The Best American Mystery Stories 2013 Page 43

  And because Will does not want to think of all that, because as long as he has a daughter or wife or brother he cannot allow himself to be crushed by what he knows, cannot grant himself the gift of oblivion, he lifts his eyes to the horizon and thinks of autumn coming and of what it will be like in the woods this year. He thinks maybe he will not hunt anymore, because nothing will ever be the same. The fine powdered snow on the dry leaves will not be the same, and neither will the wind through bare branches or the shafted sunlight or the sharp crackling of ice-encrusted limbs. But Molly is old enough to go into the woods this year, and he does not want to disappoint her. Stevie will be looking forward to it, too. So maybe even though nothing will be the same, Will should take them hunting after all. But no, nothing will ever be the same. Nothing ever is.

  And with this thought Will pauses for a moment in his sweeping. Only then does he realize that without even knowing when he started again, he has swept thirty feet of the sidewalk clean. The motorcycle key is still in his hand, pressed against the broom handle now and biting into his palm, leaving an impression on his skin. But it is Harvey’s key, and Will grips it tightly as he resumes his sweeping. The bristles make a rhythmic sound as they scrape the concrete, chhhhh, chhhhh, chhhhh, chhhhh. And before long he is thinking of Portugal again, that fantasy impossibly serene. Maybe Molly will get there someday. Maybe now she can.

  As for me, he tells himself, you weren’t made for traveling, you weren’t made for big ideas. You were made for sweeping. For frying wings and making daiquiris. For opening bottles of beer. For keeping a room clean and relatively quiet and as dim as an old cathedral. For maintaining the coward’s refuge from a sun-bruised sky.

  PATRICIA SMITH

  When They Are Done with Us

  FROM Staten Island Noir

  Port Richmond

  MAURY’S EYES WERE crazy wide, staring right into the camera, just like they were on yesterday’s show and the show before that. His hand rested on the shoulder of some blubbering white girl, Keisha or Kiara something, her hair all hard-curled and greased up into those stiff-sprayed rings, smeared black circling her eyes, greening gold Nefertitis swinging from her ears, more faux preciousness twinkling from her left nostril. Seems like K or K’s baby daddy could be any one of the fidgeting young black men and—surprise!—she kinda didn’t know which one.

  The contestants were all sloe-eyed, corkscrew braids, double negative, mad for no reason except that they had been identified on national television as fools who didn’t give a damn where their dicks went.

  It was time, once again, for the paternity test and Maury’s dramatic slicing open of that manila envelope. For some reason, the prospect of finally knowing whose seed had taken hold reduced Kiara or Keisha to unbridled bawling and a snorting of snot.

  Jo had the show on more for background than anything, but she stopped for a closer look at the little nasty who’d opened her legs and been done in. It amazed her how anybody, let alone a white girl, could look at any one of those sad sacks and feel bad enough about herself to fuck him. “I ain’t never been, or ain’t never gonna be, that damned horny,” she said out loud, just as Tyrell, sloe-eyed and corkscrewed, was revealed to be the father of the squirming little bastard in question.

  “I’m gon’ take care of my ’sponsibility,” he monotoned, a semiearnest declaration which was greeted by wild hooting and hand-clapping from Maury’s drama-drunk studio audience. Even after receiving the sudden blessing of papahood, Tyrell avoided looking at or touching the mother of his child. Kiara or Keisha stood, shivering in a whorish skirt and halter top, in dire need of at least an orchestrated hug. She continued to keen.

  I cannot watch this shit, Jo thought, just after thinking, Where did she find an actual halter top in 2010? Although she made a move to punch the television off, she didn’t do it. Instead she lowered the volume so the string of skewed urban vignettes could still distract her from what she really needed to be doing. Maybe the next segment would feature some tooth-challenged redneck hurling a chair across the stage upon discovering, after a week or so of sweaty carnal acrobatics, that the he he thought was a she was really a he fervently embracing his she-ness.

