The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

by Louise Penny

  “Buy you a drink?” I said.

  She lifted her left hand so I could see her ring. “He’s nothing to brag on, but he’s the only one I got.”

  “I admire principle,” I said.

  “That’s why you hang out in here?”

  “There’s worse.”

  “Where?”

  I didn’t have an answer. She picked the cherry out of her vodka collins and sucked on it. “It’s not polite to stare.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I get the blues, that’s all,” she said.

  “I know what you mean,” I replied.

  I couldn’t tell if she heard me or not. Kitty Wells was singing on the jukebox.

  “Will you dance with me?” I said.

  “Another time.”

  Through the screen door the sun was bright and hot, and heat waves were bouncing on the bay. The electric fan on the wall feathered her hair against her cheeks. She had a sweet face and amber eyes, with a shine in them like beer glass. There was no pack of cigarettes or an ashtray in front of her. She bent slightly forward, and I saw the shine on the tops of her breasts. I didn’t think it was intentional on her part.

  “I played piano for Ernie Suarez and Warren Storm at the Top Hat in Lafayette,” she said.

  “Looking for a job?”

  “My husband doesn’t like me hanging in juke joints.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “He comes and goes.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Not what you’re thinking. He flies a plane out to the rigs.”

  “How’d you know I was in Korea?”

  “The bartender.”

  Her face colored, as though she realized I knew she’d been asking about me. “My name is Loreen Walters.”

  “How you do, Miss Loreen?”

  “Where’d you get the accent?” she asked.

  “East Kentucky.”

  She put her wallet in her drawstring bag. The leather was braided around the edges and incised with a rearing horse ridden by a naked woman. It was a strange wallet for a woman to carry. I glanced at Loreen. She seemed to be one of those people whose faces change constantly in the light, so you never know who they actually are.

  “Are you fixing to leave?” I said.

  “There’s nothing wrong in talking, is there?” she said.

  “No, ma’am, not at all.”

  I could see myself close to her, next to the jukebox, my face buried in her hair, breathing her perfume and the coolness of her skin. I felt my throat catch.

  “Then, again, why borrow trouble?” she said. “See you, sweetie. Look me up in our next incarnation. Far as I’m concerned, this one stinks.”

  I went back on my seismograph barge early the next day. The sun was red and streaked with dust blowing out of the cane fields, the steel plates on the pilothouse dripping with drops of moisture as big as silver dollars.

  The lowest and hardest job in the oil business was building board roads through swamps and marshland; the second lowest was “doodlebugging,” stringing underwater cable off a jug boat, sometimes carrying it on a spool along with the seismic jugs through a flooded woods thick with cottonmouths and mosquitoes. We’d drop eighteen dynamite cans screwed end-to-end down a drill hole and teach the earth who was running things. The detonation was so great it jolted the barge on its pilings and blew fish as fat as logs to the surface and filled the air with a sulfurous yellow cloud that would burn the inside of your head if you breathed it.

  Lizard was the driller. His skin looked like leather stretched on a skeleton. At age twenty he already had chain-gang scars on his ankles and whip marks from the Black Betty on his back. He whistled and sang while he worked, and bragged on his conquests in five-dollar brothels. I was jealous of his peace of mind. He knew about what happened on our drill site down in South America, but he slept like he’d just gotten it on with Esther Williams. I had nightmares that caused me to sit on the side of my bunk until the cook clanged the breakfast bell.

  My first day back on the quarter boat, Lizard sat down across from me at supper. He speared a steak off the platter and scooped potatoes and poured milk gravy on it and sliced it up, and started eating like he was stuffing garbage down a drain hole. “Word to the wise, Elmore,” he said.

  “What’s that, Lizard?” I asked.

  “Don’t be milking through the wrong fence.”

  “Who says I am?”

  “Saw you with Miss Loreen at the Gator.”

  “Then you didn’t see very much.”

  He worked a piece of steak loose from his teeth. “Know who her old man is?”

