The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  I went back to the campus many times. I went to avoid my mother as much as anything. Her new boyfriend was an asshole, and she whined when he was around. When he wasn’t around, she whined about him on the phone. Sometimes she called two people in a row to whine about exactly the same things that he’d said or done. Even when I played music loud so I couldn’t hear her, I could feel her. When that happened, I’d leave my music on so that she’d think I was still in my room and I’d go to the campus. I’d follow lone female students as closely as I could, and I’d feel the other place running against the membrane of the world, almost touching it.

  Why does it make sense to put romantic music together with a story about a little boy murdering people? Because it does make sense—only I don’t know how. It seems dimly to have to do with justice, with some wrong being avenged, but what? The hurts of childhood? The stupidity of life? The kid doesn’t seem to be having fun. Random murder just seems like a job he has to do. But why?

  Soon enough I realized that the college campus was the wrong place to think about making it real. It wasn’t an environment I could control; there were too many variables. I needed to get the girl someplace private. I needed to have certain things there. I needed to have a gun. I could find a place; there were deserted places. I could get a gun from Chet’s house; I knew where his father kept his. But the girl?

  Then, while I was in the car with my mom one day, we saw a guy hitchhiking. He was middle-aged and fucked-up-looking, and my mom—we were stopped at a light—remarked that nobody in their right mind would pick him up. Two seconds later, somebody pulled over for him. My mom laughed.

  I started hitchhiking. Most of the people who picked me up hitchhiking were men, but there were women, too. No one was scared of me. I was almost eighteen by then, but I was still small and quiet-looking. Women picked me up because they were concerned about me.

  I didn’t really plan to do it. I just wanted to feel the gun in my pocket and look at the woman and know that I could do it. There was this one—a thirtyish blonde with breasts that I could see through her open coat. But then she said she was pregnant and I started thinking about what if I was killing the baby?

  Doug had a lot of nightmares when he was a baby, by which I mean between the ages of two and four. When he cried out in his sleep, it was usually Marla who went to him. But one night she was sick and I told her to stay in bed while I went to comfort the boy. He was still crying “Mommy!” when I sat on the bed, and I felt his anxiety at seeing me instead of his mother, felt the moment of hesitation in his body before he came into my arms, vibrating rather than trembling, sweating and fragrant with emotion. He had dreamed that he was home alone and it was dark, and he was calling for his mother, but she wasn’t there. “Daddy, Daddy,” he wept, “there was a sick lady with red eyes and Mommy wouldn’t come. Where is Mommy?”

  That may’ve been the first time I truly remembered her, the woman in the car. It was so intense a moment that in a bizarre intersection of impossible feelings I got an erection with my crying child in my arms. But it lasted only a moment. I picked Doug up and carried him into our bedroom so that he could see his mother and nestle against her. I stayed awake nearly all night watching them.

  The day it happened was a bright day, but windy and cold, and my mom would not shut up. I just wanted to watch a movie, but even with the TV turned up loud—I guess that’s why she kept talking; she didn’t think I could hear—I couldn’t blot out the sound of her yakking about how ashamed this asshole made her feel. I whispered, “If you’re so ashamed why do you talk about it?” She said, “It all goes back to being fucking molested.” She lowered her voice; the only words I caught were “fucking corny.” I went out into the hallway to listen. “The worst of it was that he wouldn’t look at me,” she said. I could almost hear her pacing around, the phone tucked against her shoulder. “That’s why I fall for these passive-aggressive types who turn me on and then make me feel ashamed.” Whoever she was talking to must’ve said something funny then, because she laughed. I left the TV on and walked out. I took the gun, but more for protection against perverts than the other thing.

