First Thrills

by Lee Child

  “What?” Victor would have to yell.

  “Curt,” Joanne would yell back from the kitchen. “She’s rude and disrespectful when I call you at the office. Who does she think she is?”

  When Joanne came home from work, she would always go straight to the kitchen. She’d take off her shoes and hang her blouse over the back of a kitchen chair. She’d cook dinner in her brassiere, and her skirt and her suntan pantyhose with the reinforced toe. Joanne would stand at the stove, stirring Ragu spaghetti sauce. The loose flesh at the back of her upper arms quivered. But her breasts stood high and firm in the cross bracing of her sturdy white brassiere.

  Joanne stuck it out until Ronny went off to college.

  One afternoon, while Victor was watching a sport-fishing program, Joanne entered the TV room. She was wearing her blouse, and carrying a suitcase. She said she was going to her sister’s, and there were potpies in the freezer. After a month, Joanne hadn’t come home. But Victor received a letter from her lawyer.

  Victor continued to get mail after his death. Every morning, the postman slipped mail through the slot. It fell onto a pile drifting up against the door.

  As a corpse, Victor received glossy brochures beckoning him to join other active seniors in their retirement communities. The retirees in the ads were always cutting up—spinning brodies in their golf carts or coasting on their bicycles with their feet kicked up in the air. And the active senior men were always with foxy active senior women who looked like forty-year-old models in gray wigs.

  It was when he retired that Victor noticed Heidi started going out more. They’d only been married for a couple of years. But she was restless. She’d leave dinner for him, a plate covered in foil. He’d put it in the micro wave and eat on a TV tray. When she got home, she’d turn off the TV and go to bed. She’d leave him sleeping in the Barcalounger.

  They didn’t start fighting until the move came up. Victor was ready to go to Palm Springs; he’d been looking forward to it for years. But Heidi said she was too young to go out there. “What about my career,” she said.

  “You’re a fucking secretary,” Victor said, “what career?”

  Heidi got herself a town house up in Newport Beach with the settlement money. And Victor noticed that Ronny stopped calling him around that time. He suspected something he didn’t even want to say out loud. Ronny and Heidi were the same age, and she did “confide” in him. That’s what she’d called it. Fuck them, he said to himself. And he moved out to Palm Springs on his own.

  A couple of days after Marina and Pedro split, Victor felt a tugging sensation at his abdomen. The TV was playing that show about the renegade cop who solves crime with his obsessive-compulsive disorder. The OCD cop worked with another cop who had Asperger’s syndrome. He solved crimes with his overbearing nature. That autistic guy’s going to get his own spin-off, Victor thought.

  The tugging at his abdomen got stronger. And to Victor’s surprise, a slender, glistening cord shimmied out from the elastic waistband of his tracksuit pants. It aspired up, toward the ceiling, pulling at his navel.

  Then Victor was on the ceiling, looking down at himself sitting in the Barcalounger. He held his hand in front of him, and it shimmered silver and white, like a TV screen in the old days when the programming ended for the night.

  He remembered how he’d often wake up in his chair and that static screen would be crackling. It made him feel kind of blue, kind of alone. Now the TV played twenty-four/seven, and Victor didn’t wake up.

  He looked down at the silver cord, tracing its trajectory. It looked so fragile—it was crimped and looping and it glistened wet. But it was strong. The cord anchored into Victor’s navel and it tethered his silver, shimmering self—his self that was floating along the ceiling—to the brown, dry corpse in the Barcalounger below.

  I am dead, Victor realized.

  Vic sat dead in front of his TV watching more episodes of a psychic renegade cop. He also regularly saw a show about a gritty renegade cop. This guy had so much grit that he took on international terrorists—Towelheads, Victor identified them—all by himself. Gritty cop was always under the gun. For instance, he had just hours to locate a nuclear bomb no bigger than a burrito. Under this pressure, the gritty detective had to do the only thing that a real renegade can do. He tortured suspects with ordinary house hold items: duct tape, ballpoint pens, and, in one case, an electric nose hair trimmer.

  The AC kept the ranch bungalow cool and dry. The Freon circulated, leeching the scant humidity out of the air, wicking the moisture out of Victor’s body.

