The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (28 page)

 

Over the next two weeks, a clique of professionally coiffed men and women descended upon our town. They shot bleak snowscapes that framed the prison building and the Bloom farmhouse, which was quarantined by yellow tape, and they said grave things into cameras: how Albright had broken into the Blooms' garage, how young Joshua Bloom had interrupted Albright as he tried to hotwire the Blooms' truck. In somber tones they recounted the struggle in which Albright fatally stabbed Joshua, only to be killed moments later by a blast from Isaiah Bloom's shotgun. We turned off our televisions and let our newspapers molder on our porches. We didn't need to be told who the Blooms were, or who we were, for that matter.

The week before Christmas we held a memorial service at church. Neither Isaiah nor Annalee Bloom attended. Pastor Kimble did his best, but most of us barely heard a word. We were sick with grief for the two of them, but they wanted nothing to do with us. They'd spoken to no one, refused every interview, rebuffed even the pastor. They made private arrangements for their son's body, and some months later left for Pennsylvania.

It was those killings that put us on the map, but not in the way we'd expected. For years afterward, our town couldn't be mentioned without them. When people moved away, their new neighbors would bring it up as soon as they found out where the movers had come from. When we traveled across the state for our children's cross-country meets and wrestling championships, fellow parents would squint through pained smiles when we told them where we lived. Huh, they'd say. That's the prison town, isn't it? The shopping malls and processing plants we'd hoped for never materialized. Instead, once a respectful amount of time had passed, Corvus quietly purchased the Blooms' farm and started building an expansion.

The cohort of guards who survived the cafeteria melee began drinking nightly at Barry's. They didn't talk about it, but they'd all been changed by what happened. Certain vivid thoughts boiled up with greater and greater frequency. They'd be sitting at dinner with their families when the images surfaced, uninvited. They couldn't look at their children without flashing on batons striking their skulls, the
thwock
they'd make ringing out in their own heads. That summer the group of them took turns building decks around the pools in each other's yards. Amid the camaraderie and coolers of beer on those long weekend afternoons, it occurred to more than one that his hammer had the same heft as his club.

Everyone thought the warden would resign after the killings, but instead he gave a pep talk and promised to support the guards, whether that meant more training, more staff, or better weapons. There was a new generation of tasers coming to market that promised to “revolutionize compliance management.” Another flurry of media attention fell on us during the DOC inquiry, once a dozen inmates' lawyers raised hell. But after a few days of anemic coverage, the story disappeared. The inquiry faded, too. All eyes turned overseas, where news had leaked that American forces were operating a vast network of secret prisons across the globe. To the town's great relief, we were forgotten.

 

From the looks of things, the town is back to normal. The Cineplex has reopened, and the manicured lawns and flower boxes along the thoroughfare are flush with color. The smell of fresh asphalt cuts the air. Not a single building in our modest downtown remains empty. And all the while, everything outside of town decays. The state teeters on the edge of bankruptcy. We hear rumors of cutbacks and shutdowns—schools, hospitals, fire departments, police. Everything but the prisons, those marvelous engines that run on damaged men. We should feel lucky.

Our parents' faces have become our own. Maybe, for all their talk about the permanence of the plant, they knew all along just how precarious our arrangement was. The plant offered a good job, but there was risk there, too. Every so often, someone got caught in the gears.

Over drinks at Barry's, Ed McConnell brought news of the Chiltons, who had moved away after Robert quit. Little Anthony—healthy and strong, according to McConnell—had started school, and Grace had found work as a teacher again. Robert was working as an undertaker's assistant after being unemployed for the better part of a year. “Hell of a way to earn a living,” said McConnell.

Yeah, we said. But then again, what isn't?

NICK MAMATAS

FROM
Long Island Noir

 

Northport

 

My father told me around the time I seriously started reading books as a teenager that he used to know Jack Kerouac. “When I was a young man, he was living right here in Northport,” he said. When we were next on Main Street, he pointed to Gunther's Tap Room as we passed it and said, “Petey, Kerouac used to play pool in there all the time, and sometimes he'd hold court on whatever subject bubbled up in his writerly brain.” There were even a few photos of Kerouac in the window, and a sign reading
KEROUAC DRANK HERE
, which I'd never noticed before. I was a kid; I had eyes only for Lic's Ice Cream, the Sweet Shop, and the little newsstand that carried comic books alongside
Newsday
and car magazines. But then I started noticing the other Northport, the one day-trippers don't see.

