The Best American Mystery Stories Part 13

You asked your father once why he had no pictures of her. Why hadn't he taken a picture of her? Just one lousy picture?

He said, "You think it'd bring her back? No, I mean, do you? Wow," he said, and rubbed his chin. "Wouldn't that be cool."

You said, "Forget it."

"Maybe if we had a whole alb.u.m of pictures?" your father said. "She'd, like, pop out from time to time, make us breakfast."

Now that you've been in prison, you've been doc.u.mented, but even they'd had to make it up, take your name as much on faith as you. You have no Social Security number or birth certificate, no pa.s.sport. You've never held a job.

Gwen said to you once, "You don't have anyone to tell you who you are, so you don't need anyone to tell you. You just are who you are. You're beautiful."

And with Gwen that was usually enough. You didn't need to be defined - by your father, your mother, a place of birth, a name on a credit card or a driver's license or the upper left corner of a check. As long as her definition of you was something she could live with, then you could, too.

You find yourself standing in a Nebraska wheat field. You're seventeen years old. You learned to drive five years earlier. You were in school once, for two months when you were eight, but you read well and you can multiply three-digit numbers in your head faster than a calculator, and you've seen the country with the old man. You've learned people aren't that smart. You've learned how to pull lottery-ticket scams and asphalt-paving scams and get free meals with a slight upturn of your brown eyes. You've learned that if you hold ten dollars in front of a stranger, he'll pay twenty to get his hands on it if you play him right. You've learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks lies.

You're seventeen years old in that wheat field. The night breeze smells of wood smoke and feels like dry fingers as it lifts your bangs off your forehead. You remember everything about that night because it is the night you met Gwen. You are two years away from prison, and you feel like someone has finally given you permission to live.

This is what few people know about Sumner, West Virginia: every now and then someone finds a diamond. Some dealers were in a plane that went down in a storm in '51, already blown well off course, flying a crate of Israeli stones down the eastern seaboard toward Miami. Plane went down near an open mineshaft, took some swing-shift miners with it. The government showed up, along with members of an international gem consortium, got the bodies out of there, and went to work looking for the diamonds. Found most of them, or so they claimed, but for decades afterward rumors persisted, occasionally given credence by the sight of a miner, still grimed brown by the shafts, tooling around town in an Audi.

You'd been in Sumner peddling hurricane insurance in trailer parks when word got around that someone had found a diamond as big as a casino chip. Miner by the name of George Brunda, suddenly buying drinks, talking to his travel agent. You and Gwen shot pool with him one night, and you could see his dread in the bulges under his eyes, the way his laughter exploded too high and too fast.

He didn't have much time, old George, and he knew it, but he had a mother in a rest home, and he was making the arrangements to get her transferred. George was a fleshy guy, triple-chinned, and dreams he'd probably forgotten he'd ever had were rediscovered and weighted in his face, jangling and pulling the flesh.

"Probably hasn't been laid in twenty years," Gwen said when George went to the bathroom. "It's sad. Poor sad George. Never knew love."

Her pool stick pressed against your chest as she kissed you, and you could taste the tequila, the salt, and the lime on her tongue.

"Never knew love," she whispered in your ear, an ache in the whisper. "What about the fairground?" your father says as you leave the office of True-Line Efficiency Experts Corp. "Maybe you hid it there. You always had a fondness for that place."

You feel a small hitch. In your leg, let's say. Just a tiny clutching sensation in the back of your right calf. But you walk through it, and it goes away.

You say to your father as you reach the car, "You really drive her home this morning?"

"Who?"

"Mandy?"

"Who's . . .?" Your father opens his door, looks at you over it. "Oh, the wh.o.r.e?"

"Yeah."

"Did I drive her home?"

"Yeah."

Your father pats the top of the door, the cuff of his denim jacket flapping around his wrist, his eyes on you. You feel, as you always have, reflected in them, even when you aren't, couldn't be, wouldn't be.

"Did I drive her home?" A smile bounces in the rubber of your father's face.

"Did you drive her home?" you say.

That smile's all over the place now - the eyebrows, too. "Define home."

You say, "I wouldn't know, would I?"

"You're still p.i.s.sed at me because I killed Fat Boy."

"George."

"What?"

"His name was George."

"He would have ratted."

"To who? It wasn't like he could file a claim. Wasn't a f.u.c.king lottery ticket."

Your father shrugs, looks off down the street.

"I just want to know if you drove her home."

"I drove her home," your father says.

"Yeah?"

"Oh, sure."

"Where'd she live?"

"Home," he says, and gets behind the wheel, starts the ignition.

You never figured George Brunda for smart, and only after a full day in his house, going through everything down to the point of removing the drywall and putting it back, resealing it, touching up I he paint, did Gwen say, "Where's the mother stay again?"

That took uniforms, Gwen as a nurse, you as an orderly, Gentleman Pete out in the car while your father kept watch on George's mine entrance and monitored police activity over a scanner.

The old lady said, "You're new here, and quite pretty," as Gwen shot her up with phen.o.barbital and Valium and you went to work on the room.

This was the glitch: You'd watched George drive to work, watched him enter the mine. No one saw him come back out again, because no one was looking on the other side of the hill, at the exit of a completely different shaft. So while your father watched the front, George took off out the back, drove over to check on his investment, walked into the room just as you pulled the rock from the back of the mother's radio, George looking politely surprised, as if he'd stepped into the wrong room.

