The Best American Noir of the Century

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  “Maybe in the divorce he let you keep the house.”

  “It’s in the prenup, I get zip. And at thirty-two I’m back stripping on Federal Highway, or working in one of those topless doughnut places. You have tits, at least you can get a job. Woz’s favorite, I’d come out in a nurse’s uniform, peel everything off but the perky little cap?” The woman’s mind moving to this without pausing. “Woz said the first time he saw the act he wanted to hire me. I’d be the first topless surgical nurse.”

  Lourdes imagined this woman dancing naked, men watching her, and thought of Miss Olympia warning the cleaning women with her Biblical Integrity: no singing or dancing around while cleaning the offices, or they might catch the eye of men working late. She made it sound as if they were lying in wait. “Read the Book of Judges,” Miss Olympia said, “the twenty-first verse.” It was about men waiting for women, the daughters of Shiloh, to come out to dance so they could take them, force the women to be their wives. Lourdes knew of cleaning women who sang while they worked, but not ones who danced. She wondered what it would be like to dance naked in front of men.

  “You don’t want to be with him,” Lourdes said, “but you want to live in this house.”

  “There it is,” the woman who didn’t look at all like a Mrs. Mahmood said.

  Lourdes sipped her daiquiri, put the glass down, and reached for the pack of Virginia Slims on the table.

  “May I try one of these?”

  “Help yourself.”

  She lit the cigarette, sucking hard to get a good draw. She said, “I use to smoke. The way you do it made me want to smoke again. Even the way you hold the cigarette.”

  Lourdes believed the woman was very close to telling what she was thinking about. Still, it was not something easy to talk about with another person, even for a woman who danced naked. Lourdes decided this evening to help her.

  She said, “How would you feel if a load of wet concrete fell on your husband?”

  Then wondered, sitting in the silence, not looking at the woman, if she had spoken too soon.

  The redheaded woman said, “The way it happened to Mr. Zimmer? How did you feel?”

  “I accepted it,” Lourdes said, “with a feeling of relief, knowing I wouldn’t be beaten no more.”

  “Were you ever happy with him?”

  “Not for one day.”

  “You picked him, you must’ve had some idea.”

  “He picked me. At the party in Cali? There were seven Colombian girls for each American. I didn’t think I would be chosen. We married ... In two years I had my green card and was tired of him hitting me.”

  The redheaded Mrs. Mahmood said, “You took a lot of shit, didn’t you?” and paused this time before saying, “How much does a load of concrete cost these days?”

  Lourdes, without pausing, said, “Thirty thousand.”

  Mrs. Mahmood said, “Jesus Christ,” but was composed, sitting back in her yellow cushions. She said, “You were ready. Viviana told you the situation and you decided to go for it.”

  “I think it was you hired me,” Lourdes said, “because of Mr. Zimmer — you so interested in what happen to him. Also I could tell, from the first day we sat here, you don’t care for your husband.”

  “You can understand why, can’t you? I’m scared to death of catching on fire. He lights a cigar, I watch him like a fucking hawk.”

  Giving herself a reason, an excuse.

  “We don’t need to talk about him,” Lourdes said. “You pay the money, all of it before, and we don’t speak of this again. You don’t pay, we still never speak of it.”

  “The Colombian guys have to have it all up front?”

  “The what guys?”

  “The concrete guys.”

  “You don’t know what kind of guys they are. What if it looks like an accident and you say oh, they didn’t do nothing, he fell off his boat.”

  “Woz doesn’t have a boat.”

  “Or his car was hit by a truck. You understand? You not going to know anything before.”

  “I suppose they want cash.”

  “Of course.”

  “I can’t go to the bank and draw that much.”

  “Then we forget it.”

  Lourdes waited while the woman thought about it smoking her Virginia Slim, both of them smoking, until Mrs. Mahmood said, “If I give you close to twenty thousand in cash, today, right now, you still want to forget it?”

  Now Lourdes had to stop and think for a moment.

  “You have that much in the house?”

  “My getaway money,” Mrs. Mahmood said, “in case I ever have to leave in a hurry. What I socked away in tips getting guys to spot their pants and that’s the deal, twenty grand. You want it or not? You don’t, you might as well leave, I don’t need you anymore.”

  ~ * ~

  So far in the few weeks she was here, Lourdes had met Dr. Mahmood face-to-face with reason to speak to him only twice. The first time, when he came in the kitchen and asked her to prepare his breakfast, the smoked snook, a fish he ate cold with tea and whole wheat toast. He asked her to have some of the snook if she wished, saying it wasn’t as good as kippers but would do. Lourdes tried a piece; it was full of bones but she told him yes, it was good. They spoke of different kinds of fish from the ocean they liked and he seemed to be a pleasant, reasonable man.

  The second time Lourdes was with him face-to-face he startled her, coming out of the swimming pool naked as she was watering the plants on the patio. He called to her to bring him his towel from the chair. When she came with it he said, “You were waiting for me?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t see you.”

