The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  Why his wife left and moved in with her sister back in St. Louis, no one ever knew, not even his boy, Dewey. Some gossiped of another man, others of a divine irrationality unique to the frontier, compelling some to flee, others to wander wide-eyed, speaking in tongues, into the desert mists where nothing can survive except sooty gray rats that evolution has taught to place only two feet at a time against the blistering sand. Within a year George came down with cancer, and he succumbed six months after the diagnosis. Most folks felt one thing led to the other.

  “Doctors said he was eat up,” the story went, “but he never was the same after she took off. I think that’s what brought it on. His body and spirit just give up. It happens, you know?”

  Dewey tried running the store for a while after his father’s death, but everyone knew he was a braggart and a drunk, usually opening late, if at all. The old loyalties soon faded after George’s death, and Fred’s became the place to shop. One Saturday, when he woke with a hangover and no money, Dewey held a sale, everything for whatever folks felt like paying. People filled toe sacks and cardboard boxes, while Dewey berated their treachery and rattled change into a metal pail beside the door. By noon the shelves and racks were bare. The building wasn’t worth much, and you couldn’t give the land away, since so much of it went unclaimed, so Dewey walked away without bothering to lock the door.

  Once inside the double electric gates, they stumbled from the bus. The guards who had transported them removed the shackles; two guards responsible for the entrance counted them again. One stood on the threshold of the control booth, hands plunged in his back pockets, his lower lip packed with tobacco. The other called out names listed on a clipboard, holding it at arm’s length and squinting. Each inmate responded with eyes submissively averted. When he came to Webster’s name, he nodded before calling it louder than the others, his voice slick with contempt, and then, after making a show of the intervening pause, marked through it with a flourish.

  The shuffle of voices, colliding, indistinguishable, filling Ramsey’s days on the crowded compound had by that time been confined behind locked dormitory doors, the grounds empty except for prowling guards, the only sounds a distant whippoorwill, its plaintive cry unanswered, and an annoyingly nasal female voice barking coded numbers and names from portable radios clipped to the guards’ belts. Night had silenced the insects inspired by the gloaming.

  Since the other inmates had been fed, the guards led them into the empty chow hall and handed each a standard sack meal: a stale bologna sandwich, the bread soggy with mayonnaise, an apple, and a glass of lemonade, which most never drank. A black working the kitchen had been caught pissing in the vat. They ate at burled pine picnic tables. Although posted regulations forbade speaking in the chow hall, during scheduled meals, with hundreds of inmates shuttling in and out by dorm assignments, each allowed fifteen minutes to eat, the scraping of feet along with the clanging of metal plates and utensils being tossed onto a conveyor created a cacophony indigenous with captivity. However, with so few in the cavernous room, a fork dropped inadvertently, keys rattling, a sneeze, a murmuring between guards, whispers, almost, became amplified in the spaciousness, echoing, as if one wall were answering another, like spirits conversing. The relative silence tempted Ramsey to shout his name, just to hear it repeated, softer each time until it dissolved to silence, like dying, he thought, without the attendant trauma, the most he could hope for, but there would be sanctions if he dared, a period of solitary confinement, like living in a shadowy cave, or worse: the loss of his windows.

  After Fred’s came to Carson Springs, Sonic followed a couple of years later, the Desert Inn Motel soon after that, and then, given its logistical advantages and undemanding labor pool, Chrysler built a small factory at the end of a new, quarry rock road to manufacture radiator thermostats. At times it employed as many as thirty people. With approval from Fred’s corporate management, the city council began planning to expand the local store into a truck stop to service the eighteen-wheelers speeding by each day in increasing numbers. Excavation had begun for the additional underground diesel tanks, but then, as part of a flood control project, the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Tamaha River where it sliced deep between precipitous slopes in the neighboring state, which heartily endorsed the endeavor because of the recreational areas for boating along with a market for lakeside lots it would create. Within two years, however, a tongue of warm, murky water began filling low-lying areas several miles north of Carson Springs. Lacking political influence, their protests were harmlessly absorbed by a bureaucracy designed to quell dissent. SR 92 soon disappeared beneath 10 feet of brackish water. Eventually the Corps began regulating the spillways and the advance that had become a languorous but methodical flood abated, but Carson Springs had become the end of the road. SR 92 emerged many miles to the north across the great, stagnant lake at a town named Vale, but it couldn’t be seen even on the clearest day.

