The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 (10 page)

 

When he woke forty minutes later, she was holding a cloth full of ice against his nose and cheek. Groggily, still in shock, he asked, “What happened?”

“The dresser tipped over onto the bed. We're lucky it didn't kill us both.”

She could tell he didn't believe her. In all this time of waiting, she hadn't given one thought to what she would say to Blue when he woke. She was surprised by the words that came out of her mouth. It seemed outlandish even to her, but she decided, out of curiosity, to leave it at that, to offer nothing else in order to see how he'd respond. She was even more surprised that he didn't challenge her story, just lay there, limp and swelling. He pulled the sheet up over his exposed body.

When he said nothing, she felt some crucial element of power in her marriage shift.

At five-thirty, he went to work with his nose bandaged, the cuts on his face beginning to harden, his good eye as threaded with broken blood vessels as his bad one had been several years before.

 

When Tildon and the girls woke, shortly after their father left, they studied their mother's face, but she understood that they didn't really want her to tell them anything. The inner life of a marriage must be kept hidden from children. She knew that much. Loretta made them oatmeal and toast, fixed their lunches, and hurried them off to the bus stop, and then she bathed quickly. She remembered that she hadn't taken Maria Fernandez's powder. Maybe it wouldn't make her vomit this time. Maybe she had built up immunity, like a person who is bitten several times by snakes becomes snake-proof. But when she went to the pantry and opened the tin can on the top shelf where she kept the powder hidden, she found it empty. She would deal with that later. Right now she needed to remain as clearheaded as possible. She put on her nicest wool skirt and dark purple sweater and walked down to the courthouse.

“I want a divorce,” she told the clerk, Gail Weathers, a man who'd lost all four fingers of his left hand in the war.

“Why?” he asked.

“I don't love my husband anymore.”

“That ain't a good enough reason for the state of Texas.”

She pointed to her bruised face, and when he still seemed unconvinced, she discreetly rolled back the waistband of her skirt and slip to reveal the belt buckle puncture, a halo of swollen pink flesh surrounding the still-infected hole. This got Weathers's attention, mainly because of the audacity of the revelation rather than the impressiveness of the wound. But he didn't show his surprise, just continued chewing on an already gnawed toothpick.

“Guess you should talk to Hef Givens,” he said.

She walked over to the office of Hef Givens, one of only two lawyers in town.

“A divorce'll cost you more than it's worth,” he said. “And you can be sure Blue won't take it well.”

Hef Givens and Blue Simpson sometimes hunted deer together. He was not excited about being enlisted as the attorney in a divorce proceeding against his friend.

“Here,” Loretta said, handing Hef Givens $25 for his retainer, money she had been hoarding the past year by shaving a couple of dollars off the grocery bill each month. “That's all I have right now.”

These were not, despite postwar prosperity, exactly fat times in Charnelle, but Hef Givens was doing well enough. He did not need to take on this case. But his own father had been a thief who sometimes savagely beat his mother and him and then deservedly spent seven years in jail for armed robbery—a time of poverty for Hef and his mother, yet also a period of relative safety and occasional happiness, especially after they moved to Charnelle to live with his grandparents.

Hef looked at Loretta, an intelligent but sullen woman, and saw in her bruises and resolve a refracted portrait of his own mother's life. “Okay, then,” he said, without touching the money. “Here's the first order of business.”

She returned home, as Hef Givens instructed her to do, and packed Blue's personal belongings into two boxes, which she placed on the porch, along with a suitcase filled with his clothes. She took the children to Carol Lippincott's house. Then she called the sheriff and requested that a deputy be sent to escort Blue away when he arrived home.

