Harlan Coben

by The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

  “You going to school?” he asked the boy.

  “School burned down. Tom teaches me some readin’ and writin’ and cipherin’. He went eight years to school.”

  “You ever go fishin’?”

  “Just with Tom. He takes me fishin’ and huntin’ now and then.”

  “He ever show you how to make a bow and arrow?”

  “No.”

  “No, sir,” Deel said. “You say, no, sir.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Say yes, sir or no, sir. Not yes and no. It’s rude.”

  The boy dipped his head and moved a foot along the ground, piling up dirt.

  “I ain’t gettin’ on you none,” Deel said. “I’m just tellin’ you that’s how it’s done. That’s how I do if it’s someone older than me. I say no, sir and yes, sir. Understand, son?”

  The boy nodded.

  “And what do you say?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Manners are important. You got to have manners. A boy can’t go through life without manners. You can read and write some, and you got to cipher to protect your money. But you got to have manners too.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There you go … About that bow and arrow. He never taught you that, huh?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, that will be our plan. I’ll show you how to do it. An old Cherokee taught me how. It ain’t as easy as it might sound, not to make a good one. And then to be good enough to hit somethin’ with it, that’s a whole nuther story.”

  “Why would you do all that when you got a gun?”

  “I guess you wouldn’t need to. It’s just fun, and huntin’ with one is real sportin’, compared to a gun. And right now, I ain’t all that fond of guns.”

  “I like guns.”

  “Nothin’ wrong with that. But a gun don’t like you, and it don’t love you back. Never give too much attention or affection to some-thin’ that can’t return it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The boy, of course, had no idea what he was talking about. Deel was uncertain he knew himself what he was talking about. He turned and looked back through the door. Mary Lou was at the pan, washing the dishes; when she scrubbed, her ass shook a little, and in that moment, Deel felt, for the first time, like a man alive.

  That night the bed seemed small. He lay on his back with his hands crossed across his lower stomach, wearing his faded red union suit, which had been ragged when he left, and had in his absence been attacked by moths. It was ready to come apart. The window next to the bed was open and the breeze that came through was cool. Mary Lou lay beside him. She wore a long white nightgown that had been patched with a variety of colored cloth patches. Her hair was undone and it was long. It had been long when he left. He wondered how often she had cut it, and how much time it had taken each time to grow back.

  “I reckon it’s been a while,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” she said.

  “I’m not sayin’ I can’t, or I won’t, just sayin’ I don’t know I’m ready.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You been lonely?”

  “I have Winston.”

  “He’s grown a lot. He must be company.”

  “He is.”

  “He looks some like you.”

  “Some.”

  Deel stretched out his hand without looking at her and laid it across her stomach. “You’re still like a girl,” he said. “Had a child, and you’re still like a girl … You know why I asked how old you was?”

  “‘Cause you didn’t remember.”

  “Well, yeah, there was that. But on account of you don’t look none different at all.”

  “I got a mirror. It ain’t much of one, but it don’t make me look younger.”

  “You look just the same.”

  “Right now, any woman might look good to you.” After she said it, she caught herself. “I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant you been gone a long time … In Europe, they got pretty women, I hear.”

  “Some are, some ain’t. Ain’t none of them pretty as you.”

  “You ever … you know?”

  “What?”

  “You know … While you was over there.”

  “Oh … Reckon I did. Couple of times. I didn’t know for sure I was comin’ home. There wasn’t nothin’ to it. I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. It was like filling a hungry belly, nothin’ more.”

  She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “It’s okay.”

  He thought to ask her a similar question, but couldn’t. He eased over to her. She remained still. She was as stiff as a corpse. He knew. He had been forced at times to lie down among them. Once, moving through a town in France with his fellow soldiers, he had come upon a woman lying dead between two trees. There wasn’t a wound on her. She was young. Dark-haired. She looked as if she had laid down for a nap. He reached down and touched her. She was still warm.

  One of his comrades, a soldier, had suggested they all take turns mounting her before she got cold. It was a joke, but Deel had pointed his rifle at him and run him off. Later, in the trenches he had been side by side with the same man, a fellow from Wisconsin, who like him had joined the Great War by means of Canada. They had made their peace, and the Wisconsin fellow told him it was a poor joke he’d made, and not to hold it against him, and Deel said it was all right, and then they took positions next to each other and talked a bit about home and waited for the war to come. During the battle, wearing gas masks and firing rifles, the fellow from Wisconsin had caught a round and it had knocked him down. A moment later the battle had ceased, at least for the moment.

  Deel bent over him, lifted his mask, and then the man’s head. The man said, “My mama won’t never see me again.”

  “You’re gonna be okay,” Deel said, but saw that half the man’s head was missing. How in hell was he talking? Why wasn’t he dead? His brain was leaking out.

  “I got a letter inside my shirt. Tell Mama I love her … Oh, my god, look there. The stars are falling.”

  Deel, responding to the distant gaze of his downed companion, turned and looked up. The stars were bright and stuck in place. There was an explosion of cannon fire and the ground shook and the sky lit up bright red; the redness clung to the air like a veil. When Deel looked back at the fellow, the man’s eyes were still open, but he was gone.