  As he dried his face and his head, the hair so short it appeared shaved, she stared at his skin, at his round belly and his strange black penis, Lourdes looking up then as he lowered the towel.

  He said, “You are a widow?” She nodded yes and he said, “When you married, you were a virgin?”

  She hesitated, but then answered because she was telling a doctor, No, sir.

  “It wasn’t important to your husband?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Would you see an advantage in again being a virgin?”

  She had to think — it wasn’t something ever in her mind before — but didn’t want to make the doctor wait, so she said, “No, not at my age.”

  The doctor said, “I can restore it if you wish.”

  “Make me a virgin?”

  “Surgically, a few sutures down there in the tender dark. It’s becoming popular in the Orient with girls entering marriage. Also for prostitutes. They can charge much more, often thousands of dollars for that one night.” He said, “I’m thinking of offering the procedure. Should you change your mind, wish me to examine you, I could do it in your room.”

  Dr. Mahmood’s manner, and the way he looked at her that time, made Lourdes feel like taking her clothes off.

  ~ * ~

  He didn’t come home the night Lourdes and Mrs. Mahmood got down to business. Or the next night. The morning of the following day, two men from the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office came to the house. They showed Lourdes their identification and asked to see Mrs. Mahmood.

  She was upstairs in her bedroom trying on a black dress, looking at herself in the full-length mirror and then at Lourdes’s reflection appearing behind her.

  “The police are here,” Lourdes said.

  Mrs. Mahmood nodded and said, “What do you think?” turning to pose in the dress, the skirt quite short.

  Lourdes read the story in the newspaper that said Dr. Wasim Mahmood, prominent etc., etc., had suffered gunshot wounds during an apparent carjacking on Flagler near Currie Park and was pronounced dead on arrival at Good Samaritan. His Mercedes was found abandoned on the street in Delray Beach.

  Mrs. Mahmood left the house in her black dress. Later, she phoned to tell Lourdes she had identified the body, spent time with the police, who had no clues, nothing at all to go on, then stopped by a funeral ho
me and arranged to have Woz cremated without delay. She said, “What do you think?”

  “About what?” Lourdes said.

  “Having the fucker burned.”

  She said she was stopping to see friends and wouldn’t be home until late.

  ~ * ~

  One a.m., following an informal evening of drinks with old friends, Mrs. Mahmood came into the kitchen from the garage and began to lose her glow.

  What was going on here?

  Rum and mixes on the counter, limes, a bowl of ice. A Latin beat coming from the patio. She followed the sound to a ring of burning candles, to Lourdes in a green swimsuit moving in one place to the beat, hands raised, Lourdes grinding her hips in a subtle way.

  The two guys at the table smoking cigarettes saw Mrs. Mahmood, but made no move to get up.

  Now Lourdes turned from them and saw her, Lourdes smiling a little as she said, “How you doing? You look like you feeling no pain.”

  “You have my suit on,” Mrs. Mahmood said.

  “I put on my yellow one,” Lourdes said, still moving in that subtle way, “and took it off. I don’t wear yellow no more, so I borrow one of yours. Is OK, isn’t it?”

  Mrs. Mahmood said, “What’s going on?”

  “This is cumbia, Colombian music for when you want to celebrate. For a wedding, a funeral, anything you want. The candles are part of it. Cumbia, you should always light candles.”

  Mrs. Mahmood said, “Yeah, but what is going on?”

  “We having a party for you, Ginger. The Colombian guys come to see you dance.”

  <>

  * * * *

  2002

  SCOTT WOLVEN

  * * *

  CONTROLLED BURN

  Scott Wolven (1965-) was born in Fort Riley, Kentucky, where his father was stationed before going to Vietnam. He grew up in Saugerties and Catskill, New York. After earning a certificate in creative writing from Columbia University, he studied in the MFA program at Columbia. He worked as a logger, a project manager, and an instructor at Binghamton University (SUNY), and was a visiting writer at Indiana University and the University of Chicago.

  Wolven has the remarkable distinction of having appeared in seven consecutive editions of The Best American Mystery Stories. His first book, Controlled Burn: Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men (2005), collected several of these stories, as well as others, and was one of the most enthusiastically published books of the year. Among those who heaped praise on Wolven’s debut are Richard Ford (“Wolven has turned raw, unreconciled life into startling, evocative, and very good short stories. He draws on a New England different from Updike’s and even Dubus’, but his Active lives — no less than theirs — render the world newly, and full of important consequences”); Nelson DeMille (“Controlled Burn is good. Very good. Remarkable, actually. Tough, gritty, and honest — reminiscent of Hemingway with a little bit of John Steinbeck”); and George Pelecanos (“. . . tough, unsentimental, and completely earned. This is the most exciting, authentic collection of short stories I have read in years”). It had a starred review in Publishers Weekly; was named a “A Book to Remember” by the New York Public Library; and Amazon, Borders, and Barnes & Noble all selected it as a top ten fiction debut.

  Almost any story in Controlled Burn would fit comfortably between the covers of this book, but the lives depicted in this story, of people who chose “an easy way to make a hard living,” as the author once described it, are especially deserving.

