The Best American Short Stories 2019

by Anthony Doerr

  He flicked his cigarette butt into the fountain and stood up.

  “Why’d that guy give us a dirty look?” said one of the women.

  “I don’t know,” said the other. “I don’t know.”

  This would not do. It had been automatic—he wasn’t at all aware of having given those two any special look—and it would not do. Not knowing exactly how he was behaving and how he was being perceived could be fatal. (Yes, I remember him vividly: he looked at me like he wanted to strangle me.)

  Most crimes were never solved, and heading the list of reasons was the failure of people to notice things. Everyone knew that. Like most people planning a crime, he was counting on it. He had no intention of getting caught, and yet he often found himself picturing a TV reporter standing in front of his house: Neighbors of the twenty-three-year-old alleged killer were stunned to learn . . .

  It might be bad luck to keep imagining the scene of your own arrest, but the point that needed hammering was that everyone should be shocked. (Roden Jones? He was the last guy we’d have suspected!)

  Walking down Broadway, he watched the colored lights glow brighter and more lurid as the sky grew darker. As always, when he reached Times Square his pace slowed and his heartbeat accelerated. He had to maneuver around the crowds that collected to gawk at the street acts. One was a shirtless skeleton singing falsetto. Night in the CITY looks PRETTY to me. It amazed him that anyone would reward a person who sang like a cat getting fucked. And he hated Joni Mitchell. Joni Mitchell was a candidate. But the open guitar case at the man’s feet was filled with bills, even a couple of twenties.

  Most of the other panhandlers out tonight weren’t bothering to offer entertainment—unless you counted the Hare Krishnas chanting.

  Knots of cops stood around, looking sullen and bored. Or maybe just pretending to be bored. A man with a tattered Bible preached Christ’s coming. (“And maybe when He come He get you a new Bible, huh, bro?” jeered a passerby.) A girl sat on a subway grate, hugging her knees, a paper Orange Julius cup at her bare toes. Fifteen, sixteen years old, pretty, but filthy. A born-too-late hippie. She was nodding with closed eyes when he first saw her. But just as he passed she jerked her head up and looked straight at him.

  The contrast between the pure blue pools of her eyes and her smut-streaked face was startling. But the look she gave him—a look of unmistakable horror and sadness, as though she knew exactly what he was planning—made him flush and sharply turn his face away.

  He’d meant to catch the next train home, but instead he stopped in the Emerald Pub near the station. It was a place he knew well, though he always ignored the other regulars and behaved as if he’d never seen the bartender before.

  The encounter with the street girl had rattled him. But he was not superstitious—she was obviously just some deranged kid, maybe high, maybe even hallucinating—and after two scotches he was himself again.

  By the time he got home Harley would probably have gone to bed. If not, she’d give him a hard time. If she’d been hitting the scotch herself, she might throw or break something. But it was all a sham. She didn’t really care where he’d been—not in her heart, anyway.

  On the train back to Long Island he found himself sitting across from a woman slumped in her seat, nodding. She was about his age, attractive despite a few pimples. She was wearing a tight denim skirt short enough to create a mouse hole at the top of her bare thighs. He and several other men sitting nearby glued their eyes to the spot like cats, collectively willing her to relax deeper.

  Suddenly she pulled herself upright. She glared at Roden and made a big show of placing the handbag she’d been holding at her side onto her lap. He ignored her, but inside he was sniggering. Wearing a skirt that all but exposed your crotch when you sat down, being outraged when men took notice—that was women. Earlier that day, he’d witnessed another one—in a dress that, folded twice, would’ve fit like a hanky into his pocket—tear into an old bum for whistling at her.

  The girl opened her bag and dug out a stick of gum. She tore off the wrapper, dropped it to the floor, and crammed the gum into her mouth. Soon she was happily chewing and snapping. She was some kind of champion, apparently. It didn’t seem possible anyone could snap gum that loud.

