“Get that too. I don’t think there is no money. I think he was gonna try and sweet-talk Viceroy out of some of that blow. A pay-later deal.”
“He damn sure didn’t know Viceroy, did he?”
“No, he didn’t. But you know what, I ain’t gonna miss him.”
A moment later the TV and the stereo were loaded in the Cadillac. Then, just for fun, they put the chicken man and Viceroy in the chicken man’s truck and used the car crusher on it. As the truck began to crush, chickens squawked momentarily and the tires blew with a sound like mortar fire.
With Viceroy, the chicken man, and the chickens flattened, they slid the truck onto a pile of rusted metal, got in the Cadillac, and drove out of there, Butch at the wheel.
On the way over the cattle guard, Tim said, “You know, we could have sold them chickens.”
“My old man always said don’t steal or deal in anything you got to feed. I’ve stuck by that. Fuck them chickens. Fuck that mule.”
Tim considered that, decided it was sage advice, the part about not dealing in livestock. He said, “All right.”
~ * ~
Along the creek James and Elliot crept. The creek was rising and the sound of the rain through the trees was like someone beating tin with a chain.
The land was low and it was holding water. They kept going and pretty soon they heard a rushing sound. Looking back, they saw a wall of water surging toward them. The lake a mile up had overflowed and the creek and all that rain were causing it to flood.
“Shit,” said James.
The water hit them hard and knocked them down, took their hats. When they managed to stand, the water was knee-deep and powerful. It kept bowling them over. Soon they were just flowing with it and logs and limbs were clobbering them at every turn.
They finally got hold of a small tree that had been uprooted and hung on to that. The water carried them away from the trees around the creek and out into what had once been a lowland pasture.
They had gone a fair distance like this when they saw the mule swimming. Its neck and back were well out of the water and it held its head as if it were regal and merely about some sort of entertainment.
Their tree homed in on the mule, and as they passed, James grabbed the mule’s neck and pulled himself onto it. Elliot got hold of the mule’s tail, pulled himself up on its back where James had settled.
The mule was more frantic now, swimming violently. The flood slopped suddenly, and James realized this was in fact where the highway had been cut through what had once been a fairly large hill. The highway was covered and not visible, but this was it, and there was a drop-off as the water flowed over it.
Down they went, and the churning deluge went over them, and they spun that way for a long time, like they were in a washing machine cycle. When they came up, the mule was upside down, feet pointing in the air. Its painted nose sometimes bobbed up and out of the water, but it didn’t breathe and it didn’t roll over.
James and Elliot clung to its legs and fat belly and washed along like that for about a mile. James said, “I’m through with livestock.”
“I hear that,” Elliot said.
Then a bolt of lightning, attracted by the mule’s upturned, iron-shod hooves, struck them a sizzling, barbecuing strike, so that there was nothing left now but three piles of cooked meat, one with a still visible brown nose and smoking, wilting legs, the other two wearing clothes, hissing smoke from the water, blasting along with the charge of the flood.
<
~ * ~
MICHAEL MALONE
Maniac Loose
from A Confederacy of Crime
Holding a yellow smiley-face coffee mug, Lucy Rhoads sat in her dead husband’s bathrobe and looked at two photographs. She had just made a discovery about her recently deceased spouse that surprised her. Prewitt Rhoads — a booster of domestic sanguinity, whose mind was a map of cheerful clichés out of which his thoughts never wandered, whose monogamy she had no more doubted than his optimism — her spouse Prewitt Rhoads (dead three weeks ago of a sudden heart attack) had for years lived a secret life of sexual deceit with a widow two blocks away in the pretty subdivision of Painton, Alabama, where he had insisted on their living for reasons Lucy only now understood. This was the same man who had brought her home Mylar balloons proclaiming, “I Love You,” and white cuddly Valentine bears making the same claims, and an endless series of these smiley-face coffee mugs — all from the gifts, cards, and party supplies shop he owned in Annie Sullivan Mall and called The Fun House. This was the same man who had disparaged her slightest criticism of the human condition, who had continually urged her, “Lucy, can’t you stop turning over rocks just to look at all the bugs crawling underneath them?”
