The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 (12 page)

Standing on the Ashcross porch, Jeffers recalled the last time he'd been inside the house, holding the little girl by the shoulder, quizzing her on her father's death, and her dry-eyed answers. Her little fingernails had been chewed to the quick.

His remembrance was broken when he glimpsed a young pregnant woman walking down the road, her hair a freak of colors—yellow, red—her stomach full and hanging low. Jeffers thought for a moment she was the squatter, but she passed the weed-lined driveway as if she were headed elsewhere. And then Jeffers felt a twinge of lust, something he hadn't felt in a while. He stifled a half-laugh. If asked what he thought of the young woman, he would have ranted over her hairstyle and clothes—he knew a slut when he saw one! But in truth she was lovely, and her pregnancy made her all the more so. What if she had been his squatter? Could he have thrown her out? He'd never felt sorry for squatters. One winter he had thrown a whole family out, and learned later that one of their children died of pneumonia. Still he thought he'd made the right decision. He was well-off and thought it was because he'd made good decisions. These people had to earn their place; they couldn't just take. Wanting something for nothing, that was the problem.

He still liked to brag that he had once held over a million dollars in his hands. It had come from the sale of the White property, which he considered bad luck, seeing as how he got it the same day his first wife died. His second wife came with property but she died within a year of when they married. Her kids had taken her away from Jeffers, back to her home state, to care for her. He'd given all of her property to her children. It seemed the right thing to do. And after she passed, he sold off several large sections of his holdings. But he wished he had it all back now. It worried him how easily he'd accepted age, how he'd told himself he was getting old and selling off his properties was a good idea. At one time he'd owned twenty-one rental properties, most of them run-down farmhouses in which he installed young couples and hard-working hillbillies. Grief-pierced, he yearned to have it all back. Now he just had the house next to his own to give him his pocket money, and the Ashcross place.

James wanted Ashcross to put a church on, and he wanted Jeffers to donate it. But there was promise still in the property and money to be made. He needed to get the squatters out, and install fresh tenants. It was also that his son wanted the plot so bad that Jeffers couldn't let it go; he couldn't let his son take the last of his holdings, leaving him with just the squat-gable home. In his imagination, Jeffers saw his son holding the hands of a dying parish­ioner, whispering that the man who had owned the property had donated it, just gave it up. The face of the imagined parishioner looked up with a wink and smirked. And Jeffers saw that this was where his son would bury him, too—under a light-gray headstone carved with his birth and death and
ASHCROSS UNITED METHODIST CHURCH BENEFACTOR
.

The young woman passed behind some trees. His lust abated, the numbness in his feet stretched out as if originating from inside the bones. The numbness, the age. There would be a time soon when he wouldn't be able to care for himself. He wouldn't be able to rise from a chair, wouldn't be able to put himself to bed, wouldn't be able to cook or attend to his own needs. Perhaps giving the land to his son would be a good thing, and then James would have no choice but to make it his duty to devote himself to Jeffers. But what he really wanted was someone who would care for him without demand. He would pay for that.

 

That night Jeffers dreamed of LaRae. He dreamed of going over to the little house with pockets full of cash. He found her there with a baby up to her breast while she smiled brightly at him. He looked down at the baby, its jaw fluttering, gnawing. Unhealthy, pallid, the child unmistakably RD's: they shared the same sunken cheeks. LaRae draped a frayed copper-colored shawl over her chest and tugged the baby from her nipple as if to show Jeffers the infant, and the child gave out an insufferable squall, bile resembling doused ash dribbled from its mouth. Its cry wasn't like any infant's he'd heard before, and Jeffers woke to hear that the sound wasn't the child's at all but was coming from something else nearby. He sat up in bed, switched on the bedside lamp.

The painful howl went up again.

