Harvey drops to his knees beside Kenny and he thinks he hears a woman screaming in the distance, thinks he hears a dog barking. He thinks he would like to turn that God-awful television off once and for all, would like to put his fist through the screen. He thinks about Will and wishes Will were here to explain all of this to him, wishes he had the strength to find a telephone and to dial the numbers.
Even when he looks up and sees Kenny’s mother coming toward him, sees at once the horror in her eyes and the small dog yipping behind her, cowering at her heels, even as he sees her stoop to pick up the fireplace poker, he is moving away from all this, he is walking away in his own mind, walking down the street in front of Will’s place, heading for the front door, going inside to have a beer with his brother.
And everything else that happens is the work of somebody else, a man he does not know. Harvey watches it all as if from across the street, as if watching a television screen through a shop window. While now and then a pleasant scent drifts by. The smell of the bakery across the street from Will’s place, of doughnuts and fresh bread. He is able to enjoy the fragrance in a detached kind of way, the way a man who doesn’t eat might enjoy it, with longing and regret, man who has never tasted sweetness because he has no mouth, no tongue, no stomach for this life.
And when Harvey leaves Kenny’s house a quarter of an hour later, the woman is no longer screaming and the dog has stopped barking. He has turned the television off. A bone is broken just below his left wrist where he raised it to block the poker that the woman was swinging at his face, and the flesh is swollen and pulsing, the splintered bone is pulsing, too. Otherwise, as he walks back through town, he is as still inside as the night itself, and the only thought he will permit himself is that he wishes Will’s place were still open, he could really use a cold one now.
He requires no lights in order to see his dark rooms clearly; the details are emblazoned on his mind. The kitchen with its painted cupboards, the noisy icemaker in the refrigerator. The living room with the rose-colored sofa Jennilee begged him to let her buy, nearly $2,000, he does not regret the expense anymore, regrets nothing. His recliner facing the television set, the gun cabinet against the rear wall, all those seasons of hunting deer and turkey with his father and brothers, and then just his brothers. Even as he eases himself onto his recliner he can recall the scent of autumn leaves kicked up beneath his boots, can recall the fragrance of pine woods in those minutes before dawn when the fog is lifting and the air is chill. It all comes back to him now, all the happy moments unfettered by desire, because he knows it is all he has left now, and that it is all slipping away from him this night, it is nearly out of reach already.
He is not startled when the light flares on overhead. There is an inevitability to revelation, too. Just as there is to Jennilee’s sharp intake of breath at the sight of him. He can only imagine how he must look to her, as if he has dipped his head in blood, his torn shirt splattered with it and sticking to his chest. He smiles to tell her it’s not as bad as it looks. The pain is there but far away.
“My God!” she says, and comes as near as the television set, no closer. “What happened to you?”
He lifts up the compact disk he has been holding, shows it to her. Then, with a tired flick of his wrist, he sails it toward her feet. She stares down at it, a perfect roundness, chromium-bright, smeared with bloody fingerprints. Tears slide down her cheeks. She shakes her head, wanting to push away the inevitable, deny the obvious.
Her voice is hoarse and weak. He is surprised by its plaintiveness. “Did you hurt him?” she wants to know. “Harvey, please, please. Please tell me you didn’t hurt him.”
He has no desire to move, to say anything. But he knows she will keep talking if he does not speak. And so he tells her, “He isn’t hurt anymore.”
Her response is an explosion, too loud, he feels it deep inside his head. “What did you do to him?” she screams. “What did you do?”
His voice in comparison is as placid as sleep. “What would any man do?”
Her knees buckle, she drops to her knees, she clings to the side of the television cabinet. Her sobs are wails as sharp as glass.
Only now does it dawn on him that she is still wearing only her panties and teddy, that she looks so inelegant there, naked knees spread apart. The soles of her feet are dirty.
She sobs, hyperventilating, forehead against the cabinet, until a thought occurs to her, and she climbs to her feet, drags herself up, and then crosses to the telephone on the end table beside the sofa, punches in the seven numbers, listens to the repetitious ring.
