The Best American Noir of the Century

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Leaves drifted, huge poplar leaves veined with amber so golden they might have been coin of the realm for a finer world than this one. He cut the ignition of the four-wheeler and got off. Past the lowering trees the sky was a blue of an improbable intensity, a fierce cobalt blue shot through with dense golden light.

  She slid off the rear and steadied herself a moment with a hand on his arm. Where are we? she asked. Why are we here?

  The paperhanger had disengaged his arm and was strolling among the gravestones reading such inscriptions as were legible, as if he might find forebear or antecedent in this moldering earth. The doctor’s wife was retrieving her martinis from the luggage carrier of the ATV. She stood looking about uncertainly. A graven angel with broken wings crouched on a truncated marble column like a gargoyle. Its stone eyes regarded her with a blind benignity. Some of these graves have been rob, she said.

  You can’t rob the dead, he said. They have nothing left to steal.

  It is a sacrilege, she said. It is forbidden to disturb the dead. You have done this.

  The paperhanger took a cigarette pack from his pocket and felt it, but it was empty, and he balled it up and threw it away. The line between grave robbing and archaeology has always looked a little blurry to me, he said. I was studying their culture, trying to get a fix on what their lives were like.

  She was watching him with a kind of benumbed horror. Standing hip-slung and lost like a parody of her former self. Strange and anomalous in her fashionable but mismatched clothing, as if she’d put on the first garment that fell to hand. Someday, he thought, she might rise and wander out into the daylit world wearing nothing at all, the way she had come into it. With her diamond watch and the cocktail glass she carried like a used-up talisman.

  You have break the law, she told him.

  I got a government grant, the paperhanger said contemptuously.

  Why are we here? We are supposed to be searching for my child.

  If you’re looking for a body the first place to look is the graveyard, he said. If you want a book don’t you go to the library?

  I am paying you, she said. You are in my employ. I do not want to be here. I want you to do as I say or carry me to my car if you will not.

  Actually, the paperhanger said, I had a story to tell you. About my wife.

  He paused, as if leaving a space for her comment, but when she made none he went on. I had a wife. My childhood sweetheart. She became a nurse, went to work in one of these drug rehab places. After she was there a while she got a faraway look in her eyes. Look at me without seeing me. She got in tight with her supervisor. They started having meetings to go to. Conferences. Sometimes just the two of them would confer, generally in a motel. The night I watched them walk into the Holiday Inn in Franklin I decided to kill her. No impetuous spur-of-the-moment thing. I thought it all out and it would be the perfect crime.

  The doctor’s wife didn’t say anything. She just watched him.

  A grave is the best place to dispose of a body, the paperhanger said. The grave is its normal destination anyway. I could dig up a grave and then just keep on digging. Save everything carefully. Put my body there and fill in part of the earth, and then restore everything the way it was. The coffin, if any of it was left. The bones and such. A good settling rain and the fall leaves and you’re home free. Now that’s eternity for you.

  Did you kill someone, she breathed. Her voice was barely audible.

  Did I or did I not, he said. You decide. You have the powers of a god. You can make me a murderer or just a heartbroke guy whose wife quit him. What do you think? Anyway, I don’t have a wife. I expect she just walked off into the abstract like that Lang guy I told you about.

  I want to go, she said. I want to go where my car is.

  He was sitting on a gravestone watching her out of his pale eyes. He might not have heard.

  I will walk.

  Just whatever suits you, the paperhanger said. Abruptly, he was standing in front of her. She had not seen him arise from the headstone or stride across the graves, but like a jerky splice in a film he was before her, a hand cupping each of her breasts, staring down into her face.

  Under the merciless weight of the sun her face was stunned and vacuous. He studied it intently, missing no detail. Fine wrinkles crept from the corners of her eyes and mouth like hairline cracks in porcelain. Grime was impacted in her pores, in the crepe flesh of her throat. How surely everything had fallen from her: beauty, wealth, social position, arrogance. Humanity itself, for by now she seemed scarcely human, beleaguered so by the fates that she suffered his hands on her breasts as just one more cross to bear, one more indignity to endure.