  Ramsey lived with almost two hundred inmates, mostly blacks, far fewer whites, and one Ukrainian who didn’t speak English, but after having his head pummeled like a punching bag a few times, translation became unnecessary. Housed in one of eight dormitories, each a dusty, concrete block building with galvanized roofs and epoxied slabs, iron-framed, double bunk beds filled the interiors, three rows down the center and two, parallel to the others, lining the longer walls, the beds about eighteen inches apart. For his first two years, Ramsey was assigned a lower bunk, the head against the wall. And then his longevity and lack of disobedience merited an upper bunk, but still with nothing behind but reinforced concrete block. Two years later, he was moved to an upper bunk with a window behind, and then, on the anniversary of his eighth year, an upper bunk in a corner with a view out two windows, one of four coveted locations.

  With access to their factory no longer profitable, Chrysler moved the operation to Mexico, leaving the workers staring in dismay at the plant’s shuttered doors and despising more each day the unassuming migrants laboring in the fields. Someone artlessly sprayed FUCK YOU across the front wall in red. Then the bank foreclosed on the Desert Inn, with its ten rooms and pink flamingos standing crooked on wire legs. One morning the dark-skinned woman with a red spot on her forehead who ran it loaded her station wagon and headed south, leaving the beds made with clean sheets and the green neon sign on SR 92 blinking VACANCY. And then the Sonic, whose presence had been overly ambitious, dismissed its employees with two days’ notice and $100 severance. Fred’s remained in business, but half its employees lost their jobs. The pits that had been excavated for the proposed diesel tanks filled with muddy water and became breeding ponds for mosquitoes during the summers. The population of Carson Springs began aging and declining, so when the state proposed building a prison nearby, no one objected, the citizenry fearing poverty more than the threat of escaped convicts.

  After they had eaten, lines were assembled outside and then began moving in different directions toward their respective dorms. Cameras mounted high on building corners swiveled to track each group. Ramsey had never been on the compound at night, the grounds so fully lighted that no shadows were cast; no trees, no leaves to mottle the ground; the stars, whose humbling canopy he missed, blinded.

  The noise inside the dorm, without rhythm or tone, seemed more aggravating than usual after the relative quiet of the day. Some played cards or Scrabble while others lay in bunks staring emptily with hands laced on their stomachs; a few, who knew how, were reading. Showers were over, but since Ramsey and the others who had searched were late through no fault of their own, the guard magnanimously turned the water on for three minutes, reminding them that he was not required to, and handed each a clean towel. Ramsey always tried to shower immediately after supper, before the tiled floors became slick from inmates masturbating with impunity in the large, open stall.

  Once in his bunk, he tried to block the noise, broken words mostly and mirthless laughter, by remembering its absence outside, as if by concentrating, everything aroun
d him could be locked in a cell of its own. Solitude, besides freedom, was the thing he missed most. Squinting against blinding fluorescents dangling just out of reach, he woke each morning groggy-eyed to screaming bells, which marked the sequence of relentless rituals dictating his life. During the day, if the din became unbearable, he’d retreat to the remotest corner of the recreation field to try and escape the sounds, but even there the air was stained by cop-killer rap drifting from ghetto blasters inside the open shed where the blacks, their dreadlocks dangling like willow bangs, worked with weights to further enhance arms so bloated they looked like wings. While many whites withered as captives, laboriously shuffling their feet, as if somehow gravity had been heightened, most blacks seemed to thrive, strutting the compound, reveling in the social reversal.