Well, now Lucy had tripped over a boulder of a rock to see in the exposed mud below her own Prewitt Rhoads scurrying around in lustful circles with their widowed neighbor Amorette Strumlander, Lucy’s mediocre Gardenia Club bridge partner for more than fifteen years; Amorette Strumlander, who had dated Prewitt long ago at Painton High School, who had never lived anywhere in her life but Painton, Alabama, where perhaps for years she had sat patiently waiting, like the black widow she’d proved herself to be, until Prewitt came back to her. Of course, on his timid travels into the world beyond Painton, Alabama, Amorette’s old boyfriend had picked up a wife in Charlotte (Lucy) and two children in Atlanta before returning to his hometown to open The Fun House. But what did Amorette Strumlander care about those encumbrances? Apparently nothing at all.
Lucy poured black coffee into the grimacing cup. Soon Amorette herself would tap her horn in her distinctive pattern, honk honk honk pause honk honk, to take Lucy to the Playhouse in nearby Tuscumbia so they could see The Miracle Worker together. Lucy was free to go because she had been forced to accept a leave of absence from her job as a town clerk at Painton Municipal Hall in order to recover from her loss. Amorette had insisted on the phone that The Miracle Worker would be just the thing to cheer up the grieving Mrs. Rhoads after the sudden loss of her husband to his unexpected heart attack. “I always thought it would be me,” said Amorette, who’d boasted of a heart murmur since it had forced her to drop out of Agnes Scott College for Women when she was twenty and kept her from getting a job or doing any housework ever since. Apparently, Lucy noted, the long affair with Prewitt hadn’t strained the woman’s heart at all.
Lucy wasn’t at all interested in seeing The Miracle Worker; she had already seen it a number of times, for the Playhouse put it on every summer in Tuscumbia, where the famous blind deaf mute Helen Keller had grown up. The bordering town of Painton had no famous people to boast of in its own long, hot, languid history, and no exciting events either; not even the Yankees ever came through the hamlet to burn it down, although a contingent of Confederate women (including an ancestor of Amorette’s) was waiting to shoot them if they did. A typical little Deep South community, Painton had run off its Indians, brought in its slaves, made its money on cotton, and then after the War between the States had gone to sleep for a hundred years except for a few little irritable spasms of wakefulness over the decades to burn a cross, or (on the other side) to send a student to march with Martin Luther King, or to campaign against anything that might destroy the American Way of Life.
In its long history, Painton could claim only three modest celebrities: There was Amorette Strumlander’s twice-great-grandmother who’d threatened to shoot the Yankees if they ever showed up; she’d been a maid of honor at Jefferson Davis’s wedding and had attended his inauguration as president of the Confederacy in Montgomery. Fifty years later there was a Baptist missionary killed in the Congo either by a hippopotamus or by hepatitis; it was impossible for his relatives to make out his wife’s handwriting on the note she’d sent from Africa. And thirty years ago there was a linebacker in an Alabama Rose Bowl victory who’d played an entire quarter with a broken collarbone.
But of course none of these celebrities could hold a candle to Helen Keller, as even Amorette admitted �
� proud as she was of her ancestral acquaintance of Jefferson Davis. Indeed no one loved the Helen Keller story as told by The Miracle Worker more than she. “You can never ever get too much of a good thing, Lucy, especially in your time of need,” Mrs. Strumlander had wheedled when she’d called to pester Lucy into going to the play today. “The Miracle Worker shows how we can triumph over the dark days even if we’re blind, deaf, and dumb, poor little thing.”
Although at the very moment that her honey-voiced neighbor had phoned, Lucy Rhoads was squeezing in her fist the key to her husband’s secret box of adulterous love letters from the deceptive Amorette, she had replied only, “All right, come on over, Amorette, because I’m having a real dark day here today.”