  “No, and I don’t care, because I haven’t done anything wrong,” I said.

  “Except not listen to the wisdom of your betters.”

  “How’d you like your food pushed in your face?”

  “Where’s that shithole you grew up in?”

  “The Upper South.”

  “Much inbreeding thereabouts, retardation and such?”

  My dreams were in Technicolor, full of murmurs and engine noise and occasionally the sundering of the earth. A man caught by a flamethrower makes a sound like a mewing kitten. A shower of potato mashers is preceded by the enemy clanging their grenades on their helmets before lobbing them into our foxholes. A toppling round becomes a hummingbird brushing by your ear. The canned dynamite we slide down our drill pipe kills big creatures stone dead and belly-up, somehow assuring us we are the dispatchers of death and not its recipient. Sometimes I heard a baby crying.

  I once used a boat hook to kill a moccasin that was trapped in the current. I threw it up on the deck to scare Lizard. I don’t know why. Later I felt ashamed and told a prostitute in a Morgan City bar what I’d done. She tapped her cigarette ash in a beer can.

  “My stories are a little weird?” I said.

  “I think you’re in the wrong bar,” she replied.

  Every memory in my head seemed like a piece of glass. I woke the second day on the hitch to a single-engine, canary-yellow pontoon plane coming in above the trees, swooping right over the upper deck. Ten minutes later, down in the galley, I saw the plane touch the water and taxi to the bow of the quarter boat. The pilot was Hamp Rieber, a geologist with degrees from the University of Texas and MIT. His hair was mahogany-colored and wavy, combed straight back with Brylcreem. He liked to wear polo shirts and jodhpurs and tight, ventilated leather gloves, and always buzzed us when he visited the quarter boat or the drill barge. One time Lizard climbed on the pilothouse and flung a wrench at him. He missed the prop by less than a foot.

  Hamp was sent to check on us by the Houston office. Sometimes he went to a brothel in Port Arthur with the crew, although I couldn’t figure out why. He was rich and lived with a handsome wife in an old plantation house south of Lake Charles.

  He came in and started eating scrambled eggs and bacon and pancakes across from me. Lizard was three places down. A big window fan drew a cool breeze through the room. It was a fine time of day, before the sun started to flare on the water and the smell of carrion rose out of the swamp. Hamp’s face was full of self-satisfaction while he talked. I wished Lizard had parked that wrench in his mouth.

  “You look thoughtful, Elmore,” he said.

  “I’m philosophically inclined.”

  “Been reading your thesaurus?”

  “I go my own way and don’t have truck with those who don’t like it,” I said.

  “You’re a mystery man, all right,” he said, reaching for the grits. “I always get the feeling you’re looking at me when my back is turned. Why is that?”

  “Search me.”

  “Yes, sir, a regular mystery man.”

  I got up with my plate and coffee mug and finished eating in a shady spot on the deck. I wished I could float away to a palm-dotted island beyond the horizon, a place where machines had never been invented, where people drank out of coconut husks and ate shellfish they harvested from the surf with their hands.

  The rea
l reason I didn’t like Hamp was because of what happened down in Latin America. At first the Indians were curious about our seismograph soundings, but eventually they lost interest and disappeared back into trees that clicked and rattled with animal bones. Hamp selected a drill site in the jungle and we started clearing the earth with a dozer, piling greenery as high as a house, soaking and burning it with kerosene and turning the sun into an orange wafer. The soil was soggy, with thousands of years of detritus in it. When it was compressed under the weight of the dozer, the severed root systems twitched like they were alive.

  We put up the derrick and starting drilling twenty-four hours a day, using three crews, tying canvas on the spars when monsoon amounts of rain swept through the jungle. After we punched into a pay sand, the driller ignited the flare line to bleed off the gas, and a flame roared two hundred feet into the sky. The sludge pit caught fire and blew a long flume of thick, black, lung-choking smoke all the way to the horizon. It hung over the jungle like a serpent until morning.