  How far you’ve come, the paperhanger said in wonder. I believe you’re about down to my level now, don’t you?

  It does not matter, the doctor’s wife said. There is no longer one thing that matters.

  Slowly and with enormous lassitude her body slumped toward him, and in his exultance it seemed not a motion in itself but simply the completion of one begun long ago with the fateful weight of a thigh, a motion that began in one world and completed itself in another one.

  From what seemed a great distance he watched her fall toward him like an angel descending, wings spread, from an infinite height, striking the earth gently, tilting, then righting itself.

  ~ * ~

  The weight of moonlight tracking across the paperhanger’s face awoke him from where he took his rest. Filigrees of light through the gauzy curtains swept across him in stately silence like the translucent ghosts of insects. He stirred, lay still then for a moment getting his bearings, a fix on where he was.

  He was in his bed, lying on his back. He could see a huge orange moon poised beyond the bedroom window, ink-sketch tree branches that raked its face like claws. He could see his feet bookending the San Miguel bottle that his hands clasped erect on his abdomen, the amber bottle hard edged and defined against the pale window, dark atavistic monolith reared against a harvest moon.

  He could smell her. A musk compounded of stale sweat and alcohol, the rank smell of her sex. Dissolution, ruin, loss. He turned to study her where she lay asleep, her open mouth a dark cavity in her face. She was naked, legs outflung, pale breasts pooled like cooling wax. She stirred restively, groaned in her sleep. He could hear the rasp of her breathing. Her breath was fetid on his face, corrupt, a graveyard smell. He watched her in disgust, in a dull self-loathing.

  He drank from the bottle, lowered it. Sometimes, he told her sleeping face, you do things you can’t undo. You break things you just can’t fix. Before you mean to, before you know you’ve done it. And you were right, there are things only a miracle can set to rights.

  He sat clasping the bottle. He touched his miscut hair, the soft down of his beard. He had forgotten what he looked like, he hadn’t seen his reflection in a mirror for so long. Unbidden, Zeineb’s face swam into his memory. He remembered the look on the child’s face when the doctor’s wife had spun on her heel: spite had crossed it like a flicker of heat lightning. She stuck her tongue out at him. His hand snaked out like a serpent and closed on her throat and snapped her neck before he could call it back, sloe eyes wild and wide, pink tongue caught between tiny seed-pearl teeth like a bitten-off rosebud. Her hair swung sidewise, her head lolled onto his clasped hand. The tray of the toolbox was out before he knew it, he was stuffing her into the toolbox like a ragdoll. So small, so small, hardly there at all.

  He arose. Silhouetted naked against the moon-drenched window, he drained the bottle. He looked about for a place to set it, leaned and wedged it between the heavy flesh of her upper thighs. He stood in silence, watching her. He seemed philosophical, possessed of some hard-won wisdom. The paperhanger knew so well that while few are deserving of a miracle, fewer still can make one come to pass.

  He went out of the room. Doors opened, doors closed. Footsteps softly climbing a staircase, descending. She dreamed on. When he came back into the room he was cradling a plastic-wrapped bundl
e stiffly in his arms. He placed it gently beside the drunk woman. He folded the plastic sheeting back like a caul.

  What had been a child. What the graveyard earth had spared the freezer had preserved. Ice crystals snared in the hair like windy snow-flakes whirled there, in the lashes. A doll from a madhouse assembly line.

  He took her arm, laid it across the child. She pulled away from the cold. He firmly brought the arm back, arranging them like mannequins, madonna and child. He studied this tableau, then went out of his house for the last time. The door closed gently behind him on its keeper spring.

