The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Page 38

  “So if you want to teach him a little lesson about fairness and such, then okay, I’m with you all the way. Mainly because I don’t think you have the brains to pull it off on your own without getting caught.”

  “You never liked him either?”

  “What’s to like? Back when you two were in school together, you’re this big football star, right? And what’s he? He’s in the band! Plays the piccolo or some such thing.”

  “Freakin’ flute.”

  “Same difference. You’re the one set the All-Conference rushing record. And who gets elected class president? Who gets voted Homecoming King? I was only in ninth grade, but, I don’t know, that really pissed me off for some reason. What I could never figure out was why you even wanted him as a friend.”

  A thought occurs to Harvey then, as perfect as a blow to his chest, that Will has been harboring a jealousy of Kenny all these years, quiet Will, so soft-spoken and patient—a resentment because Will had wanted to be Harvey’s best friend back then, but of course was not; he was the younger brother, a nuisance to be tormented or ignored. And Harvey is suddenly ashamed of his youth, all those wasted years. But how to encapsulate his regret in an apology? He can’t.

  Harvey says, his voice huskier now, “Jennilee thinks he’s like the perfect man or something.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s his sister. That’s just loyalty talking.”

  Harvey nods, his jaw tight.

  Will says, “What’s he make as the superintendent of schools—fifty, sixty thousand?”

  “Probably more like eighty.”

  “I used to watch him when you two were painting houses together. You were the one did all the hard work, all the scraping and patching. What did he ever do?”

  “Slapped on a little paint and collected the check.”

  “Then why in God’s name was he your friend?”

  Harvey has no idea how to justify the choices he made a quarter century ago. He had admired Kenny’s easy way with women, that was one thing. He admired his nonchalance, his nice clothes. But mostly it was the women. Even in high school, Kenny had bragged that he was getting laid on a regular basis, and Harvey had to admit that it was probably true. There was something about Kenny that girls seemed to like. He was a smooth talker, generous with compliments. And he had been generous with Harvey, too, had made him feel, almost, like a member of the family.

  But in recent years the very things Harvey had admired about his brother-in-law had begun to irritate him. Things that had once seemed like virtues in Kenny began to feel, to Harvey, like mere sheen. Like high-gloss paint over a wall full of termites.

  Will and Harvey stand there in the gathering dark. It pleases Harvey that his brother has gotten angry now, too. He doesn’t know why Will’s anger should please him, except that it is such a rare thing. He says, “So what are we going to do about him?”

  “Give me a day or so,” Will says. “I’ll think of something.”

  “This better not be a trick of some kind just to get me to cool off.”

  “No, I want to do this,” Will says, and even in the stink and gloom of the alley, Harvey thinks he detects a sinister turn to his brother’s smile. “Seriously. I could use a little fun in my life.”

  When Harvey returns home that evening, after he unlaces his work boots just inside the back door, Jennilee comes toward him through the kitchen, smiling. She is wearing tight blue jeans and a white silk shirt—still, in his opinion, the prettiest woman in town, still slender and naturally blond and as graceful as a breeze. He can see her bra through the sheer blouse, and something catches in his chest at the sight of her.

  “Hi, baby,” she says, and then tells him that she is going across town to the ten-room Victorian Kenny has lived in all his life. It bothers Harvey that his wife always says she is “having dinner over home” instead of “over at Mom’s.”

  He says, “How about staying here for a change and having dinner with me?”

  “I had dinner with you last night, didn’t I?”

  “Most people, you know, when they get to be adults, they’re happy not to have to be spending four or five nights a week with their mother and brother.”

  “You see your brothers practically every day, don’t you?” She asks this with a smile, sweetly. She leans close to him, her hand on his waist. He feels the warmth of her hand through his shirt. Even after seven years of marriage, her touch still dizzies him.

  She says, “You know, when we lost Daddy last month, the thing I regretted most was not spending enough time with him. And now Mom’s getting up there, too, and—”

  “She’s barely seventy years old.”