  The next night the Indians showered us with arrows.

  The company built a wooden shell around the rig. It must have been 120 degrees inside. By noon the floor men were puking in a bucket and pouring water on their heads to keep from passing out. But at least we’d stymied the Indians, we thought. Then an Indian shot a blowgun from the trees at one of our supply trucks coming up the road. A kid from Lufkin got it in the cheek and almost died.

  “This shit ends,” Hamp said.

  He’d flown a spotter plane in Korea and bragged he’d shot down Bed Check Charlie with a .45.

  “What are you aiming to do?” I asked.

  “Know who Alfred Nobel was?”

  “The man who invented dynamite.”

  “Nobody is going to catch flies on you.”

  At sunset Hamp and another guy flew away in a two-cockpit biplane. About ten minutes later we heard a dull boom and felt a tremor under our feet and saw birds lift from the canopy in the jungle. A minute later there was a second boom, this one much stronger, then we heard the drone of the plane’s engine headed back toward us. Lizard was standing next to me, bare-chested, staring at the smoke rising from the trees and the sparks churning inside it. He poured mosquito repellent on his palm and rubbed it on his neck and face. “Satchel charges,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  “He brought them from town a couple of days ago. He was just waiting on the excuse.” He looked at my expression. “You keep them damn thoughts out of your head.”

  “What thoughts?”

  “The kind a water walker has. It’s their misfortune and none of our own. Stay the hell out of it.”

  I looked around at the other men on the crew. They had come out of the bunkhouse, some of them with GI mess kits in their hands. None of them seemed to know what they should say. The tool pusher, a big man who always wore khaki trousers and a straw hat and a Lima watch fob and long-sleeve shirts buttoned at the wrists, looked at the red glow in the jungle. You could hear the wind rustling the trees and smell an odor like the chimney on a rendering plant. “I don’t know about y’all, but I got to see a man about a dog,” he said.

  The others laughed as he unzipped his fly and urinated into the dark.

  In the morning the tool pusher told me to take a supply truck to the port twenty miles away and pick up a load of center cutters for the ditching machine. I tried to convince myself that Hamp had frightened the Indians out of the village before he dropped the satchel charges, that he meant to scare people and not kill them. My head was coming off as we drove down the dirt road that skirted the jungle. It was raining and the sun was shining, and a rainbow curved out of the clouds into almost the exact spot where the fire had burned out during the night.

  I told the driver to stop.

  “What for?” he said.

  “I got dysentery. I’ll walk back.” I took the first-aid kit and a roll of toilet paper from under the seat.

  The gearshift knob was throbbing in his palm. “You sure you know what you’re doing, Elmore?”

  “Some Tums and salt tablets and I’ll be right as rain.”

  The huts in the village had been made from thatch and scrap lumber and corrugated tin the Indians stole from construction sites. The satchel charges had blown them apart and set fire to most everything inside. I counted nine dead in the ashes, their eyes starting to sink in the sockets like they were drifting off to sleep. I took some alcohol out of the first-aid kit and poured it on my bandanna and tied it across my nose and mouth, and tried not to breathe too deeply.

  There was not a living creature in the village, not even a bird or insects. The only sound came from the cry of a small child, the kind that says the child is helpless, unfed, and thirsty, its diaper soaked and dirty and raw on the skin.

  I followed a path along a stream that had overflowed its banks. The ground was carpeted with leaves and broken twigs. Then I started to see more bodies. There were nails embedded in some of the trees, blood drags where people had tried to reach the water, pieces of hair and human pulp on the rocks by the stream. The child was lying on its back next to a woman who looked made out of sticks. One of her breasts was exposed. She wore old tennis shoes without socks and a wooden cross on a cord around her neck. A tear was sealed in one eye.

