only the insistent ringing of the telephone by his side that postponed his moment of wrath.

  “Yes? Yes? What is it? Oh, you, Inspector. Well? What? The gardener? But … Oh, on him? Every missing item? Very good then, charge him at once.”

  He replaced the receiver and looked at Ghote.

  “Yes, Inspector,” he said blandly, “that chap Divekar. As I was saying, he wants watching, you know. Close watching. I’ll swear he is up to something. Now, he’s bound to be at the Test Match tomorrow, so you had better be there too.”

  “‘Yes, sir,” Ghote said.

  A notion darted into his head.

  “And, sir, for cover for the operation should I take this boy of mine also?”

  “First-rate idea. Carry on, Inspector Ghote.”

  WHAT THE DORMOUSE SAID

  by Carolyn Wheat

  When Doug Greene asked me about publishing a book of my short stories, I was elated. That my stories could join a roster that contained Ed Hoch, mystery short story maven, was nothing short of amazing.

  Crippen and Landru has done the mystery community a tremendous service in collecting, preserving, and disseminating mysterydom’s most ephemeral form, the short story. Yes, we could find stories in crumbling EQMMs and in out-of-print anthologies, but with C & L, we can savor the delights of one author’s short-form output in a binge-reading orgy. I’m honored to be a small part of that legacy.

  August 1970: The Freaks wish I were dead.

  Sweat pours from Bobbie Tate’s face onto her tie-dyed tank top

  as she climbs, positioning one exhausted booted foot after another up Slide Mountain and thinks long, hard thoughts about death. How could love go so wrong so quickly? It’s like that song by Janis Joplin, whom Bobbie never used to like all that much, but now it’s as if she and Janis are soul sisters in pain and grief. Joplin’s raw-liver voice cuts through the haze of sweat and pain, searing itself into Bobbie’s brain as she climbs ever closer to the white angels of death.

  “Take another little piece of my heart, why don’t you? You know you got it, if it makes you feel good.”

  Enid takes pieces of her heart any time she wants them, and Bobbie, like Janis, dares her to take more, to chew bits of her heart between her even little teeth, and spit them on the ground. The meadow behind the commune, which was once known as the Thompson place, is littered with pieces of Bobbie’s sixteen-year-old heart.

  One day she and Enid were like two vines intertwining. They couldn’t leave the house to go to the barn without holding hands and halfway there starting to kiss and then fondle one another and by the time they were in the barn, the fragrant hay called to them and they gave in. She couldn’t get enough of Enid, not the taste of her kisses or her green apple breasts, and she was sure Enid felt the same, the way Enid’s slender fingers always went to the zipper of her jeans, the way Enid’s soft hand explored under Bobbie’s blue cambric work shirt.

  Oh, God, she’d never felt like that before, and it was like being in heaven only better, and now—

  Now Quinn is here, and all Enid does is follow him around, her hand in the back pocket of his jeans, her naked body draped across his clothed one like a stole, her teasing little smile telling Bobbie how wonderful she thinks Quinn is, and how having sex with Bobbie was just another phase in her development as a woman.

  Thinking about it makes Bobbie want to scream.

  So she does. Long, howling screams like a dog in pain, punctuated by sobs so gusty they could sink small boats. She has never felt so much pain in her whole life, not even the day Pop told her that Mom was gone for good.

  Thinking of Pop only makes it worse. She sinks to her knees halfway up the last rise to the top of the mountain, crouches down like a child, and lets her hair trail in the dust. Moans emanate from her throat, moans so deep, so anguished, she doesn’t even notice she’s inhaling dirt from the trail.

  She’s a lost child, lost and alone. First Mom, then Pop, and now Enid—will no one ever love her completely? Will no one ever not leave her?

  She is consumed by pain, eaten through with it the way Grandma was eaten through with cancer, and the pain she feels is no less than what Grandma suffered in those last skeleton days.