That's about when I figured out what my father did for a living. “Waste management, middle management,” he'd tell me, “boss of all the garbage men on the North Shore.” I'd repeat that line in school, knowing it wasn't quite the whole story. I knew we were semiconnected, since Uncle Peter, for whom I am named, couldn't stop talking about it. He was a cliché, central casting for
The Sopranos
, with a thick-tongued accent my father didn't have, a penchant for tracksuits, a ridiculous silvery Cadillac, and rings too gaudy for even the pope to wear.

I'd be working on my Commodore 64 or have my nose in a book when he'd come over for dinner and say, “That's right. You do good in school, you hear me, and get a good job. A
career
.”
Career
was a three-syllable word to Uncle Peter. “Work to get laid,” he'd say. “Not to get made. It's no life.” Even I knew what getting made was.

Uncle Peter said he knew Kerouac, too. “That guy? Ha! Jim said he knew him?” Granted, my father was a little man, balding with a bundt cake of hair around the back of his head, and he dressed like an accountant. Not the kind of guy you'd think would be hanging out with the king of the Beats.

“Yeah,” Uncle Peter continued, all wistful. “Me and this friend of mine, we'd seen Kerouac on TV, then two days later in his garden, wearing coveralls like some kid, then that night wandering down the street like a real stumblebum. The guy was
stunad
, so I thought we'd give him a shakedown.”

“Why, Uncle Peter?”

“Eh, we were just dumb kids. We thought writers had money! Anyway, he was a pretty big dude. A lot of muscle, and he could take a punch. I was waling on him, my friend was holding—”

“Who? Dad?”

“Pfft, no way. Nah, you don't know this guy. He was my friend who died before you were born. Anyway, Kerouac was just standing there. It was like punching a car through a pillow. There were definitely muscles under all that fat, and he was just going on about Buddhism and how he was a pacifist. Anyway, your
nonna
had sent Jim to go find me, and he pulls me off and tells me that writers don't have any money, and plus Jack is the only one left to take care of his old mother, so don't hurt him, and especially don't break his thumbs as he won't even be able to do any writing if we did. Kerouac looked like a friggin' bum—unshaved, ratty old navy coat, smelled like a vineyard, so I felt bad and I ended up putting fifty bucks in
his
pocket.” Uncle Pete ran his big palms over his face. “Man, that was a time.” Then, conspiratorially, “Don't tell Elaine about any of this.”

Elaine was Uncle Peter's fiancée. The wedding took place a week after that conversation, in Queens where they lived. We had to park four long Queens blocks away from the church because every spot on the street was taken up by a sedan—some belonged to guests, others to pairs of men who sat in their cars the whole time, eating sandwiches, writing down notes on little pads, and occasionally taking photos of the church, the street, or one of the other cars.

My mother fixed my tie, put a tired smile on her face, and said, “Stand up straight. Pretend that you're famous and that the men across the street are paparazzi.” Left unspoken was
and not federal agents
.

It was a great wedding. Tons of food, and dancing, and all sorts of guys coming up to my father at our table and shaking his hand, telling me what a good guy my dad was, how fair and honest and sweet, and that I'd be lucky to grow up to be like him. “Keep that nose clean! In the books!” My father bragged to them about my grades and that I had free access to the adult section at the public library. “Adult, eh?” a few of them said, snickering.

That was a Saturday, June 16, 1984. Back in Northport Ricky Kasso was torturing and killing Gary Lauwers out in the Aztakea Woods. Kasso was the high school “Acid King,” a drug dealer and user who was into heavy metal and, supposedly, Satanism. Kasso stabbed Lauwers over a dozen times, demanding that he say, “I love Satan!” Lauwers was the good boy of the story—he would only say, “I love my mother!” The body wasn't discovered till the Fourth of July, his eyes ruined, maggots in the wounds, animals picking at scraps of flesh. Kasso, who had been bragging to his friends about “human sacrifice,” killed himself in jail three days later. Then Northport really went crazy.

