The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (50 page)

As he headed for the burial ground, David was tottering a bit. Rounding the equipment shed, he nearly ran into Weldon Case, who walked by without speaking or apparently seeing him. Behind the ranch buildings, a cow trail led into the prairie, then wound toward a hillside spring that didn’t quite reach the surface, visible only by the greenery above it. Just below that was the place that Morsel had told him about, pockmarked with anthills. The ants, Morsel claimed, carried the beads to the surface, but you had to hunt for them.

David sat down among the mounds and was soon bitten through his pants. He jumped to his feet and swept the ants away, then crouched, peering and picking at the anthills. His thighs soon ached from squatting, but then he found a speck of sky blue in the dirt, a bead. He clasped it tightly in one hand while stirring with the other and flicking away ants. He didn’t think about the bodies in the ground beneath him. By the time it was too dark to see, his palm was filled with Indian beads and he felt elevated and still drunk.

As he passed the equipment shed, he made out first the silhouette of Weldon Case’s Stetson and then, very close, the face of Weldon himself, who gazed at him before speaking in a low voice. “You been in the graves, ain’t you?”

“Yes, to look for beads.”

“You ought not to have done that, feller.”

“Oh? But Morsel said—”

“Look up there at the stars.”

“I don’t understand.”

Weldon reached high over his head. “That’s the crow riding the water snake,” he said, and turned back into the dark.

David was frightened. He went to the house and got into bed as quickly as he could, anxious for the alcohol to fade. He pulled the blanket up under his chin, despite the warmth of the night, and watched a moth batting against an image of the moon in the window. When he was nearly asleep, he saw Morsel’s headlights wheel across the ceiling, then turn off. He listened for the car doors, but it was nearly ten minutes before they opened and closed. He rolled close to the wall and pretended to be asleep, while the front door opened quietly. Once the reverberation of the screen-door spring had died down, there was whispering that came into the bedroom. He felt a shadow cross his face as someone peered down at him. Soon the sound of muffled copulation filled the room, stopped for the time it took to raise a window, then resumed. David listened more and more intently, until Ray said, in a clear voice, “Dave, you want some of this?”

David stuck to his feigned sleep until Morsel laughed, got up, and walked out with her clothes under her arm. “Night, Ray. Sweet dreams.”

The door shut, and after a moment Ray spoke. “What could I do, Dave? She was after my weenie like a chicken after a June bug.” Snorts and, soon after, snoring.

Morsel stood in the doorway of the house, taking in the early sun and smoking a cigarette. She wore an old flannel shirt over what looked like a body stocking that revealed a lazily winking camel toe. Her eyes followed her father as he crossed the yard very slowly. “Look,” she said, as David stepped up. “He’s wetting his pants. When he ain’t wetting his pants, he walks pretty fast. It’s just something he enjoys.”

Weldon came up and looked at David, trying to remember him. He said, “This ain’t much of a place to live. My folks moved us out here. We had a nice little ranch at Coal Bank Landing, on the Missouri, but one day it fell in the river. Morsel, I’m uncomfortable.”

“Go inside, Daddy. I’ll get you a change of clothes.”

Once the door had shut behind him, David said, “Why in the world do you let him fly that airplane?”

“It’s all he knows. He flew in the war and dusted crops. He’ll probably kill himself in the damn thing.”

“What’s he do up there?”

“Looks for his cows.”

“I didn’t know he had cows.”

“He don’t. They all got sold years ago. But he’ll look for them long as he’s got fuel.”

Morsel turned back to David on her way inside. “I can’t make heads or tails of your friend Ray,” she said. “He was coming on to me the whole time at the cage fights, then he takes out a picture of his wife and tells me she’s the greatest piece of ass he ever had.”

“Huh. What’d you say to that?”

“I said, ‘Ray, she must’ve had a snappin’ pussy, because she’s got a face that would stop a clock.’ He didn’t like that too much. So I punched him in the shoulder and told him he hadn’t seen nothing yet. What’d you say your name was?”

“I’m David.”

“Well, Dave, Ray says you mean to throw in with us. Is that a fact?”

“I’m sure giving it some thought.”

David was being less than candid. He would have slipped away the day before if he hadn’t felt opportunity headed his way on silver wings.

“You look like a team player to me. I guess that bitch he’s married to will help out on that end. Long as I never have to see her.”