  Pain and hate. Don’t forget the hate. It is, she thinks, all that keeps her alive, all that keeps her from going to Kaaterskill Falls and throwing herself off the highest rock into the stream below. Indians did that, according to local legend. Indian maidens died for love, and perhaps Bobbie Tate will, too.

  Then Enid will be sorry. Bobbie sees her own corpse in her mind’s eye, as she plods steadily, sweatily up the mountain toward the white death waiting to be picked and used in the final ceremony. Her face will be serene, waxen, beautiful at last. She will wear white gauze, Mandy’s Mexican wedding dress, and her hands will be folded on her breast like an angel’s, and candles will flank her head and feet. Enid will sob and beg forgiveness; Pop will throw himself on her coffin and tell her he’s sorry for all the things he said when he found out about Enid.

  She stops suddenly, as if she’d heard a rattle in the lush growth, but it isn’t that. It’s another thought, another vision.

  Why should hers be the dead body? Why should Quinn remain alive to be with Enid?

  She straightens her shoulders and pushes farther up the trail with renewed purpose, visions of little white mushroom caps dancing in her head.

  “If it wasn’t Quinn, it would be someone else,” Mandy tells Bobbie, but that doesn’t help at all. Not at all. She needs to hear that Enid is temporarily brainwashed, that this thing with Quinn is a passing phase, and Enid will wake up tomorrow and realize that Bobbie is her true love, that Quinn will leave the commune and go back to Taos without Enid.

  Is it worse because Quinn’s a man?

  She isn’t sure. Picturing Enid with Patrice doesn’t feel any better— worse, maybe, because after all, Quinn does have one thing that she, Bobbie, doesn’t have, whereas if it were Patrice or Mandy, then Bobbie would feel even more inadequate, more certain that something wrong within herself is what pushed Enid away.

  “Go home,” Warren tells her. Behind the barn, where she’s feeding chickens, he walks up and says the words bluntly, no frills: “Go home. You don’t belong here.”

  As if she didn’t know that. As if she had no clue how much Warren resents her—not that he’s in charge or anything. It’s a commune; nobody’s in charge, but somehow Warren always acts as if he is, as if he has the right to give orders.

  He thinks she doesn’t contribute because she doesn’t make anything the way the others do. Enid with her stained glass, sharp cutting edges with bright, stabbing colors,
whirls and triangles and wavy glass and little round gems that glitter like bug eyes. Leo’s wooden bowls, hand-turned, polished to gleaming perfection, the touch of them as soft as silk; Mandy’s patchwork quilts, like stained glass you can sleep under; Scott’s pottery, so thin, so delicate, they might be made of paper instead of clay. Patrice makes big copper bracelets and brass earrings, just the slightest trace of Africa in their shape and bulk. Warren—Warren isn’t the creative one; he manages the money and places the crafts at the consignment shop off Route 28A near the Ashokan Reservoir.

  So if Warren contributes because he handles money, why can’t she contribute by feeding chickens, cleaning the house, tending Joachim, and minding Katie?

  She doesn’t say this to Warren, any more than she tells him she has no home to go to. She hasn’t told anyone her father threw her out. She’s afraid to say the words because if she does, she’ll cry forever.

  And maybe it won’t matter. Maybe no one will care that she has no place else to go.

  Mandy sits in the rocker, her long, patchwork skirt catching the firelight. She smiles at the baby suckling her breast with loud smacking noises. She moves her leg, and one patch glares iridescent green. John’s old tie. That square is flanked on one side by plum-colored velvet, on the ocher by a piece of the aqua dress she wore to be invested into Eastern Star.

  So long ago, that dress, that life. She and her mother, two peas in a Methodist pod, hair identically teased and sprayed into bouffants as stiff as meringue. Long, pastel formal gowns, stiletto heels, matching clutch purses. Pat Nixon clones in suburban Chicago.

