The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 (11 page)

“I don't feel so good, you know. It's been a hard day, Loretta. I need to rest.”

“Sir,” Fortney said, “I'm afraid you have to leave. I'll help you.”

“You'll be hearing from Hef Givens in the morning,” Loretta said.

“Hef Givens?”

“My lawyer.”

“Hef? What do you mean Hef Givens is your lawyer? Hef is
my friend.
”

He remembered suddenly, vividly, the last time he and Hef had gone hunting, both of them squatting in the bushes, the predawn light shrouding them, their breaths misting in the November air, both of them waiting, waiting, waiting for the bucks to appear on the meadow by the lake. He loved such moments, rare though they were, when he and another man, who also understood the dignity and beauty and suspense of such stillness, crouched together, watching and waiting patiently.

“It's over,” she said.

“Come along, sir,” the deputy said, his voice rising again in a way that reminded Blue of Tildon.
Where was Tildon? Where were the girls?

Fortney put his hand on Blue's arm, a place where Blue had blistered himself that very day when he dropped the torch as he fell to the concrete floor. Blue knocked the boy's hand away and stood up.

“Mr. Simpson,” the deputy said, unsnapping the button on his holster. Later he would swear under oath that he didn't aim for the man's back but for the fireplace, though after the trial he would sometimes remember or, in a feverish night sweat, dream it differently, would see his revolver pointed at a spot just below Blue Simpson's left shoulder blade, would feel again his finger squeezing the slightly oily steel of the trigger. But right now Fortney only saw Blue glance down at the front of his pants. A small dark circle growing wider and wider. The man's swollen lips seemed to curl with the dismissive contempt Fortney had put up with his whole damn existence. Blue shoved him aside and took two long strides toward his wife.

It was now dusk, and the lights were not yet on in the house. Loretta was surprised when her husband moved toward her, suddenly blocking the window. The shadowy outline of him suddenly reminded her of the young man—not even twenty, with a thin fuzz of reddish blond scruff on his chin and jaw—who had charmed her when she was at college in Denton. The night they'd met, Blue was standing on the edge of the dance floor. He'd offered his hand. She'd taken it, and he twirled her quickly through a double-time waltz, and she'd smiled, thanked him for the dance, and started away, but then the next song began—a slow melancholy number, evocative, lovely—and he'd pulled her close, held her against him, and they'd moved in slow, swaying circles, and just like that he'd kissed her on the lips, a feather touch, then leaned back and smiled.

As he crossed their living room now, Blue seemed impossibly young again and determined to claim Loretta's last dance. But then she saw his face clearly. That left eye disfigured. She could see again the filament of steel lodged in the iris—like a tiny jagged flower. There it was, and then gone. She heard the sound of the shot, which echoed in the small room and kept ringing in her ears days later. Then she no longer saw Blue's features, just his distinct silhouette falling toward her, eclipsing the fading sun.

FROM
New Orleans Review

 

A
T ONE TIME
the landlord Jeffers had been a busy person, but not anymore. Now he had time to think, and he had recently decided that he was going to die. His stomach was no longer the taut paunch it had been. Food passed his tongue joylessly. He no longer lusted. His feet and legs often went numb, and he'd taken to massaging isopropyl alcohol on them to regain some feeling. The smoke from his pipe remained one of the only things that seemed right—perhaps the craving for vice was the last thing to leave a person. Just before his mother passed away she would only eat soft candies. Jeffers's death wouldn't be immediate: he wouldn't pass away today or tomorrow. It just landed upon him, pressed upon him, that his own passing was imminent, and he had no idea what to expect in the afterward.

Alone on the front porch in a frayed and stretched lawn chair, eyes closed, he imagined funerals. His tenant's wife had died a few days ago. He pictured her supine like all bodies he'd seen in a coffin—clenched eyes, somewhat enlarged nostrils, mouth gently closed as if asleep. Peaceful rest. He remembered the summer evening years before when he'd had a body removed from Ashcross. The renter's daughter draped across her father's swollen body, weeping “Daddy . . . Daddy.” Her little fists sinking into her father's stomach, her fingers groping at his shirt. The mortician's assistant, grinding his teeth, pulled the little girl off the body, rending the moist stitching around the shirt's collar. The renter didn't appear as if he slept. In the near-subterraneous light, gape-jawed with eyes half closed and unfocused, his waxy face was constricted into a rictus articulating the ineffable of the beyond. Or perhaps the lack thereof. He didn't look heaven-bound. If Jeffers had not gone when the rent stopped coming in, he wondered how long the kid would have stayed there, caring for her father's decomposing body.

