The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

by C. J. Box

  “Tell him to get off the train and do it,” Grandfather replied.

  “Maybe him and some others don’t want to draw attention.”

  The shades were drawn on all the passenger windows in the train. “They’re celebrities?” Grandfather said.

  “Maybe one of them was there when Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow got it,” Mr. Watts said. “Know who that might be?”

  “You’re talking about Frank Hamer?”

  “He didn’t give his name. He just said he knowed you.”

  “Which car is he in?”

  “The second behind the engine.”

  Grandfather took me by the hand and we walked past the caboose to the first passenger car. It was the dark green of an olive. “Let’s see what’s going on, Buster Brown.” He swung me up on the steel steps.

  The passenger seats had been removed from the car and replaced with benches, a pickle barrel, and a table that had smoked fish and several half-empty bottles of Hires root beer on it. There was a potbelly stove in one corner. Five men in suits and slouch or cowboy hats were sitting on the benches. Two of them wore mustaches. All of them were unshaved and looked like they had slept in their clothes. All of them were armed.

  “One of you wanted to see me?” Grandfather said.

  A tall man stood up. His mustache was jet-black and drooped to his collar. “I always wanted to meet you. I heard you slept with the girlfriend of the Sundance Kid.” He grinned.

  “You must have me mixed up with somebody else,” Grandfather said. “Number two, I got my grandson with me.”

  “Excuse me,” the man said.

  “Y’all Pinkertons?” Grandfather said.

  “Friends of the railroad.”

  “One of y’all saw Bonnie and Clyde get it?”

  “I did,” said the same man.

  Grandfather studied his face. “No, you didn’t,” he said. “I know every man who was there.”

  “I got pictures. But I won’t argue.”

  “What do you fellows want?”

  “We think there’s some Chinamen coming through here with the wetbacks. Except they’re not Chinamen.”

  “They’re Japs?” Grandfather said. My hand was still inside his. It felt hard and moist and callused and yet gentle.

  “Would that surprise you?” the tall man said.

  “Stay clear of me. That includes my family and workers.”

  “We don’t call the shots. The railroad is going to be carrying a lot of soldiers through here.”

  “I understand that and I don’t need to hear any more,” Grandfather said. “You got my message.”

  “You really knew the Sundance Kid?”

  “Yes, I did. He was a moron who breathed through his mouth a lot. Are y’all going to make trouble for me?”

  “That’s up to you, Mr. Holland.”

  “Son, you don’t know what trouble is,” Grandfather said.

  One of the other men set his Hires root beer on the table. In the silence the sound made my face jerk.

  * * *

  I was too little to understand adult cruelty. Like most children, I thought adults possessed all the power they needed and hence had no reason to be cruel. So I was not equipped to comprehend the events that happened three days later when Mr. Watts’s Model T drove up the dry streambed, followed by a big khaki-colored truck with a canvas top on the back.

  Mr. Watts and the man with the mustache got out by the barn. The truck made a circle into the field behind the windmill and herded three Mexican men toward the house. No, I didn’t say that right. The men hung their heads and walked with the docility of animals going up a slaughter chute. Maria was squeezing out the wash with a hand-crank roller on the back porch, her baby in a bassinet made from an orange crate. Three of the men from the train car jumped off the back of the truck, rifles in their hands. Mother came out the screen door wearing a man’s suit coat, her face disjointed, the way it did before one of her spells came on.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she said.

  “The Mexican woman and the child are illegals,” a man with a chin beard said.

  “You have no proof of that.”

  “We don’t need it, lady.”

  “Don’t you dare put your hand on her,” Mother said. “Did you hear me?”

  “Ma’am, don’t mix in it or we’ll have to take you too.”

  “That’s what you think,” she said.

  “Step back, please,” the man said.

  “Hold on there, Ed,” Mr. Watts called, walking toward us. “I’ll handle this.”

  “You will handle nothing,” Mother said.

  “Get your father out here,” Mr. Watts said.