His feet and shins were numb, as they often were when he woke. He slipped on his yard shoes and tried to stand. He sat down on the bed and then stood up again. It felt as though he was walking on peg legs. He stumbled across the room. Another wail went out. He forwent his pants. He went to the closet, held on to the doorjamb, his leg muscles smarting and stinging. He pulled out his pistol. He tromped down the hall in his boxer shorts and undershirt; he said a prayer that his varicose legs wouldn't give out and that he'd have sense enough to protect himself. He looked out the living room window and saw nothing. He eased his front door open, his pistol pointed in the direction he imagined the sound was coming from, his lips parted, ready to receive a breath of cool air.

The outdoor lamp washed everything in a plaintive white or buried it in shadow. At the far end of his yard, a quaking silhouette crouched under a pecan tree. He walked slowly over to it—his face jutted trying to see what it was. His pistol lowered.

The old dog moaned as Jeffers approached. Its gut had been slit open. Blood adorned its fur in black blotches.

He heard rustling in the pine trees that flanked his property. He kept the pistol lowered and listened. He called for the cutthroat to come out. He called again. The base of the pine trees were bleached white from the lamp's light and between their trunks Jeffers could see only darkness.

He looked down at the dog. One visible eye glinted in the sparse light. Jeffers looked back at the stand of pine trees before gripping the barrel of the pistol. He brought its handle down swiftly on the dog's skull to avoid firing a bullet in the middle of the night, which would bring the curiosity and ire of neighbors. And there was the cost of the bullet to consider.

He hit it again—and then a third time. After each strike, he glanced back at the trees and saw only rib-white pine trunks and night. Jeffers peered down at the extinguished dog before limping back to the house, knowing the man in the pines was watching.

His sleep was chancy these days. Many nights he sat up, the vapors from the isopropyl alcohol rising from his feet, a subsuming numbness creeping further up his legs. He often mapped its ascent, trying to sense the true direction of the numbness, what area it would covet next, whether it had or would enter his spine or some other territory. When would it be too late to ask for help? When would the numbness settle in his stomach and make it impossible to eat? Or would it skip his stomach and spine and ground itself with fresh purchase in his heart? And then what? Death.

But this night Jeffers sat at his kitchen table, puffing on his pipe, replaying the events. He figured it was RD who had gutted the dog. He imagined the two, both lean and dirty animals—RD with the upper hand only because he had sense to bait the scrawny thing and could wield a knife.

Just before light, he went out with a shovel to remove the dog from the yard. Taped to the door was a list of LaRae's burial expenses written in an untrained hand. At the bottom, beneath the tally, was the message “You O me that much RD.”

 

It was unlike Jeffers to befoul one of his properties and he wished he hadn't. He knew he might suffer for the considerable effort it took to carry the animal up a ladder, but he was angry and dropping the dog's gut-slung body down RD's chimney made him feel young, as if he were playing some outlandish prank. He knew the dog would get stuck in the flue and create an unbearable stink. But it had felt good, his legs felt strong.

Seated on his porch, a warm breeze eased him. Numbness slowly budded in his toes. Soon it would blossom up his legs, and then like vines it would gather around his waist and approach his back. Unrelieved numbness: faintly its tendrils would furl the base of his spine. He knew paralysis would take soon. He looked up at the bags of pennies and water. Such a simple measure, and a small cost to keep the flies at bay. With lips folded between teeth, he squelched a whimper.

As the numbness grew, he pondered over the list of expenses RD had tacked to his door. He thought of his own wives. One was buried in the city's cemetery and the other was buried in North Carolina. Even though it had been almost a decade, he knew by the tally tacked to his door that he'd spent more, given more respect, to his wives than RD had to LaRae.

He saw RD coming up the driveway, gripping something nearly hidden in his hand.

“Ain't you got business?” Jeffers blurted.

“I'm here on business. I've been to the funeral home.”

He gazed down at RD, who was dressed in a shirt Jeffers wouldn't have used for a rag—threadbare in the chest, as if it belonged to a man who itched a lot. He noticed that RD was petting a rabbit's foot in his left hand, part of a keychain. “You bring that for luck?”

“Hell, I don't need no luck.”