Still Lucy wasn’t getting ready. She was drinking black coffee in her dead husband’s robe and looking at the photos she’d found in the box. She was listening to the radio tell her to stay off the streets of Painton today because there was a chance that the streets weren’t safe. In general, the town of Painton didn’t like to admit to problems; the motto on the billboard at the town limits proclaimed in red, white, and blue letters, there’s no pain in painton, the cheerfulest town in alabama. There was always a patrol car hidden behind this billboard with a radar gun to catch innocent strangers going thirty-six miles an hour and slap huge fines on them. If Deputy Sheriff Hews Puddleston had heard one hapless driver joke, “I thought you said there was no pain in Painton,” he’d heard a thousand of them.
The local billboard annoyed Lucy, as did the phrasing of this radio warning; she thought that a town so near the home of Helen Keller had no business suggesting life was “cheerful” or that the streets were ever safe. The reporter on the radio went on to explain rather melodramatically that there was a maniac loose. A young man had gone crazy at Annie Sullivan Mall on the outskirts of Painton and tried to kill his wife. Right now, live on the radio, this man was shooting out the windows of a florist shop in the mall, and the reporter was outside in the atrium hiding behind a cart selling crystals and pewter dwarves. No one was stopping the man because he had a nine-millimeter automatic assault weapon with him, and he had yelled out the window that he had no problem using it. The reporter had shouted at him, “No problem,” and urged the police to hurry up. The reporter happened to be there broadcasting live at the mall because it was the Painton Merchants Super Savers Summertime Sale for the benefit of the Painton Panthers High School football team, 1992 state semifinalists, and he’d been sent to cover it. But a maniac trying to kill his wife was naturally a bigger story, and the reporter was naturally very excited.
Lucy turned on her police scanner as she searched around for an old pack of the cigarettes Prewitt had always been hiding so she wouldn’t realize he’d gone back to smoking again despite his high cholesterol. He’d never hidden them very well, not nearly as well as his sexual escapades, and she’d constantly come across crumpled packs that he’d lost track of. Lucy had never smoked herself, and had little patience with the Gardenia Club members’ endless conversations about when they’d quit, how they’d quit, or why they’d quit. But today Lucy decided to start. Why not? Why play by the rules when what did it get you? Lighting the match, she sucked in the smoke deeply; it set her whole body into an unpleasant spasm of coughing and tingling nerves. She liked the sensation; it matched her mood.
On the police scanner she heard the dispatcher rushing patrol cars to the mall. This maniac fascinated her, and she went back to the radio, where the reporter was explaining the situation. Apparently the young man had gone to the mall to shoot his wife because she’d left him for another man. According to the maniac’s grievance to the reporter, his wife was still using his credit cards and had been in the midst of a shopping spree at the mall before he caught up with her in the Hank Williams Concourse, where they’d fought over her plan to run off with this other man and stick the maniac with the bills. She’d fled down the concourse to the other man, who owned a florist shop at the east end of the concourse. It was here that the maniac caught up with her again, this time with the gun he’d run back to his sports van to collect. He’d shot them both, but in trying to avoid other customers had managed only to hit the florist in the leg and to pulverize one of his wife’s shopping bags. Plaster flying from a black swan with a dracaena plant in its back gouged a hole out of his wife’s chin. He’d allowed the other customers to run out of the shop but held the lovers hostage.
Lucy could hear the sirens of the approaching patrol cars even on the radio. But by the time the police ran into the atrium with all their new equipment, the florist was hopping out of his shop on one foot, holding on to his bleeding leg and shouting that the husband had run out the back door. The police ran after him while the reporter gave a running commentary as if it were a radio play. As the florist was wheeled into the ambulance, he told the reporter that the maniac had “totally trashed” his shop, “terminator time.” He sounded amazingly high-spirited about it. The reporter also interviewed the wife as she was brought out in angry hysterics with a bandage on her chin. She said that her husband had lost his mind and had nobody but himself to blame if the police killed him. She was then driven off to the hospital with the florist.