  “He’s in town,” she said. “If he was here, you’d be dead.”

  “Well, we’ll have to do our job without him, won’t we, Wynona?”

  “You will not address me by my first name.”

  Mr. Watts turned to the other men. “Load them up, the female and the baby first. Search the barn and the loft. Look in the outhouse as well, and then in the main house.”

  “You don’t have the authority to do this,” Mother said.

  “I’m head constable,” Mr. Watts said. “These men are contract law officers working for the government. Now you stand aside or I’ll arrest you myself.”

  “Like hell you will,” she said.

  Mr. Watts looked at the windmill spinning and the dust blowing out of the fields. His eyes were bright and small under the brim of his hat. He bit the corner of his lip. “Cuff her and keep her here till we’re gone,” he said.

  And that’s what they did, with her arms pulled behind her, her throat corded with veins. The child began crying in the orange crate, his little chest and fists shaking with the effort. Minutes later Maria looked back at us from under the canvas top on the truck, her body rocking with the movement of the bed, her face small and frightened inside the scarf tied on her head.

  Mr. Watts started toward his Model T, then returned to the porch. “Stop yelling,” he said to my mother. “Don’t you tell lies to your father about me, either. Goddamnit, shut up! They’re just deportees.”

  * * *

  That night Mother sat in her room upstairs by herself while in the kitchen I told Grandfather what had happened. He was quiet a long time. The wind was up, the sky black, and through the window I could see sparks twisting from the ventilation pipe on the smokehouse.

  “Did she strike Mr. Watts?” he said.

  “No, sir.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did they put their hands on Miss Maria?”

  “One man held her while another man carried the crate to the truck.”

  “The man with the mustache from the train, the one who was talking about the Sundance Kid, what was his part in all this?”

  “He told me he was sorry. He said to tell you that. He acted afraid.”

  “Ask your mother to come down here, please.”

  “What for, Grandfather?” I rarely questioned what Grandfather said. But this time I was truly scared. For all of us.

  “I need her to drive me to town. You’ll have to come with us. I don’t want you here by yourself.”

  “What are we doing, Grandfather?”

  “That’s up to other people.”

  I got my mother from upstairs. Grandfather had already put on his canvas coat. His revolver and gun belt and holster were on the table, the belt wrapped around the holster, the leather loops stuffed with brass cartridges.

  “Don’t do this, Daddy,” Mother said.

  “He’s the man who caused you all that pain, Wynona,” Grandfather said. “Now he’s doing it again.”

  “I do not think about him anymore,” she said. “He has nothing to do with my life.”

  “Will you drive me to town? I can saddle Blue. But it’s fixing to rain.”

  “It might rain in your prayers, but that’s the only place you’re going to see it,” she said.


  “Either h’ep me or I’ll get my slicker.”

  We climbed into the car and drove to town. I could see flickers of light on the horizon, like a string of firecrackers popping on the rim of the earth.

  * * *

  The saloon was a leftover from the nineteenth century, the ceiling plated with stamped tin, the bar outfitted with a brass foot rail and cuspidors. Not far away some of the pens that marked the exact inception spot of the Chisholm Trail were still standing. Mother parked at an angle to the elevated concrete sidewalk and cut the engine. The window of the saloon was gray with dust, a solitary bulb burning inside. Through the windshield I could see men tipping tin cups in a bucket of beer and playing poker dice at the bar.

  “We’ll wait here,” Mother said.

  Grandfather got out on the passenger side, his gun belt looped on his shoulder, the revolver hanging under his armpit. “I want Aaron to see this,” he said.

  “See what?” my mother asked.

  “That our family doesn’t tolerate abuse.”

  She half opened the driver’s door and stood partially in the street and looked across the car roof at him. She wasn’t wearing a coat, and her flesh was prickled with cold, her amber hair wild and beautiful. “I made my choices. Now, leave well enough alone, Daddy.”