  She fingers the black wool, cut from the suit she wore to her mother’s tasteful funeral. No tears; Mom wouldn’t have wanted them. But oh, the ache, the gaping hole where her mother had been. Tears clog her throat; tears that even now her WASP upbringing won’t let her shed. She longs to show Joachim to her mother, to point out how Katie has grown, to introduce her to the miracle that is Scott.

  Truth: Mom would be horrified at the leaky old farmhouse, at Mandy’s black-soled bare feet, her home-sewn clothes, the baby born out of wedlock, Scott. She’d wonder how Mandy could ever have left a man like John, a solid man with a future, for an unemployed hippie who threw pots for a living. More, she’d hate that Mandy dragged Katie into this nomadic life, commune to commune, pad to pad, rundown funky area of town to tie-dyed, psychedelic-painted section of some other town. Milwaukee to Denver to the Haight to Dupont Circle in D.C. to the East Village, and now, at last, to this little farm in the Catskills, the first place she can see herself and her little family growing old.

  She smiles at the vision of herself with long white hair, of Scott a white-bearded Merlin, of Joachim grown to manhood in the image of his father, of Katie strong and beautiful in her womanhood, a baby at her own breast.

  Joey’s fist falls away from her breast and the hungry, milky lips still. She bends down to kiss the top of his downy head, then places him slowly, lovingly, into the cradle Leo made when he was born.

  They are so lucky. Home at last, home in the cooperative with friends and comrades, safe at last.

  Katie runs into the house, all flying hair and barefoot smiling excitement. “He’s putting up a tepee! Like an Indian! Come and see, Mommy.”

  Mandy rises gracefully from the rocker and follows Katie outside to where Quinn, naked from the waist up, his tanned back oily with sweat, raises the poles for his tent.

  Quinn’s long, lean, sinewy body is like Dylan’s voice made flesh, and a shiver of hunger, deep animal wanting, thrills through Mandy’s breasts, sensitive from baby sucking.

  “Come on without, come on within, you’ll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn.”

  Quinn’s sexuality is like the electrically charged air of the summer Catskills. Always there, always threatening a storm. He looks at Mandy with his avid, promising eyes even as Enid rubs her barely covered breast against his chest. He slides appreciative glances at Patrice’s nutbrown skin and talks, talks, talks about open sex and throwing off the shackles of middle-class monogamy, pointedly aiming his remarks at Scott, whom he’d known back in San Francisco.

  Will Quinn get to Scott, fan the flames of discontent just under the placid surface of their lives, remind Scott that once he was free?

  That she will be the one to succumb to Quinn’s siren song doesn’t enter her mind.

  “Remember that girl, what the hell was her name? The one you were balling back then?”

  “Moonstar. She called herself Moonstar.” The weight of Joachim in the body sling pulls down on him, weighs more than a baby should.

  “Yeah. What a chick. What a free spirit. I saw her in Taos, man. Still zooming out there, still exploring. We did some peyote together, man, it was like the old days in the Haight. Next day she split for California, and I headed east. No baggage, man.”

  Joachim is baggage. Mandy is baggage. Katie of the blue eyes and dirty little toes, Katie is baggage. Even the tools of his trade, his art, pottery wheel and kiln, root him.

  With Moonstar he was air, he was fire. Now he is earth, solid, packed down, heavy with responsibility for three other people, when once he’d refused to accept responsibility even for himself.

  Through Quinn’s eyes he sees at once what he has unknowingly become: his own father.

  They make their own ceremonies, no longer tied to Hallmark cards and ribbons made in Taiwan. The Mushroom Feast becomes a hallowed eve, to be celebrated in song and story. Best clothes are put on, velvet skirts and silk blouses, embroidered shawls with long tendrils of fringe. Leo wears a sarape from Mexico, tinkling Indian earrings dangle from Enid’s shapely ears, Patrice is adorned like an African princess, and even Bobbie, who has few clothes of her own, sports borrowed finery in the form of an Indian gauze shirt that shows her braless chest. The priest, the shaman, Quinn the Eskimo, wears his ceremonial robes in the form of a long-fringed leather vest, a belt with silver conchas, a leather headband with an eagle feather dangling from it. Bare feet and a leather thong around his neck, with Enid’s handmade glass beads and a cowrie shell from the Bahamas, Patrice’s contribution.

