The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 (27 page)

Miles looked up at Cash, his sad eyes hooded. “Mr. Cash,” he asked softly, “have you ever wept?”

The question surprised the older man. “Sure, son, everyone cries. Don't think because you're a man or a police officer that you're not allowed to cry.”

Miles shook his head sharply and leaned forward in his seat. His tone implored Cash for understanding. “Not
cry.
I'm talking about
weeping.
When I looked at that guy, I sat down on the porch next to him and I wept. I mean, really
wept.
In my whole life I never did that; sure, I've cried—from pain, frustration, anger, sorrow, but I never wept. Not until tonight.”

Cash straightened in his seat. Jesus, he thought, the kid was really taking this hard. All this crap about weeping and crying, as if there were some difference. “Look, son, it's tough, we all cry, and no cop who saw you will ever mention it. They know it could be them next time.”

Miles reacted sharply, almost rising from his seat. “No, dammit,” he said in a suddenly strong, clear voice. “It's not the macho thing, it's not about
crying,
it's about
weeping
! You don't understand. I didn't care about that guy, or his family, or his friends, nobody. I only cared about his
body,
his blood and his brain, his chemistry, his parts, his fuckin' anatomy. All that incredible machinery, broken, dead. I wept for
that.
Don't you understand? Nobody ever thinks about that or cares. But that's all there is, Mr. Cash, that's all there is to care about.”

Cash leaned back in his seat. “Listen, Anthony, you're tired, you're upset. You're not making a hell of a lot of sense here, and tomorrow no one will appreciate that kind of talk. It doesn't sound . . . just doesn't sound right, do you understand?”

Miles shook his head and abruptly stood up. He was still trembling. He stepped around the table to the window. “I don't care how it sounds, it's true. Just look out there.” He gestured at the window. Cash turned somewhat nervously, as much to keep his eye on Miles as to glance out the window. “Look out at Camden. Tell me, what value does a person have if he's a rapist, a murderer, a junkie? Or a liar or a cheat, or a mean bastard or skinflint for that matter? How many people out there fit that description, or part of that description? If some terrorist blew it all to hell, what would be said? All those poor people, those poor human beings, murdered. But they'd be talking . . . about something else, something totally different from what I'm saying. They wouldn't care about the
bodies,
the machinery.
That's
why I wept for that guy, because I destroyed his body. If his soul even existed, it wasn't worth a damn to him, me, or anybody else. Humans are pompous fools, they award themselves souls so they can look at a cow or a monkey and say,
I'm better than that, I'm a human being.
So what, Mr. Cash? How can anyone really give a goddamn?”

Cash rose from his chair and moved closer to Miles. He faced the window, speaking to his own reflection in the darkened glass. “Anthony, you killed a man tonight. When you took this job, you must have asked yourself at least one time,
Am I willing to chance being killed? Am I willing to chance killing someone?
Well, tonight it came to pass, son, and you did what had to be done. If you're going to get all philosophical about it, you'll only cause yourself a lot of grief. You wouldn't be so damn philosophical if you were lying in the morgue right now, or up in the OR with a bullet lodged in your spine. You killed a man; I don't give a damn if you think you killed his soul, his body, or his goddamned asshole. He's dead and you're not. So when you're interviewed tomorrow, you forget about all this bullshit and you talk facts; you talk distance in feet and inches, you talk lighting and visibility, and you talk police procedure. You talk it because that's what they want to hear. That's what they
need
to hear. If you have a problem with something, talk to a priest. If you can't handle it, go see a psychiatrist. This is a police shooting and we talk facts, not bullshit. Do you understand me, Anthony?” Cash turned and peered at the young officer. “Do you understand me?” he said into the bloodshot eyes glaring back at him.

“Yes, I understand. It's
you
who doesn't understand. You prove my point. Answer the questions, fill out the forms, toe tag the corpse, and shovel it under. Then on Sunday talk soul and spirit.” Miles paused and returned to his chair. He sat down heavily and spoke softly: “I'm sorry. Maybe I don't know what I'm saying. Maybe you're right. Maybe any damn thing. It's dawn and I feel like I came to work a week ago. I'm exhausted. Can I go home now?”