  Jo revisited her mental to-do. Last night’s crusted dishes, still “soaking.” A mountain of undies and towels, waiting to be lugged to the Bright Star laundromat, where the guy who guarded the dollar changers—to make damned sure that no “nonlaunderers” used them—never missed an opportunity to converse with her tits. Oh, and she’d skipped breakfast again. After her last tangle with an oil-slick omelet at the New Dinette, a succession of Dunkin’s dry toasted things, and her own ambitious attempts to get healthy and choke down oatmeal, the idea of a morning meal had lost its appeal. By 3 P.M. she’d be trolling Port Richmond Avenue, inhaling a loaded slice or two at Denino’s or resigning herself to the New’s lunch menu and one of their huge, dizzying burgers.

  There wasn’t much in the fridge—various leftover pastas curling in Tupperware and cold cuts she could practically hear expiring. Ravenous, she spotted the pack of Luckies on the edge of the dinette table, and her whole mouth tingled with crave. Although the pack was half empty, she didn’t remember buying it. Just one, she thought. Just one, and maybe a little drinkie to follow. Instead she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, shutting it out, and did what Katie had told her to do. She said the word poem out loud.

  That’s it, she thought, scrambling for her wire-bound notebook and new pen. I’m going to write me a poem. From the flickering Panasonic, Maury asked, “When did you first suspect that Aurelio was sleeping with your mother?”

  Poetry was Jo’s new medicine. During her last trip to the university hospital’s emergency room, her vague complaint that she had been “sleeping too long and smoking too much and maybe drinking a little harder and my kid is driving me crazy” earned her a useless nicotine patch and the advice of Katie McMahon, a perky community counselor, who suggested she put little bits of her life into lines. Rhyme or not, no matter. About anything she wanted it to be about. “If you call it a poem, then it is,” Katie had said.

  Surprisingly, the little scrawlings helped. She’d written more than a few choice lines about Al, the ex-cop who showed up with his monthly hard-on to pound her into the mattress with something he called love. She wasted whole pages on Charlie, who’d inhabited her womb for nine months and now had no patience for her “stupid fuckin’ rules.” He dropped by occasionally to pilfer weed money from her wallet, gobble the contents of the refrigerator, or sleep off an encounter with too many shots of Jäger. On good days—or when she needed to remember that there had actually been good days—she wrote all pretty about a moment when she was full of light, strolling over the Bayonne Bridge like she was walking on water. From up there the island magically shed its dingy and became more than gossip, stench, and regret. The key to happiness on Staten Island, she decided, was to get as close as you could to the sky and make the assholes as small as possible.

  Flipping to a fresh page in the notebook, she clicked the top of her pen and licked the point the way she’d seen real writers do before they—

  A key rattled in the lock and the front door was flung open with such force that it banged into the wall, knocking more mint-green chips from the plaster. Jo felt her heart go large and stone.

  “Hey, what the hell is up, Jo?”

  He refused to call her Mom. Or Mother. Sixteen years old, six feet, two inches of swaggering explosive. Her son.

  “It’s hot as shit out there. What’s in this place to eat?”

  “I think there’s some ham in the—”

  “The same ham as last time? That shit’s old. Ain’t nuthin’ cooked in this bitch?”

  Jo steeled herself. “Charlie, I told you not to come in here—”

  “Cursing? Hungry? And you gon’ do what?”

  Jo knew the answer. Nothing. She had never not been terrified of her son. Charlie had ripped her open at birth, glared at her as he bit her breast to demand mi
lk, pinched and pummeled his kindergarten classmates, set fire to wastebaskets in school restrooms, been suspended from sixth grade for showing up plastered on a vile mix of Kool-Aid and vodka, and greeted all attempts to control and educate with a raised middle finger. He strutted and primped in Day-Glo Jordans, a too-big Yankees cap twisted sideways on his head, pants two sizes too wrong pulled down so far the waistband backed his ass. He adopted the lyric swagger of black boys, taking on their nuance and rhythms while hissing about “niggers” in the circle of his crew. While Jo watched in horror, Charlie grew as wide and high as a wall. He arced over her when she dared make mama noises, and huffed in her face with dead breath, which stank of cheap tobacco.