 

The sheriff's office had already received a call from Hef Givens, and no one there relished this assignment. They didn't appreciate domestic situations, since those were often the only dangerous ones in Charnelle. Not many people were injured with criminal intent in the county unless, experience had taught Sheriff Britwork, they were on the receiving end of a love gone sour. In 1949 there was very little by way of criminal activity at all in Charnelle, so Sheriff Britwork and his four officers spent most of their time at the Ding Dong Daddy Diner, drinking coffee and munching onion rings, or hanging out at the high school football and basketball games to prevent adolescent brawls, or cruising through Mexican Town to make sure the residents knew that someone was keeping a suspicious eye on them. There were also no divorces recorded in Charnelle during the previous six years, even if a majority of marriages, by Britwork's estimation, were not happy ones. Sometimes a couple would separate temporarily, or a man would run off with a mistress for a while, or a wife would run off with her husband's best friend, only to return a few days or weeks later. These incidents seldom resulted in divorce. Acrimony, certainly, and a malignant resentment. Sometimes shots were fired or knives wielded or suicides threatened. But seldom divorce.

The sheriff sent Fortney Nevers, the pudgy twenty-year-old deputy, out to the Simpson home to oversee the proceedings. This wasn't a kind assignment on the part of the sheriff, but Britwork had a root canal performed that very morning—the fourth of what would eventually be six surgeries—and he was not in a generous mood. He didn't want to be the one dealing with a marital dispute, especially between Blue and Loretta Simpson. He had known them since they first moved to Charnelle. The sheriff and his wife had even played pinochle with the Simpsons a time or two before both couples were besieged by children. Britwork would now and again shoot a game of pool with Blue down at the Armory, but since Blue's accident a few years ago, the two families seldom saw each other, and that was just fine with the sheriff. Blue Simpson carried his misfortune and self-pity around like a virus, and the sheriff didn't want to catch it.

Besides, it would serve Fortney Nevers right. The young deputy annoyed the sheriff. The boy's fatness was particularly galling to Britwork, a man with the metabolism of a greyhound, who harbored an unreasonable prejudice against the portly.

“Nevers ain't old enough,” Britwork once told his other officers, within earshot of the deputy, “to have earned the right to be fat.”

The sheriff had been forced to hire the twenty-year-old because Fortney's uncle was the Honorable Cleavis Nevers, the county judge. Given the irritable mood the root canal had fostered in Britwork, he half hoped that Blue Simpson might beat the shit out of the young deputy—not badly enough to inflict serious injury, of course, but enough to persuade the pudgy kid to give up on police work.

Months later, at Fortney Nevers's trial, the sheriff would change his tune. He would testify that the deputy was a model policeman, and that he had been confident Fortney could handle the assignment when he sent him to the Simpsons' house that day. The sheriff would tell the court that he was sure the boy had warned Blue Simpson not to take another step, and that he had fired the shot only to scare the man. The jury would acquit Fortney Nevers, in large part because of their fondness for Hef Givens, who had agreed to represent the young officer, and out of deference to Judge Nevers, who reluctantly recused himself from the case but sat on the front row, directly behind his nephew, and stared solemnly at the jury members, as if issuing his own verdict. Sheriff Britwork would emerge as the incompetent one, the person in fact most culpable for the tragedy, a courtroom performance that would result in the loss of his job in the next election.

 

Blue was already in a surly mood when he left for home. His eye itched and watered. His nostrils had swollen shut during the day, forcing him to breathe through his mouth, and now his throat was raw. He'd gobbled down aspirin every two hours to diminish the pain of his swollen nose and cheek and the scratches on his face and back, but it didn't seem to help much. To make matters worse, he'd had to field the same questions a dozen times from his coworkers about how his face had become mangled.

He repeated what Loretta had told him—that the dresser had fallen on him while sleeping. It had knocked him out and broken his nose, maybe busted his cheek. His coworkers' arched eyebrows and smirks reinforced the suspicion he'd already had that such an accident was unlikely at best and preposterous at worst. Moreover, he didn't have a good excuse for the scratches on his face, not to mention the unseen ones on his back and shoulders, and couldn't come up with any better story. He didn't tell them he'd gone a little nuts himself last night, drunk too much tequila, lost too much shooting pool, and did what he always regretted doing when he drank more than three shots and lost more than $20. Nor did he tell them that he didn't really remember much after that, except that he woke in the morning with his face swollen and aching, his nose broken, his eyes black.

