The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 (33 page)

“It's raining like hell out there, like it's never going to stop,” he said tentatively. There was no reaction to these first few words, so he continued. “It reminds me of a story I heard about a flood. It happened about twenty years ago, right here in eastern Colorado, though I'm not sure if it was up north on the South Platte or down on the Arkansas. Both rivers flood sometimes in the late spring when the snowmelt has already filled the river and a rainy spell sets in.

“So the rains came and swelled the river over its banks and into the pasture of this farm that was usually a half-mile from the river. The farmer had his cows penned up by his barn, but the river was rising steadily, so he let them out and herded them up onto the prairie sandhills above his farm. He struggled through the mucky soil, but he and his dog got them out and up into the hills with only one of the cows running off. When he was sure the others were safe, he and the dog took off to find the lone cow, a young milker who had always been a little skittish.

“Let me tell you about this dog. It wasn't the kind of dog the farmer would have picked for a work dog. It had come wandering into the farmyard a couple of years earlier, and after a week of tossing rocks and shouting at it, the dog was still skulking around. Against his better judgment, the farmer began to leave food scraps in an old Ford hubcap behind the barn, and soon the dog began to follow him around as he did his chores. He soon found that the dog had a touchy and unpredictable nature. The farmer sometimes caught a gleam in the dog's eye that seemed like a challenge, as if it would as soon go for you as listen to what you had to say. But the dog learned to handle the cows, so the farmer put up with it and let it live in the barn.

“The dog's mongrel collie coat hid the splashes of mud that stained it as he roamed about, searching for the cow. They worked well together, covering a lot of ground. The signs they found pointed to the brainless cow heading right down into the flooded cottonwoods that bordered the swollen river.

“When they came to the edge of the flood, the farmer waded into the slow-moving, muddy water. He looked back and saw that the dog had hesitated. He cursed it and commanded it to come, but it only paced at the water's edge. Finally he went back and picked up the unwilling animal and carried it with him. When he was fifty yards from the edge and still only up to his ankles, he dropped the dog. It looked back anxiously to the muddy land but moved on as the farmer did, staying by his side.

“It was too close to dark for the farmer to search for very long, as he didn't know when the flood crest would hit the area. For all he knew, it would reach clear to his farmhouse, but he was stubborn and single-minded, and as the gray sky turned to black he kept up his search, slogging along in his rubber work boots, already fighting his way through waves of uprooted plants and small trees and drowned varmints. He had no luck spotting the cow, and only turned back when it was dark enough that he needed the yard lights up by the house to guide him home.

“He didn't notice the loss of the dog until he waded onto the bog that had been his alfalfa field. The animal had been alternately swimming and scrambling onto branches and raised clumps of grass as they wended their way through the flooded cottonwood forest. The farmer remembered the dog being near him only ten or fifteen minutes before, as he heard its whine when it traversed a long log and didn't want to jump into the water again, and he had cussed it and chided it along. He looked back at the huge dark expanse of the murmuring flood and whistled a couple of times and then trudged up to his house. What a mess the day had turned into. He told himself that if the cow and the dog survived until morning, he'd find them then.”

“What the hell does this have to do with anything? Who gives a damn about a lost dog or cow?” Brucie said. He stood up and put the carpenter's pencil behind his left ear. He was small and thin, maybe five-four and 140 pounds, and he wore dirty jeans with holes in the knees and a red flannel shirt over a black T-shirt. His hair was black and thick and he needed a shave. He had a mean kick and hard, fast fists.

“I think it's a good story,” said the big woman, Jane. Dan had heard Brucie call her Jane several times, usually with a nasty descriptor in front of Jane, like Lard-Ass or Two-Ton. “You know I love dogs. I don't think I ever been closer to a cow than a hamburger or a glass of milk, though.” She laughed heartily, shaking the whole bed so that the headboard banged against the wall.

“How do you know it's a good story? You ain't even heard the whole thing.”

“Well, let him finish it, then.”