  “How old was Daddy? Seventy-six. And how old were your parents? It can happen at any moment, just like that.”

  He takes a deep breath to steady his voice, doesn’t want to sound whiny. “My point, Jennilee—”

  She snuggles against him. “I know what your point is, sweetie, and I agree with you. Now you take that casserole out of the oven in about ten minutes, okay? And enjoy a nice quiet dinner by yourself. I’ll be home about eight-thirty or so and we can make some popcorn and watch TV together.”

  He knows that the way she holds him now, both hands rubbing up and down his back, one knee between his legs, he knows it is a ploy she uses, a way to defuse him because she does not like confrontation, does not like voices raised in anger, and she especially does not like to be circumvented in any of her choices. He knows all this, yet he cannot resist the smell of her, the vagueness of apricot in her hair, still as blond as a teenager’s, still cornsilk-soft. And he cannot resist either the subtlety of Obsession in the nape of her neck, the heat of her breasts pressed against him. He breathes her in and feels his arms closing around her, hands pulling at the tail of her blouse and then sliding underneath, fingers finding the cool smooth wonder of her waist.

  “Baby, I’m going to be late,” she says, but as he leans down to lay his mouth against the side of her throat she tilts her head back and exposes her neck to him. Gratitude swells in his chest, but he cannot ignore the swift surge of fear that washes through him, too, a heat racing up the sides of his face and into his temples, this fear for the loss of her, this only woman he has ever needed, as essential to him as air, a compulsion as inexplicable as death.

  His mouth is on hers then and his hands fumbling with the snap of her jeans, fingers so thick with dumb desire that she has to take over finally, guiding him into the living room and onto the sofa. And this is the thing that keeps him from crying out in the anguish of his desire, that she has never told him no, never pushed him away with a damning look or excuse, has never once denied him. This is what he clings to, how he gauges the truth of her love.

  But it is always a temporary affirmation, and afterward, as always, he is left to deal with his fear and gratitude alone, as weak-legged and hollow as ever while Jennilee tucks her blouse in and makes her exit through the kitchen, her face as bright and cheerful as ever, her body as graceful as a breeze, untouched.

  As she heads for the door he calls out to her, “Tell your brother for me that what goes around comes around.”

  A pause; he can picture the way she cocks her head now, smiles in confusion. “Excuse me?”

  “Just tell him,” he says.

  Now he envisions the way she rolls her eyes before answering. “If you say so.”

  Then she slips away and leaves him standing there in the living room hollowed out and weak and alone.

  Harvey watches television with the casserole dish on his lap, bleeding its heat into his skin. He keeps the volume low on the TV, wishes there were other sounds to hear, something flesh and blood and real. He wishes they would have children, that an accident would occur. He had himself tested a couple of years ago without telling Jennilee he was going to, then was surprised by her reaction when he told her that everything had checked out okay with him. “Why would you do such a thing?” she had demanded, then immediately turned and stormed into the bedroom and locked t
he door. Later she explained that she wasn’t really angry with him. “It’s just that it means it must be me,” she said.

  A few months later he found the birth control pills. He had called in sick that day, a Tuesday, nausea and a pulsing headache. By noon the sickness passed, and, thinking it would please her, he had seared a sirloin tip roast and put it in the oven to slow-bake through the afternoon. Then he washed two loads of laundry, everything in the hamper. Dried and folded all the clothes and put them away in their drawers. And that was when he found the disk of tiny pills, wrapped inside a camisole too delicate to be crushed beneath the cotton pajamas he was putting away. A disk meant to hold thirty pink pills, twelve spaces empty.

  He was in bed when she came home at three-thirty.

  “Still feeling bad?” she asked, and brought him a glass of ginger ale, and took his temperature, and looked sincerely pained by his discomfort.

  She’s a good person, he had told himself. Just doesn’t want to be a mother.