  I gave my boy that dream as surely as if I’d handed it to him. But I’ve given him a lot of other things, too. The first time he caught a fish he responded to my encouraging words with a bright glance that I will never forget. We let that one go, but only after he had held it in his hands, cold and quick, muscle with eyes and a heart, scales specked with yellow and red, and one tiny fin orange. Then the next one, bigger, leaping to break the rippling murk—I said, “Don’t point the rod at the fish. Keep the tip up, keep it up”—and he listened to me and he brought it in. There is a picture of it on the corkboard in his room, the fish in the net, the lure bristling in its crude mouth. I have another picture, too, of him smiling triumphantly, holding it in his hands, its shining, still living body fully extended.

  She was older than I’d wanted, forty or so, but still good-looking. She had a voice that was strong and lifeless at the same time. She had black hair and she wore tight black pants. She did not have a wedding ring, which meant that maybe no one would miss her. She picked me up on a lightly traveled 45-mile-an-hour road. She was listening to a talk show on the radio and she asked if I wanted to hear music instead. I said no, I liked talk shows.

  “Yeah?” she said. “Why?”

  “Because I’m interested in current events.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I just listen to this shit because the voices relax me. I don’t really care what they’re talking about.”

  They were talking about a war somewhere. Bombs were going off in markets where people bought vegetables; somebody’s legs had been blown off. We turned onto a road with a few cars, but none close to us.

  “You don’t care?”

  “No, why should I? Oh, about this?” She paused. There was something about a little boy being rushed to an overcrowded hospital. “Yeah, that’s bad. But it’s not like we can do anything about it.” On the radio, foreign people cried.

  I took the gun out of my pocket.

  I said, “Do you have kids?”

  “No,” she said. “Why?”

  “Take me to Old Post Road. I’m going to the abandoned house there.”

  “I’m not going by there, but I can get you pretty close. So why do you care about current events? I didn’t give a shit at your age.”

  “Take me there or I’ll kill you.”

  She cocked her head and wrinkled her brow, as if she were trying to be sure she’d heard right. Then she looked down at the gun and cut her eyes up at me; quickly, she looked back at the road. The car picked up speed.

  “Take the next right or you’ll die.” My voice at that moment came not from me but from the other place. My whole body felt like an erection. She hit the right-turn signal. There was a long moment as we approached the crucial road. The voices on the radio roared ecstatically.

  She pulled over to the shoulder.

  “What are you doing?”

  She put the car in park.

  “Turn right or you die!”

  She unbuckled her seat belt and turned to face me. “I’m ready,” she said. She leaned back and gripped the steering wheel with one hand, as if to steady herself. With her free hand she tapped herself between the eyes—bright, hot blue, rimmed with red. “Put it here,” she said. “Go for it.”

  A car went by. Somebody in the passenger seat glanced at us blankly. “I don’t want to do it here. There’s witnesses. You need to take me to the place.”

  “What witnesses? That car’s not stopping—nobody’s going to stop unless the emergency lights are on and they’re not, look.”

  “But if I shoot you in the head the blood will spray on the window and somebody could see.” It was my own voice again: the power was gone. The people on the radio kept talking. Suddenly I felt my heart beating.

  “Okay, then do it here.” She opened her jacket to show me her chest. “Nobody’ll hear. When you’re done yo
u can move me to the passenger seat and drive the car wherever.”

  “Get into the passenger seat now and I’ll do it.”

  She laughed, hard. Her eyes were crazy. They were crazy the way an animal can be crazy in a tiny cage. “Hell, no. I’m not going to your place with you. You do it here, motherfucker.”

  I realized then that her hair was a wig, and a cheap one. For some reason that made her seem even crazier. I held my gun hand against my body to hide the tremor.

  “Come on, honey” she said. “Go for it.”

  Like a star, a red dot appeared in the white of her left eye. The normal place and the other place were turning into the same place, quick but slow, the way a car accident is quick but slow. I stared. The blood spread raggedly across her eye. She shifted her eyes from my face to a spot somewhere outside the car and fixed them there. I fought the urge to turn and see what she was looking at. She shifted her eyes again. She looked me deep in the face.

  “Well?” she said. “Are you going to do it or not?”

  Words appeared in my head, like a sign reading I DON’T WANT TO.