  Grandfather looked down at me. “We do it our way, don’t we, Buster Brown? Come along now and don’t pay your mother no mind. She knows I’m right.”

  I put my hand in his and walked with him into the saloon. I thought I smelled rain. I was sure I did. The way it smells in the spring. Like a great gold-green world full of pure oxygen and mist and sunshine and new beginnings. The bell rang above the door. A half-dozen men turned and stared at us. Mr. Watts shook the dice in a leather cup and slung the dice along the bar. “Wrong address, Mr. Holland,” he said.

  “What’d y’all do with Maria and her baby and the rest of my Mexicans?” Grandfather said.

  “They’re your property, are they?” Mr. Watts said.

  Mother came inside and closed the door behind her, the bell tinkling again. The smell of rain went away and the air became close and laced with a masculine odor and a burned stench from the woodstove. A man in a mackinaw bent over and spat a stream of tobacco juice in a cuspidor. Grandfather let go of my hand and approached Mr. Watts. “Say you’re sorry.”

  “To who?” Mr. Watts said.

  “My daughter.”

  “For what?”

  “What you did.”

  “I have nothing to apologize for.” Mr. Watts reached around for his tin cup and accidentally knocked it over. “Give me a towel over here,” he said to the bartender.

  “Forget the towel,” Grandfather said. “Look at me.”

  “I will not do anything you say.” Mr. Watts pointed his chin in the air, like a prideful child.

  The man with the drooping jet-black mustache was three feet from Mr. Watts. “We ain’t part of this, Captain Holland.”

  “Then stand aside,” Grandfather said.

  “You’re not really gonna do this, are you?” said the man with the mustache. “You’re a smarter man than that, right?”

  Grandfather picked me up and put me in Mother’s arms. “Go sit by the stove, Wynona.”

  “Please, Daddy,” she said.

  “Do as I ask.”

  She walked with me to the rear of the saloon and sat down in a rocking chair. She kept me on her lap, her arms folded across my chest. I could feel her heart beating against my back, her breath on my neck.

  Mr. Watts was staring at Grandfather, his hands by his side, as though he didn’t know where to put them. “This needs to stop. We’re all white men here. We’re all on the same side. There’s a war on.”

  “Apologize and we’ll be gone.”

  Mr. Watts looked sick. The contract lawmen around him moved slowly away from the bar.

  “You cain’t walk in here and shoot a constable,” Mr. Watts said.

  “Give me your word you’ll bring Maria and her baby back to our house.”

  “They’re already on their way to a processing station in Laredo,” Mr. Watts said.

  “Then you’d better go get them,” Grandfather said.

  Mr. Watts’s bottom lip was trembling, as though he were about to cry. With time I would learn that his desperation was even greater than I thought. He had reached that moment of fear and humiliation when a man is willing to take whatever measure is necessary to avoid the shame and self-loathing that follows a public display of cowardice.

  “You were a drunkard back then, Mr. Holland,” he said. “Half the time you were in a blackout. That’s why they took your badge. It wasn’t me caused the problem with your daughter.”

  “What?”

  “Ask her. I brought her home from the movies. A week later she told me what you did. You were drunk and you put the blocks to her.”

  He could hardly get the last sentence out. Grandfather shook his gun belt from his arm and curled his hand around the handle of the revolver as the belt and cartridges struck the floor. He cocked the hammer.

  “Tell him, Wynona,” Mr. Watts said.

  “He’s lying, Daddy,” she said.

  “Bring a Bible out here,” Mr. Watts said. “I’ll put my hand on it.”

  “Is he telling the truth, Wynona?” Grandfather said.

  “How many times were you so drunk you couldn’t remember what planet you were on?” Mr. Watts said. “Down in Mexico in 1916. You didn’t do that with Pancho Villa’s señoritas?”

  “You close your mouth, you vile man,” Mother said.