David had an unhappy conversation with his mother, but at least it was on the phone, so she couldn’t throw stuff.

“The phone is ringing off the hook! Your ranchers are calling constantly, wanting to know when you’ll get there.”

“Ma, I know, but I got tied up. Tell them not to get their panties in a wad. I’ll be there.”

“David!” she screeched. “This is not an answering service!”

“Ma, listen to me. Ma, I got tied up. I’m sparing you the details, but relax.”

“How can I relax with the phone going off every ten seconds?”

“Ma, I’m under pressure. Pull the fucking thing out of the wall.”

“Pressure? You’ve never been under pressure in your life!”

He hung up on her. He couldn’t live with her anymore. She needed to take her pacemaker and get a room.

That week Morsel was able to get a custodial order in Miles City, based on the danger to the community presented by Weldon and his airplane. Ray had so much trouble muscling Weldon into Morsel’s sedan for the ride to assisted living that big strong David had to pitch in and help Ray tie him up. Weldon tossed off some frightful curses before collapsing in defeat and crying. But the God he called down on them didn’t hold much water anymore, and they made short work of the old fellow. At dinner that night, Morsel was a little blue. The trio’s somewhat obscure toasts were to the future. David looked on with a smile; he felt happy and accepted and believed he was going somewhere. His inquiring looks were met by giddy winks from Morsel and Ray. They told him that he was now a “courier,” and Ray unwound one of his bundles of cash. He was going to California.

“Drive the speed limit,” Ray said. “I’m going to get to know the airplane. Take it down to the oil fields. It’s important to know your customers.”

“Do you know how to fly it?” This was an insincere question, since David had learned from the so-called widow about Ray’s repossessed plane.

“How’s thirteen thousand hours sound to you?”

“I’ll keep the home fires burning,” Morsel said, without taking the cigarette out of her mouth.

David had a perfectly good idea of what he was going to California for, but he didn’t ask. He knew the value of preserving his ignorance. If he could keep his status as a simple courier, he was no guiltier than the United States Postal Service. “Your Honor, I had no idea what was in the trunk, and I am prepared to say that under oath or take a lie-detector test, at your discretion,” he rehearsed.

He drove straight through, or nearly so. He stopped briefly in Idaho, Utah, and Nevada to walk among cows. His manner with cattle was so familiar that they didn’t run from him but gathered around in benign expectation. David sighed and jumped back in the car. He declined to pursue this feeling of regret.

It was late when he got into Modesto, and he was tired. He checked into a Super 8 and woke up when the hot light of a California morning shone through the window onto his face. He ate in the lobby and checked out. The directions Ray had given him proved exact: within ten minutes, he was pulling around the house into the side drive and backing into the open garage.

A woman came out of the house in a bathrobe and walked past his window without a word. He popped the trunk and sat quietly as she loaded it, then closed it. She stopped at his window, pulling the bathrobe up close around her throat. She wasn’t hard to look at, but David could see you wouldn’t want to argue with her. “Tell Ray I said be careful. I’ve heard from two IRS guys already.” David said nothing at all.

He was so cautious that the trip back took longer. He stayed overnight at the Garfield again, so as to arrive in daylight, and got up twice during the night to check on the car. In the morning he skipped eating at the café for fear he might encounter some of his rancher clients. Plus he knew that Morsel would take care of his empty stomach. He was so close now that he worried about everything, from misreading the gas gauge to flat tires. He even imagined the trunk flying open for no reason. Now he drove past fields of cattle with hardly a glance.

He had imagined a hearty greeting, an enthusiastic homecoming, but the place was silent. A hawk sat on the wire that ran from the house to the bunkhouse, as though it had the place to itself. It flew off reluctantly when David got out of the car. Inside, there were soiled plates on the dining-room table. Light from the television flickered without sound from the living room. David walked in and saw the television first—it was on the shopping network, a closeup of a hand dangling a gold bracelet. Then he saw Morsel on the floor with the channel changer in her hand. She’d been shot.

David felt an icy calm. Ray must have done this. He checked the car keys in his pocket and walked out of the house, stopping on the porch to survey everything in front of him. Then he went around to the equipment shed. Where the airplane had been parked in its two shallow ruts lay Ray, also shot, a pool of blood extending from his mouth like a speech balloon without words. He’d lost a shoe. The plane was gone.

