~ * ~
My father was an old-time pipeline man whose best friend was killed by his side on the last day of World War I. He read classical literature, refused to mow the lawn under any circumstances, spent more days than he should have in the beer joint, attended church irregularly, and contended there were only two facts you had to remember about the nature of God: that He had a sense of humor and, as a gentleman, He never broke His word.
The last part always stuck with me.
Benny had proved himself a liar and a bum. My sense of having been used by him seemed to grow daily. My mother could not make me eat, even when my hunger was eating its way through my insides like a starving organism that had to consume its host in order to survive. I had bad spins when I woke in the morning and vertigo when I rode my bike to school, wobbling between automobiles while the sky, trees, and buildings around me dissolved into a vortex of atomic particles.
My mother tried to tempt me from my abstinence with a cake she baked and the following day with a codfish dinner she brought from the cafeteria, wrapped in foil, butter oozing from an Irish potato that was still hot from the oven.
I rushed from the house and pedaled my bike to Nick’s. We sat inside the canebrake at the end of our old street, while the day cooled and the evening star twinkled in the west. There was a bitter taste in my mouth, like the taste of zinc pennies.
“You miss your dad?” Nick asked.
“I don’t think about it much anymore. It was an accident. Why go around feeling bad about an accident?” I replied, turning my face from his, looking at the turquoise rim along the bottom of the sky.
“My old man always says your dad was stand-up.”
“Benny Siegel treated us like jerks, Nick,” I said.
“Who cares about Benny Siegel?”
I didn’t have an answer for him, nor could I explain why I felt the way I did.
I rode my bike home in the dusk, then found a heavy rock in the alley and threw it against the side of the Dunlops’s house. It struck the wood so hard the glass in the windows rattled. Vernon came out on the back porch, eating a piece of fried chicken, his body silhouetted in the kitchen light. He wore a strap undershirt and his belt was unbuckled, hanging loosely over his fly.
“You’re lucky, dick wipe. I got a date tonight. But wait till tomorrow,” he said. He shook his chicken bone at me.
~ * ~
I couldn’t sleep that night. I had terrible dreams about facing Vernon in the morning. How could I have been so foolish as to actually assault his house? I wished I had taken the pounding right then, when I was in hot blood and not trembling with fear. I woke at 2 a.m. and threw up in the toilet, then went into the dry heaves. I lay in bed, my head under the pillow. I prayed an asteroid would crash into our neighborhood so I wouldn’t have to see the sunrise.
At around five o’clock I fell asleep. Later I heard wind rattle the roof, then a loud knocking sound like a door slamming repeatedly on a doorjamb. When I looked out my window screen I could see fog on the street and a maroon convertible with whitewall tires parked in front of the Dunlops’s house. An olive-skinned man with patent leather hair parted down the middle, wearing a clip-on bow tie and crinkling white shirt, sat in the passenger seat. I rubbed my eyes. It was the Cheerio man Mr. Dunlop had run off from the parking lot in front of Costen’s Drug Store. Then I heard Benny’s voice on the Dunlops’s porch.
“See, you can’t treat people like that. This is the United States, not Mussoliniville. So we need to walk out here and apologize to this guy and invite him back to the corner by the school. You’re good with that, aren’t you?”
There was a gap in the monologue. Then Benny’s voice resumed. “You’re not? You’re gonna deny kids the right to enter Cheerio yo-yo contests? You think all those soldiers died in the war for nothing? That’s what you’re saying? You some kind of Nazi pushing around little people? Look at me when I’m talking, here.”
Then Benny and Mr. Dunlop walked out to the convertible and talked to the Cheerio man. A moment later Benny got behind the wheel and the convertible disappeared in the fog.
I fell sound asleep in the deep blue coolness of the room, with a sense of confidence in the world I had not felt since the day the war ended and Kate Smith’s voice sang “God Bless America” from every radio in the neighborhood.
When I woke, it was hot and bright outside, the wind touched with dust and the stench of melted tar. I told my mother of Benny Siegel’s visit to the Dunlops.
“You must have had a dream, Charlie. I was up early. I would have heard,” she said.
“No, it was Benny. His girlfriend wasn’t with him, but the Cheerio man was.”
She smiled wanly, her eyes full of pity. “You’ve starved yourself and you break my heart. Nobody was out there, Charlie. Nobody,” she said.
I went out to the curb. No one ever parked in front of the Dunlops’s house, and because the sewer drain was clogged, a patina of mud always dried along the edge of the gutter after each rain. I walked out in the street so I wouldn’t be on the Dunlops’s property, my eyes searching along the seam between the asphalt and the gutter. But I could see no tire imprint in the gray film left over from the last rain. I knelt down and touched the dust with my fingers.
Vernon opened his front door and held it back on the spring. He was bare-chested, a pair of sweatpants hanging below his navel. “Losing your marbles, frump?” he asked.