  “Controlled Burn” was originally published in the winter 2002 issue of Harpur Palate, and was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2003.

  ~ * ~

  I

  t was a bad winter and a worse spring. It was the summer Bill Allen lived and died, the sweltering summer I landed a job cutting trees for Robert Wilson’s scab-logging outfit near Orford, New Hampshire. June boiled itself away into the heavy steam of July. Heat devils rose in waves off the blacktop as timber trucks rolled in. By the end of July, we switched gears and started cutting stove wood. I was cutting eight cords a day while Robert worked the hydraulic splitter. Then we’d deliver it in one of our dump trucks. Some men drove to the woodlot to pick up their own. Some of them had white salt marks on their boots and jackets from sweat — some of them smelled like beer. Most of them smelled like gasoline. They didn’t say much, just paid for their wood and left with it in their pickup trucks. They were either busy working or busy living their lies, which is work in itself. I knew about that. The hard work crushed one empty beer can day after another, adding to my lifetime pile of empties. Summer moved on, gray in spite of the bright sun.

  That Friday, I was Bill Allen. I was Bill Allen all that summer. Bill Allen was what caused me to jump every time the phone rang. I was Bill Allen from Glens Falls, New York, and I was taking a summer off from college. I repeated that story as often and as loudly as possible. And each ring of the phone might be someone asking me to prove I was Bill Allen, which was out of the question. Back in December, in the middle of another, different lie, I tried to rob a gas station near Cape May, New Jersey. It was off-season then, nobody around, and I thought it would be easy. It fit the person I’d lied about being. A high school girl was behind the counter. I wore a ski mask and carried a cheap, semiautomatic pistol. I must have touched the trigger, because the gun went off. Maybe she lived. I really couldn’t say. I left fast. My brain was on fire, I hadn’t meant to shoot her. But it was too late for that. I took a roll of bills and ended up at Robert’s. Robert paid cash at the end of the week, didn’t bother with Uncle Sam, didn’t ask for references, and had plenty of backbreaking work that needed doing, without his son around to help him. Bill Allen was just the man for the job, and every day I was Bill Allen to the best of my ability. It didn’t help — my grim yesterdays cast the longest shadows in the Connecticut River Valley. I watched every car, studied every face. Bill Allen never knew a peaceful day. If it hadn’t been for the marathon workload Robert demanded, Bill Allen never would have slept. I’d have probably shot Bill Allen myself if I hadn’t been working so hard to keep him going. Some days, he lives on with different names. Allen Williams, Al Wilson, Bill Roberts. Bill Allen probably died in a fire that summer. Leave it at that, with questions about Bill Allen.

  ~ * ~

  The phone at the woodlot rang around noon that Friday. I heard it, had been hearing it most of August. Roberts son John was in jail in Concord, awaiting trial for murderous assault, so there were a lot of phone calls. Robert had rigged the phone with two speakers — one bolted to the stovepipe that stuck out of the roof of our headquarters shack and the other attached by some baling wire to the sick elm on the end of the lot. The sudden scream of the phone spiked my heart rate at least twice a day. Echoing in the alleys between the giant piles of long logs. The woodlot sat surrounded by low, field-grass hills and trees in a natural bowl, just off the highway north of Hanover. Robert’s house was on the top of the hill, built with its back to the woodlot, facing a farm field. On a still day, the beauty of the Connecticut River drifted the quarter mile over the farm field and quietly framed all the other sounds, the birds, the trees in the breeze. I was never a part of those days.

  The phone rang over the diesel roar of my yellow Maxi-lift, the near-dead cherry picker we kept around to police up the yard. I was working, sweating in the sun, busy shifting a full twelve-ton load of New Hampshire rock maple to the very back of the drying mountains of timber, heat against next year’s winter. The phone rang again, not that anyone wanted to talk to me. Most times I’d shut the equipment down, run across the yard, slam into the shed, pick up, and get “Robert there?” and they’d hang up when I said no. Or they wouldn’t say anything, just hang up when they knew I wasn’t Robert. And I could breathe again, because it wasn’t someone looking for me. Just locals, as if I couldn’t take a wood order. Or it would be the mechanical jail operator, would I please accept a collect call from inmate John Wilson at the Merrimack Correctional Facility. Then I’d say yes
and have to go get Robert anyway. Nobody wanted to talk to me, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone, so I let it ring. Robert would get it. Or he wouldn’t. They know where to find me, he’d say. Working in the same place for thirty years, if they can’t find me, what the hell would I want to talk to them for, he’d say. Must be stupid if they can’t get hold of me. Robert’s voice was a ton of gravel coming off a truck, years of cigarettes mucking up the inside of his barrel chest. There was no sign at the dirt road entrance to the woodlot. It was Robert Wilson’s woodlot, and everyone knew without asking.

  Robert came out of the shed and waved at me to shut the cherry picker down. I flipped a switch, turned the keys back a click, and cranked the brake on. I walked over to the shed. Robert had his jean coveralls on. He squinted against the sun, nodded, and spoke.