  His skin cured into beef jerky. His eyeballs clouded over with a bluish white film, and they popped out of his eye sockets and rested on his cheekbones. They burst and flattened, so they looked like two hatched reptile eggs, dried under the desert sun into empty leather sacks.

  Marina’s face flashed onto the TV screen. It was an old police- file photo. Her blond hair looked very yellow, and her roots showed. She was pale and when it was frozen on film like that—when she wasn’t talking or licking her lips—her jaw looked very long and narrow. A photo of Pedro appeared beside her. He looked frightened and bewildered, childish. Greasy fucking Mexican, Victor noted. A bright sheen bounced off the tight curls of Pedro’s mushroom-cap hairdo.

  Then a third photo appeared: a bald man with face like a boxer—broken nose, piggy little eyes, mean slash of a mouth. The newscaster said his name was Boris something or other. He was an “associate” of Marina’s. Boris, Victor snorted. That’s rich. How fucking cliché.

  Boris was being sought by the authorities, the newscaster said. Live film of a desert scene rolled onto the screen: a black Lincoln, high-centered on the edge of an arroyo. The car doors were standing open. A couple of lumps were lying on the sand, covered in white tarps.

  Dirt nap, Victor announced to himself.

  Week after week, Vic floated dead, bobbing along the ceiling of his ranch style bungalow. Below him, his desiccated husk withered into the Naugahyde of the Barcalounger.

  The TV blasted.

  Program after program. Commercial after commercial. Season after season. Through live coverage, and summer reruns. Through hurricanes, murders, and high-altitude bombings. Through real cops, fake cops, fake real cops. Through make overs, liposuctions, and boob jobs. Through entertainment, infotainment, and docudramas. Through re-enactments, dramatizations, and purely fictional events. Through summer, then winter, and then through summer again. The television glowed blue and white, flickering over Victor’s lifeless face.

  Marina had showed him how to set up his automatic payments. She’d been sure to leave enough money in the checking account to cover at least a year of utility bills. There were so many passwords, and clicks, and “I Agree” buttons—it was so easy to cash out the stocks and drain the 401K. And who had the money now? Maybe Boris.

  It was two years before anyone came to the house. The visitor didn’t come to see Victor. He came to read the meter. He let himself in the side gate and walked around the back of the house.

  The pool was drained dry and full of palm fronds. They’d blown down from the date palms over the course of two spring seasons when the winds are high and fierce. The dried palm fronds crinkled and rustled in the arid cement bowl of the pool. Tree rats harbored in the withered leaves, burrowing into the arboreal necropolis.

  The meterman stepped back from the pool. Where there are rats, there are snakes.

  He heard a television blasting. It was a game show. A crowd roared; Wheel of Fortune.

  Some old person, he thought. Can’t hear.

  He rang the back doorbell, then pounded on the door. He walked over to the glass sliding door, looked in the window through the gap in the vertical Levelors. He saw Victor—his profile sagging, his hair bristling, his leather hands were clamping black talons dimpling the armrests.

  When the gurney wheeled out onto the driveway, the silver cord that attached Victor to the brown husk dissolved. He floated freely, into the cloudles
s sky, looking down at the streets in their tidy grids, the rows of palm trees lined up so neatly, so intentionally, and the swimming pools, blue and twinkling like merry gems.

  As he floated higher, Victor realized, without alarm, that the shimmering silver pieces that suggested his form were drifting apart. The spaces between the silver became wider, and wider, until there was nothing but space. A brief thought flashed. Victor knew that he would, himself, be on television that evening. And he felt curiously happy, because he no longer cared.

  *

  CYNTHIA ROBINSON lives in San Francisco. She is the author of the Max Bravo series of black comedy mysteries. St. Martin’s Press is publishing The Dog Park Club in 2010 and The Barbary Galahad in 2011.

  J. T. ELLISON

  I’ve just killed Carol Ann. Sweet, innocent Carol Ann. Her blond hair flows down her back and trails in the spreading pool of blood. What have I done?