  Someone asked about Webster. Ramsey told them what he knew. Although he tried to push it from his mind, the image of Webster lying among the crushed oats, the top of his head scalloped away, burned with a sunken anger. Ramsey doubted the body would be claimed, most outside allegiances, including his own, surviving no more than a year. To him, it seemed inevitable. How many weekends could they sit with families and ask about a sister or a brother, a father or mother, a son or daughter, and speak hopefully of a future that might never come? On Sundays, some stood as close as permitted to the front gate, plaintively watching the visitors enter, waiting for someone they knew, or perhaps, expecting no one, trying to remember what it was like to be free and have someone care.

  Webster would be buried without ceremony or marker in an overgrown field that bordered the dump; no one would mourn his loss.

  As they had boarded the Bluebird at the field that afternoon, emergency vehicles began arriving, their red and blue lights turning the twilight into a violence of slashing red and blue. And then the business of assigning responsibility, if possible, for the girl began; cameras flashed; men, slipping white coveralls over their street clothes and snapping on latex gloves, crawled on hands and knees, sifting through the maze of stems, dropping minute pieces of this and that into clear plastic bags, a wooden stake with a DayGlo ribbon stapled to the top, marking the location.

  After Dewey ran through the money from the sale at his father’s store, he took a job loading feed at Slater’s Mill for six dollars an hour. On that Tuesday he called in sick, as he often did, and drove out to the abandoned factory in his pickup, an oxidized blue Dodge with rusted rocker panels and a primered front fender. He emptied what remained in a bottle he’d stashed under the seat and napped until it wore off. He woke with a boner and a parched throat. He checked himself in the rearview mirror. His eyes were bloodshot, and he hadn’t shaved in days. He raked a hand through his hair, reset the mirror, and headed into town, empty cans and broken tools rattling around the truck bed. After passing the old trailer sitting on a red clay lot scooped out of a loblolly pine thicket that ran from the factory to the edge of town, he saw the girl, walking toward him, her hair braided to the waist, a book bag dangling from her shoulder; he thought nothing of it at first, but then he slowed and stopped beside her, his elbow crooked out the window.

  “Hey,” he said, and smiled. “What’s your name?”

  “Melissa Gayle,” she said, squinting against the sun and shading her eyes. She wore a starched white blouse and a plaid skirt, the hem several inches above her white socks and black patent leather shoes.

  “Going home?”

  “Yeah.”

  He opened the door by reaching through the window and stepped out, looking both ways along the road.

  “You know me. You and your momma used to shop at my store.”

  “I remember.”

  “Come on, I’ll give you a ride home.”

  She pointed in the direction of the trailer.

  “It ain’t that far.”

  He took her arm.

  “Come on, I wanted to talk to your momma anyway.”

  He lifted her into the cab and shoved her to the passenger’s side. He tossed the book bag into the bed, started the truck, and turned around.

  “That’s where I live,” she said as he sped past the trailer toward the abandoned factory.

  An old singlewide sat down the factory road from what townspeople called “the junction to nowhere,” beneath a large willow, its twisted mane reaching the ground and bunching atop the sloppily tarred roof. Although within walking distance of town, no other dwellings were built close enough to be called neighboring. The trailer had been placed there fifteen years before by the town’s only realtor, who also sold and serviced farm implements. He posted a rental sign in the front window. People had moved in and out, none staying more than a year. Most were drifters and drunks who had to be forcibly evicted. It had been empty for several months when the woman showed up one day in a fully packed, humpbacked Oldsmobile station wagon and rented the place, just her and the little girl. No one ever saw her with a man or any strangers entering or leaving the trailer. At first she drove to town, but something happened to the Oldsmobile. The tires eventually dry-rotted flat.