  When he got up to move to another seat she shot him a smug look, as if she’d scored a triumph over him.

  She is a candidate, he thought. What a joy it would’ve been to go back and make her choke on that gum, to squeeze her neck until the pimples burst.

  When the train reached his stop he did not go straight home but drove instead to a nearby street, where at least half the houses stood deserted. The last house on the right was reddish-pink in daylight, the walls peeling badly, as if the house had sunburn. But at night it might have been any color.

  In a front window throbbed a lime-green neon sign: READINGS BY LOLA.

  He was let in by a man wearing Ho Chi Minh sandals and a soiled undershirt who shuffled wordlessly back to his beer and the TV show he’d been watching in the dark.

  The lights in the room at the back of the house were on, and though the TV was so loud that it might as well have been in there with her, the woman had been sleeping. She rubbed her eyes and uttered a low, disgruntled sound when the door opened. She was wearing a red bra and a black nylon half slip.

  When she saw who it was she made an effort to smile, saying, “Hey, Jake”—the name he’d given her—and rolled onto her stomach. She slid the slip up over her hips, exposing blue-mottled thighs and a massive doughy rump. On one cheek, a mark the shape and color of a plum, as if a giant had pressed his thumb there.

  As though from a tower he plunged into that familiar paradoxical state in which his senses were both blunted and incredibly heightened. He no longer asked himself why, no matter who the woman—girlfriend or stranger, whore or lawful wedded wife—he had never had sex without shame.

  If it was going to look like a robbery, it would be better if it wasn’t at home. For one thing, break-ins were infrequent in their neighborhood, and besides, there was an alarm.

  Two years ago, when they were on their honeymoon, their hotel room had been robbed. This was in Aruba, and that particular night they were out at a club. In spite of warnings from hotel management, they had neglected to lock their patio door. It was no big loss—just a few pieces of Harley’s costume jewelry. Other than that, they’d been delighted with Aruba and with that particular little two-story hotel, where every room had either a balcony or a patio facing the sea. Harley had been talking about going back ever since.

  He remembered how easy it had been for the thief to enter. And he thought how often it happened that a thief caught in the act ended up committing murder—usually out of panic, but surely in some cases because, at the sight of a helpless victim, the thief’s blood jumped, and the beast that might otherwise have slept roared to life.

  Strange, that he couldn’t remember the precise moment when he’d decided to subtract Harley. Sometimes it seemed as if the idea had always existed, ever since they’d known each other, as it seemed he had always hated her, though of course he knew this was false.

  He’d been barely out of his teens when he proposed to her. His mother’s death that year had left him alone. His father had died a few days before Roden’s fifteenth birthday—killed one day on his way to work when his Pontiac hit a giant pothole and threw itself into an oncoming car. After the settlement, his mother had bought a house near the ocean and, with the help of a string of boyfriends, proceeded to go through the rest of the money at such a pace that there might have been nothing left if she hadn’t succumbed to a bad case of lupus.

  Roden’s uncle Gene was afraid that inheriting a large sum of money would squelch what little motivation Roden appeared to have. It was true that he’d come of age with no particular goals, but he believed this would have happened anyway. It was how he was made. He’d always been a bad student, and in spite of an IQ score he was told was above average he’d never had any in
terest in going to college.

  He was still in school when his mother’s health first started to fail. He’d stayed with her till the end, not thinking much about the future, and after she was gone he wasn’t sure what to do with himself. He believed he’d think of something—he was still young, after all. Look how the money had come to him. His uncle warned him that a dollar didn’t go as far as it used to, and Roden shouldn’t forget that most of his life was still ahead of him. But Roden believed that if everyone would just leave him alone, let him think in peace, he’d discover what to do. And for the moment he was glad he didn’t have to work at some shit job like so many other people. The very idea made him sick. He was sure he’d become a thief or some kind of con man, or a drug dealer, like his old school pal Lanny, before he’d ever have let that happen. Those who chose the path of crime earned more respect from him than all the working stiffs.