  I’ve known Carol Ann for nearly my whole life. Every memory from my childhood is permeated by the blonde angel who moved in across the street when I was five or so. Skipping up the street after the ice cream truck, getting lost in the shadows during a game of hide-and-seek, watching her sit in the window of her pink room, brushing that glorious hair. We were two peas in a pod, two sides of the same coin. Best friends forever. Forever just turned out to be an awful long time.

  Our relationship started as benignly as you’d expect. I’d seen the moving truck leave and knew that a family had taken the Estes’ house. Mrs. Estes died, left her son with bills and a dozen cats. I missed the cats. I’d wondered about the family, then went back to my own world.

  Carol Ann spied me sitting on our front step, twirling my fingers through the dandelions in the flowerbeds. Mama had sent me out to pluck the poor, insignificant weeds from the ground, worried they’d ruin her prized flowers. Mama’s flowerbeds were local legend. The best in three states. At least that’s what the members of the garden club said about them. Full to the brim with the heady blooms of gardenias, azaleas, jasmine, roses, sweet peas, hydrangea, daylilies, iris, rhododendrons, ferns, fertile clumps of monkey grass, and a smattering of black-eyed Susans . . . the list went on and on. A green thumb, Mama had. She could make any flower grow and peak under her watchful gaze. All but me, that is. Her Lily.

  I was crying about something that day, I don’t remember what. It was past ninety degrees, a sweltering summer afternoon. A shadow cast darkness across my right foot. A strange girl stood on the sidewalk in front of the A-frame house I grew up in. A yellow-haired goddess. When she spoke, I felt a rush of love.

  “Hey girl,” she said. “Would you like to play?”

  “Do I wanna play?” I answered, suddenly numb with fright. I’d never had a playmate before. Most folks’ kids steered clear of me. The nearest child my age was a bed-ridden boy who smelled funny and coughed constantly. Mama made me go over there once, but after I screamed as loud as I could and pulled his hair, she didn’t make me go back. Mama’s garden-club friends didn’t bring their spawn to visit with me while they played canasta under the billowing tent in the backyard. There was no one else.

  “Are you simple or something?” the girl asked.

  “Simple?”

  “Oh, never mind.” She turned her back and started away toward the river, skipping every third step. She wore a white dress with a pink ribbon tied in the back in a big bow—the kind I’d only ever wear on Easter, to go to church with Mama. Even from behind, she was perfect.

  “Wait!”

  My voice rang as true and strong as it ever had, deep as a church bell. She stopped, dead in her tracks, and turned to me slowly. Her eyes were wide, bluer than Mama’s china teapot. Then she smiled.

  “Well. Who knew you’d sound like that? I’m Carol Ann. It’s nice to meet you.”

  She strode to me, her hand raised. I’d never shaken hands with a girl my age before. It struck me as awfully romantic. She grasped my hand in hers.

  “How do,” I mumbled.

  “Now, is that any way to greet your dearest friend?” Her voice had a lilt to it, Southern definitely, but something foreign, too. She squeezed my hand a little harder, her little fingers pinching mine.

  “That hurts. Stop it.” I tried to shake loose, but she was like a barnacle I’d seen on Tappy’s boat once. Tappy took care of the rest of the yard for us. He wasn’t allowed to touch the flowerbeds, but someone had to mow and weed and prune. Mama could grow grass like nobody’s business, too.

  “Not until you do it right. My God, am I going to have to teach you manners as well as how to bathe?”

  She wrinkled her nose at me and I realized how sweet she smelled. Just like Mama’s flowers. I was lost. I looked her straight in those china blue eyes, my dull brown irises meeting hers. I cleared my throat, but I didn’t smile.

  “It’s nice to meet you as well.”

  She dropped my hand then and laughed, a tinkling, musical sound like wind chimes on a breezy afternoon. She had me enthralled in a moment.

  “Let’s go skip rocks in the river.”

  “I’m not allowed. Mama says—”

  “Oh, you’re one of those.” She dragged the last word out, gave it an extra syllable and emphasis.

  “One of what?” My hackles rose. Two minutes and we were having our first fight. It should have been a warning. Instead it made my blood boil.