Lucy made herself eat a tuna sandwich, although she never seemed to be hungry anymore. When she finished, the maniac was still on the loose and still in possession of the nine-millimeter gun that he’d bought only a few months earlier at the same mall. News of the failure of the police to capture him was oddly satisfying. Lucy imagined herself running beside this betrayed husband through the streets of Painton, hearing the same hum in their hearts. The radio said that neighbors were taking care of the couple’s four-year-old triplets, Greer, Gerry, and Griffin, who hadn’t been told that their father had turned into a maniac in Annie Sullivan Mall. The couple’s neighbors on Fairy Dell Drive were shocked; such a nice man, they said, a good provider and a family man. “I’dah never thought Jimmy’d do something like this in a million years, and you ask anybody else in Painton, they’ll tell you the same,” protested his sister, who’d driven to the mall to plead with her brother to come out of the florist shop, but who had arrived too late.
The reporter was obliged temporarily to return the station to its Mellow Music program, Songs of Your Life, playing Les Brown’s Band of Renown doing “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries.” Lucy twisted the dial to off. She did not believe that life was a bowl of cherries, and she never had. In her view life was something more along the lines of a barefoot sprint over broken glass. She felt this strongly, although she herself had lived a life so devoid of horror that she might easily have been tricked into thinking life was the bowl of sweet fruit that her husband Prewitt had always insisted it was. The surprised reaction of the Mall Maniac’s neighbors and family annoyed her. Why hadn’t they suspected? But then, why hadn’t she suspected Prewitt and Amorette of betraying her? At least the maniac had noticed what was going on around him — that his wife was stockpiling possessions on his credit cards while planning to run off with the florist. Lucy herself had been such an idiot that when years ago she’d wanted to leave Prewitt and start her life over, he’d talked her out of it with all his pieties about commitment and family values and the children’s happiness, when at the exact same time, he’d been secretly sleeping with Amorette Strumlander!
Lucy smashed the smiley mug against the lip of the kitchen counter until it broke and her finger was left squeezed around its yellow handle as if she’d hooked a carousel’s brass ring. There, that was the last one. She’d broken all the rest this morning, and she still felt like screaming. It occurred to her there was no reason why she shouldn’t. She didn’t have to worry about disturbing her “family” anymore.
It had been twenty-one days now since the death of the perfidious Prewitt. Last Sunday the Rhoads son and daughter had finally returned to their separate lives in Atlanta, after rushing home to bury their father and console their mother. These two young people, whom Prewitt had named Ronny after Reagan and Ju
lie after Andrews, took after their father, and they thought life was a bowl of cherries too, or at least a bowl of margaritas. They were affable at the funeral, chatting to family friends like Amorette Strumlander about their new jobs and new condo clusters. They liked Amorette (and had Lucy not distinctly recalled giving birth to them, she could have sworn Amorette was their mother, for like her they both were slyly jejune). Ronny and Julie were happy with their lifestyles, which they had mimicked from trendy magazines. These magazines did not explain things like how to behave at a father’s funeral, and perhaps as a result Ronny and Julie had acted during the service and at the reception afterward with that convivial sardonic tolerance for the older generation that they had displayed at all other types of family functions. Amorette later told Lucy she thought “the kids held up wonderfully.”
Lucy was not surprised by her children’s lack of instinct for grief. Their father would have behaved the same way at his funeral had he not been the one in the casket. “The kids and I are day people,” Prewitt had told his wife whenever she mentioned any of life’s little imperfections like wars and earthquakes and pogroms and such. “You’re stuck in the night, Lucy. That’s your problem.” It was true. Maybe she should have grown up in the North, where skies darkened sooner and the earth froze and the landscape turned black and gray, where there wasn’t so much Southern sun and heat and light and daytime. For life, in Lucy’s judgment, was no daytime affair. Life was stuck in the night; daytime was just the intermission, the waiting between the acts of the real show. When she listened to police calls on the radio scanner, the reports of domestic violence, highway carnage, fire, poison, electrocution, suffocation, maniacs loose in the vicinity of Annie Sullivan Mall always struck her as what life was really about. It suddenly occurred to her that there must have been a police dispatch for Prewitt after she’d phoned 911. She’d found him by the opened refrigerator on the kitchen floor lying beside a broken bowl of barbecued chicken wings. The scanner must have said: “Apparent heart attack victim, male, Caucasian, forty-eight.”
The Best American Mystery Stories 3 Page 34