  The woman was bone thin, birdlike, even, pale-skinned, with a long face and large eyes, her hair, the color of stone, tied behind in a bun. Like her mother, the girl was all knees and elbows but with red hair and freckles. Each month the woman deposited a railroad pension check in the bank, paying cash for food, always counting her change carefully. If someone spoke, she would respond politely with a shy smile.

  The woman enrolled the girl in Rosewater Elementary and Middle School, the only one in the county.

  “She was never a problem,” said one of the teachers.

  “Smart as a whip,” said another.

  The woman had even invited the visitation ladies inside the first Thursday night they came to call, fixing coffee, chatting civilly, promising to attend Sunday school, which she did the following weekend. The women gave Jesus and His Disciples coloring books and a box of crayons to the girl before they left, holding a brief prayer meeting at the opened door.

  Around dusk on the day Dewey had picked the girl up, he drove back from the factory alone, both arms itching from weed rash and insect bites. His hands trembled. He passed through town, honking and waving at the sheriff, who sat outside the office, elbows draped over the back of a wooden bench. Dewey drove north on SR 92 toward the water, the lights in his rearview mirror having vanished, and turned off onto a grassy path matted down by truck tires that few people knew about, and those who did held their tongues. Sumac and low, broad-leafed trees obscured the entrance. Despite idling the truck in gear, it still bottomed a couple of times, limbs clawing the windshield and scraping the sides, cottontails scampering out of the beams. An old bootlegger named Mel lived at the end in a two-room log cabin with hubcaps nailed along the front wall. Several rusted cars sat on concrete blocks, hoods yawning open, an engine dangling by chain from a thick sycamore limb. A reflection of the moon rippled in the lake behind his cabin.

  Dewey took a quick step back when a German shepherd, snarling and baring its teeth, lunged at him as Mel cracked the door.

  “I’m tapped out,” the old man growled in a smoker’s voice, holding the dog’s collar with both hands. “Come back in a day or two.”

  “I need something now,” Dewey said, opening his hands submissively.

  The old man kicked the door shut.

  Dewey drove back to town. A dually pulling a carrier full of bawling cattle passed in the opposite direction, the radio blaring music. He stopped across from the courthouse, under a streetlight, and counted his money. He had enough for the 30-mile trip down SR 92 to an all-night liquor store just across the state line.

  Searchers found no trace of the girl at the dump or around the abandoned factory. Fishermen launched jon boats into the murky lake, probing shadowed marshes along the shore, but soon abandoned the effort. Some in hip boots waded the drainage ditches surrounding a large field banded by barbed wire and choked with oats ready for harvest, looking for evidence of damaged and broken stalks, suspicious
trails, all the obvious places where someone might have thoughtlessly discarded a child. No such evidence was found.

  Vultures were a common sight, floating in imprecise circles on thermal pillows, constantly trolling, so few people paid them any mind, but when they began drifting above the field in greater numbers, the implication became clear.

  Since the field was so large, over a square mile, and the crop so dense, the sheriff asked the prison for help. Ramsey and other inmates, all with records free of disciplinary infractions, were caged in the Bluebird and driven to the field. Flanked by guards armed with shotguns, they stepped unshackled from the bus.

  Determined to complete the search before dark, the sheriff assembled two lines at opposite ends of the field, each to proceed methodically toward the center. Due to the size of the field and the waist-high crop, one line could not see the other. Except for the vultures and strings of manmade clouds dispersing as soon as they formed, nothing occluded the sun, inclined toward afternoon and punishing without quarter, shirts sweat-plastered to itching backs, the air thick with heat that Ramsey felt through the soles of his brogans. A shuffle of birdcalls, along with the croaking of frogs and the ratcheting sound of summer insects, formed an unscripted, ubiquitous chorus. Dragonflies rested their twin sets of veined, translucent wings by lighting atop the swaying pods for a moment, their bodies swathed in twisted rainbows. Mosquitoes began swarming and feasting upon exposed skin. No-see-’ems clogged nostrils and ears.