  The paperhanger left in the Mercedes, heading west into the open country, tracking into wide-open territories he could infect like a malignant spore. Without knowing it, he followed the selfsame route the doctor had taken some eight months earlier, and in a world of infinite possibilities where all journeys share a common end, perhaps they are together, taking the evening air on a ruined veranda among the hollyhocks and oleanders, the doctor sipping his scotch and the paperhanger his San Miguel, gentlemen of leisure discussing the vagaries of life and pondering deep into the night not just the possibility but the inevitability of miracles.

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  * * * *

  2001

  F. X. TOOLE

  * * *

  MIDNIGHT EMISSIONS

  F. X. Toole, the pseudonym of Jerry Boyd (1930-2002), was the son of Irish immigrants. He had a varied background, working in such jobs as shoe-shine boy, bartender, and cement truck driver. After reading Ernest Hemingway’s nonfiction work about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, he moved to Mexico to learn how to be a matador. After his bullfighting career ended, he moved to Los Angeles, getting into shape at boxing gyms and eventually becoming a trainer and cutman, who attends to a fighter’s injuries between rounds.

  After trying unsuccessfully for forty years, he finally sold his first short story to a literary journal, Zyzzyva, in 1999. Once he was published, he chose a pseudonym, an amalgam of Francis Xavier, the sixteenth-century philosopher, teacher, and saint, and his favorite actor, Peter O’Toole. A collection of his short stories, Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner, was published in 2000. Incidents from several of these stories were adapted for the screenplay of Million Dollar Baby (2004); the film won four Academy Awards, for Best Picture, Best Director (Clint Eastwood, who also starred), Best Actress (Hilary Swank), and Best Supporting Actor (Morgan Freeman). Many of the stories were based on the real-life exploits of Boyd’s friend Dub Huntley, who taught him to box. Four years after Toole’s death, his long novel, Pound for Pound, was published to outstanding reviews. In 2007 the AMC cable channel announced a series of one-hour boxing dramas based on Toole’s short stories.

  “Midnight Emissions” was first published in the anthology Murder on the Ropes (Los Angeles: New Millennium, 2001); it was selected for the 2002 edition of The Best American Mystery Stories.

  ~ * ~

  B

  utcherin’ was done while the deceased was still alive,” Junior said.

  See, we was at the gym and I’d been answering a few things. Old Junior’s a cop, and his South Texas twang was wide and flat like mine. ‘Course he was dipping, and he let a stream go into the Coke bottle he was carrying in the hand that wasn’t his gun hand. His blue eyes was paler than a washed-out work shirt.

  “Hail,” he said, “one side of the mouth’d been slit all the way to the earring.”

  See, when the police find a corpse in Texas, their first question ain’t who done it, it’s what did the dead do to deserve it?

  ~ * ~

  Billy Clancy’d been off the police force a long time before Kenny Coyle come along, but he had worked for the San Antonia Police Department a spell there after boxing. He made some good money for himself on the side — down in dark town, if you know what I’m saying? That’s after I trained him as a heavyweight in the old El Gallo, or Fighting Cock gym off Blanco Road downtown. We worked together maybe six years all told, starting off when he was a amateur. Billy Clancy had all the Irish heart in the world. At six-three and two-twenty-five, he had a fine frame on him, most of his weight upstairs. He had a nice clean style, too, and was quick as a sprinter. But after he was once knocked out for the first time? He had no chin after that. He’d be kicking ass and taking names, but even in a rigged fight with a bum, if he got caught, down he’d go like a longneck at a ice house.

