The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 (22 page)

“Get the gun,” I say.

“I'm putting the phone on the bed.” Over the line I can hear Emma's labored breathing. It sounds like she's trying to put the receiver in her mouth. She was born at thirty weeks, the size of my forearm.

“I have it,” Nicholle says. “Okay, I have it.” A pause. “They're fighting. God, they're fighting.”

“Like we practiced. Put the magazine in. It should have rounds in it.”

“Crashing downstairs.”

“Pull the hammer back,” I say.

“What? What's the hammer?”

“I mean the slide. Shit, the slide. We've practiced this. The top part, throw the slide back.”

“It's sticking. On the stairs now,” she whispers. “Up the stairs.”

“Yell out to them, ‘I have a gun.'” She does. “And again,” I say. She says it again. “And I will shoot you.” I hear her say it, and she says, “Motherfuckers.” Emma cries.

“It's sticking,” is all she says to me.

“Do you remember?”

“Yes,” she says. “I know what to do, but it's sticking.” Her pitch rises. No one is on their way to them.

“Got it,” Nicholle says. Then, “They're talking on the stairs.” And her voice lowers even more. “They said ‘Dub.' My God, they know us.”

“Say it again.”

“What?”

“The gun,” I say.

“I've got a gun,” she yells.

“If they open the door, you shoot until the gun stops firing and then load the next magazine.”

She must hear the finality in my voice because she says, “No.” I hear it right before I hang up and dial 911. I sling information as fast as I can to the operator, and picture the safety on the gun Nicholle holds, turned down, the red dot hidden. My sight goes wavy, the ceiling lowers on me as I think of the locked trigger. I hang up, call home, and the metallic tone pulses off and on until the answering machine engages. It's her slow morning voice: “You've reached Nicholle and Keith Bailey,” and my voice in the background, “and Emma”—she's laughing—“We're not in right now, but please leave a message and we'll get back with you. Thank you.” I listen to the entire thing and hang up and call back. She won't be able to hear me, no matter what I say into the phone. When I get the message again, I hang up immediately and call back. This time I let the whole message play and sit with the phone in my hand, a beam of light from the hotel window now in my eyes. I close them. The silence through the line is muffled. It's recording me listening, and I think there's a chance, if I'm loud enough, Nicholle might be able to pick up one word, through the drywall and beams and carpet, past Dub's body, through the locked bedroom door, past the men with outstretched arms.

I breathe and scream, “Safety,” over and over and over, until there are no more words, just a machine recording my empty lungs.

FROM
storySouth

 

A
S FAR AS
James is concerned, the asphalted tongue of interstate between Houston and Baton Rouge will never end, and he's been driving it half his life. Having first taken it westbound to college; then backtracking along it every Christmas before his stepfather died, when his mother was still so fixed on the idea that the four of them—James and her; his stepfather and his stepfather's son, Moultrie—would some year shape themselves into a family.

But this time Baton Rouge is not exactly where he's headed. He may have driven grudgingly into Louisiana, where the car of choice seems to be a mud-spattered white Caddy, but no way does he have any allegiance to this place, where houses seem to be something to be carried along interstates by flatbed trailers and debris he keeps having to swerve to avoid litters the road.

“I'm not even related to him,” he'd reminded his mother when she phoned, though it had wanted to come out of his mouth as
He ain't no real kin of mine.
In Houston he's careful about how he says things and is able to get away with claiming he grew up in Louisiana miraculously, without any accent.

“He's all the kin you've got,” his mother had said with asperity. “You know none of those people he ran around with will ever be coming to see him.” Her voice softened. “And there's something he says he wants to talk to you about. You know he's just no good at letters.”

Letters that, James realizes—guilt being something his mother has always been especially good at—he probably wouldn't have answered, were they to have arrived in the first place.

Now, because of that same guilt, he is driving once more over the Atchafalaya Basin into that brief hollow space sandwiched between night and dawn, when the bonds that hold things together seem, mysteriously, either strongest or loosest. Beyond the vapor lights' wan glow, the darkness is rich, has
body,
is like some fine wine. It remains unpunctured. Once, this stretch of interstate arching over swamp, where when he was in high school someone either he or his stepbrother Moultrie knew always lost their life on prom night, signaled either the beginning or the end of his trips. This time, the pitch from elevated roadway down to solid ground just indicates that he still has farther to go.

The squatty cinder-brick houses that announce the outskirts of Baton Rouge are already bravely swathed with Christmas lights, but their red glow might as well be that of a cigarette tossed from a passing truck. The blue and green seem thoughtless to James, something that draws the wrong kind of attention to unguarded houses built too close to the roadway.

When his stepfather passed away and left his mother a widow, Moultrie had been the one to show up unannounced at her house with a stepladder under his arm, the one who good-naturedly hauled the artificial tree down from the crawlspace and outlined the windows and eaves with Christmas lights. Another of Moul­trie's typical gestures, simple and perfect and something James would have thought of himself, if he hadn't been busy—
working,
unlike his stepbrother—in Houston.

 

Up until the very second when what Moultrie still refers to as his
misstep
occurred, he always claimed he got some sort of lenience. He was still in business because he had scruples and they knew it: if the sale of certain drugs was going to happen in Baton Rouge, they'd rather it be him that did it than anybody else, so they turned a blind eye. This logic seemed stupid to James, one of his stepbrother's wrongheaded assumptions that left him wondering how Moultrie had managed to survive life for almost forty years.

“Who's
they
?” he'd said a year ago at Christmas, the last time he actually saw Moultrie. “You're full of shit—you know that, don't you?”