He can hear the ringing too, hollow and distant. How long is she going to stand there listening?
“There’s nobody to answer it,” he tells her. He is about to say, Not even the dog, but she responds with a prolonged scream of “Nooo!” and flings herself at him, pulling the phone off the end table. She swings the receiver at him again and again, screaming all the while. He sits with arms wrapped around his head but does nothing else to defend himself, only feels the distant blows and the distant pain and thinks, as if he is watching from far away, You’re just like your mother.
She stops screaming finally, is too breathless to continue, and leans away from him, moaning, a kind of whimpering sound he has never before heard.
He lifts his eyes to hers, can scarcely recognize her now. His voice is whisper-soft. “Tell me the truth, Jennilee. It was never just the pictures, was it?”
She is as quick as a snake, lunges forward and spits in his face, three times before his hand comes up and slaps her hard, dropping her to the floor, where she curls into a fetal position and again begins to sob. He had not known he was going to slap her, never intended to do so.
Ten or fifteen seconds pass, neither knows how long. Harvey has his eyes closed now, has settled back in his chair. Jennilee climbs to her feet slowly, and with cautious glances to see if he is watching, she makes her way to the gun cabinet. She expects him to jump up and stop her as she feels for the key atop the cabinet, but he never stirs. Eventually she finds the key, inserts it in the lock, pulls open the door.
She moves more quickly now, in a hurry before he looks her way. She pulls a shotgun off the wooden rack, reaches into a box of shells, knocks the box over, fumbles for a shell, tries to break the shotgun open so as to insert the shell the way Harvey taught her the one time he took her turkey hunting, the time she thought it might be fun that year they were married, except it wasn’t fun, it was boring, and after an hour he drove her home and she never accepted his invitation again.
But this shotgun will not break open the way the other one did and she turns it in her hands, wild with fear because Harvey has opened his eyes and is watching her now, he is staring at her reflection on the TV’s black screen.
And now he is rising from his chair, pushing himself up and coming toward her, moving as if under water, thick and warm and heavy.
When he is a step away, she turns the shotgun around and, holding it by the barrel, swings the heavy stock at his head, but he catches it easily and with one pull wrenches the shotgun from her hands.
He reaches toward the spilled shells and picks up three. Slides one into the magazine, and then a second. “This is a twelve-gauge Winchester,” he tells her. Snaps open the breech and slides a third shell directly into the barrel. “It loads like this.” He pushes a tiny lever and the breech door snaps shut.
He holds the shotgun in both hands now, looks at her as she shrinks away from him. “The safety is off,” he tells her, and hands the weapon to her. For a moment she does not comprehend. Then she reaches out, jerks the shotgun from his hands. He returns to his chair and eases himself down.
He would like to close his eyes now, but he has one more thing to say. And soon she crosses to stand in front of him. She holds the shotgun’s stock tight against her shoulder, the way he taught her. He does not look at her but at her reflection on the television screen, Jennilee in miniature, shrunken by the truth.
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br /> “It’s nice,” he says, and she says, “What is?”
“That I don’t want you anymore.” He looks up at her and smiles.
She thinks the gunshot is the loudest sound she has ever heard.
And after a while she lays the shotgun across the arms of his chair. She goes to the kitchen, trembling; the entire house is trembling, a frozen place, so cold. And soon she returns, dragging a kitchen chair, which she pulls in front of his. She sits facing him with her bare feet straddling his legs, their knees touching. She leans forward and picks up the shotgun, ejects the empty shell, rams another one home. Then she wedges the shotgun’s stock into Harvey’s crotch, rests the barrel between her breasts, holds it there with her left hand. Now she leans toward Harvey, bends toward him as the barrel pushes hard against her chest and her right hand reaches out, hand and fingers stretching. Finally she finds the trigger, that scimitar moon of metal. And this time she hears no sound at all.
A week, two weeks, sixteen days later, or so Will has been told. Long enough that life has resumed much of its routine. But soon enough that even routine seems unreal. It is a morning in September, the streets are quiet, the rumbling school buses have completed their routes. Will has kissed Molly and Lacy and has watched them go and now he is standing in the bar’s open doorway, a broom in hand. He can smell the bakery across the street, a sweetness in the air, leaden in his stomach.