He smiled at you and Gwen, held up a hand in apology, and backed out of the room.

Gwen looked at the door, looked at you.

You looked at Gwen, looked at the window, looked at the rock filling the center of your palm, the entire center of your palm. Looked at the door.

Gwen said, "Maybe we -"

And George came through the door again, nothing polite in his face, a gun in his hand. And not any regular gun - a mother-lucking six-shooter, like they carried in Westerns, long, thin barrel, a family heirloom maybe, pa.s.sed down from a great-great-great-grandfather, not even a trigger guard, just the trigger, and crazy fat George the lonely unloved pulling back on it and squeezing off two rounds, the first of which went out the window, the second of which hit metal somewhere in the room and then bounced off that. The old lady went "Ooof," even though she was doped up and pa.s.sed out, and it sounded to you like she'd eaten something that didn't agree with her. You could picture her sitting in a restaurant, halfway through coffee, placing a hand to her belly, saying it: "Ooof." And George would come around to her chair and say, "Is everything OK, Mama?"

But he wasn't doing that now, because the old lady went a.s.s-end-up out of the bed and hit the floor, and George dropped the gun and stared at her and said, "You shot my mother."

And you said, "You shot your mother," your entire body jetting sweat through the pores all at once.

"No, you did. No, you did."

You said, "Who was holding the f.u.c.king gun?"

But George didn't hear you. George jogged three steps and dropped to his knees. The old lady was on her side, and you could see blood staining the back of her white johnny.

George cradled her face, looked into it, and said, "Mother. Oh, Mother, oh, Mother, oh, Mother."

And you and Gwen ran right the f.u.c.k out of that room.

In the car Gwen said, "You saw it, right? He shot his own mother."

"He did?"

"He did," she said. "Baby, she's not going to die from that."

"Maybe. She's old."

"She's old, yeah. The fall from the bed was worse."

"We shot an old lady."

"We didn't shoot her."

"In the a.s.s."

'We didn't shoot anyone. He had the gun."

"That's how it'll play, though. You know that. An old lady. Christ."

Gwen's eyes were the size of that diamond as she looked at you, and then she said, "Ooof."

"Don't start," you said.

"I can't help it, Bobby. Jesus."

She said your name. That's your name - Bobby. You loved hearing her say it.

Sirens were coming up the road behind you now, and you were looking at her and thinking, This isn't funny, it isn't, it's f.u.c.king sad, that poor old lady, and thinking, OK, it's sad, but G.o.d, Gwen, I will never, ever live without you. I just can't imagine it anymore. I want to ... What?

Wind was pouring into the car, and the sirens were growing louder, an army of them, and Gwen's face was an inch from yours, her hair falling from behind her ear and whipping across her mouth, and she was looking at you, she was seeing you - really seeing you. n.o.body'd ever done that, n.o.body. She was tuned to you like a radio tower out on the edge of the unbroken fields of wheat, blinking red under a dark-blue sky, and that night breeze lifting your bangs was her, for Christ's sake, her, and she was laughing, her hair in her teeth, laughing because the old lady had fallen out of the bed and it wasn't funny, it wasn't, and you said the first part in your head, the "I want to" part, but you said the second part aloud: "Dissolve into you."

And Gentleman Pete, up there at the wheel, on this dark country road, said, "What?"

But Gwen said, "I know, baby. I know." And her voice broke around the words, broke in the middle of her laughter and her fear and her guilt, and she took your face in her hands as Pete drove up on the interstate, and you saw all those siren lights washing across the back window like Fourth of July ice cream. Then the window came down like yanked netting and chucked gla.s.s pebbles into your shirt, and you felt something in your head go all shifty and loose and hot as a cigarette coal.

The fairground is empty, and you and your father walk around for a bit. The tarps over some of the booths have come undone at the corners, and they rustle and flap, caught between the wind and the wood, and your father watches you, waiting for you to remember, and you say, "It's coming back to me. A little."

Your father says, "Yeah?"

You hold up your hand, tip it from side to side.

Out behind the cages where, in summer, they set up the dunking machine and the bearded lady's chair and the fast-pitch machines, you see a fresh square of dirt, recently tilled, and you stand over it until your old man stops beside you, and you say, "Mandy?"

The old man chuckles softly, scuffs at the dirt with his shoe, looks off at the horizon.

"I held it in my hand, you know," you say.

"I'd figure," the old man says.

It's quiet, the land flat and metal-blue and empty for miles in every direction, and you can hear the rustle of the tarps and nothing else, and you know that the old man has brought you here to kill you. Picked you up from prison to kill you. Brought you into the world, probably, so eventually he could kill you.

"Covered the center of my palm."

"Big, huh?"

"Big enough."

"Running out of patience, boy," your father says.

You nod. "I'd guess you would be."

"Never my strong suit."

"No."

"This has been nice," your father says, and sniffs the air. "Like old times, reconnecting and all that."

"I told her that night to just go, just put as much country as she could between you and her until I got out. I told her to trust no one. I told her you'd stay hot on her trail even when all logic said you'd quit. I told her even if I told you 1 had it, you'd have to cover your bets - you'd have to come looking for her."

Your father looks at his watch, looks off at the sky again.

"I told her if you ever caught up to her, to take you to the fairground."

"Who's this we're talking about?"