Jeffers envied those who had seen a person die. He believed they understood what he didn't—what death brought. He asked the renter's little girl what had happened when her father passed. Without a tear in her eye, she said she didn't know. She hadn't seen it.

This envy had taken root when his son, James, witnessed his mother pass away while Jeffers was out making a deal with a man named White who was ignorant enough to believe a handshake was still as good as a notarized contract. For James, watching his mother's passing had been such a powerful thing he'd gone into the seminary. He now ran a church out of the storefront of an old third-rate grocery in the lower part of the state; its sanctuary still smelled of hoop cheese and day laborers. (Jeffers thought his son would have been better off reopening the grocery.) But James had witnessed many of his parishioners die, some of old age, others from disease. Each time his son told him of another death, Jeffers's resentment grew. He never asked his son what it was like, afraid he'd get an earful of capricious religious nonsense, a tangle of words that would make him feel stupid.

He opened his eyes to stop the images and looked at the clear plastic freezer bags filled with water and four pennies hanging from the upper porch railings. Craziest thing he'd ever heard—a suggestion from James, an article he'd sent Jeffers on how to ward off flies. It said to hang plastic freezer bags with pennies and water outside to keep flies away. It worked. But as the sunlight shot through them, casting a liquid-copper glow, he thought of the coins once used to cover the eyes of the deceased. He spat over the porch railing. He put his unlighted pipe in his mouth.

He tried to recover his mind, replacing contemplating death with what to do about the Ashcross property, in which—he'd been told—a set of kids were now squatting. He'd let the place go to seed since the renter died in it nearly three years ago. Its roof and plumbing leaked, its walls drilled out by all manner of nest-builders, but he couldn't abide the squatting. But apathy or something like it had gotten hold of him; it had embraced him at the same time the numbness started creeping into his legs. In quiet times such as these, something in the boredom and the numbness and the nature of age drew back like a bow and twanged when he tried to move, and a misdirected laugh or, on occasion, a hiccuplike cry sprang from his mouth. He didn't understand it. But it locked him in his chair, kept him from getting anything done.

He tapped a wooden, bald-headed match on the arm of the chair while trying not to look at the pennies. But images of edemas, time at work, wasting disease, null and vacant and quicklime-covered faces impinged upon his concentration. His pipe hung limply from his lips. He sucked on the raw tobacco packed inside it to get a hint of sweetness mixed with a burned residue.

Jeffers saw the tenant who lived across the street walking up the driveway. As he walked, he smacked at the ash-brown leaves of the spent okra that framed one side of the property.

Jeffers dropped the unlighted match in his palm.

The tenant stopped at the porch steps. A scrawny man with brow-darkened eyes and a fresh crookedness barbing his face as if he'd been howling or banging his head against the wall.

“RD, what's ailing you?”

“We buried LaRae this morning,” RD said, closing his eyes.

“I was sorry to hear about LaRae,” Jeffers said. He looked down at RD, who shifted his weight between his feet like a child needing to pee. He patted the porch railing, causing it to wobble. “It's a hard thing to lose a wife,” Jeffers continued, to fill in the silence. He pictured his two wives in his mind, pondered which one might meet him in heaven, if there was a heaven. Age had made him hopeful again that there was such a place. Experience made him doubtful. “I've lost two myself.”

RD nodded thoughtfully at the bottom of the porch steps. He shifted his weight and squinted at the pennies and water bags.

Jeffers studied RD. He knew little about him. Looked mid-thirties, but Jeffers had stopped believing he could guess a person's age a long time ago. A quiet tenant—paid his rent. But RD had a bottom-of-the-litter look, runtish, forgotten. He looked given to schemes. He might have been the skinniest
grown
man Jeffers had ever seen—his shoulders angled like those on a starved child. He'd known scrounging for sure. RD and LaRae had come from Tennessee.