“Nah. I'm tired of hearing him talk. Besides, if he has something to say, I want it to be that he remembers the number for the cash machine so we don't have to wait for the goddamn bank to open.”

“He said he didn't remember. Even when you hit him,” she said. Then she lowered her voice. “When are you going to learn that hitting never helps?”

Brucie didn't say anything for a minute, just cocked his ear toward her like he was waiting for another stupid remark. Then he slowly turned his head and looked across at her, his blue eyes turning to slits so all that showed was a venomous, milky gray. She tried to evade his stare but wasn't able to: the smile behind that hearty laugh disappeared and her heavy shoulders descended lower and lower until she sagged into a sad, rounded lump.

Brucie had her intimidated all right. Dan had noticed how quiet she was in the car, but it hadn't meant much to him then. He generally never picked up hitchhikers, especially when he had a full slate of appointments and an order book with too many blank pages, but today he'd been bored and
out there.
Out there,
where the wind and the rain put him. He could go for weeks without doing a stupid, crazy thing, and then along would come a blow and suddenly he would decide to take a 200-mile detour to find some ribs cooked just the way he liked them, or that he needed a rest and he would end up spending three days in a motel room, drinking whiskey all night, crying to every sad song on the radio.

He knew something was going to happen when he realized he had driven for two hours with his radio off, racing out of western Kansas and into Colorado in an eerie trance. He had his eyes hard to the road, following the flashes of lightning like the dazzle from a hypnotist's watch. The wind carried the rain across the road, billowing it in waves that nearly flooded the highway before they gusted away. It was like driving along a stormy California beach.

Then he saw them, in a lightning flash, the little one huddled against the big one on a stretch of nowhere 60 miles into Colorado. So he pulled over and picked them up, thinking he was just being humane, but knowing it was really the wind and the rain and being
out there.
They didn't say much, only making small talk, revealing themselves in little ways, and after a hundred miles he thought that he was going to be all right, that just having the company was pulling him back, was calming him down. Then the seed of a story began to sprout, something about a flood, about a lost cow and a dog, lost to the storm and the flood.

The motel squatted in the far corner of a lonely crossroads on the two-lane, 10 miles away from a stagnant and dying farm town of a few thousand people and 20 miles from the interstate, where cars rocketed along oblivious to its existence. There was just the one motel and the filling station with the lunch counter across the highway. The café wouldn't even open until 6 a.m.
,
when the farmers and truckers and other traveling souls might stop in for breakfast. He abruptly decided to pull in, because the story was coming too fast and he wanted to let it grow at its own pace. He would spend the night at the motel, and in the morning go across to the diner and tell the story to the locals, judging its success by smiles and nodding heads and a coffee cup that was always full; or become embarrassed by turned backs and snickers and the loud clanking of silverware against thick ceramic plates.

The occasional praise from these small audiences made his long trips on the road bearable. He spent his days driving hundreds of mind-numbing miles back and forth across the prairie and fields of eastern Colorado, western Kansas, and Nebraska, pestering service-station owners into buying the latest equipment to service the latest, increasingly complicated cars. Or failing to convince them, as had been the recent trend. No, he didn't mind, because he still had adventures in his head, and he loved the chance to meet and entertain new people with his stories.

There was an overhanging awning and a bench in front of the diner, and the big woman said they would be all right there until it opened, that they were dry now, thanks very much for the ride. He felt a little bad leaving them there, but at least he'd gotten them out of the rain.

Across the road, he had to wake up the motel clerk, who groggily fumbled with his pen when Dan checked in, and it seemed to take forever, but he was a nice enough fellow and Dan thought he might share the story with him tomorrow when it was polished and ready to tell. He had the trunk of his Toyota open and he was fumbling around with his bag when the dim light from the buzzing motel sign suddenly became even dimmer. A shadow flashed across his hand on the bag and when he looked over his shoulder, the woman hovered over him. For a moment he imagined she might have a question to ask, or have come to ask for a little food money, but then he felt the jab in his back and he flexed upright, banging his head against the lid of the trunk. A blow behind the ear quickly followed.