  They smoke a little grass first. Before that, they eat a fine chickpea and wild mushroom stew Mandy made with Bobbie’s help. Bobbie the mushroom expert, who picked the wild fungus on the slopes of the mountains where she trekked herself to exhaustion, trying to forget Enid.

  Katie is upstairs in bed; Joachim sleeping in his cradle in the corner, near the black wood stove.

  At first, Bobbie feels nothing, just full and content and for once accepted by the circle sitting on the floor around Leo’s low maple table. The smell of sandalwood incense romances her nose, and she rocks back with the power of it, the pungency, the taste of exotic lands, the vision of Marrakesh or Ceylon. Faraway places, gold shot through fabric, the light from the fire catching Mandy’s hair, her incredible hair. The colors like wood, like Leo’s work, like brass and bronze and leaves in the autumn and maple syrup. She wants to taste Mandy’s hair, which looks as rich as the sandalwood smells.

  The connection is like a silver thread powered by thousands of watts of electricity. It shoots from Enid to Bobbie, then from Bobbie to Mandy, Mandy to Leo, and so on around the circle, binding them forever in a state of perfect love. Bobbie sees clearly now how silly, how juvenile her passion for Enid was. The love she felt for Enid isn’t special at all; it’s just one tiny piece of the global love that fills her now, has her eyes streaming tears of joy, her hand clutching Mandy’s with the simple faith of a child. The tears choke her and then dissolve in laughter as spontaneous as butterflies drunk on nectar.

  They are all drunk, not with alcohol, not even with magic mushrooms, but with Life Itself. The love of one another, of the human race, of the earth and all living creatures, overwhelms them, and they laugh and laugh at how absurd their old lives used to be and how free they are now. Free to hold anyone’s hand, free to look anyone in the eye and hold the glance until true human connection is made, free to take off t
heir clothes if they want to—and suddenly everyone wants to.

  Tasting and touching skin soft as powder, tasting of peat and curry, of roses and musk, Scott settles down to a feast of skin and hair, lips and breasts, no longer aware of identity, just knowing this woman, this amazing woman with skin the color of amber, is inside him and enveloping him at the same time. He thrusts and she parries, he kisses and she kisses back, both swept away into a world of sensory pleasure he’d never before dreamed existed.

  “Patrice,” he says, and the name sounds like an incantation. Her hair, luxurious and oiled, seems to melt in his hands.

  Did the baby cry? Does he have a baby? Where’s Mandy?

  Does he care?

  Mandy can’t keep the voice of Bob Dylan out of her head. That raspy, knowing voice is the way Quinn looks, rough and male and sinewy, eager and detached at the same time, way beyond cool and hot as the devil himself.

  “When Quinn the Eskimo gets here, everybody’s going to jump for joy.”

  She wants him so much. Scott is wonderful, a tender lover and a good man, a father to both her children, and the man in whose arms she wants to die someday, but right now she has to have Quinn inside her. She sees herself as a giant black jaguar, a female animal in heat, eager for a male to enter and possess her, then walk away without looking back.

  Mushrooms give Quinn to her. Mushrooms take her where she wants to go.

  But once it’s over, will Scott still be there? Will she still die in his arms?

  Touching naked skin is the most beautiful thing Bobbie has ever done. Like velvet—no, velvet is too coarse, silk too earthbound. Like a baby, like Joachim’s soft fuzzy head, and now everyone feels baby-soft, baby-innocent. First she strokes Mandy’s long hair, lets the hair flow over her face, drinks in the scent of rosemary from her herbal rinse, then allows her lips to wander downward until Mandy’s breast is in her mouth.