  Deel reached inside the man’s jacket and found the letter. He realized then that the man had also taken a round in the chest, because the letter was dark with blood. Deel tried to unfold it, but it was so damp with gore it fell apart. There was nothing to deliver to anyone. Deel couldn’t even remember the man’s name. It had gone in one ear and out the other. And now he was gone, his last words being, “The stars are falling.”

  While he was holding the boy’s head, an officer came walking down the trench holding a pistol. His face was darkened with gunpowder and his eyes were bright in the night and he looked at Deel, said, “There’s got to be some purpose to all of it, son. Some purpose,” and then he walked on down the line.

  Deel thought of that night and that death, and then he thought of the dead woman again. He wondered what had happened to her body. They had had to leave her there, between the two trees. Had someone buried her? Had she rotted there? Had the ants and the elements taken her away? He had dreams of lying down beside her, there in the field. Just lying there, drifting away with her into the void.

  Deel felt now as if he were lying beside that dead woman, blond instead of dark-haired, but no more alive than the woman between the trees.

  “Maybe we ought to just sleep tonight,” Mary Lou said, startling him. “We can let things take their course. It ain’t nothin’ to make nothin’ out of.”

  He moved his hand away from her. He said, “That’ll be all right. Of course.”

  She rolled on her side, away from him. He lay on top of the covers with his hands against his lower belly and looked at the log rafters.

  A couple of days
and nights went by without her warming to him, but he found sleeping with her to be the best part of his life. He liked her sweet smell and he liked to listen to her breathe. When she was deep asleep, he would turn slightly, and carefully, and rise up on one elbow and look at her shape in the dark. His homecoming had not been what he had hoped for or expected, but in those moments when he looked at her in the dark, he was certain it was better than what had gone before for nearly four horrible years.

  The next few days led to him taking the boy into the woods and finding the right wood for a bow. He chopped down a bois d’arc tree and showed the boy how to trim it with an ax, how to cut the wood out of it for a bow, how to cure it with a fire that was mostly smoke. They spent a long time at it, but if the boy enjoyed what he was learning, he never let on. He kept his feelings close to the heart and talked less than his mother. The boy always seemed some yards away, even when standing right next to him.

  Deel built the bow for the boy and strung it with strong cord and showed him how to find the right wood for arrows and how to collect feathers from a bird’s nest and how to feather the shafts. It took almost a week to make the bow, and another week to dry it and to make the arrows. The rest of the time Deel looked out at what had once been a plowed field and was now twenty-five acres of flowers with a few little trees beginning to grow, twisting up among the flowers. He tried to imagine the field covered in corn.

  Deel used an ax to clear the new trees, and that afternoon, at the dinner table, he asked Mary Lou what had happened to the mule.

  “Died,” Mary Lou said. “She was old when you left, and she just got older. We ate it when it died.”

  “Waste not, want not,” Deel said.

  “Way we saw it,” she said.

  “You ain’t been farmin’, how’d you make it?”

  “Tom brought us some goods now and then, fish he caught, vegetables from his place. A squirrel or two. We raised a hog and smoked the meat, had our own garden.”

  “How are Tom’s parents?”

  “His father drank himself to death and his mother just up and died.”

  Deel nodded. “She was always sickly, and her husband was a lot older than her … I’m older than you. But not by that much. He was what? Fifteen years? I’m … Well, let me see. I’m ten.”

  She didn’t respond. He had hoped for some kind of confirmation that his ten-year gap was nothing, that it was okay. But she said nothing.

  “I’m glad Tom was around,” Deel said.

  “He was a help,” she said.

  After a while, Deel said, “Things are gonna change. You ain’t got to take no one’s charity no more. Tomorrow, I’m gonna go into town, see I can buy some seed, and find a mule. I got some musterout pay. It ain’t much, but it’s enough to get us started. Winston here goes in with me, we might see we can get him some candy of some sort.”

  “I like peppermint,” the boy said.

  “There you go,” Deel said.

  “You ought not do that so soon back,” Mary Lou said. “There’s still time before the fall plantin’. You should hunt like you used to, or fish for a few days … You could take Winston here with you. You deserve time off.”

  “Guess another couple of days ain’t gonna hurt nothin’. We could all use some time gettin’ reacquainted.”

  Next afternoon when Deel came back from the creek with Winston, they had a couple of fish on a wet cord, and Winston carried them slung over his back so that they dangled down like ornaments and made his shirt damp. They were small but good perch and the boy had caught them, and in the process shown the first real excitement Deel had seen from him. The sunlight played over their scales as they bounced against Winston’s back. Deel, walking slightly behind Winston, watched the fish carefully. He watched them slowly dying, out of the water, gasping for air. He couldn’t help but want to take them back to the creek and let them go. He had seen injured men gasp like that, on the field, in the trenches. They had seemed like fish that only needed to be put in water.

  As they neared the house, Deel saw a rider coming their way, and he saw Mary Lou walking out from the house to meet him.