“Don't move like that again, buddy,” said the voice behind him, “or you'll get more than a slap upside the head.” This time the jab was stronger and sharper, and he realized it was a knife at his back. He should have been surprised, but wasn't, chastising himself that he hadn't noticed that they were the kind of grungy hitchhikers who showed you a smile as you passed and then cursed you and gave you the finger if you passed them by. He hadn't noticed, he'd been
out there,
and then the story had come and he'd become distracted and careless.

Now Jane got up from cowering on the bed and went to the window. She pulled aside the curtain and looked out into the darkness. The side of her face, he could see, was illuminated by the pink neon from the motel sign, and there were shiny trails of tears running down from her eyes.

Brucie came over and squatted down on his haunches. He crossed his arms and looked at Dan. Dan guessed he was about twenty-five, but he could have been some perpetually adolescent forty-year-old. He smiled at Dan until Dan found himself smiling, too, unable to say why, nodding at the silliness of it all, how it seemed more like some prank than a robbery. No one robbed you this way.

Brucie uncrossed his arms and his left shot out, the closed fist catching Dan on the side of the head. He had been turning away as he nodded and the blow glanced off, but was still hard enough to stun him. There was another fist to his face and he felt the tearing of the inside of his cheek between the bony knuckles and his teeth, leaving the sudden, grim taste of blood. Dan thought about the angelic look on Brucie's face, the mask that hid the nasty workings of a small, mean man who never had anything but small, mean thoughts. He took two or three more blows, not really able to keep track of the damage, they came so fast.

“You made this too hard, man,” he heard Brucie say. Dan's ears rang and the man's voice sounded hollow and far away. “What kind of salesman don't carry his money in cash? Plastic ain't the way for a man to carry his money. It ought to be cash.”

Dan fell onto his side. Brucie was still squatting beside him. Dan had his eyes closed. He felt a hand on his hair as he was dragged up, back into a sitting position.

“I think you're lying about that damn number. I think you're wasting my time because you think you're going to get away with something. Let me tell you what,” he said. Dan opened his eyes, squinting now through the pain. Brucie's face was only inches away. His breath reminded Dan of the wind from the beef packing plant back home, the odor of rotting meat so intense it weighed down the breeze that carried it.

“I don't want the number anymore. When that branch bank or whatever it is in that little town up the road opens, you're going to clean out your account, and if you're lucky, we'll let you live. If you'd given us the number for that card, we'd already be gone. You just had to make it hard. Well, I can make it hard, too.”

Then he stood, giving Dan's hair a hard yank and throwing his head back against the wall. He glanced at the woman, jangling the keys he had taken from Dan earlier. “I'm going out to check out that car again; I know he's got some more cash stashed somewhere. Make sure he don't move. And don't be talking to him.” He slammed the door as he left.

Dan's head ached as the booming of the door shook the thin walls of the motel room. He sucked away the blood from the numerous cuts inside his mouth, wanting to spit it out but feeling weak and impulsively swallowing. The echoing pain in his head started to subside as the flow of blood decreased and what he swallowed began to taste less salty.

Jane continued to look out the window. He hadn't seen how she reacted to Brucie's blows. She had said she didn't like hitting. But she did not seem disturbed now; maybe she only meant she didn't like being hit herself. Dan was sure that it happened, that the little man beat up on the big woman. There were no bruises on her that he could see, but he knew that it happened.

She turned away from the window and walked back to the bed, sitting down to a groaning screech from the box springs. A sigh came out of her that seemed to go on and on.

“I liked that story you were telling,” she said. “I wish he'd let me talk to you so's I could hear how it ended. He doesn't like it when I have fun over something he hasn't made up.”

“I could tell you the rest of that story,” he said slowly, trying to keep the edges of his teeth away from the cuts inside his mouth.