The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  Jeffers saw the tenant who lived across the street walking up the driveway. As he walked, he smacked at the ash-brown leaves of the spent okra that framed one side of the property.

  Jeffers dropped the unlighted match in his palm.

  The tenant stopped at the porch steps. A scrawny man with brow-darkened eyes and a fresh crookedness barbing his face as if he’d been howling or banging his head against the wall.

  “RD, what’s ailing you?”

  “We buried LaRae this morning,” RD said, closing his eyes.

  “I was sorry to hear about LaRae,” Jeffers said. He looked down at RD, who shifted his weight between his feet like a child needing to pee. He patted the porch railing, causing it to wobble. “It’s a hard thing to lose a wife,” Jeffers continued, to fill in the silence. He pictured his two wives in his mind, pondered which one might meet him in heaven, if there was a heaven. Age had made him hopeful again that there was such a place. Experience made him doubtful. “I’ve lost two myself.”

  RD nodded thoughtfully at the bottom of the porch steps. He shifted his weight and squinted at the pennies and water bags.

  Jeffers studied RD. He knew little about him. Looked mid-thirties, but Jeffers had stopped believing he could guess a person’s age a long time ago. A quiet tenant—paid his rent. But RD had a bottom-of-the-litter look, runtish, forgotten. He looked given to schemes. He might have been the skinniest grown man Jeffers had ever seen—his shoulders angled like those on a starved child. He’d known scrounging for sure. RD and LaRae had come from Tennessee.

  “She saw haints, you know,” RD said.

  “Haints?”

  “Ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?”

  RD nodded and splashed a brown vein of spit into the grass. A wind buffeted his face, and he looked a slight better to Jeffers, who supposed the little man had come over just to talk out his sadness. Jeffers struck the match, sheltered its flame, and pressed it to the tobacco while making gentle, moist pops to pull the fire into the pipe.

  “In that house of yourn,” RD said.

  “What’s that?” Jeffers said.

  “Haints in your house.”

  “This house?”

  “No, ourn. The one you lettin us have.”

  Jeffers lowered the pipe and shook out the match. “Rent.”

  “Yep. Haints in that house you lettin us rent.”

  Jeffers leaned forward and looked across the porch where he could see through a stand of weather-broken pines the squat gables of the house RD rented. Below the boundary of trees, a graying neighborhood dog was working over roadkill flattened on the unlined blacktop that split the properties.

  “I’ll be damned.” Jeffers looked back at RD, who had climbed the first step and was leaning toward the porch as if he wanted to come up. He was almost panting.

  “Them haints killed LaRae.”

  Jeffers leaned back in his chair and drew on his pipe. The spirit of the tobacco warmed his mouth as he considered his next words. RD climbed another step. He shuddered and proffered a what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it glare. Behind the spindly man, the sun was low and the sky bloodied in a balsam light.

  Jeffers took the pipe down. “I am sorry about LaRae. But what do you want me to do about a ghost? I cain’t charge it rent.”

  “You could pay for LaRae’s buryin expense, that’s what, since it was your haints that killed her.”

  “How you figure they’re mine?”

  “It was in your house.”

  “Well, they could have come with you from Tennessee. I’ve had untold number of folks live in that house. Not one of them complained of ‘haints.’ ”

  RD squinted, catching the sarcasm in Jeffers’s voice. He quivered.

  “If there are haints in that house, as you say, RD, they must’ve come to roost the same time you did. And that house is only supposed to be occupied by two people. The way I see it, you might owe me money, housing your haints, when your lease says only two shall live there.” Jeffers drew on his pipe, satisfied with himself. He felt a pleasant jolt of blood and adrenaline shock his body.

  “That house killed her.”

  “House or haints?”

  RD chewed the inside of his cheek. The broad outlines of his skull were visible. He reminded Jeffers of the half-fed prisoners who worked chain gang years ago.

  “RD, how do you make money? You work?”

  RD, leering, backed down a step.

