The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  As Szabo headed away from the Denver airport, he could see its marvelous shape at the edge of the prairie, like a great nomads’ camp—a gathering of the tents of chieftains, more expressive of a world on the move than anything Szabo had ever seen. You flew into one of these tents, got food, a car, something to read, then headed out on your own smaller journey to the rapture of traffic, a rented room with a TV and a “continental” breakfast. It was an ectoplasmic world of circulating souls.

  On a sunny day, with satellite radio and an efficient midsized Korean sedan, the two-hour drive to the prison that had held his son for the past couple of years flew by. Szabo was able to think about his projects for the ranch—a new snow fence for the driveway, a mouse-proof tin liner for Moon’s grain bin, a rain gauge that wouldn’t freeze and crack, a bird feeder that excluded grackles and jays—nearly the whole trip. But toward the end of the drive his head filled with the disquieting static of remorse, self-blame, and sadness, and a short-lived defiant absolution. In the years that had turned out to be critical for David, all he had given him was a failing marriage and a bankrupt home. I should have just shot Karen and done the time, Szabo thought with a shameful laugh. The comic relief was brief. Mom in California, Dad in Montana, David in prison in Colorado: could they have foreseen this dispersion?

  Razor wire guaranteed the sobriety of any visitor. The vehicles in the visitors’ parking lot said plenty about the socioeconomics of the families of the imprisoned: Szabo’s shiny Korean rental stuck out like a sore thumb. The prison was a tidy fortress of unambiguous shapes that argued less with the prairie surrounding them than with the chipper homes of the nearby subdivision. It had none of the lighthearted mundane details of the latter—laundry hanging out in the sun, adolescents gazing under the hood of an old car, a girl sitting on the sidewalk with a handful of colored chalk. The place for your car, the place for your feet, the door that complied at the sight of you, were all profoundly devoid of grace—at least, to anyone whose child was confined there.

  David came into the visiting room with a promising, small smile and gave Szabo a hug. He had been a slight, quick-moving boy, but prison had given him muscle, thick, useless muscle that seemed to impair his agility and felt strange to the father who embraced him. They sat in plastic chairs. Szabo noticed that the room, which was painted an incongruous robin’s-egg blue, had a drain in the middle of its floor, a disquieting fact.

  “Are you getting along all right, David?”

  “Given that I don’t belong here, sure.”

  “I was hoping to hear from you—” Szabo caught himself, determined not to suggest any sort of grievance. David smiled.

  “I got your letters.”

  “Good.” Szabo nodded agreeably. There was nothing to look at in the room except the person you were speaking to.

  “How’s Grandma?” David asked.

  “I think she’s doing as well as can be expected. You might drop her a note.”

  “Oh, right. ‘Dear Grandma, you’re sure lucky to be growing old at home instead of in a federal prison.’”

  Szabo had had enough.

  “Good, David, tell her that. Old as she is, she never got locked up.”

  David looked at his father, surprised, and softened his own voice. “You said in your letter you’d had some health problem.”

  “My shoulder. I had surgery.”

  Szabo knew that the David before him was not David on drugs, but now that the drugs were gone, he still hadn’t gone back to being the boy he’d been before. Maybe it would happen gradually. Or perhaps Szabo was harboring yet another fruitless hope.

  “Melinda still working for you?”

  “I couldn’t do without her. She stayed with me even when I couldn’t pay her.”

  “Melinda’s hot.”

  “She’s attractive.”

  “No, Dad, Melinda’s hot.”

  Szabo didn’t know what David meant by this, if anything, and he didn’t want to know. Maybe David just wanted him to realize that he noticed such things.

  “David, you’ve got less than a year to go. Concentrate on avoiding even the appearance of anything that could set you back. You’ll be home soon.”

  “Home?”

  “Absolutely. Where your friends are, where you grew up. Home is where your mistakes can be seen in context. You go anywhere else—David, you go anywhere else and you’re an ex-con. You’ll have to spend all your time overcoming that, when everyone at home already knows you’re a great kid.”

  “When I get out of here,” David said in measured tones, “I’m going to live with Mom and Cliff.”

  “In California?”

  “Last time I checked.”

  Szabo was determined not to react to this. He let the moment subside, and David now seemed to want to warm up. He smiled faintly at the blue ceiling.

  “And yes, I’ll write Grandma back.”

  “So you heard from her?”

  David laughed. “About her boyfriend, Barney. I think that’s so sweet. A relationship! Is Barney her age?”

  “Actually, he’s quite a bit younger.”

  As Szabo drove back to the airport, he tried to concentrate on the outlandish news of Barney’s role in his mother’s life, but he didn’t get anywhere. He couldn’t stop thinking about David, and thought of him in terms of a proverb he had once heard from a Mexican man who had worked for him: “You have only one mother. Your father could be any son of a bitch in the world.” That’s me! I’m any son of a bitch in the world.

  He did have a mother, however, there in God’s waiting room with a new companion. His late father, a hard-working tradesman, would have given Barney a wood shampoo with a rake handle. But my standing, thanks to my modest prosperity and education, means that I shall have to humor Barney, and no doubt my most earnest cautions about the forty-year age gap between Barney and my mother will be flung back in my face, Szabo thought. Suddenly tears burned in his eyes: he was back to David.