~ * ~
By noon my skin was crawling with anxiety and fear. Worse, I felt an abiding shame that once again I had been betrayed by my own vanity and foolish trust in others. I didn’t care anymore whether Vernon beat me up or not. In fact, I wanted to see myself injured. Through the kitchen window I could see him pounding dust out of a rug on the clothesline with a broken tennis racquet. I walked down the back steps and crossed into his yard. “Vernon?” I said.
“Your butt-kicking appointment is after lunch. I’m busy right now. In the meantime, entertain yourself by giving a blowjob to a doorknob,” he replied.
“This won’t take long,” I said.
He turned around, exasperated. I hit him, hard, on the corner of the mouth, with a right cross that Nick Hauser would have been proud of. It broke Vernon’s lip against his teeth, whipping his face sideways, causing him to drop the racquet. He stared at me in disbelief, a string of spittle and blood on his cheek. Before he could raise his hands, I hit him again, this time square on the nose. I felt it flatten and blood fly under my knuckles, then I caught him in the eye and throat. I took one in the side of the head and felt another slide off my shoulder, but I was under his reach now and I got him again in the mouth, this time hurting him more than he was willing to live with.
He stepped back from me, blood draining from his split lip, his teeth red, his face twitching with shock. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his father appear on the back porch.
“Get in here, boy, before I whup your ass worse than it already is,” Mr. Dunlop said.
~ * ~
That afternoon Nick Hauser and I went to a baseball game at Buffalo Stadium. When I came home my mother told me I had received a long-distance telephone call. This was in an era when people only called long-distance to inform family members that a loved one had died. I called the operator and was soon connected to Sister Felicie. She told me she was back at Our Lady of the Lake, the college in San Antonio where she had trained to become a teacher.
“I appreciate what your friend has tried to do, but would you tell him everything is fine now, that he doesn’t need to act on my behalf anymore?” she said.
“Which friend?” I asked.
“Mr. Siegel. He’s called the archdiocese twice.” I heard her laugh, then clear her throat. “Can you do that for me, Charlie?”
~ * ~
But I never saw Benny or his girlfriend again. In late June I read in the newspaper that Benny had been at her cottage in Beverly Hills, reading the L. A. Times, when someone outside propped an m-1 carbine across the fo
rk of a tree and fired directly into Benny’s face, blowing one eye fifteen feet from his head.
Years later I would read a news story about his girlfriend, whose nickname was the Flamingo, and how she died by suicide in a snowbank in Austria. I sometimes wondered if in those last moments of her life she tried to return to that wintertime photograph of her and Benny building a snowman in west Montana.
Vernon Dunlop never bothered me again. In fact, I came to have a sad kind of respect for the type of life that had been imposed upon him. Vernon was killed at the Battle of Inchon during the Korean War. Nick Hauser and I became schoolteachers. The era in which we grew up was a poem and Bugsy Siegel was a friend of mine.
<
~ * ~
JEFFERY DEAVER
Born Bad
From Dangerous Women
Sleep, my child and peace attend thee,
all through the night.…
The words of the lullaby looped relentlessly through her mind, as persistent as the clattering Oregon rain on the roof and window.
The song that she’d sung to Beth Anne when the girl was three or four seated itself in her head and wouldn’t stop echoing. Twenty-five years ago, the two of them: mother and daughter, sitting in the kitchen of the family’s home outside Detroit. Liz Polemus, hunching over the Formica table, the frugal young mother and wife, working hard to stretch the dollars.
Singing to her daughter, who sat across from her, fascinated with the woman’s deft hands.
I who love you shall be near you, all through the night.
Soft the drowsy hours are creeping.
Hill and vale in slumber sleeping.
Liz felt a cramp in her right arm-the one that had never healed properly-and realized she was still gripping the receiver fiercely at the news she’d just received. That her daughter was on her way to the house.
The daughter she hadn’t spoken with in more than three years.
I my loving vigil keeping, all through the night.
Liz finally replaced the telephone and felt blood surge into her arm, itching, stinging. She sat down on the embroidered couch that had been in the family for years and massaged her throbbing forearm. She felt light-headed, confused, as if she wasn’t sure the phone call had been real or a wispy scene from a dream.
Only the woman wasn’t lost in the peace of sleep. No, Beth Anne was on her way. A half-hour and she’d be at Liz’s door.
Outside, the rain continued to fall steadily, tumbling into the pines that filled Liz’s yard. She’d lived in this house for nearly a year, a small place miles from the nearest suburb. Most people would’ve thought it too small, too remote. But to Liz it was an oasis. The slim widow, midfifties, had a busy life and little time for housekeeping. She could clean the place quickly and get back to work. And while hardly a recluse, she preferred the buffer zone of forest that separated her from her neighbors. The minuscule size also discouraged suggestions by any male friends that, hey, got an idea, how ‘bout I move in? The woman would merely look around the one-bedroom home and explain that two people would go crazy in such cramped quarters; after her husband’s death she’d resolved she’d never remarry or live with another man.