“She saw haints, you know,” RD said.

“Haints?”

“Ghosts.”

“Ghosts?”

RD nodded and splashed a brown vein of spit into the grass. A wind buffeted his face, and he looked a slight better to Jeffers, who supposed the little man had come over just to talk out his sadness. Jeffers struck the match, sheltered its flame, and pressed it to the tobacco while making gentle, moist pops to pull the fire into the pipe.

“In that house of yourn,” RD said.

“What's that?” Jeffers said.

“Haints in your house.”

“This house?”

“No, ourn. The one you lettin us have.”

Jeffers lowered the pipe and shook out the match. “Rent.”

“Yep. Haints in that house you lettin us rent.”

Jeffers leaned forward and looked across the porch where he could see through a stand of weather-broken pines the squat gables of the house RD rented. Below the boundary of trees, a graying neighborhood dog was working over roadkill flattened on the unlined blacktop that split the properties.

“I'll be damned.” Jeffers looked back at RD, who had climbed the first step and was leaning toward the porch as if he wanted to come up. He was almost panting.

“Them haints killed LaRae.”

Jeffers leaned back in his chair and drew on his pipe. The spirit of the tobacco warmed his mouth as he considered his next words. RD climbed another step. He shuddered and proffered a what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it glare. Behind the spindly man, the sun was low and the sky bloodied in a balsam light.

Jeffers took the pipe down. “I am sorry about LaRae. But what do you want me to do about a ghost? I cain't charge it rent.”

“You could pay for LaRae's buryin expense, that's what, since it was your haints that killed her.”

“How you figure they're mine?”

“It was in your house.”

“Well, they could have come with you from Tennessee. I've had untold number of folks live in that house. Not one of them complained of
‘haints.' 
” 

RD squinted, catching the sarcasm in Jeffers's voice. He quivered.

“If there are haints in that house, as you say, RD, they must've come to roost the same time you did. And that house is only supposed to be occupied by two people. The way I see it, you might owe me money, housing your haints, when your lease says only two shall live there.” Jeffers drew on his pipe, satisfied with himself. He felt a pleasant jolt of blood and adrenaline shock his body.

“That house killed her.”

“House or haints?”

RD chewed the inside of his cheek. The broad outlines of his skull were visible. He reminded Jeffers of the half-fed prisoners who worked chain gang years ago.

“RD, how do you make money? You work?”

RD, leering, backed down a step.

Jeffers held his gaze wide-eyed until he squinted from the falling sun breaking from the clouds. If this was a scheme, Jeffers thought, it's awfully weak.

“Before LaRae passed, she told me that you would take care of her funeral bill. She said it was your wives who told her that you'd cover it.”

Jeffers peered unblinkingly through white smoke.

“You going to pay?”

“What do you think?” Jeffers said.

“I think you will.”

For a brief moment he considered giving in before a surge of meanness rose up. “Get the hell off my porch 'fore I throw you off.”

RD stood up straight and a haughty tic ran through his shoulders. He turned and headed back in the direction he'd come from.

Jeffers called to RD when the little man was equidistant between the porch and the road: “If you see them haints, send them my way.”

RD didn't respond. As he passed the old dog in the road, he stopped to stare at it, and then for no reason scared it off its tire-mangled dinner.

Jeffers spat a long silvery streak into his boxwoods. He relaxed and puffed, satisfied. But the reminder of LaRae's passing made him think again about his own shortening time, of what was to come. He lowered the pipe and leaned once more to see the house across the road, looking for the little, dissatisfied man, angry with him for his audacity and privation and for his existence, which Jeffers suddenly considered unearned.

 

The little spat with his tenant left Jeffers wanting some more excitement and so he went to the Ashcross property to run the squatters out. He found no one there. They had trounced the weeds around the house, creating a cowpath to a five-gallon bucket simmering with turds and urine. In the long-untended shade tree hung wispy catfish skins. Several catfish heads had been hammered into the tree's trunk and their husky mouths and eyes gawked in bewilderment. Redneck trophies, Jeffers thought.