  Mary Lou went up to the man and the man leaned out of the saddle, and they spoke, and then Mary Lou took hold of the saddle with one hand and walked with the horse toward the house. When she saw Deel and Winston coming, she let go of the saddle and walked beside the horse. The man on the horse was tall and lean with black hair that hung down to his shoulders. It was like a waterfall of ink tumbling out from under his slouched gray hat.

  As they came closer together, the man on the horse raised his hand in greeting. At that moment the boy yelled out, “Tom!” and darted across the field toward the horse, the fish flapping.

  They sat at the kitchen table. Deel and Mary Lou and Winston and Tom Smites. Tom’s mother had been half Chickasaw, and he seemed to have gathered up all her coloring, along with his Swedish father’s great height and broad build. He looked like some kind of forest god. His hair hung over the sides of his face, and his skin was walnut-colored and smooth and he had balanced features and big hands and feet. He had his hat on his knee.

  The boy sat very close to Tom. Mary Lou sat at the table, her hands out in front of her, resting on the planks. She had her head turned toward Tom.

  Deel said, “I got to thank you for helpin’ my family out.”

  “Ain’t nothin’ to thank. You used to take me huntin’ and fishin’ all the time. My daddy didn’t do that sort of thing. He was a farmer and a hog raiser and a drunk. You done good by me.”

  “Thanks again for helpin’.”

  “I wanted to help out. Didn’t have no trouble doin’ it.”

  “You got a family of your own now, I reckon.”

  “Not yet. I break horses and run me a few cows and hogs and chickens, grow me a pretty good-size garden, but I ain’t growin’ a family. Not yet. I hear from Mary Lou you need a plow mule and some seed.”

  Deel looked at her. She had told him all that in the short time she had walked beside his horse. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He wasn’t sure he wanted anyone to know what he needed or didn’t need.

  “Yeah. I want to buy a mule and some seed.”

  “Well, now. I got a horse that’s broke to plow. He ain’t as good as a mule, but I could let him go cheap, real cheap. And I got more seed than I know what to do with. It would save you a trip into town.”

  “I sort of thought I might like to go to town,” Deel said.

  “Yeah, well, sure. But I can get those things for you.”

  “I wanted to take Winston here to the store and get him some candy.”

  Tom grinned. “Now, that is a good idea, but so happens, I was in town this mornin’, and—”

  Tom produced a brown paper from his shirt pocket and laid it out on the table and carefully pulled the paper loose, revealing two short pieces of peppermint.

  Winston looked at Tom. “Is that for me?”

  “It is.”

  “You just take one now, Winston, and have it after dinner,” Mary Lou said. “You save that other piece for tomorrow. It’ll give you somethin’ to look forward to.”

  “That was mighty nice of you, Tom,” Deel said.

  “You should stay for lunch,” Mary Lou said. “Deel and Winston caught a couple of fish, and I got some potatoes. I can fry them up.”

  “Why, that’s a nice offer,” Tom said. “And on account of it, I’ll clean the fish.”

  The next few days passed with Tom coming out to bring the horse and the seed, and coming back the next day with some plow parts Deel needed. Deel began to think he would never get to town, and now he wasn’t so sure he wanted to go. Tom was far more comfortable with his family than he was, and he was jealous of that and wanted to stay with them and find his place. Tom and Mary Lou talked about all manner of things, and quite comfortably, and the boy had lost all interest in the bow. In fact, Deel had found it and the arrows out under a tree near where the woods firmed up. He took it and
put it in the smokehouse. The air was dry in there and it would cure better, though he was uncertain the boy would ever have anything to do with it.

  Deel plowed a half-dozen acres of the flowers under, and the next day Tom came out with a wagonload of cured chicken shit and helped him shovel it across the broken ground. Deel plowed it under and Tom helped Deel plant peas and beans for the fall crop, some hills of yellow crookneck squash, and a few mounds of watermelon and cantaloupe seed.

  That evening they were sitting out in front of the house, Deel in the cane rocker and Tom in a kitchen chair. The boy sat on the ground near Tom and twisted a stick in the dirt. The only light came from the open door of the house, from the lamp inside. When Deel looked over his shoulder, he saw Mary Lou at the washbasin again, doing the dishes, wiggling her ass. Tom looked in that direction once, then looked at Deel, then looked away at the sky, as if memorizing the positions of the stars.

  Tom said, “You and me ain’t been huntin’ since well before you left.”

  “You came around a lot then, didn’t you?” Deel said.

  Tom nodded. “I always felt better here than at home. Mama and Daddy fought all the time.”

  “I’m sorry about your parents.”

  “Well,” Tom said, “everyone’s got a time to die, you know. It can be in all kinds of ways, but sometimes it’s just time and you just got to embrace it.”

  “I reckon that’s true.”

  “What say you and me go huntin’?” Tom said, “I ain’t had any possum meat in ages.”

  “I never did like possum,” Deel said. “Too greasy.”

  “You ain’t fixed ‘em right. That’s one thing I can do, fix up a possum good. ‘Course, best way is catch one and pen it and feed it corn for a week or so, then kill it. Meat’s better that way, firmer. But I’d settle for shootin’ one, showin’ you how to get rid of that gamey taste with some vinegar and such, cook it up with some sweet potatoes. I got more sweet potatoes than I know what to do with.”