  His eyes looked like someone had died behind them.

  She wasn’t sure what he did during the day. It wasn’t school. She’d gotten letters and phone calls from Port Richmond High attesting to his continued absence. “He’s a dropout,” she finally blurted to one well-meaning guidance counselor, before hanging up the phone.

  There were even rumors that Charlie had managed to father a child. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, Jo could see him snarling, fully erect, a gum-cracking girl laid wide and waiting. His lovemaking would be thrust and spit. When she thought of a child built of Charlie and air, a thick shudder ripped through her.

  “Did you hear me? Food! I’m fuckin’ hungry! I swear, Jo, don’t make me have to—”

  She sprang from her chair and bolted for the kitchen with no idea what she would do once she got there.

  He’d only hit her once.

  One clouded August night, a week after Charlie turned sixteen, Jo saw him on the street just after finishing her part-time job at Bloomy Rose, a florist in Midland Beach. She’d worked late that night, helping with a huge order for the funeral of a local politician. As she wound her way toward her bus stop, a fierce rain needled her cheeks. Assuming the rain had driven everyone inside, she was surprised to see a dark human huddle on Father Capodanno Boulevard just before Midland Avenue, and even more surprised to see her son at its edges.

  But there he was, hanging on yet another corner with Bennie Mahoney, a no-gooder from New Dorp, and two other boys she didn’t know. Their backs were hunched against the downpour, and she saw the orange flare of cigarettes. She wanted and didn’t want to know what they were up to.

  The sign on the nearest building on Midland read Q.S.I.N.Y., and she could hear the guttural thump of dance music from inside. The letters made no sense to her until she realized where she’d seen them before. The island’s first openly gay club had launched on the Fourth of July weekend to much fanfare and trepidation. Staten Island wasn’t known for its tolerance, and there were worries that the patrons of the club would become targets for ham-handed haters.

  The letters stood for Queer Staten Island New York.

  Jo felt an ominous drop in her belly.

  Charlie’s views on all things gay were well known and frequently bellowed. While Jo admitted a cringe when she thought about man-on-man, and a starkly uncomfortable curiosity when she considered girl-on-girl, Charlie’s florid vocabulary was peppered with references to “fuckin’ fags,” “cocklickers,” and “turd burglars.” Jo remembered a bespectacled whisperer from their block who had packed up and hightailed it off the island with his family after being on the receiving end of a vicious beatdown. He never identified his attackers, but Jo remembered how he would practically shrivel when he passed Charlie on the street.

  The Charlie who now, for no good reason, was in the middle of a meeting outside a gay dance club. Afraid of what he might be planning, and before she thought about the consequences of doing so, Jo shouted his name.

  The group stopped its conspiratorial grumbling. All eyes snapped to her, standing across the street from them, the wind crimping her cheap umbrella, her cotton blouse plastered to her breasts and darkening with rain.

  Her son’s eyes bored holes into her. He did not move.

  Bennie punched Charlie’s shoulder hard and laughed. “Hey, it’s your fuckin’ mommy.” The two other boys joined in the merriment. But Charles Liam Mulroy, his steel-gray eyes locked to his mother’s, did not speak. Jo couldn’t bring herself to utter his name again.

  They stood that way, three of the young men snickering, one son motionless and burning, one drenched mother craving the world of ten minutes ago. Finally Jo spotted the approaching bus spewing puddles. She scurried to the stop and boarded, never looking back.

  Late that night, she woke from a fitful sleep to an angry wall in her room, a wall dripping rain and hissing through its teeth. After two deep glasses of screw-top wine, gulped to calm her nerves, Jo hadn’t heard Charlie come in.

  “Don’t you ever fuckin’ do that again. You wanna be somebody’s mother, get your ass a dog. Don’t you ever admit you even fuckin’ know me. Not in front of my crew. You see me, you don’t say shit. You lucky I didn’t lay your bitch ass flat right there on the street.”