“You need something. You've eaten or buried the best part.”

“You get my note.”

“Yeah, I got your duns.”

“I told them at the home you'll pay for it.”

“You kill that dog?”

“LaRae said it was your wives that haunted her. Said you beat 'em.”

“I never struck them.”

“That's not what they said.”

“You kill that dog?” Jeffers asked again.

“Said you should have to pay.”

“You kill that dog?” Jeffers leaned forward, puffed smoke.

RD gnawed at the inside of his cheek. “Why don't you give me a smoke and I'll knock off a few dollars on that bill.”

“You kill that dog?”

“I know who did. I'll tell you for ten dollars.”

“So you know it's dead.”

“I know you been asking about a dead one, and that one's been lately put out of its misery.”

Jeffers shot a gleaming stream of spit at the little man without hitting him. “I didn't cause its misery.”

“But you killed it.”

“I put it down.”

“Then why are you ragging on me about killing a dog?”

“Cause you're the one who gutted it to start with.”

“I don't know about that,” RD said.

“You don't know you gutted a dog?”

“I didn't.”

Jeffers was silent.

Looking at the spit webbed across the parched green leaves of the boxwoods, RD said, “What's that dog mean to you?”

“Nothing. Having it slaughtered on my property does mean something.”

“Well, I'll help you look for your dog-gutter if you pay for LaRae.”

Jeffers felt the slight palpation of his heart. “I'm not paying you for a goddamn thing.”

“You will.”

“Why do you think I'll pay?”

“You want peace, don't you?”

Jeffers legs were numb, up to his stomach. At that moment, he wanted more than anything to chase RD down and beat him senseless.

Slightly hunched, RD eased up onto the porch as if he sensed weakness. He stood up and reached for one of the Ziploc bags of pennies and plucked it down from its nail. Jeffers's head twitched and he ground his teeth. There was no feeling whatsoever in his legs, as if he were dead from the waist down.

RD turned and walked down the steps.

“Hey,” Jeffers called. “Come get this.” Jeffers held up the funeral bill.

RD stood in the yard, with a big smile on his face, danced a burlesque and mocked masturbation and then spat a reddish brown streak. He wiped his chin. “You can knock four cents off that bill,” he said. He turned and walked out of the yard, disappearing behind the trees.

 

His Sunday evening phone calls with James were little more than reminders—for James it reminded him that his father was still alive, and for Jeffers that his son was little more than a beggar, begging for a donation. Tonight James called asking about some article he'd sent Jeffers regarding blood circulation. Poor circulation: that was what was wrong with Jeffers, according to James.

They sat in silence, Jeffers listening to his son's breath and the hum of foreign ambience at the other end of the line. He yawned. He flicked off the lamp beside the chair and sat in the dark so he could see through the window to the little, unlighted house across the road. He opened his shirt and put a hand to his chest, his heart. His feet were cold in his bedroom shoes.

“Any more thought given to what you're going to do with the Ashcross place?”

“Some,” Jeffers said.

“I spoke to the United Methodist Ministries. They said if I could get the land, they'd help me with the church.”

“That so?”

“Yes.”

James called it a perfect little hill to build a church upon. For Jeffers, property had to be earned. He
had
earned it, bought with monies he got paid from other lands, which he bought with monies he earned originally from labor in a dust-filthy mill. Everything he owned he'd earned. He wanted his son to earn it. James prated on about church, but Jeffers couldn't listen to him. He was angry with RD, angry with himself. He was going to have to get rid of the little man, evict him.

“Anything else going on up there?” James asked.

“Nothing.”

“Did you get the squatters out of the house?”

“Not yet.”

“You can't do anything with the place until you get them out.”

Jeffers let out a meek
huh,
which his son didn't respond to. He flicked the light back on and saw himself in the blackened window with a hand across his chest as if he were taking a pledge. His face was sullen. He smiled at himself, mirthless, false. When he stopped smiling the leaden expression returned. His son wasn't speaking. Who was his confidant? Jeffers wondered.