David felt as if he were trapped between the two bodies, with no safe way back to the car. When he got to it, a man was waiting for him. “I must have overslept. How long have you been here?” He was David’s age, thin and precise in clean khakis and a Shale Services ball cap. He touched his teeth with his thumbnail as he spoke.

“Oh, just a few minutes.”

“Keys.”

“Yes, I have them here.” David patted his pocket.

“Get the trunk for me, please.” David tried to hand him the keys. “No, you.”

“Not a problem.”

David bent to insert the key, but his hand was shaking and at first he missed the slot. The lid rose to reveal the contents of the trunk. David didn’t feel a thing.

KYLE MINOR

FROM
The Normal School

T
HE TOP FLOOR
of the Beirut Supermarket was a fur shop—fox, rabbit, mink, beaver, otter, sable, seal, coyote, and chinchilla. Other racks displayed cowboy hats, suede jackets, thigh-high leather boots, knee boots, harness boots, stacked heels, stiletto heels, kitten heels, pumps, platforms, mules, and sling-backs. The middle floor was a children’s boutique, with shelves filled to the ceiling with the kinds of toys you never saw anyplace else in Haiti—Star Wars TIE fighters and programmable Lego robots, Barbie dolls and Nerf guns, a five-foot-tall princess play castle and a diesel-powered go-kart with a driver’s seat sized for a six-year-old. Things for rich ladies, rich children. Money things.

All the real action was at ground level, on the grocery floor, which was as well stocked as any food store anywhere, a credit to the Nasser family, and especially to Samir Nasser, chief proprietor, who had inherited two tiny storefront operations from his father and grandfather and turned them into a twelve-store import-and-retail operation spanning from Cap-Haïtien to Jacmel, of which the Beirut was the crown jewel. The fruit came through the port in Saint-Marc if it wasn’t local. Husky tangerines, golden kiwi, Cavendish bananas, freestone nectarines, bunches of grapes. Purple grapes, green grapes, black grapes. Other sweets too. Chocolates and red velvet cakes and baklavas and taffies and ice creams and sherbets. And dry goods in packages lettered in French, Spanish, English, Dutch, and Arabic. In the back of the store, the vodkas, rums, and whiskeys lived in a dark anteroom, the backlit shelves glowing like Amsterdam in a phosphorescent bluish white. Past the liquor area, another dark room, this one carpeted in Persian rugs and ringed in black-and-white frescoes after the manner of the woodcuts in Frankétienne’s
Dezafi
, and where, more than once, I saw Samir’s fingers brush the edges of the iron bars that guarded the money-changing station.

The rest of what I knew about Samir Nasser could fit in a paragraph. He was rich. He was fit. He was short and handsome. He was well regarded in the community. He was married. His one daughter, beloved Anna, was a senior at the Baptist high school in Koulèv-Ville. They belonged to a large extended family of Maronite Christians who had emigrated from Lebanon in the late nineteenth century. The rumor is that one brother impregnated the fiancée of another and boarded a ship and fled for Marseille, but that’s how the Lebanese are sometimes slandered. More likely the founding Nassers sailed from France in hope of selling silk in some American port—New York or Boston or Baltimore or New Orleans—but they never made it past Port-au-Prince. Maybe something went wrong—news arrived of immigration hassles or violence on the American side, or a silk deal went bad and the family was stranded without money. Or maybe something went right. Maybe one of the Nassers fell in love on the island and wanted to marry. Maybe they found a thriving marketplace at the port and saw an opportunity to make a lucrative living as middlemen. Maybe it was simply the Caribbean sky that I miss so much now that I no longer get to live beneath it—a quality of light so embracing, so flattering, that it is impossible for a person to be ugly.

It seems right to speak now of ugliness and beauty. There’s Anna Nasser, seventeen years old, standing in her white dress on the balcony of the Beirut Supermarket. I was the photographer who snapped the famous picture. That’s her face, lit by three hundred vigil candles. There’s the priest from Bel Air. There are the people, marchers rich and poor, standing in solidarity against the kidnappings, against the gangs of
chimères
, against every variety of violence and extortion. There’s Samir, weeping openly in the company of all of them, warning against mob violence, saying,
Anna’s kidnappers must be brought to justice in the courts, not the streets. The law must be honored. It is a new day in Haiti. But today, we celebrate. My daughter was lost and now she is found.