  He never mentioned the pills.

  And now sometimes he watches TV alone and wishes the house did not feel so empty. He wishes he could awake some morning and stumble over toys scattered underfoot, a tricycle in the yard. He knows that when he and Jennilee are older, her deceit might grate on him and make him like some of the older men in town, silent brooders, never smiling. Or maybe he will gravitate back to the bottle and his earlier ways, drinking his way to self-destruction, having conceded at last that love was not his salvation but his undoing.

  “You mind if I turn this thing off?” Will asks after he has come into the bedroom. Some kind of music is emanating from the little TV atop the dresser, a repetitious bass thump that he feels against the back of his tired eyes.

  Lacy peers over the paperback she holds open on her chest, a Ludlum thriller. “I didn’t even know it was on.”

  He stands before the TV for a few moments, remote in hand. Two black men in baggy clothes are striding vehemently back and forth across a stage, jabbing their hands at the air, chanting a mostly indecipherable rhyme. “MTV?” he says.

  “Molly was watching it.”

  He turns at the neck, cocks an eyebrow.

  “She was in bed by ten, don’t worry. So you can just quit looking at me like that.”

  And with her smile he feels some of the heaviness lift away, feels the weariness lighten just a bit, as if her smile, like the fan in the corner, is blowing the day’s chaff off his skin. He comes to the bed and sits on his side, removes his shoes, pulls off his socks and then his shirt. Stands again to unbuckle his belt. Hopefully he asks, “You want maybe I should lock the door?”

  “Well,” she says, and lays the book flat on her stomach, “I’ve been staying awake in hopes that Mel Gibson might show up, but he’s usually here by eleven if he’s coming. So I guess it’s your lucky night, big boy.”

  He lets his trousers slide to the floor. “You want me to get a shower first?”

  “How much beer did you spill on yourself tonight?”

  “Not a drop, surprisingly. But I fried several baskets of wings.”

  “So lock the door, chickie boy, and get yourself on down here.”

  She is wearing the short pajamas and sleeveless top he likes, the powder-blue set he gave her for Christmas last year, and when he touches her he is as grateful as he was the first time so many years ago. No woman has ever smelled and tasted as good to him as Lacy does, and he knows he will never need any more than this, never want another woman.

  Afterward, he feels that he has fallen from a great height. He has landed softly and without injury, but the feeling of having fallen is there nonetheless. She lies curled against him, her head on his chest, her knees nudging his.

  “We’re still pretty good together, aren’t we?” he asks.

  “I think it’s better than it ever was.”

  He runs a hand up and down her spine, feels the ridges beneath his fingers, the lovely fragile stem beneath her skin, this flower in his hands.

  “I mean more than just the sex, though,” he tells her. “I mean everything. We work pretty good together, don’t we?”

  “Mmmm,” she says. “Fourteen years and going strong.”

  He winces at the mention of fourteen years, a tightening at the back of his skull. “I wish I could do better for you and Molly, though. I wish the bar did better.”

  “It will pick up again,” she says.

  But he does not believe it. He is not certain when he stopped believing it, but he believes it no longer. People drink when times are good, the previous owner had told him, and when times are bad they drink even more! But the previous owner had failed to mention that nearly all those people would soon do their drinking somewhere else.

  “Anyway,” Lacy tells him, “we’re getting by okay.”

  “After fourteen years, I’d like to be doing more for us than just getting by.”

  “For instance?”

  And he says, “Portugal.”

  She laughs softly and rubs his chest. “Not me, baby. No hablo Portuguese.”

  But he remembers the way she looked that night when they had eaten spaghetti in front of the big-screen TV downstairs. His rule is that Molly cannot watch TV during dinner unless it is an educational program, so they found a travel series on PBS. In this show, the host, a lanky New Englander with a mop of blond hair, was visiting the Iberian Peninsula. Molly nearly swooned at the sight of the white beaches.