Cash turned back to the window. “Where are your guns?”

“The detectives took them. They gave me a receipt.” Miles produced the wrinkled paper and placed it on the table.

Cash glanced at it. “All right, put it away, hold on to it. You know procedure. You'll be reassigned to a desk job until you're cleared on the shooting. Tomorrow we'll talk again and cross the t's and dot the i's. Then you'll sit for your official interview. I'll be there personally to monitor things.”

Miles stood up and began to leave the room.

“One more thing,” Cash said to the man's back. “Stay home. Let Negron take you straight home and stay there. Don't speak to anyone about the shooting, not even Negron. I'll call you tomorrow.”

Miles placed a hand on the doorknob and started out. Before leaving, he turned slowly and spoke softly: “Mr. Cash, I know what everybody thinks. I know what
you
think. Tonight, any other cop would have been assigned some lawyer right out of school. But because of my father, you showed up personally. And I'm sure you know how grateful he'll be for that.”

Cash wore a neutral expression. “Yes,” he said.

“I need you to understand something, though. I want everybody to understand something. The last thing in the world my father wanted was for me to become a cop. He tried his best to change my mind, and when he couldn't he tried to talk me out of working for Camden PD. But he couldn't do that, either. There are some good people in Camden, Mr. Cash. They're trying to make a life for themselves.”

For the first time since entering the room, a small, tired smile touched Miles's face as he continued.

“I just wanted to help them do it. That's all I ever wanted. The other cops, they hardly talk to me. Negron and Sanchez have me for a partner because they pissed off the duty sergeant. But they've got me all wrong.”

He turned back to the door, speaking as he left the room.

“I was just trying to help.”

When Miles was gone, Cash turned to the window behind him, his cold gray eyes studying the early-morning light as it began to nudge against the slowly dying night sky.

He stood there alone for quite some time. He wondered why Negron, from his position of cover behind the porch, had not fired.

He wondered why Sanchez had not fired.

And as the Camden sky grew brighter, he wondered about organs and brains, nerves and enzymes, anatomy and souls.

FROM
The New Yorker

 

S
ZABO DIDN'T LIKE
to call the land he owned and lived on a ranch—a word that was now widely abused by developers. He preferred to call it his property, or “the property,” but it did require a good bit of physical effort from him in the small window of time after he finished at the office, raced home, and got on the tractor, or, if he was hauling a load of irrigation dams, on the ATV. Sometimes he was so eager to get started that he left his car running. His activity on the property, which had led, over the years, to arthroscopic surgery on his left knee, one vertebral fusion, and mild hearing loss, thanks to his diesel tractor, yielded very little income at all and some years not even that—a fact that he did not care to dwell on.

He produced racehorse-quality alfalfa hay for a handful of grateful buyers, who privately thought he was nuts but were careful to treat his operation with respect, because almost no one else was still producing the small bales that they needed to feed their own follies. They were, most of them, habitués of small rural tracks in places such as Lewistown or Miles City, owners of one horse, whose exercise rider was either a daughter or a neighbor girl who put herself in the way of serious injury as the price of the owner's dream. Hadn't Seattle Slew made kings of a couple of hapless bozos?

Szabo was not nuts. He had long understood that he needed to do something with his hands to compensate for the work that he did indoors, and it was not going to be golf or woodworking. He wanted to grow something and sell it, and he wanted to use the property to do this. In fact, the work that he now did indoors had begun as manual labor. He had machined precision parts for wind generators for a company that subcontracted all the components, a company that sold an idea and actually made nothing. Szabo had long known that this approach was the wave of the future, without understanding that it was the wave of his future. He had worked very hard and his hard work had led him into the cerebral ether of his new workplace: now, at forty-five, he took orders in an office in a pleasant town in Montana, while his esteemed products were all manufactured in other countries. It was still a small, if prosperous, business, and it would likely stay small, because of Szabo's enthusiasm for what he declined to call his ranch.