It was always cold when James saw Moultrie, always Christmastime. When his mother started asking him in June if he'd be home in December, he always told her he wouldn't, but in the end, he always was. Driving along the holiday-dead streets to pick up Moultrie, whose cars were never running, and take him to their mother's, where they went through the motions: the midnight mass attended by a sparse group of elderly parishioners which it always startled James to realize included his mother; the forced cheer of unwrapping the small pile of presents; the drawn-out dinner of Coca-Cola-basted ham.

Everything had changed about Baton Rouge, except his stepbrother and the dirty houses he lived in and the way James always wound up sitting in the living rooms of them, drinking beer and staring out the window at the messy strands of Christmas lights that licked up and down the street, while Moultrie told James who'd moved where and who had divorced or died, and other things James said didn't matter but that bummed him out a little when he thought about them later.

The house Moultrie had lived in last year had been on a different questionable side of town from the one James remembered him living in the year before, but houses Moultrie rented always smelled the same. Of old, possibly faulty gas space heaters and cigarettes, not Moultrie's, because he didn't smoke, but those of his nervous customers; of potentially decent weed; of Moultrie's clothes, which he usually found at thrift stores.

“Who's
they
?” James had demanded last Christmas.

“The Dixie Mafia,” Moultrie explained. “The police.”

“The Dixie Mafia?” James repeated. “And who is that, exactly?”

Only Moultrie would believe he was still in business because the underworld and the law, working in some weird conspiratorial partnership, believed he was a scrupulous dealer. Although it was true enough that Moultrie had never once been caught holding any bag, not once in any of the years James knew of: through buying beer for him when he was still underage to selling pot to kids who halfheartedly attended the nearby junior college.

“The other shoe is going to drop down soon enough,” James warned, taking a swig from his beer. “Get out while the getting's good.”

“I'm careful,” Moultrie said, but he wasn't. James knew he ought to stop coming by Moultrie's house, even if it was only once a year—to be there when the cops busted down the door wouldn't do him a bit of good. And in any case, he didn't want to be around, to have to be the one to break the news of Moultrie's latest bad luck to his mother.

When Moultrie had let him into his house, he hadn't even thought to lock the door behind them once he waved James through it; James had been the one who reached back and shot the probably useless deadbolt home, and he had hardly touched anything anyone could fault him for in years. If Moultrie got busted while James was sitting in his living room, James would end up downtown for questioning or as a witness at Moultrie's trial, forced to lie or tell the truth, or he'd have to make Moultrie's bail, and any of those things would solder him too tightly to this place. Which he prefers to visit for a day or so, then leave.

 

As soon as James makes it east of Baton Rouge, he has to remind himself to watch the road signs for I-12 as it branches away from 10 and slips above New Orleans, flat and even duller than the ground he's already covered. I-12's the comfortable sure shot, the choice of truckers and salesmen and the middle-aged, of those poor fools who hope to, or have to, make time. Ten's the party route, no reason to be on it but New Orleans, and for years he and Moultrie held anybody who'd choose I-12 instead of it in contempt.

The horizon beyond the windshield is brightening, degree by imperceptible degree, and some of the cars on the other side of the grassy median have already cut off their headlights. An oncoming car flashes theirs and his spirits lift. It seems like such a friendly gesture, as if the occupants of these cars streaming toward him—going where? home? to work? going somewhere—are well-meaning fellow travelers telegraphing to him the news that his long haul through the night is finally over.

In the grayish half-light, he takes his eyes from the road long enough to glance down at the piece of paper on the seat beside him. Moultrie's hand-drawn map contains a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Home Depot as landmarks, and precise mileage. How can Moultrie know these details, when he hasn't ever had the opportunity to drive this particular route himself? Moultrie's handwriting is the sort of deliberate, flourished cursive James jettisoned in high school.

All in all this situation has given me time to reflect on my life and see my accomplishments and mistakes with open eyes,
the last paragraph of the letter begins. It's hard to know whether this is a sentiment Moultrie actually wants to convey to James or it's for the benefit of someone else who reads his mail.

The postscript to the letter—and James has followed its instructions, even though it has always irked him to have Moultrie tell him what to do—is this:
Be sure to bring change for the vending machines, man.

 

Moultrie's current predicament has cleared up several things James always wondered about: how elderly mothers can continue to love felon sons; how neighbors, unswayed by yellow webs of police tape and the eyewitness of the news, always swear that the quiet man who lived across the cul-de-sac from them just went hunting a lot and that was why his house contained so many guns. Moultrie is still the same person he always was. Besides, it's not as if he killed somebody, a fact that James's mother, of whom James expected more, has not yet tired of pointing out.

When Moultrie's father married James's mother, when James was fifteen and Moultrie was seventeen, Moultrie had been fairly circumspect, and at that point all he sold was pot. It wasn't until James started college that it occurred to him that it might have been more considerate of Moultrie to move out of his father's house rather than keep living in the basement rec room.

By last year, Moultrie had long since moved out and on, as had James. By last year, Moultrie had also taken to keeping much harder stuff—
his
stuff, swaddled as tenderly as babies waiting to be adopted and taken home by people James had known all his life and others he would never meet—stashed in empty Haagen-Dazs ice cream bar containers arrayed in a row in his freezer. It was the last place anybody would look, he told James. His electronic scale and stash of Baggies were hidden underneath the floorboards in the living room, and the phone rang nonstop while he showed James exactly how he measured things with the same pride in his craftsmanship as when he'd taken him, earlier, past the cabinet he'd built of scavenged heart pine.

“Such a worrier,” he said, his fingers busy. “Be cool, man.”

Now Moultrie is the one who worries. Which is as it should be, James thinks. As James's mother says, Moultrie
frets.
Every phone call he makes to what he now without even noticing calls the
outside
requires a catechism that no longer startles James when he picks up the phone to hear it—
press 1 to indicate that you understand this call has been initiated by an inmate of the Louisiana State Prison system; press the pound key if you are willing to accept these charges.