  Grandfather’s eyes were pale blue, lidless, empty of feeling or thought, as though his soul had taken flight. I saw him swallow, then he eased down the hammer on the revolver and picked up his gun belt and replaced the revolver in its holster. “We’re leaving now,” he said. “Come on, Aaron.”

  “He’s a liar, Daddy.”

  “I don’t know what I did back then. I never will. I killed people in Mexico who have no faces. There’s a whole year I cain’t remember.”

  We went out the door and into the night. The wind was howling, the clouds huge and crawling with electricity. I sat in the front seat of the car with my mother. Grandfather was hunched in the back, like a caged animal, his eyes tunnels of sorrow.

  * * *

  Grandfather finalized our defeat that night when he went into the barn with a lantern and returned with a bottle that had a cork in it and no label. He carried the bottle into his bedroom and sat on the side of the bed and pulled the cork and tilted the bottle to his mouth. My mother took me upstairs and told me to put on my pajamas and lie down. Then she put Tige in bed with me and sat down beside me and looked into my face. “Pay no attention to what you saw or heard in the saloon, Aaron,” she said. “Grandfather is a good man and would never intentionally do harm to his family.”

  “What was Mr. Watts saying?”

  “Never listen to people like Mr. Watts. Their words are like locusts in the wind. I have to run an errand in town now. Don’t worry if Grandfather gets drunk. He’ll be all right in the morning.”

  “What kind of errand?”

  “I know someone who might be able to help Maria and Jesus,” she said. “He’s a federal judge.”

  I looked at her eyes. They were clear. “It’s too late to go to town,” I said.

  She stroked my hair, then clicked off the light and went down the stairs and out the front door. Through the window I could see the beams of her headlights bouncing on the fence posts and fields along our road.

  I woke to sunlight and the sound of rain ticking on the dormers and people’s voices downstairs. I got up and put on my blue jeans and went to the head of the stairs. I could see Grandfather talking to the sheriff and a deputy and a man in a suit with a stethoscope hanging from his neck. I did not see my mother. I walked down the stairs, still in my pajamas, Tige running in front of me, his nails clicking on the wood, his rump waddling on each step.

  “We need to
look at it, Hack,” the sheriff said. “Hackberry” was Grandfather’s first name.

  “Big waste of time, if you ask me,” Grandfather said.

  “You know the position I’m in, Hack,” the sheriff said. He wore a white beard and was almost as big as Grandfather. “Just bring it out here, will you?”

  “Whatever you want,” Grandfather said.

  He went into the hallway and returned holding his holstered revolver, the belt wrapped around it. The sheriff took it from him and he slipped the revolver from the holster and half cocked the hammer, then opened the loading gate and rotated the cylinder. “Smells and looks like you just cleaned and oiled it.”

  “A couple of days ago, I did.”

  “When did you start loading with six rounds instead of leaving an empty chamber?”

  “Since I stopped toting it,” Grandfather said.

  “I’ll keep this for a while, if you don’t mind.”

  “You’re going to run ballistics on it?”

  “I ain’t got any ballistics to run. The rounds never slowed down and are probably halfway to San Antonio.”

  The sheriff shucked the rounds from the cylinder one by one and dropped them in his coat pocket and stuck the pistol back in the holster and handed it to his deputy. The only sound in the room was the creak of the wind.

  “So we’re done here?” Grandfather said.

  “It was the way he went out that bothers me,” the sheriff said.

  “A bullet is a bullet,” Grandfather said.

  “Watts got one through the mouth and one that took off most of his penis,” the sheriff said. “What kind of shooter is apt to do that, Hack?”

  “I guess somebody who was a bad shot or pretty mad.”

  “Let me restate that,” the sheriff said. “Which gender is inclined to do that?”

  “It’s a mystery to me,” Grandfather said.

  My mother walked from the kitchen into the hallway. “The coffee is ready if you gentlemen care to sit down,” she said.

  The sheriff looked at his deputy and the man with the stethoscope and at Grandfather. “I think that would be fine, Miss Wynona,” he said. “Are you feeling okay today?”