  I could see branches that were broken farther down the path. The air was sweet from the spray on the rocks in the stream, the rain pattering on huge tropical plants that had heart-shaped leaves. I cleaned the child and pulled the shirt off a dead man and wrapped the child’s thighs and genitals and bottom inside it, and tied the first-aid kit on my belt and started walking. My passenger was a little boy. I had never married and had always wanted to have a little boy, or a little girl, it didn’t matter, and it felt funny walking with him curled inside my arms, like I was back in the infantry, except this time I wasn’t humping a BAR.

  I walked until high noon, when I saw the edge of the jungle thin into full sunlight. Farther down the dirt road I could see a stucco farmhouse, with a deuce-and-a-half army truck parked in front and a canvas tarp on poles where people were lying on blankets in the shade. I looked down at my little passenger. His eyes were closed, the redness gone from his face, his nostrils so tiny I wanted to touch them to make sure he was all right.

  “¿Qué quieres?” a soldier said.

  “What does it look like?” I said.

  “No entiendo. ¿Qué haces aquí?”

  He wore a dirty khaki uniform and a Sam Browne belt and a stiff cap with a lacquered bill, a bandolier full of M1 clips strapped around his waist. His armpits were looped with sweat, his shirt unbuttoned, his chest shiny. He kept swiping at a fly, his eyes never leaving my face. There were other soldiers standing around, as though their role was just to be there. The Indians lying on the ground in the shade of the tarp looked frightened, afraid to speak. A nun in a soiled white habit was giving water to a woman out of a canteen.

  “I’ve got to get the child to a hospital,” I said. “Where’s the hospital?”

  “Está aquí, hombre.” He pointed to the child in my arms. “Put down.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you put down.”

  I stepped back from him.

  “You don’t hear, gringo?” he said.

  “Stay away from me.”

  He gestured to one of his men. The nun stepped between them and me and took the child from my arms.

  “See, everything gonna be okay, man,” the soldier in the cap said.

  “No, it isn’t. A plane bombed the village.”

  “You ain’t got to say nothing, man. Go back to where you come from. All is taken care of.”

  “You’re not going to do anything about it?”

  “Go back with your people, gringo.”

  “Where’s the jefe?”

  “I’m the jefe. You want to be my friend? Tell me now. If you ain’t our friend, I got to take you back to town, give you a place to stay for a while, let you get to know some guys you ain�
�t gonna like.”

  The wind was hot, the tarp popping in the silence, the sky filled with an eye-watering brilliance.

  “You don’t look too good,” he said. “Sit down and have some pulque. I’m gonna give you some food. See, it’s cool here in the shade.”

  “What are you going to do with the child?”

  “What you think? Está muerto. You been in the jungle too long, man.”

  Now back to the present. When I got off the hitch, I headed straight for the Hungry Gator and went to work on an ice-cold bottle of Jax and four fingers of Jack Daniel’s. I heard somebody drop a nickel in the jukebox and play Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” Somehow I knew who was playing that song. I also knew the kind of trouble I might get into drinking B-52s. She sat down next to me, wearing a white skirt and blouse and thin black belt and earrings with red stones in them. She smelled like a garden full of flowers.

  “I thought I might have scared you off,” she said.

  “You’re not the kind that scares people, Miss Loreen,” I said.

  “Still want to buy me a drink?”

  Warning bells were clanging and red lights flashing. An oscillating fan fluttered the pages of a wall calendar in a white blur. “Anytime,” I replied.

  She ordered a small Schlitz. The bartender put the bottle and a glass in front of her. She poured it into the glass and put salt in it and watched the foam rise. “I’m trying to take it easy today.”

  “You have a taste for it?”

  “You could call it that.” She took a sip. “I was going to ask your bandleader if he could use a piano player.”

  “He’s not around today. He plays weekends.”

  “Oh,” she said, her disappointment obvious.

  “You okay?”

  “Sure.” She kept her face turned to one side, away from the sunlight blazing on the shell parking lot.

  “Look at me, Miss Loreen.”

  “What for?”

  “Somebody hurt you?”

  “He was drunk.”

  “Your husband?”

  “Who else?”

  “A man who hits a woman is a coward.”