Uncle Peter cut his honeymoon to the old country short. He was now always at our house, going off on sudden errands my father needed done. And Dad was on the phone constantly, talking to guys in the city. “Satanists in the fucking woods!” he bellowed, angry for the first time ever as far as I knew. “We got to get them out of there.”

The local priest came over for dinner; I had to wear my wedding suit again. We'd only ever gone to church on Christmas Eve, but Father Ligotti was attentive to my father's questions about Satan and “today's kids” to the point of seeming frightened. Then it clicked—my father wasn't just some pencil pusher in an office in charge of waste management, he was definitely part of the Mothers and Fathers Italian Association, and probably pretty high up. The town longhairs—that's what they called themselves; us normal kids called them dirtbags—didn't spend much time outside that summer, but when I'd see one on Main Street or over by the harbor or in the rich neighborhood pushing a mower across the lawn of someone else's house, they'd be sporting black eyes, a missing tooth, or a broken hand. They never walked alone. There were strange things happening in the woods, all right, and soon enough every kid in town knew to stay the fuck away from Aztakea.

I was too young to know the older kids except by face and reputation. They'd picked on a lot of us freshmen, but I never had any problems, thanks as I now know to Dad. I heard all the Kasso stories, most of which were just hysterical rumors. But one was true—Kasso was probably on drugs when he committed the murder. There was a boulder by the scene where he, or someone anyway, had tried to scrawl
SATAN LIVES
. But he spelled it wrong; it read
SATIN LIVES
.

We had an assembly when school started that year to talk about drugs and watching out for one another. There was a big sheet hung in the hallway by the principal's office and we were told we could write whatever we liked on it, as long as it was positive. No pentagrams, no band names, nothing like that. I wrote,
Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
from
On the Road
. My English teacher that year, Mrs. Hartman, congratulated me on my “apropos epigram.” I ate lunch in the library every day, so it was easy for me to look up
apropos
once I figured out how to spell the word.

My mother went through my records and tapes, demanding answers. “What's this?” she asked. “More heavy metal?” It was Van Halen's
1984
.

“Mom, that music's on the radio all the time! It's not Satanic. There's even an angel on the cover,” I said, probably whining, definitely embarrassed.

She snorted. “An angel! That's just the Devil's way to lure you in.” The Stephen King paperbacks went into the trash; so did
The Savage Sword of Conan
back issues. She had her hands on
Desolation Angels
, too, but my father slid into the room and grabbed her wrist, my hero. “Mary. Maria. That one's fine. That one's okay. It's a college-level book.”

I read a lot of college-level books. They were still allowed; fantasy novels, Dungeons & Dragons, Freddy Krueger, Rambo, that was all contraband. I started reading
real
books, literature, more intently than ever, so looking back I guess I don't mind. My parents, ever overprotective, didn't want me to go away for college, or even to the city. “Between the
mulignan
in the projects and the fruitcakes in the Village, you'll end up a vegetable if you go to NYU,” Uncle Peter said. My father told him not to talk that way at the table, but he agreed with the sentiment.

So I went to Hofstra and did well, then hit the road. I did a lot of scut work—janitor; a baton-twirling Wackenhut security professional for a town dump in New Jersey (my surname helped); out to Chicago as an SAT tutor; then on to California to work in a bookstore. And I wrote. I always wrote. I got over romanticizing poverty, and the road, but I never got over Kerouac. Like the book says,
I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me
.

I got a few things published, too—poems in a haiku journal, stories in
Oakland Hills Review
and one in a C-level men's magazine about D cups that ran the occasional lurid fiction feature. It was called “Satin Lives,” that story, and it was about a thinly veiled Ricky Kasso. I'd turned into what Uncle Peter called a “real smart-ass,” and over late-night coffees during Christmas when I visited for a week or three I let my father know what I thought of his work. My mother was already in bed. Cooking for forty fat cousins and their kids always took a lot out of her, especially after the lumpectomy. Nobody would lift a finger to help her either, not even me, I'm ashamed to admit.