  Drugs had swept through their small town one year. They’d always been around, but that year they were everywhere, and they had destroyed David’s generation. The most ordinary children had become violent, larcenous, pregnant, sick, lost, or dead. And then the plague had subsided. David, an excellent student, had injected the drugs between his toes, and his parents had suspected only that he suddenly disliked them. Instead of going to college, he had apprenticed with a chef for nearly a year, before heading to prison. David didn’t think that he would go back to drugs when he was released, and neither did his father. But his bitterness seemed to be here to stay, fed, likely, by his memory of the things that he had done in his days of using. Perhaps he blamed himself for the failure of his parents’ marriage. The body he had acquired in the weight room seemed to suit his current burdened personality. The way he looked, he could hardly go back to what he had been.

  The tractor was wet and gleaming in the bright sunlight. Barney was gathering stray bits of baler twine and rolling them up into a neat ball. He hardly seemed to notice Szabo’s arrival, so Szabo carried his suitcase into the house without a word. Once inside, he glanced furtively through the hall window at Barney, then went back out.

  “Good morning, Barney.”

  “Hi.”

  “This shoulder thing is behind me now. I think I’m ready to go back to work here.” Barney looked more quizzical than the situation called for. “So let’s square up and call it a day.”

  “Meaning what?” Barney asked with an extravagantly inquisitive look.

  “Meaning the job is over. Thank you very much. You’ve been a great help when I needed it most.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, I think so. I’m quite sure of it.”

  “It’s your call, Szabo. But there’s something about me you don’t know.”

  “I’m sure that’s the case. That’s nearly always the case, isn’t it, Barney?” Some ghastly revelation was at hand, and Szabo knew that there would be no stopping it. “But I’d be happy to know what it
is, in your instance.”

  Barney gazed at him a long time before he spoke. He said, “I am a respectable person.”

  Szabo found this unsettling. Clearly it was time to have a word with his mother. He asked her out to lunch, but she begged off, citing the new smoking rules that, she said disdainfully, were “sweeping the nation.” So he took her to the park near the river. Her size had been reduced by tobacco and her deplorable eating habits. She scurried along briskly, and any pause on Szabo’s part found her well ahead, poking into garden beds and uprooting the occasional weed to set an example. They found a bench and sat. Mrs. Szabo shook out a cigarette by tapping the pack against the back of her opposing hand, then raising the whole pack, with its skillfully protruded single butt, to her lips. There the cigarette hung, unlit, while she made several comments about the weather and dropped the pack back into her purse. Finally she lit it, and the first puff seemed to satisfy her profoundly.

  “How did you find David?”

  “Fine, I think. The way I get to see him down there . . . it’s uncomfortable. Just a big empty room.”

  “Is he still angry?”

  “Not that I could see.”

  “He was such an angry little boy.”

  “Well, he’s not little anymore, Mom. He’s got big muscles.”

  “Let’s hope he doesn’t misuse them. He got that attitude from your wife. The nicest thing I can say about her is that she kept on going.”

  “She married a decent, successful guy.”

  “What else could she do? She didn’t have the guts to rob a bank.”

  “You forget what David was like before his problems. He didn’t have an attitude. He was a nice boy.”

  He could see she wasn’t listening.

  “Barney said you told him he was no longer needed.”

  “He knew it was temporary from the start.”

  “Well, he’s certainly got my place pulled together. My God, what a neatnik! And he made me insure the Russell, which I should have done a long time ago. He thinks that David’s in this pickle because he got away with murder while he was growing up.”

  “What? He’s never met David!”

  “Barney’s a very bright individual. He doesn’t have to know every last thing firsthand.”

  “I think his views on how Karen and I raised David would be enhanced by actually meeting David.”

  “Why?”

  “Jesus Christ, Mom.”

  “Of course you’re grumpy. Barney does so much for me and you want me all to yourself. Can’t you just relax?”

  Telling people to relax is not as aggressive as shooting them, but it’s up there. The first time Barney had driven the tractor, he’d nearly put it in the irrigation ditch. Szabo had cautioned him, and Barney had responded, “Is the tractor in the ditch?” Szabo had allowed that it was not. “Then relax,” Barney had said.

  There was nothing like it: leaning on his shovel next to the racing water, the last sun falling on gentle hills crowned with bluestem and golden buffalo grass, cool air rising from the river bottom. Moon grazed and followed Szabo as he placed his dams and sent a thin sheet of alpine water across the hay crop. The first cutting had been baled and put neatly in the stack yard by Barney. The second cutting grew slowly, was denser in protein and more sought after by owners trying to make their horses run faster. All the way down through this minor economic chain, people lost money, their marvelous dreams disconnected from hopes of success.