  He was a big winner in the amateurs, Billy was, but after twelve pro fights, he had a record of eight and four, with his nose broke once — that’s eight wins by KO, but he lost four times by KO, so that’s when he hung ‘em up. For a long time, he went his way and I went mine. But then Billy Clancy opened Clancy’s Pub with his cop money. That was his big break. There was Irish night with Mick music, corned beef and cabbage, and Caffery’s Ale on tap and Harp Lager from Dundalk. And he had Messkin night with mariachis and folks was dancin’ corridos and the band was whooping out rancheras and they’d get to playing some of that nortena polka music that’d have you laughing and crying at the same time. For shrimp night, all you can eat, Billy trucked in fresh Gulf shrimp sweeter than plum jelly straight up from Matamoros on the border. There was kicker, and hillbilly night, and on weekends there was just about the best jazz and blues you ever did hear. B. B. King did a whole week there one time. It got to be a hell of a deal for Billy, and then he opened up a couple of more joints till he had six in three towns, and soon Billy Clancy was somebody all the way from San Antonia up to Dallas, and down to Houston. Paid all his taxes, obeyed all the laws, treated folks like they was ladies and gentlemen, no matter how dusty the boots, how faded the dress, or if a suit was orange and purple and green.

  By then he had him a home in the historic old Monte Vista section oi San Antonia. His wife had one of them home-decorating businesses on her own, and she had that old place looking so shiny that it was like going back a hundred years. His kids was all in private school, all of them geared to go to UT up Austin, even though the dumb young one saw himself as a Aggie.

  So one day Billy called me for some “Q” down near the river, knew I was a whore for baby back ribs. Halfway through, he just up and said, “Red, I want back in.”

  See, he got to missing the smell of leather and sweat, and the laughter of men — he missed the action, is what, and got himself back into the game the only way he could, managing fighters. He was good at it, too. By then he was better’n forty, and myself I was getting on — old’s when you sit on the crapper and you have to hold your nuts up so they don’t get wet. But what with my rocking-chair money every month, and the money I made off Billy’s fighters, it got to where I was doing pretty good. Even got me some ostrich boots and a El Patron 30x beaver Stetson, yip!

  What Billy really wanted was a heavyweight. With most managers, it’s only the money, ‘cause heavies is what brings in them stacks of green fun-tickets. Billy wanted fun-tickets, too, but with Billy it was more like he wanted to get back something what he had lost. ‘Course, finding the right heavyweight’s like finding a cherry at the high school prom.

  Figure it, with only twenty, twenty-five good wins, ‘specially if he can crack, a heavy can fight for a titles worth millions. There’s exceptions, but most little guys’ll fight forever and never crack maybe two hundred grand. One of the reason’s ‘cause there’s so many of them. Other reason’s ‘cause they’s small. Fans like seeing heavyweights hit the canvas.

  But most of today’s big guys go into the other sports where you don’t get hit the way you do in the fights. It ain’t held against you in boxing if you’re black nowadays, but if you’re a white heavy it makes it easier to pump paydays, and I could tell that it wouldn’t make Billy sad if I could get him a white boy—Irish or Italian would be desired. But working with the big guys takes training to a level that can break your back and your heart, and I wasn’t all that sure a heavy was what I wanted, what with me being the one what’s getting broke up.

  See, training’s a hard row to hoe. It ain’t onl
y the physical and mental parts for the fighter what’s hard, but it’s hard for the trainer, too. Fighters can drive you crazy, like maybe right in the middle of a fight they’re winning, when they forget everything what you taught them? And all of a sudden they can’t follow instructions from the corner? Pressure, pain, and being out of gas will make fighters go flat brain-dead on you. Your fighter’s maybe sweated off six or eight pounds in there, his body’s breaking down, and the jungle in him is yelling quick to get him some gone. Trainers come to know how that works, so you got to hang with your boy when he’s all alone out there in the canvas part of the world. He takes heart again, ‘cause he knows with you there he’s still got a fighting chance to go for the titties of the win. ‘Course, that means cutting grommets, Red Ryder.

  Everyone working corners knows you’ll more’n likely lose more’n you’ll ever win, that boxing for most is refried beans and burnt tortillas. But winning is what makes your birdie chirp, so you got to always put in your mind that losing ain’t nothing but a hitch in the git-along.