  “Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could go there?” she asked. “Mommy, wouldn’t you like to go there?”

  “Mmm,” Lacy had said, and then, “It would be awfully expensive, I’ll bet.”

  Will had felt a heaviness in his chest that night, and now, in bed with the woman he adores, as he inhales the scent of her hair and absorbs the heat of her skin, the heaviness comes back to him.

  It is still there long after she has fallen asleep. After a while he rises and pulls on his boxers. He sits by the open window looking out through the screen. He sits there a long time, wondering what he can do to make things better. The night is too warm and smells of the street, of road oil and dirt, of other people in transit.

  We can’t steal the bike, he thinks after a while. We can’t beat Kenny up. We don’t want to do anything that might give Kenny’s mother a heart attack. Or anything that Jennilee will divorce Harvey over. I have to be clever about this, he thinks. This is my role in things. I am not bold or fearless, but I can think things through. I’m nobody’s genius, but I can figure this out.

  He turns away from the window to look at his wife asleep. She lies facing him, left hand flat beneath her cheek. She is still naked, and he can feel himself wanting her again, the touch of her flesh against his. And this desire somehow conjoins with his desire to help Harvey and his own desire to ease the pressure that has been squeezing at the base of his scalp all day. Maybe he can be bold, after all, if that is what the situation calls for. Maybe, after all, there exists in him a seed of fearlessness and its potential for change.

  It is not yet 7 A.M. when Will pulls his car up to the loading dock beside a Jimmy Dean Sausage delivery truck. Harvey, using a dolly, is loading boxes of refrigerated sausage into the rear of the truck. Will shuts off the engine and leans his head out the open window.

  Harvey asks, “What are you doing out of bed so early?”

  “Didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  Harvey comes to the edge of the loading dock. “I hope it was because of Lacy and not that pizza you had.”

  Will spots a couple of men several yards behind Harvey in the cave of the warehouse, one running a forklift and the other scanning boxes with his hand scanner. The forklift driver is wearing a set of headphones, and the other man is working beneath the softly whirring blades of two warehouse fans.

  And Will asks in a voice barely loud enough for his brother to hear, “You still set on doing this thing?”

  “Which thing you talking about?”

  “You know which thing.”
<
br />   Harvey looks off into the distance for a moment, his body very still, as if he might be watching a bird soaring off, watching something beautiful fly away from him. “I don’t know,” he finally says. “I might’ve cooled off a little.” But the longer he gazes into the distance and the longer he stands there with the smell of the delivery truck in his nostrils, the coolness of the refrigerated boxes spreading a numbness to his hands, the more the old tension comes back to him. “Even so... yeah. Yeah. I guess I still think something needs to be done.”

  “You guess or you’re sure?” Will asks.

  “What’d I just say?”

  “Because this is no little thing we’re contemplating here.”

  “So you came up with a plan?”

  “The only thing that concerns me is that it might be a little too severe.”

  “Naw, severe is okay. Severe is good.”

  With that, Harvey jumps down off the loading dock. He bends close to Will’s window, hand to the door. “So what is it we’re doing?”

  “You want rid of him, right? You want him out of your life?”

  “I’d say that’s pretty much dead-on, yeah.”

  “He might take the motorcycle with him when he goes. Might sell it to somebody else, I really don’t know.”

  “Screw the motorcycle.”

  “Good. Because this isn’t about the motorcycle anymore.”

  “It never was.”

  Will nods. “It might be good then if I was to, you know, get some of the specifics about what this really is about.”

  Harvey says without inflection, “You don’t need any specifics.”

  Will studies his brother for a moment. Then, “So okay then. How’s tonight work for you?”

  “It just so happens I’m free tonight.”

  “Can you meet me behind the bar at eleven without Jennilee knowing?”

  “Eleven o’clock at night? I’ll be in bed by then! Jeezus, Will, I have to get up at five-thirty, you know.”

  “Sorry. I guess I overestimated your resolve in this matter.”