  She leaned forward and turned on the emergency flashers. “Get out of my car,” she said quietly. “You’re wasting my time.”

  As soon as I got out, she hit the gas and burned rubber. I walked into the field next to the road, without an idea of where I might go. I realized after she was gone that she might call the police, but I felt in my gut that she would not—in the other place there are no police, and she was from the other place.

  Still, as I walked I took the bullets out of the gun and scattered them, kicking snow over them and stamping it down. I walked a long time, shivering horribly. I came across a drainage pipe and threw the empty gun into it. I thought, I should’ve gut-shot her—that’s what I should’ve done. And then got her to the abandoned house. I should’ve gut-shot the bitch. But I knew why I hadn’t. She’d been shot already, from the inside. If she had been somebody different I might actually have done it. But somehow the wig-haired woman had changed the channel and I don’t even know if she’d meant to.

  The fly bobbing on the brown, gentle water. The long grasses so green that they cast a fine, bright green on the brown water. The primitive fish mouth straining for water and finding it as my son releases it in the shallows. Its murky vanishing.

  The blood bursting in her eye; poor woman, poor mother. My mother died of colon cancer just nine months ago. Shortly after that, it occurred to me that the woman had been wearing that awful wig because she was sick and undergoing chemo. Though of course I don’t know.

  The hurts of childhood that must be avenged: so small and so huge. Before I grew up and stopped thinking about her, I thought about that woman a lot. About what would’ve happened if I’d gotten her there, to the abandoned house. I don’t remember anymore the details of these thoughts, only that they were distorted, swollen, blurred: broken face, broken voice, broken body left dying on the floor, watching me go with dimming, despairing eyes.

  These pictures are faded now and far away. But they can still make me feel something.

  The second time I put my hand on Doug’s shoulder, he didn’t move away inside; he was too busy tuning in to the line and the lure. Somewhere in him is the other place. It’s quiet now, but I know it’s there. I also know that he won’t be alone with it. He won’t know that I’m there with him, because we will never speak of it. But I will be there. He will not be alone with that.

  JESSE GOOLSBY

  Safety

  FROM The Greensboro Review

  NICHOLLE, MY NEWLY MINTED serious girlfriend, hails from southern Alabama. The first time I meet her family, her brother, Dub, takes me to his swimming hole. Just before we splash in the muddy river he slaps my back and says, “Watch fer moccasins and snappers.” Sure enough, we’re neck-deep under the hazy summer sky when I spot a black snake enter the water. I have no idea what kind it is, and I quickly lose sight of it. Dub, this crazy bastard, is unaffected by my update. I don’t want to be scared, but I’ve reached my breaking point and hurtle myself toward the bank. There’s a ways to go and every water ripple grows a tail and fangs. Behind me I hear Dub laughing at my terror.

  When it’s all done and I sit at the dinner table with Nicholle, Dub, and her parents, I wonder if there’s anything in my northern New Mexico upbringing that would scare Dub, and although I search hard, all I recall is a harmless bluegill fish attached to my pinkie when I’m eight. I look across the table at Nicholle’s mother, a cheerful, plump lady who, if I unfocus my eyes enough, could be Nicholle in thirty years. Her father smiles approvingly at me, so at least I have that going. I’m nervous as hell, but I still feel for Nicholle’s thin legs underneath the table. She swats me away.

  Dub scares me a little. His hair is cut at varied lengths and there appears to be a knife scar across his cheek. After dinner, he asks me if I’ve ever been waterboarded. I tell him no, and he says he hasn’t either.

  “But,” he says, “I beat up a homeless guy. Dumbass didn’t even fight back, just laid there.”

  “Thanks for that, Dub.”

  “I’ve seen some shit,” he says. He’s out of high school, probably eighteen or so, but has an enthusiasm and weakness of intellect that makes eighteen hard to swallow. “Nicholle don’t know this, but I can count cards. I act broke, but there’s ten thou in my room. Swear.”

  “Okay,” I say while fingering my chin, “cool.”

  I have no idea why I say “cool,” can’t think of anything else, and even Dub looks at me curiously.