  Jeffers held his gaze wide-eyed until he squinted from the falling sun breaking from the clouds. If this was a scheme, Jeffers thought, it’s awfully weak.

  “Before LaRae passed, she told me that you would take care of her funeral bill. She said it was your wives who told her that you’d cover it.”

  Jeffers peered unblinkingly through white smoke.

  “You going to pay?”

  “What do you think?” Jeffers said.

  “I think you will.”

  For a brief moment he considered giving in before a surge of meanness rose up. “Get the hell off my porch ’fore I throw you off.”

  RD stood up straight and a haughty tic ran through his shoulders. He turned and headed back in the direction he’d come from.

  Jeffers called to RD when the little man was equidistant between the porch and the road: “If you see them haints, send them my way.”

  RD didn’t respond. As he passed the old dog in the road, he stopped to stare at it, and then for no reason scared it off its tire-mangled dinner.

  Jeffers spat a long silvery streak into his boxwoods. He relaxed and puffed, satisfied. But the reminder of LaRae’s passing made him think again about his own shortening time, of what was to come. He lowered the pipe and leaned once more to see the house across the road, looking for the little, dissatisfied man, angry with him for his audacity and privation and for his existence, which Jeffers suddenly considered unearned.

  The little spat with his tenant left Jeffers wanting some more excitement and so he went to the Ashcross property to run the squatters out. He found no one there. They had trounced the weeds around the house, creating a cowpath to a five-gallon bucket simmering with turds and urine. In the long-untended shade tree hung wispy catfish skins. Several catfish heads had been hammered into the tree’s trunk and their husky mouths and eyes gawked in bewilderment. Redneck trophies, Jeffers thought.

  Standing on the Ashcross porch, Jeffers recalled the last time he’d been inside the house, holding the little girl by the shoulder, quizzing her on her father’s death, and her dry-eyed answers. Her little fingernails had been chewed to the quick.

  His remembrance was broken when he glimpsed a young pregnant woman walking down the road, her hair a freak of colors—yellow, red—her stomach full and hanging low. Jeffers thought for a moment she was the squatter, but she passed the weed-lined driveway as if she were headed elsewhere. And then Jeffers felt a twinge of lust, something he hadn’t felt in a while. He stifled a half-laugh. If asked what he thought of the young woman, he would have ranted over her hairstyle and clothes—he knew a slut when he saw one! But in truth she was lovely, and her pregnancy made her all the more so. What if she had been his squatter? Could he have thrown her out? He’d never felt sorry for squatters. One winter he had thrown a whole family out, and learned later that one of their children died of pneumonia. Still he thought he’d made the right decision. He was well-off and thought it was because he’d made good decisions. These people had to earn their place; they couldn’t just take. Wanting something for nothing, that was the problem.

  He still liked to brag that he had once held over a million dollars in his hands. It had come from the sale of the White property, which he considered bad luck, seeing as how he got it the same day his first wife died. His second wife came with property but she died within a year of when they married. Her kids had taken her away from Jeffers, back to her home state, to care for her. He’d given all of her property to her children. It seemed the right thing to do. And after she passed, he sold off s
everal large sections of his holdings. But he wished he had it all back now. It worried him how easily he’d accepted age, how he’d told himself he was getting old and selling off his properties was a good idea. At one time he’d owned twenty-one rental properties, most of them run-down farmhouses in which he installed young couples and hard-working hillbillies. Grief-pierced, he yearned to have it all back. Now he just had the house next to his own to give him his pocket money, and the Ashcross place.

  James wanted Ashcross to put a church on, and he wanted Jeffers to donate it. But there was promise still in the property and money to be made. He needed to get the squatters out, and install fresh tenants. It was also that his son wanted the plot so bad that Jeffers couldn’t let it go; he couldn’t let his son take the last of his holdings, leaving him with just the squat-gable home. In his imagination, Jeffers saw his son holding the hands of a dying parish­ioner, whispering that the man who had owned the property had donated it, just gave it up. The face of the imagined parishioner looked up with a wink and smirked. And Jeffers saw that this was where his son would bury him, too—under a light-gray headstone carved with his birth and death and ASHCROSS UNITED METHODIST CHURCH BENEFACTOR.