“That dresser must've had some pretty sharp fingernails,” Melvin Doogle said. The other men snickered in such a way that Blue understood he'd been and would continue to be the butt of jokes for days, maybe weeks, to come. It didn't help that at four o'clock that afternoon, lightheaded and then dizzy, hyperventilating, he'd collapsed on the floor of the shop and had been forced to breathe into a paper bag that Bean Peterson, the foreman, put over his mouth.

How could the day be any more miserable? But then he arrived home to find a police cruiser parked on the curb, two boxes and a suitcase on the front porch, the door locked.

Blue rapped on the door, but no one answered. He didn't have his key. They never locked the house, except when they went for Christmas every other year to Bug Tussle and Honey Grove. He knocked again and heard footsteps on the other side, but no one answered.

“Open the damn door,” he said.

“Take your things and leave,” Loretta answered.

He pressed his cheek, the one that was not bruised, against the wood and could hear his wife breathing on the other side, her face just inches from his.

“Open it!”

“No.”

“I don't mind breaking this fucking door down.” He said this flatly, without malice, which was a kind of victory, though he regretted the profanity. He didn't usually swear at his wife unless he'd drunk too much tequila, and he'd sworn off tequila soon after he'd become lightheaded today and found himself on the floor with a paper sack over his face.

The deadbolt was thrown. He waited a few seconds and then opened the door to find Loretta standing on the other side of the room, near the fireplace.

“What are you doing?”

“Stay there,” she said. There wasn't any alarm in her voice. In fact, he wondered if this might be an elaborate joke.

His sinuses throbbed, and he felt again the wooziness he'd experienced just moments before he'd passed out earlier in the day. He touched his nose. It felt tender and swollen—and he imagined that it was already turning a darker shade of blue. Both his good and bad eye began to itch and water, but he knew enough not to scratch that itch. It would only make things worse. He blinked a few times to clear his vision. A chubby boy in a uniform suddenly emerged from the bathroom.

“Who are you?” Blue asked.

“Deputy Nevers?” the boy said, his voice going up at the end so that his answer sounded like a question.

“You related to Judge Nevers?”

“I'm his nephew,” Fortney said, almost embarrassed. He had arrived at the Simpson home shortly before five-thirty and had been waiting for nearly an hour, wishing all the while that he'd urinated before he left the station because he didn't want to be stuck inside the Simpson bathroom with his penis in his hand when Blue showed up. Fortney had inherited a weak bladder from his father's side of the family, complicated by a serious kidney infection when he was a boy, and consequently he had to piss eight to ten times a day and often twice during the night. When he was nervous, he sometimes lost continence, which was not advantageous for a young man, especially a deputy—a predicament that forced him to order double-padded underwear from Montgomery Ward. This solution minimized but did not entirely eliminate his worry and shame.

“Get out,” Loretta said. “This officer will follow you to the Charnelle Inn or wherever you want to go. But you
must
leave. Now.”

“What're you talking about?” Though Blue assumed that whatever he'd done last night could not have been good, given the state of his own face and hers, he didn't expect such immediate nor dire consequences for his actions. He just wanted, for now, to lie down in his own bed and sleep for about twelve hours.

“Blue. Now.”

“Where're the kids?”

“Out,” she said. Blue wasn't sure if she was referring to the children or issuing him another order. He breathed deeply through his mouth, having forgotten again, in the confusion of the moment, that this was the only way he
could
breathe. Dizziness seemed ready to engulf him.

“Come with me, Mr. Simpson,” Fortney said nervously. “I'll help you load your things.”

“Loretta,” Blue said. He could hear a whine in his own voice, which surprised and embarrassed him.

“Go, Blue,” she said, quieter now. He detected a trace of pity, a tenderness that he thought he might leverage to his advantage.

“Let's just you and me have a glass of tea and talk about it.” He sat down in the chair closest to the door.

“No, Blue. You have to go.”