  She smiled coyly. “A mama’s girl.”

  Back then, I thought it was an insult. I reached out to smack her one good, but she pranced away, closer to the river which each skip.

  “Mama’s girl, mama’s girl.” She singsonged and danced and I followed, my chin set, incensed. Before I knew it, we were on the river, a whole block away from Mama’s house. I wasn’t allowed to go to the river. A boy drowned the summer past, no one I really knew, but all the grown-ups decided it wasn’t safe for us to play down there. This girl was new, she wouldn’t know any better. I didn’t want to be a mama’s girl anymore.

  Mama skinned my hide that night. She’d called and called for me to come to dinner, had Tappy look for me. Carol Ann and I were too busy to hear. We skipped rocks, whistled through pieces of grass turned sideways between our thumbs, and dug for worms. I showed her how to bait a line and she nearly fainted dead away when I put a warm, wriggling worm in her hand. Tappy found us right after sunset and took me home screaming over his shoulder. The joy I felt wouldn’t be suffused by Mama’s switch. Never again. I had a friend, and her name was Carol Ann.

  It was the first of many concessions to her whims.

  “My Goodness, Lily, can’t you try to look happy? You’re all sweet and clean, and we’ll have some ice cream after, if you’re good. All right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I mumbled, sullen.

  Mama had me spit-shined and polished for a funeral service at church. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to run off to the river with Carol Ann, skip rocks, have a spitting contest, something. Anything but go to church, sit in those hard pews, and listen to Preacher yell at the old folks who couldn’t sing loud enough because their voices were caked with age and rot.

  I didn’t think that was fair to them. I remember my granny vaguely, who smelled like our attic and had a long hair poking out of her chin. She’d scoop me in her arms and sing to me, her voice soft like the other old folks. I liked that, liked to hear them whisper the words. It made the hymns seem dangerous in a way. Like the old folks knew the dead would reach out of their very graves and grab their hands, pull them down into the earth with them if they sang loud enough to wake them.

  Mama wasn’t hearing no for an answer today. We walked the quarter mile to the Southern Baptist, greeted our brothers and sisters, sat in the hard pews, and celebrated the death of Mrs. O’Leary. Preacher made sure we knew that we were sinners, and I felt that vague guilt that I was alive and Mrs. O’Leary was dead, though it was supposed to be glorious to have passed to the better side.

  We finished up and put Mrs. O’Leary in the ground. I tried hard to hold my breath in
the graveyard so no spirits could inhabit me, but the graveside service took so long I had to breathe. I took small sips of air through my nose, felt my vision blacken. Mama pinched my upper arm so hard I gasped.

  I gave up trying to hold my breath. All the ghosts had been waiting, watching, patiently hovering, anticipating the moment when I took in a full breath of air. They’re inside me now; they inhabited my soul, tumultuous and gray. I tried to fight them, until I couldn’t find any more reason to.

  I begged to be allowed to go home, to be with Carol Ann, but Mama kept a firm grip on my arm while I cried. Folks thought I was grieving for Mrs. O’Leary. I was grieving for myself.

  Mama decided homemade ice cream was just as good as the Dairy Dip, after all.

  One day a massive storm came through. The trunks of the trees were black with wet, the leaves in green bas-relief to the long-boned branches. Storms frightened me—the ferocity of the winds, the booming thunder felt like it was tearing apart my very skin, shattering my soul. Carol Ann and I had taken refuge in my room. She rubbed my stomach, trying to calm me, crooning under her breath. Nothing was working. I was shaking and sweaty, low moans escaping my lips every once in a while. Carol Ann was at a loss. She stood, leaving me on the floor, and went to the window.

  “Come away from there, Carol Ann.” My voice sounded panicky, even to me. She turned and smiled.

  “Don’t be a goose, Lily. What, do you think the wind’s going to suck me right out that window?”

  A flash of lightning lit up the room and the thunder shook the house. I whimpered in response, my eyes begging her to come back to me. She turned and stared out the window, ignoring my pleas.

  Then she whirled around, a wide smile on her heart-shaped face. “I have an idea. Let’s be blood sisters.”

  “Blood sisters? What’s that?”