  The young woman passed behind some trees. His lust abated, the numbness in his feet stretched out as if originating from inside the bones. The numbness, the age. There would be a time soon when he wouldn’t be able to care for himself. He wouldn’t be able to rise from a chair, wouldn’t be able to put himself to bed, wouldn’t be able to cook or attend to his own needs. Perhaps giving the land to his son would be a good thing, and then James would have no choice but to make it his duty to devote himself to Jeffers. But what he really wanted was someone who would care for him without demand. He would pay for that.

  That night Jeffers dreamed of LaRae. He dreamed of going over to the little house with pockets full of cash. He found her there with a baby up to her breast while she smiled brightly at him. He looked down at the baby, its jaw fluttering, gnawing. Unhealthy, pallid, the child unmistakably RD’s: they shared the same sunken cheeks. LaRae draped a frayed copper-colored shawl over her chest and tugged the baby from her nipple as if to show Jeffers the infant, and the child gave out an insufferable squall, bile resembling doused ash dribbled from its mouth. Its cry wasn’t like any infant’s he’d heard before, and Jeffers woke to hear that the sound wasn’t the child’s at all but was coming from something else nearby. He sat up in bed, switched on the bedside lamp.

  The painful howl went up again.

  His feet and shins were numb, as they often were when he woke. He slipped on his yard shoes and tried to stand. He sat down on the bed and then stood up again. It felt as though he was walking on peg legs. He stumbled across the room. Another wail went out. He forwent his pants. He went to the closet, held on to the doorjamb, his leg muscles smarting and stinging. He pulled out his pistol. He tromped down the hall in his boxer shorts and undershirt; he said a prayer that his varicose legs wouldn’t give out and that he’d have sense enough to protect himself. He looked out the living room window and saw nothing. He eased his front door open, his pistol pointed in the direction he imagined the sound was coming from, his lips parted, ready to receive a breath of cool air.

  The outdoor lamp washed everything in a plaintive white or buried it in shadow. At the far end of his yard, a quaking silhouette crouched under a pecan tree. He walked slowly over to it—his face jutted trying to see what it was. His pistol lowered.

  The old dog moaned as Jeffers approached. Its gut had been slit open. Blood adorned its fur in black blotches.

  He heard rustling in the pine trees that flanked his property. He kept the pistol lowered and listened. He called for the cutthroat to come out. He called again. The base of the pine trees were bleached white from the lamp’s light and between their trunks Jeffers could see only darkness.

  He looked down at the dog. One visible eye glinted in the sparse light. Jeffers looked back at the stand of pine trees before gripping the barrel of the pistol. He brought its handle down swiftly on the dog’s skull to avoid firing a bullet in the middle of the night, which would bring the curiosity and ire of neighbors. And there was the cost of the bullet to consider.

  He hit it again—and then a third time. After each strike, he glanced back at the trees and saw only rib-white pine trunks and night. Jeffers peered down at the extinguished dog before limping back to the house, knowing the man in the pines was watching.

  His sleep was chancy these days. Many nights he sat up, the vapors from the isopropyl alcohol rising from his feet, a subsuming numbness creeping further up his legs. He often mapped its ascent, trying to sense the true direction of the numbness, what area it would covet next, whether it had or would enter his spine or some other territory. When would it be too late to ask for help? When would the numbness settle in his stomach and make it impossible to eat? Or would it skip his stomach and spine and ground itself with fresh purchase in his heart? And then what? Death.

  But this night Jeffers sat at his kitchen table, puffing on his pipe, replaying the events. He figured it was RD who had gutted the dog. He imagined the two, both lean and dirty animals—RD with the upper hand only because he had sense to bait the scrawny thing and could wield a knife.

  Just before light, he went out with a shovel to remove the dog from the yard. Taped to the door was a list of LaRae’s burial expenses written in an untrained hand. At the bottom, beneath the tally, was the message “You O me that much RD.”