It wasn't that he was proud of the John Deere tractor that he was still paying for and which he circled with a grease gun and washed down like a teenager's car. He wasn't proud of it: he loved it. There were times when he stood by his kitchen window with his first cup of coffee and gazed at the gleaming machine in the morning light. Even the unblemished hills of his property looked better through its windshield. The fact that he couldn't wait to climb into it was the cause of the accident.

The hay, swathed, lay in windrows, slowly drying in the Saturday morning sun. Szabo had gone out to the meadows in his bathrobe to probe the hay for moisture and knew that it was close to ready for baling. The beloved tractor was parked at the foot of the driveway, as though a Le Mans start would be required once the hour came around and the moisture in the tender shoots of alfalfa had subsided, so that the hay would not spoil in the stacks. Szabo, now in jeans, tennis shoes, hooded sweatshirt, and baseball cap, felt the significance of each step as he walked toward the tractor, marveling at the sunlight on its green paint, its tires nearly his own height, its baler pert and ready. He reached for the handhold next to the door of the cab, stepped onto the ridged footstep, and pulled himself up, raising his left hand to open the door. Here his foot slid off the step, leaving him briefly dangling from the handhold. A searing pain informed him that he had done something awful to his shoulder. Releasing his grip, he fell to the driveway in a heap. The usually ambrosial smell of tractor fuel repelled him, and the towering green shape above him now seemed reproachful. Gravel pressed into his cheek.

 

As he lay in recovery, the morphine drip only prolonged his obsession with the unbaled hay, since it allowed him to forget about his shoulder, which he had come to think of not as his but as a kind of alien planet fastened to his torso, which glowed red like Mars, whirling with agony, as soon as the morphine ran low. It was a fine line: when he wheedled extra narcotic, his singing caused complaints and he got dialed back down to the red planet. Within a day, he grew practical and managed to call his secretary.

“Melinda, I'm going to have to find somebody for the property. I've got hay down and—”

“A ranch hand?”

“But just for a month or so.”

“Why don't I call around?”

“That's the idea. But not too long commitment-wise, okay? I may have to overpay for such a limited time.”

“It is what it is,” Melinda remarked, producing a mystification in Szabo that he ascribed to the morphine.

“Yes, sure,” Szabo said. “But time is of the essence.”

“You can say that again. Things are piling up. The guy in Germany calls every day.”

“I mean with the hay.”

Melinda was remarkably efficient, and she knew everyone in town. Her steadiness was indispensable to Szabo, who kept her salary well above temptation from other employers. By the next day she had found a few prospects for him. The most promising one, an experienced ranch hand from Wyoming, wore a monitoring ankle bracelet that he declined to explain, so he was eliminated. The next most promising, a disgruntled nursery worker, wanted permanent employment, so Szabo crossed him off the list, ignoring Melinda's suggestion that he just fire him when he was through. That left a man called Barney, overqualified and looking for other work, but happy to take something temporary. He told Melinda that he was extremely well educated but “identified with the workingman” and thought a month or so in Szabo's bunkhouse would do him a world of good. Szabo called Barney's references from his hospital bed. He managed to reach only one, the wife of a dentist who ran a llama operation in Bozeman. Barney was completely reliable, she said, and meticulous: he had reshingled the tool shed and restacked their large woodpile in an intricate pattern—almost like a church window—and swept the sidewalk. “You could eat off it!” she said. Szabo got the feeling that Mrs. Dentist had been day-drinking. Her final remark confused him. “Nobody ever did a better job than Barney!” she said, laughing wildly. “He drove us right up the wall!”

Szabo took a leap of faith and hired him over the phone. The news seemed not to excite Barney. “When do you want me to start?” he droned. After the call, Szabo gazed at his phone for a moment, then flipped it shut. His arm in a sling, his shoulder radiating signals with every beat of his heart, he returned to his office and stirred the things on his desk with his left hand. Eventually he had pushed the papers into two piles: “urgent” and “not urgent.” Then there was a painful reshuffle into “urgent,” “not that urgent,” and “not urgent.” Melinda stood next to him. “Does that make sense?” he asked.