Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 11/01/10

by EQM

  There’s a hatch in the roof. I go up there at night, beat the snow down till it’s packed, carefully so no one hears me, and add to it from the other side of the roof, behind the house where nobody’ll miss it. The next night, it snows on top of the pile. It looks like a big hump, but you can only see it from up on the hill, and no one’ll look up at the roof, I hope. People here in the valley just stare at the ground, that’s another thing I can’t stand.

  And then I send the snow down on top of Bud when he’s chopping wood down below. I do it with the old electric heater we’ve got for when the heating goes out. I take it up to the attic early in the morning, up where you can see the sky through the cracks in the roof tiles when there’s no snow on the roof. I think to myself, it’ll take a couple of hours until the roof tiles are warm and the snow melts from underneath and then that packed snow will take off, maybe not all the way to Africa, but at least down the slope. With a firm push from behind, through the roof hatch. And it works! There's a really loud crack when the snow breaks loose, and then Bud’s gone. I jump into the shower and pretend I haven’t heard a thing. I hope no one else did either—Mom’s down in the valley and Dad’s at the mayor’s office. It takes a little while to breathe your last, I think to myself, and put a heavy-duty conditioner on my hair. You’re supposed to leave it on and let it sink in if you want it to work, that’s what it says on the bottle.

  When I come down, the neighbor’s digging away. The axe is lying there, it’s not hard to guess who’s under the avalanche.

  Quick! hollers the neighbor. Someone could be buried! Get a shovel and help me!

  Nobody else is here, I say. Dad’s not home and Mom’s down in the valley. But then I go and get a shovel out of the shed, slowly. I don’t want them talking about me, after all. We shovel and shovel, but it’s a lot of snow and it won’t be fast enough for Bud.

  But then the neighbor uncovers an arm, and everything happens really fast. I start screaming, That’s my Bud! My Bud’s in there! And people come from all around and finally he’s out and the ambulance takes him to the hospital in Oberstadt where he spends three days being spoiled like a baby. I bring him bananas and beer that I hide under my clothes and everything’s just like before except that Bud gets on my nerves and everybody else is telling the story of his miraculous rescue over and over.

  Death on the mountain, I think, damn it all, doesn’t anything work the way it’s supposed to? I give up. He wants to go to Africa and I want to go too and when we’re back it will be spring in the valley and who knows, maybe it’ll help, maybe I’ll like Bud better when we get home. And then we plan the wedding and I go along with it, the way everybody wants me to, everybody down in the village and God in his heaven too, it looks like.

  And Africa is really incredible. They’ve even got mountains there, which I didn’t know at all. You could see them from the airplane. Travel educates you, that’s what they say. The cities are horrible, I learn things there that they don’t put in books. And Bud doesn’t seem so bad either; he’s tanned and the women all look at him, the way he lies on the beach with his legs and his big beer belly in the sand, emptying bottle after bottle. And if they think he’s a good catch, and after all they’ve got a choice, then he ought to be good enough for me, I think, and chase away the thoughts of murder with cocktails and drumming for the tourists. We’re tourists now too. You can’t think thoughts like that under this sun, I discover, thoughts like that belong in a dark valley, in the winter. Down here, they seem absurd. I tell myself I didn’t really mean any of it, but I know that’s not true.

  Once we take a jeep ride up into those mountains. They’re so green, not gray like ours. And then we drive into a valley, flat and full of coconut palms—they call it a plantation. They give us kaba, a plantation drink with cocoa in it. I remember it from long ago, from the mom-and-pop grocery shop near the church. It’s closed now, of course. Kaba was pretty much the only thing in the valley that was exotic, and even that was just a word to us.

  And now I’m colossally colonial myself, I’m visiting a plantation. Bud loves riding in the Jeep and I love the warm wind and the foreignness. Maybe we really can ... it was better last night than it usually is. I found my tanned body tempting and Bud did too. Here, nobody cares who’s married, some people even do it on the beach, I’ve seen them. At home they’d be shocked, but they don’t even know what a warm tropical night is, or how you drink a fresh green coconut. How could they? People don’t broaden their horizons in a narrow little valley full of mortgages.

  Bud wants a photo of the two of us under a palm tree to show everybody back home, and we ask our native guide to take the picture. I’m showing him how to use the camera when Bud goes and stands under the tree, legs planted wide apart in his safari pants. And then—I’m still having to tell the story back home—then a coconut falls and hits Bud right on the head, and he drops on the spot. And I run to him and see that it’s split open, not just the coconut, but Bud’s head, too, everything’s white and red and jelly-like and dripping. And water and blood, and under the hot sun it starts to smell right away, the way it smells on the farm when we butcher a hog.

  That coconut weighs more than eight pounds. For a coconut, it wasn’t so heavy, they tell me, but from that height it was traveling eighty kilometers an hour when it hit, says the doctor. When he talks I can tell right away that he’s from Vienna like my dad’s brother. That makes a ton of pressure, he says, not even the strongest skull can survive that. And Bud wasn’t the strongest upstairs anyway, I think sadly, and nod, and that’s when they tell me that this kind of accident is pretty common down here in Africa. Some people fall out of the tree when they’re picking coconuts, and some people get caught down below. Sometimes even kids, and when you look at it like that, Bud ought to be glad he got to live so long. And while they’re putting him in the zinc coffin—just like the one I always imagined—I can’t stop crying and sobbing. I’m surprised at myself, but the crying’s all real.

  “Died in foreign lands”—That’s what they put on Bud’s gravestone. He’s the only one in the cemetery who died somewhere other than Tyrolia, and that’s rare enough. Bud. Sometimes I cry for him, when nobody’s looking. They don’t want us, out there in the wide world, that’s for sure. If he’d never left . . . that’s what they’re saying in the village, and they’re probably right. They all feel sorry for me.

  Except Alfons. Ever since, he looks sideways at me. But who cares? I’ve been to Africa and he hasn’t and besides, now I’m seeing Karl, and as the only daughter and the heir to the farm, I can have anybody I want. Now that Bud’s gone.

  Death on the mountain or death down in the valley. It all amounts to the same thing. It’s the way people always say: Man proposes, but God disposes.

  Copyright © 2010 Nessa Altura