  It was unlike Jeffers to befoul one of his properties and he wished he hadn’t. He knew he might suffer for the considerable effort it took to carry the animal up a ladder, but he was angry and dropping the dog’s gut-slung body down RD’s chimney made him feel young, as if he were playing some outlandish prank. He knew the dog would get stuck in the flue and create an unbearable stink. But it had felt good, his legs felt strong.

  Seated on his porch, a warm breeze eased him. Numbness slowly budded in his toes. Soon it would blossom up his legs, and then like vines it would gather around his waist and approach his back. Unrelieved numbness: faintly its tendrils would furl the base of his spine. He knew paralysis would take soon. He looked up at the bags of pennies and water. Such a simple measure, and a small cost to keep the flies at bay. With lips folded between teeth, he squelched a whimper.

  As the numbness grew, he pondered over the list of expenses RD had tacked to his door. He thought of his own wives. One was buried in the city’s cemetery and the other was buried in North Carolina. Even though it had been almost a decade, he knew by the tally tacked to his door that he’d spent more, given more respect, to his wives than RD had to LaRae.

  He saw RD coming up the driveway, gripping something nearly hidden in his hand.

  “Ain’t you got business?” Jeffers blurted.

  “I’m here on business. I’ve been to the funeral home.”

  He gazed down at RD, who was dressed in a shirt Jeffers wouldn’t have used for a rag—threadbare in the chest, as if it belonged to a man who itched a lot. He noticed that RD was petting a rabbit’s foot in his left hand, part of a keychain. “You bring that for luck?”

  “Hell, I don’t need no luck.”

  “You need something. You’ve eaten or buried the best part.”

  “You get my note.”

  “Yeah, I got your duns.”

  “I told them at the home you’ll pay for it.”

  “You kill that dog?”

  “LaRae said it was your wives that haunted her. Said you beat ’em.”

  “I never struck them.”

  “That’s not what they said.”

  “You kill that dog?” Jeffers asked again.

  “Said you should have to pay.”

  “You kill that dog?” Jeffers leaned forward, puffed smoke.

  RD gnawed at the inside of his cheek. “Why don’t you give me a smoke and I’ll knock off a few dollars on that bill.”

  “You kill that dog?”

  “I
know who did. I’ll tell you for ten dollars.”

  “So you know it’s dead.”

  “I know you been asking about a dead one, and that one’s been lately put out of its misery.”

  Jeffers shot a gleaming stream of spit at the little man without hitting him. “I didn’t cause its misery.”

  “But you killed it.”

  “I put it down.”

  “Then why are you ragging on me about killing a dog?”

  “Cause you’re the one who gutted it to start with.”

  “I don’t know about that,” RD said.

  “You don’t know you gutted a dog?”

  “I didn’t.”

  Jeffers was silent.

  Looking at the spit webbed across the parched green leaves of the boxwoods, RD said, “What’s that dog mean to you?”

  “Nothing. Having it slaughtered on my property does mean something.”

  “Well, I’ll help you look for your dog-gutter if you pay for LaRae.”

  Jeffers felt the slight palpation of his heart. “I’m not paying you for a goddamn thing.”

  “You will.”

  “Why do you think I’ll pay?”

  “You want peace, don’t you?”

  Jeffers legs were numb, up to his stomach. At that moment, he wanted more than anything to chase RD down and beat him senseless.

  Slightly hunched, RD eased up onto the porch as if he sensed weakness. He stood up and reached for one of the Ziploc bags of pennies and plucked it down from its nail. Jeffers’s head twitched and he ground his teeth. There was no feeling whatsoever in his legs, as if he were dead from the waist down.

  RD turned and walked down the steps.

  “Hey,” Jeffers called. “Come get this.” Jeffers held up the funeral bill.

  RD stood in the yard, with a big smile on his face, danced a burlesque and mocked masturbation and then spat a reddish brown streak. He wiped his chin. “You can knock four cents off that bill,” he said. He turned and walked out of the yard, disappearing behind the trees.