He has swept out the two wide rooms of his bar, and now he doesn’t know what to do with himself. All the glasses are washed and all the shelves are stocked. The bar will not open for business for another hour and a half, and Will can think of nothing left to do until that time. So he stands there in the open doorway with a broom in his hand. He thinks about sweeping the sidewalk in front of his bar. It is an exercise in futility, he knows. But sometimes that is all a man is given.
He has been sweeping for ten minutes or so when he hears the low growl of a motorcycle, sees it coming toward him down the street. He does not recognize Deputy Landers until the man is just a block away; he looks too tall for the machine, all elbows and knees. A few seconds later the deputy pulls to the curb in front of Will, he shuts off the motorcycle, he takes the key from the ignition. He climbs off finally, nods to himself, crosses to Will, holds out the key.
“Sheriff thought it would be safer here with you than in Kenny’s garage. Somebody broke a window out of the house last night. Kids, probably.”
Will stares at the key.
“I know it’s only been a couple of weeks, but... sheriff asked me to remind you that you need to hire somebody to get your brother’s place cleaned up. And he says he hopes you don’t mind, but you oughta take care of Kenny’s place, too. The way the sheriff figures it, you’re going to end up with both places more than likely. Jennilee being the beneficiary, and her married to your brother and all. It’s all fairly convoluted from what I hear, but the lawyers will straighten it out, I wouldn’t worry if I was you. You’re going to end up with Kenny’s place, too, when it’s all said and done, just you wait and see. One house for you and one for Stevie, that’s the way I figure it. Get him out of that trailer of his finally. I’ll bet he won’t be complaining about that.”
The deputy continues on like this for a while, none of it registering with Will except as a kind of buzzing drone, a drill in his ear. This is the deputy who never shuts up, he tells himself. The other one... who’s the other one? What’s his name? It’s Ronnie Walters, he reminds himself, though he has known both men all their lives. Ronnie Walters. A man as close-mouthed as God himself.
Finally Deputy Landers starts to walk away. But as he does so he crosses once more to the motorcycle, runs his hand over the gas tank, trails his hand over the leather seat. “Somebody sure did a great job of restoring this beauty,” he says. “Still rides good, too. Be sure and let me know if you decide to sell it.”
Will isn’t aware of when the deputy stops talking and moves away. His next awareness of the deputy is when Will looks up and sees him walking briskly toward the center of town, already maybe fifty feet away, as if time has moved in a fragmented leap, lurching over moments irretrievable.
This is what it’s like, Will tells himself, when everything is broken.
He feels the key in one hand and the broom handle in the other. He doesn’t know what to do with either one of them. He should go inside, maybe. Except that he doesn’t want to go inside. He doesn’t want to go or be anywhere.
He looks at the motorcycle parked at the curb, its chrome and painted surfaces waxed and buffed to a glassy sheen, and reflected on the side of the shiny gas tank is the image of an odd-looking man looking back at Will, a man reduced to the size of a bird, his body bent to fit the curve of the tank, warped and shrunken and compacted by the weight of his own weariness, a weariness that glitters in his eyes like splinters of chrome, eyes that are asking for something, forgiveness maybe, redemption, or maybe just begging for an answer now and then, each man pleading to the other but neither having anything to offer, nothing but a key clutched invisibly in the fist, and in the other hand a broom good for cleaning nothing for very long, man and broom alike no bigger than a toothpick in the face of life’s storm.
And because Will does not want to think of all that, because as long as he has a daughter or wife or brother he cannot allow himself to be crushed by what he knows, cannot grant himself the gift of oblivion, he lifts his eyes to the horizon and thinks of autumn coming and of what it will be like in the woods this year. He thinks maybe he will not hunt anymore, because nothing will ever be the same. The fine powdered snow on the dry leaves will not be the same, and neither will the wind through bare branches or the shafted sunlight or the sharp crackling of ice-encrusted limbs. But Molly is old enough to go into the woods this year, and he does not want to disappoint her. Stevie will be looking forward to it, too. So maybe even though nothing will be the same, Will should take them hunting after all. But no, nothing will ever be the same. Nothing ever is.