  She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until her head began to pound. Charlie was panting, fists clenched, backlit and glowing in the moonwash. She was just beginning to think how oddly beautiful the image was when it grabbed a fistful of pink pajama top, pulled her up from the pillow, and then knocked her back down with a slap that rattled her teeth.

  “Don’t. You. Ever. Fuckin’. Embarrass. Me. Again.”

  He dropped his body down on the side of the bed, waiting for Jo to meet his eyes. She couldn’t. She lay with her head flattened to the left, the way it had fallen after the slap. She felt his hard gaze. After a wet intake of breath, he slowly lifted the pajama top and clamped her bare right breast with a huge, calloused hand. Jo silently willed her spirit out of the room. Charlie squeezed rough, then pinched the tip of her nipple so hard she whimpered.

  He laughed. “This some sick shit. Wow. Man. You done got my cock hard in this bitch.”

  He popped up and strutted out of the bedroom, leaving behind the dead green smell of bad weather.

  They never talked about it. She never called anyone, never thought about reporting him, never even mentioned it to Al, the ex-cop. From that day on, she never acknowledged him in public, no matter what he was doing, who he was with, where he was. And she stopped remembering the thick smear of blood she’d seen on his skinned knuckles that night. She stopped wondering whose it was.

  “I am fuckin’ starvin’ up in this bitch!” Charlie screamed again.

  Jo clawed through cabinets and the fridge, searching for something, anything, that wasn’t the same old ham. In the front room, Maury had probably morphed into another screechfest. She wanted to be back in that room, opening her notebook, finding that empty page, picking up her pen . . .

  “Ooooohhhhh, godDAMN! What is this shit?”

  Jo bolted for the living room and swallowed hard at the sight of Charlie holding the purple notebook, starkly focused on a particular page.

  “Give that to me,” she said, as calmly as she could manage. “That’s mine.”

  “Oh, hell no. I’m seeing my name, so this shit is my business. I already read the one about you gettin’ naked and fuckin’ that cop. Mama’s a muthafuckin’ freak.”

  His eyes scanned the page, and she saw it all take turns in his face—confusion, anger, embarrassment, confusion, realization, anger again. She wondered what poem he’d found. She wondered what she’d pay for writing it.

  Charlie started reading, his voice all exaggerated white:

  Charlie is not a son, not a boy, not a man

  He is the way a day turns toward a storm

  He is a star that screams before disappearing

  He is night without a bottom

  I can’t wake up from him, can’t give

  him back, can’t even give him away,

  can’t think of anyone who would even want

  that kind of exploding. I can’t even say his

  name without my heart stopping. I wish I

  could remember giving him a home

 
in my body. I wonder if it would just

  be easier to stop stop stop loving him

  as easy as it was to stop loving me

  Hearing the poem out loud, Jo couldn’t help noticing that she was using the word even too much. Concentrating on that kept her from focusing on the ominous silence that followed Charlie’s booming of the word me.

  The silence was broken by a laughter Jo had never heard before. Charlie threw back his head and opened so wide she could see the collapsed gray teeth at the back of his mouth. He laughed so hard he sputtered, and when he could manage it, he spat out snippets of her poem. “Not a son! Give him back! Give him away! Home in your body! Stop, stop, stop!” He laughed until there were tears in his eyes. “Stop!”

  Still snorting, he pushed past her into the kitchen, waving the notebook over his head. He slapped it flat on a burner of the gas stove and held Jo at arm’s length while he turned the knob up as far as it would go. Flames leaped up around the notebook and burrowed toward its heart. The smoke alarm started thin, warbled, then blared. Above the din, Charlie laughed maniacally.

  As Jo’s poetry flared and sizzled, all those words she had scraped directly from the surface of her skin, Charlie turned the water on full blast in the kitchen sink, where last night’s dinner dishes were still soaking. With a pair of metal salad tongs, he lifted the blazing notebook and tossed it under the running water. Jo could swear she heard it moan.