  Once winter was in the air, Szabo spent less time on his property and made an effort to do the things for his business that he was most reluctant to do. In November he flew to Düsseldorf and stayed at the Excelsior, eating Düsseldorfer Senfrostbraten with Herr Schlegel while pricing robotic plasma welding on the small titanium objects that he was buying from him. The apparent murkiness of Germany was doubtless no more than a symptom of Szabo’s ignorance of the language. He wondered if all the elders he saw window-shopping on the boulevards were ex-Nazis. And the skinheads at the Düsseldorf railroad station gave him a sense of historical alarm. After a long evening in the Altstadt, Szabo found himself quite drunk at the bar of the Lindenhof Hotel, where he took a room with a beautiful Afro-Czech girl called Amai, who used him as a comic, inebriated English instructor, her usual services being unnecessary, given his incapacity. Since Szabo appeared unable to navigate his way back to the Excelsior, Amai drove him there in return for the promise of a late breakfast in the Excelsior’s beautiful dining room. Afterward, she asked for his address so that they could stay in touch once he was home.

  From Germany, Szabo flew directly to Denver. He slept most of the way and awoke to anxiety at the idea that this was probably the last visit he would have before David was released. In the chaotic year that preceded his son’s confinement, he had never known what David was doing or to what extent he was in danger; in the last weeks of his marriage, he and Karen had admitted to feeling some relief, now that David was in jail, simply at knowing where he was. Perhaps it was that relief that had allowed them to separate. Yet Cliff’s prompt appearance had aroused Szabo’s suspicion: he sensed that California had beckoned while his marriage was still seemingly intact.

  David was warmer toward his father this time, but more fretful than he had been on the previous visit. Szabo understood that David was probably as afraid of his impending freedom as Szabo was on his behalf. He seemed, despite the muscles, small and frightened, his previous sarcasm no more than a wishful perimeter of defense. And the glow of anger was missing. Szabo wondered if jet lag was contributing to his heartache. He hardly knew what to say to his son.

  “In two weeks, you’ll be in California,” Szabo said.

  “That was the plan.”

  “Is it not anymore?”

  “Mom and Cliff said they didn’t want me. I’ve got to go to Plan B.”

  “I’m sorry, David. What’s Plan B?”

  “Plan B is I don’t know what Plan B is.”

  “What made your mom and Cliff change their minds?”

  David smiled slightly. He said, “I’m trying to remember how Mom put it. She said that a new relationship requires so many adjustments that introducing a new element could be destabilizing. It was sort of abstract. She left it to me to figure out that I was the destabilizing new element. Then Cliff got on the phone and said that unfortunately closure called for the patience of all parties.”

  “Did you say anything?”

  “Yes, Dad, I did. I told Cliff to blow it out his ass.”

  Szabo could have taken this as evidence of David’s unresolved anger. Instead, he enjoyed the feeling that they were in cahoots. “How did Cliff take that?”

  “He said he was sorry I felt that way. I told him not to be. I told him I didn’t feel anything at all.”

  They were quiet for long enough to suggest the inkling of comfort. Finally David said, “Tell me about Barney.”

  “Barney! What about him?”

  “Why did you send him here to see me?”

  Startling as this was, Szabo did not react at first. He was quiet for a long and awkward moment. Then he asked quite levelly, “When did Barney show up?”

  “While you were still in wherever. He said you sent him.”

  “Not exactly. Perhaps, based on our conversations, Barney thought it might be something I wanted him to do.” Szabo had no idea why he was dissembling like this, unless it was to buy time. He suddenly recalled, from David’s childhood, the purple dinosaur toy called Barney that was guaranteed to empower the child, a multimillion-dollar brainstorm for cashing in on stupid parents. “Did he explain what he was doing here? How did he get here?”

  “He came in your car.”

  “Of course. Well, that was cheaper than flying. What was the purpose of his trip?”

  “Are you asking me?”

  “David, cut me some slack. I’ve been halfway around the world.”

  “Did you sleep in those clothes, Dad?”

  Now Szabo was on the defensive, still in t
he clothes of his Düsseldorf night with Amai, whom, in this moment of bewilderment, he was certain he should have married. Escape was not so easy. If he hadn’t fallen off a tractor and injured himself, this squirrel Barney wouldn’t be in the middle of his life. What would he be doing? Living in Germany with Amai, siring octoroons and trying to keep her out of the bars? “I’m afraid I underpacked, David. I wore this suit at meetings and slept in it on the plane. So, Barney was here . . . for what?”

  “I guess for counseling of some kind, to prepare me for the outside world.” David winced at these last two words.

  “Why would Barney think he was in a position to counsel you?”

  “If you don’t know, Dad, I’m sure I don’t, either. At least he has a PhD.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “Dad, I’m not following this! I didn’t send him here—you did!”

  “I know, I know, and I’m sure it’s all to the good. Was Barney helpful?”

  “You tell me. He said I should go home and take over the ranch.”

  “It’s hardly a ranch, David. It’s just some property. What made him think you should do that?”

  “Nothing you need to hear.”

  “What do you mean by that? I want to hear what some jackass with a PhD had to say.”

  “You won’t like it.”

  “David, I’m a big boy. Tell me.”

  “He said that you were incompetent and that it was only a matter of time before you broke your neck doing something you had no business doing.”