And with this thought Will pauses for a moment in his sweeping. Only then does he realize that without even knowing when he started again, he has swept thirty feet of the sidewalk clean. The motorcycle key is still in his hand, pressed against the broom handle now and biting into his palm, leaving an impression on his skin. But it is Harvey’s key, and Will grips it tightly as he resumes his sweeping. The bristles make a rhythmic sound as they scrape the concrete, chhhhh, chhhhh, chhhhh, chhhhh. And before long he is thinking of Portugal again, that fantasy impossibly serene. Maybe Molly will get there someday. Maybe now she can.
As for me, he tells himself, you weren’t made for traveling, you weren’t made for big ideas. You were made for sweeping. For frying wings and making daiquiris. For opening bottles of beer. For keeping a room clean and relatively quiet and as dim as an old cathedral. For maintaining the coward’s refuge from a sun-bruised sky.
PATRICIA SMITH
When They Are Done with Us
FROM Staten Island Noir
Port Richmond
Maury’s eyes were crazy wide, staring right into the camera, just like they were on yesterday’s show and the show before that. His hand rested on the shoulder of some blubbering white girl, Keisha or Kiara something, her hair all hard-curled and greased up into those stiff-sprayed rings, smeared black circling her eyes, greening gold Nefertitis swinging from her ears, more faux preciousness twinkling from her left nostril. Seems like K or K’s baby daddy could be any one of the fidgeting young black men and—surprise!—she kinda didn’t know which one.
The contestants were all sloe-eyed, corkscrew braids, double negative, mad for no reason except that they had been identified on national television as fools who didn’t give a damn where their dicks went.
It was time, once again, for the paternity test and Maury’s dramatic slicing open of that manila envelope. For some reason, the prospect of finally knowing whose seed had taken hold reduced Kiara or Keisha to unbridled bawling and a snorting of snot.
J
o had the show on more for background than anything, but she stopped for a closer look at the little nasty who’d opened her legs and been done in. It amazed her how anybody, let alone a white girl, could look at any one of those sad sacks and feel bad enough about herself to fuck him. “I ain’t never been, or ain’t never gonna be, that damned horny,” she said out loud, just as Tyrell, sloe-eyed and corkscrewed, was revealed to be the father of the squirming little bastard in question.
“I’m gon’ take care of my ’sponsibility,” he monotoned, a semiearnest declaration which was greeted by wild hooting and hand-clapping from Maury’s drama-drunk studio audience. Even after receiving the sudden blessing of papahood, Tyrell avoided looking at or touching the mother of his child. Kiara or Keisha stood, shivering in a whorish skirt and halter top, in dire need of at least an orchestrated hug. She continued to keen.
I cannot watch this shit, Jo thought, just after thinking, Where did she find an actual halter top in 2010? Although she made a move to punch the television off, she didn’t do it. Instead she lowered the volume so the string of skewed urban vignettes could still distract her from what she really needed to be doing. Maybe the next segment would feature some tooth-challenged redneck hurling a chair across the stage upon discovering, after a week or so of sweaty carnal acrobatics, that the he he thought was a she was really a he fervently embracing his she-ness.
Jo revisited her mental to-do. Last night’s crusted dishes, still “soaking.” A mountain of undies and towels, waiting to be lugged to the Bright Star laundromat, where the guy who guarded the dollar changers—to make damned sure that no “nonlaunderers” used them—never missed an opportunity to converse with her tits. Oh, and she’d skipped breakfast again. After her last tangle with an oil-slick omelet at the New Dinette, a succession of Dunkin’s dry toasted things, and her own ambitious attempts to get healthy and choke down oatmeal, the idea of a morning meal had lost its appeal. By 3 P.M. she’d be trolling Port Richmond Avenue, inhaling a loaded slice or two at Denino’s or resigning herself to the New’s lunch menu and one of their huge, dizzying burgers.
The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Page 42