Her thoughts now drifted to Jim. Their daughter had left home and cut off all contact with the family before he died. It had always stung her that the girl hadn’t even called after his death, let alone attended his funeral. Anger at this instance of the girl’s callousness shivered within Liz but she pushed it aside, reminding herself that whatever the young woman’s purpose tonight there wouldn’t be enough time to exhume even a fraction of the painful memories that lay between mother and daughter like wreckage from a plane crash.
A glance at the clock. Nearly ten minutes had sped by since the call, Liz realized with a start.
Anxious, she walked into her sewing room. This, the largest room in the house, was decorated with needlepoints of her own and her mother’s and a dozen racks of spools-some dating back to the fifties and sixties. Every shade of God’s palette was represented in those threads. Boxes full of Vogue and Butterick patterns too. The centerpiece of the room was an old electric Singer. It had none of the fancy stitch cams of the new machines, no lights or complex gauges or knobs. The machine was a forty-year-old, black-enameled workhorse, identical to the one that her mother had used.
Liz had sewed since she was twelve and in difficult times the craft sustained her. She loved every part of the process: buying the fabric-hearing the thud thud thud as the clerk would turn the flat bolts of cloth over and over, unwinding the yardage (Liz could tell the women with near-prefect precision when a particular amount had been unfolded). Pinning the crisp, translucent paper onto the cloth. Cutting with the heavy pinking shears, which left a dragon-tooth edge on the fabric. Readying the machine, winding the bobbin, threading the needle…
There was something so completely soothing about sewing: taking these substances-cotton from the land, wool from animals-and blending them into something altogether new. The worst aspect of the injury several years ago was the damage to her right arm, which kept her off the Singer for three unbearable months.
Sewing was therapeutic for Liz, yes, but more than that, it was a part of her profession and had helped her become a well-to-do woman; nearby were racks of designer gowns, awaiting her skillful touch.
Her eyes rose to the clock. Fifteen minutes. Another breathless slug of panic.
Picturing so clearly that day twenty-five years ago-Beth Anne in her flannel ‘jammies, sitting at the rickety kitchen table and watching her mother’s quick fingers with fascination as Liz sang to her.
Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee. . .
This memory gave birth to dozens of others and the agitation rose in Liz’s heart like the water level of the rain-swollen stream behind her house. Well, she told herself now firmly, don’t just sit here… do something. Keep busy. She found a navy-blue jacket in her closet, walked to her sewing table, then dug through a basket until she found a matching remnant of wool. She’d use this to make a pocket for the garment. Liz went to work, smoothing the cloth, marking it with tailor’s chalk, finding the scissors, cutting carefully. She focused on her task but the distraction wasn’t enough to take her mind off the impending visit-and memories from years ago.
The shoplifting incident, for instance. When the girl was twelve.
Liz recalled the phone ringing, answering it. The head of security at a nearby department store was reporting-to Liz’s and Jim’s shock-that Beth Anne had been caught with nearly a thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry hidden in a paper bag.
The parents had pleaded with the manager not to press charges. They’d said there must’ve been some mistake.
“Well,” the security chief said skeptically, “we found her with five watches. A necklace too. Wrapped up in this grocery bag. I mean, that don’t sound like any mistake to me.”
Finally, after much reassurance that this was a fluke and promises she’d never come into the store again, the manager agreed to keep the police out of the matter.
Outside the store, once the family was alone, Liz turned to Beth Anne furiously. “Why on earth did you do that?”
“Why not?” was the girl’s singsong response, a snide smile on her face.
“It was stupid.”
“Like, I care.”
“Beth Anne… why’re you acting this way?”
“What way?” the girl’d asked in mock confusion.
Her mother had tried to engage her in a dialogue-the way the talk shows and psychologists said you should do with your kids-but Beth Anne remained bored and distracted. Liz had delivered a vague, and obviously futile, warning and had given up.
Thinking now: You put a certain amount of effort into stitching a jacket or dress and you get the garment you expect. There’s no mystery. But you put a thousand times more effort into raising your child and the result is the opposite of what you hope and dream for. This seemed so unfair.
Liz’s keen gray eyes examined the wool jacket, making sure the pocket lay flat and was pinned correctly into position. She paused, looking up, out the window toward the black spikes of the pine, but what she was seeing were more hard memories of Beth Anne. What a mouth on that girl! Beth Anne would look her mother or father in the eye and say, “There is no Goddamn way you’re going to make me go with you.” Or, “Do you have any fucking clue at all?”
Maybe they should’ve been stricter in their upbringing. In Liz’s family you got whipped for cursing or talking back to adults or for not doing what your parents asked you to do. She and Jim had never spanked Beth Anne; maybe they should’ve swatted her once or twice.
One time, somebody had called in sick at the family business-a warehouse Jim had inherited-and he needed Beth Anne to help out. She’d snapped at him, “I’d rather be dead than go back inside that shithole with you.”
The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Page 7