  Not that he was afraid to get his hands dirty. Gene, who worked as a contractor, put him on a crew from time to time, and he liked the achy, wasted feeling he had at the end of a day of manual labor, the hard-earned cash Gene stuffed into his shirt pocket. But that didn’t mean he wanted to make a career of it.

  That sizzling August day when he met Harley for the first time (at Jones Beach, posed on a towel like a pinup in a leopard-skin bikini), she was a key-punch operator working in an office in the Chrysler Building. But once they were engaged she quit. She was two years older than Roden, who was surprised to learn that she was in no hurry to get pregnant. He’d always thought a woman couldn’t wait to have kids. Though she was never a loving mother herself—though she heaped sarcasm on her son and beat him with an extension cord—his mother had always assured him this was a universal truth.

  But it meant nothing to him, either, that Harley wanted to put off motherhood. His cousin and best man, Ryan, warned him that, wedding accomplished, everything would change. This was another universal truth.

  “Suddenly, she’s got you where she wants, she thinks she’s the boss of you, and everything you do is wrong. And once the first kid arrives, she’s got no more time for you. And then the weight comes on, and there’s something about this weight that seems to cause headaches or cramps most nights of the week. Next thing you know, high heels and makeup, not to mention screwing, are for special occasions. A blow job, like your birthday and Christmas, comes but once a year, and soon you’re like, whoa, did I marry my girl or her fucking mother?”

  Sometime between their first and second anniversaries, Harley stopped talking about putting off having kids. She stopped talking about having kids at all. She couldn’t be accused of letting herself go, though. If anything, she was sleeker and better dressed than ever.

  He had never committed a serious crime, but he had a criminal’s instincts, including the one that said it was the small stuff you had to worry about. The smallest detail was the one that would bust you, like the sneeze that busts the last hijacker at the end of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

  He goes over the plan again and again, step by step, even writing it all down (though careful afterward to tear the paper into tiny strips and throw them away).

  They would be in their hotel room, getting ready to go out. She would be eager to go out. She loved nightclubs—clubs, fancy restaurants: these were the kinds of places where Harley shone. Above all, she loved to go dancing.

  He would wait till she was in the bathroom. He would wait by the bathroom door, and when she came out he’d pounce. Even for a woman she was weak, couldn’t open a jar without a rubber husband, or a bag of chips without using her teeth. Add to that the element of surprise, and it’d be a cinch to wrestle her down and gag and bind her. As an extra precaution he’d put a pillowcase over her head. Turn on the TV.

  While she lay there, figuring it out, he’d toss the room. Then he’d leave and go down to the hotel bar, where he’d order a beer and take it to one of the tables in the courtyard. Remember to bring a newspaper or magazine. He’d sit by the pool and drink some of the beer, savoring it. Savoring her fear.

  After a few minutes he’d get up, leaving the unfinished beer and the paper or magazine on the table. Just needed to use the men’s room or buy cigarettes or make a phone call. He’d go back to the room and strangle her, using the telephone cord. Ten seconds or so and she’d be unconscious (he’d done his research, at the library—in the library, rather than checking out any possibly incriminating evidence). With the application of continuous pressure, death will occur in four or five minutes.

  It had to be quick. No matter how exciting it might be to go slow, resist temptation. Oh, but of course he’d remove the pillowcase: he wanted to see her face. And she must see him. Must watch him do it.

  Tear off gag and bonds, stuff into pockets to be discarded later, race back to courtyard. He’d sit down at his table and calmly take up his reading again, take up his beer, and when the beer was all gone he’d go back inside to the bar.

  Looking at his watch, he’d ask the bartender if he could use the phone to make an in-house call. He’d dial his room number, let it ring several times before hanging up. Thank the bartender for the use of the phone. Decline if asked whether he’d like another beer. Wait around another minute or so, hands in pockets (gestures were very important) as if expecting someone momentarily to arrive. Finally, check watch again, shake head, furrow brow, leave bar.