  “You count cards?” he asks.

  Actually, I do, but I’m not interested in where the conversation will go or what I’ll be invited to do. “You mean like gambling?” I say.

  “Jesus,” he says, laughing. He shakes his head. “Gambling.”

  What Dub doesn’t know, and what I never plan on telling Ni­cholle, is that I do gamble. It’s not bad: local games with friends. I bring what I can lose and that’s it.

  I do have the bad type of secrets. At the top of the list is a night in Los Alamos, New Mexico, just after dusk. I was late to a no-limit game across town, and I decided to cut through the Woodmen Pointe subdivision. I was up to 40 miles per hour on the straightaway near the end of a row of tan stucco homes. I never saw the girl scatter from the shadows, never heard her over the radio. I only felt the bump of her body, like running over a small dog. And before I could think about anything, the Jeep stopped, my fingers strangled the wheel. I closed my eyes. For a weightless moment only sound: Tom Petty, the idling four-cylinder, a slight breeze whistling the aspen. When I opened my eyes, no one was outside to scream and rush forward and finger me. No cars approached the other way. There was just a motionless girl in my rearview mirror, basking in the filtered red brake light. She wore torn pink sweatpants, and the soles of her tiny shoes were brand-new white. I saw my arm reach out and turn off the radio, then put the Jeep into first. My eyes swung back to the rearview mirror just in time to see her legs jolt once, then calm. Was she dead or just now dying? I drove away. I could still see her through the suffocating air, now quiet as a napping child.

  Later that night I huddled in my shower, replaying images of the jolting pink legs. I tried to convince myself that she’d live, that a doctor would find her, that she’d suffer a little—a lifelong limp, perhaps—and there would be a recovery, but her death was on the news and in the paper the next morning. It was a hot story in Los Alamos for two weeks, until the wildfires took over. Even the big station in Albuquerque carried it. On the telecast the anchors reported the event and begged people to call in with any information on the assailant. They showed her family huddled on their front yard in front of microphones, their faces falling apart.

  I don’t know where my belief in a just universe comes from, but it’s there, and one day, be it snake or other ailment, I know my time will come. I can’t get it out of my head. The worst part is that it’s a waiting game, and so I wait and feel the possibility of justice h
overing over me, pausing until the time is right.

  The night I call Nicholle’s father to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage he cries. Gravel dances in his throat. “I couldn’t be happier,” he says. “I’ll let you talk to Karen.” There’s silence while he passes the phone, but his voice comes through again. “Two things, son.” It’s the first time he’s called me son. “One. I’ll only loan you money if Nicholle asks. Two. If you don’t have a gun, get one.” A pause. I smile. “Three. You’re a Tide fan when you visit. Four. I’ll give you a nickname which you probably won’t like. Just smile. Five. We’ve loved you for a while now. Good luck.”

  After I ask Nicholle to marry me under a flowering dogwood, she makes me call Dub.

  “Know where I been?” Dub says after telling me good job on the proposal. I tell him no, I don’t know where he’s been. “Riverboats, man. Rivers are international waters. No rules, buddy. State, government, can’t touch ’em.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Should get married on a riverboat. There’s one called the Gypsy.”

  “We’ll consider it, Dub.”

  “Love you, man,” he says, like he means it.

  I pass the phone to Nicholle, who’s all smiles. “The Gypsy?” she says while I shake my head next to her. She gives me a look. It means that Dub is off-limits.

  During our engagement, Nicholle and I pick up books about marriage. We open our favorite one, The Questions You Should Ask Before “I Do,” whenever we Sunday-drive from Knoxville, where we both work. I learn that Nicholle would never adopt, thinks sex three times a week is enough, hates cats, wants to visit Mongolia (“Just to say I’ve been”), doesn’t mind if I have to travel for work, dreams of performing on Broadway if she could sing, is scared of getting her mother’s cheeks, and doesn’t like it when I say, “Ya know what I’m saying?” when trying to prove a point.