  Back in the room, he’d take a few seconds to make sure all was in order before calling the police.

  Long before this moment, he would have rehearsed in front of a mirror the facial expressions and gestures that would show shock and grief without seeming hammy.

  It was not what they called an airtight alibi. If anyone happened to notice how long he’d been gone from the courtyard, it could be established that, in theory, at least, he’d had enough time to do the killing. If asked where he’d gone, he planned to say to the john. But suppose, on his way to or from his room, he passed somebody? This was a risk he must be prepared for. He must make absolutely sure that the person did not get a good look at him.

  But even if his alibi wasn’t perfect—even if the police suspected him (which, of course, they would)—as long as they had no hard evidence he was safe. Besides, an airtight alibi was a necessity only when there was a glaring motive, and in his case there was none. No history—not even hearsay—of domestic abuse. He had never beaten Harley, and because he detested petty squabbling he rarely even argued with her. He was a master of the silent treatment, and his way when a fight began escalating was to put on his coat and leave. Growing up, he’d watched his father do the same and learned how divinely it worked against his mother.

  There’d be no one to say they’d heard fighting coming from the hotel room. In fact, no one had ever witnessed them fighting anywhere. The marriage might have been a flop, but appearances meant everything to Harley. She was too proud to let others know the truth. Instead, she liked to gloat, to make others envious, especially her girlfriends. “He treats me like a queen,” she’d lie. And he never denied it. Sometimes he thought maybe she was even fooling herself. “He’s my little puppy dog, aren’t you, doll?” And he’d play along, making silly little yapping or whimpering noises.

  No one had ever heard him say a word against his wife, or that he wished he were single again. He had his pride, too, and it would not let him whine. It would have killed him to be seen as one of those crushed and bitter husbands like Ryan. Better that the world believe any lie about you than that you were not your own man.

  There was no sheet on him. As a kid, he’d committed plenty of vandalism and petty theft, but he’d never been caught, let alone arrested. There was no Other Woman. Harley had no money of her own and no life insurance policy. Tourists everywhere attracted robbers, everyone knew that, and though the murder of a tourist was a rare thing in the Caribbean, crime in general had been creeping up.

  And, of course, this would not be the first break-in at The Nook in Blue Heaven.

  That the balcony door
wasn’t locked would not cause suspicion: guests were advised to lock their doors only when they were away from the room.

  He goes over it, again and again. He works it out, scene by scene. Sitting in the darkness of himself, he watches it play and replay, like a movie. He assures himself that, for a prime suspect, a perfect alibi would only increase suspicion. He reminds himself that to believe that you are capable of a perfect crime is delusional. You took your chances as with everything else in life. And as with everything else in life, fortune favored the brave.

  He tells the travel agent to make all the necessary arrangements for the last week of January. Harley is ecstatic. Nothing she liked more than the prospect of flaunting a winter tan.

  It was a change so subtle that, for a while, he thought it was only because he was watching her so carefully. Yet he could have sworn she was more subdued than usual, as if she was under the weather, or under some kind of special pressure, and there were times he believed she was watching him as carefully as he watched her.

  But why? Was she worried that he was thinking of leaving her? Maybe. But hadn’t he been the one to suggest a second honeymoon in Aruba? She couldn’t possibly have guessed his plan. If she had even an inkling, would she dare stick around?

  But what if some sixth sense was trying to warn her. He’d never known her to be afraid of him. In fact, he’d always had a grudging respect for her in this regard: she might have been physically weak, but compared with most women Harley was fearless.

  The last week of January was still months away—a long time to cope with the anxiety that was now eating at him. Night after night he closed his eyes only to see that strange hippie-girl’s blue ones widen in horror. He slept badly, then spent his days in a fog. Which would not do. He must keep a clear head.