The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (29 page)

“I don't hurt anyone, Petey. If not for me, there'd be a lot more people hurting, I'll tell you that much,” my father said. “It's what we call
property rights
. There's a lot of money to be made hauling trash on Long Island. People here are pigs; they certainly generate enough garbage. The island used to be beautiful, all trees and little towns. Now it's just a hundred-mile-long dump for hamburger wrappers and toxic waste. A lot of people want in on sanitation, and I keep everyone happy, working a certain territory.”

“And if someone steps out of line?” I asked. “Or wants to just run an honest business?”

He snorted. My family was full of snorters. My mother was the champion, but Dad was a top contender. “Honest business? Good luck. Look at Wall Street. And anyway, you weren't complaining about ethics when I paid your college tuition; when you were able to gallivant around the country without a penny of debt thanks to me.”

“What about the government? What about the law?”

“Listen, if the government cared, they'd just municipalize garbage collection and put us all out of business. We're more efficient than they are, even with the occasional
present
we have to buy, or a labor action here and there. You think garbage men could afford to live out here if Suffolk County paid them? Pfft.”

“That doesn't mean what you're doing isn't illegal. The law, the American way—”

He laughed. He had a great laugh, my father. “You sound like Kerouac now. He was a real Republican near the end, all that beatnik business aside. He
hated
hippies, hated liberals. Let me tell you, what does the government do? It organizes property rights just like I do. And yes, it threatens violence when it has to. The difference is that the government doesn't care about the people—they're a violence monopoly, they don't have to. We have to watch out for ourselves; we can't just go crazy and invade the next town over for no reason, not like the Bushes invading Iraq whenever they want to feel tough.” George W. Bush was rattling the saber just then for what would be the 2003 invasion, just like his own father had back when I was in college.

“It's not the same, it's just not the same.” I was tired, itching for a fight. “The government...” What? I thought to myself. The government doesn't bully people? Doesn't tax the hell out of them? Doesn't dump toxic waste out in Aztakea Woods and pollute water tables and give nice suburban mothers breast cancer? The rest of my sentence hung in the air like steam from my mouth. Dad knew where we could take the conversation if I wanted, and so did I. It was nowhere good. I went outside to smoke a cigarette and stare up at the Long Island sky.
The stars were pinpricks in the woolen blanket of the night here, but not in the metropolises of America, where you never dare look up
. I wrote that down, and put it in an (unpublished) poem.

 

I don't know exactly what happened; it surely wasn't our arguments. But the following summer my dad went to the DA and turned rat. He wasn't offered a deal or pressured. He just showed up with a zip drive full of evidence and an eagerness to explain where “all the bodies are buried”—as it read on the front page of
Newsday
—right after he buried my mother. It was the breast cancer that killed her, like so many ladies from Long Island.
No cancer cluster on LI, my prostate!
Listen to that. Here I am, turning into Uncle Peter, who was coming tonight to kill my father, his own brother. Uncle Peter was always a kidder, always ready with a joke or a smart remark. But he took his oath seriously, more seriously than marriage or blood. Not like my dad, not like me.

I was waiting outside, on the porch. I didn't smoke anymore, but I smoked that night to keep my lungs warm. The sky was brighter than when I was a kid, thanks to the big-box stores and strip malls dotting the highway. My father didn't rate any police protection—though it took a few months, the government got all they wanted out of him, and the local uniforms could be bought off with grocery money. He was inside, drinking his best wine, the stuff he used to kid he was saving for my wedding, and waiting to join his Maria. Uncle Peter's giant boat of a Caddy, still all polished and gleaming, drove up the curve of the driveway. My mother always loved this house.

“Hey, kid,” he said conversationally. “When'd you get in? Haven't seen you since your poor mother, bless her in heaven, passed.” Uncle Peter wasn't as huge as he used to be. He looked partially deflated, like a Macy's Day parade balloon half an hour after the crowds left.

“I just got here this morning. Took in the sights. Had some fresh snapper; the fish are better out here than in California, you know. Had a Crazy Vanilla ice cream down at the store, went to Gunther's, that sort of thing.”

“Gunther's, eh? You a pool hustler now?” He edged forward, keeping his hands in front of him. Maybe he wouldn't kill me here on this porch. Maybe Northport was still a nice small town, where a gunshot wouldn't be written off as a car backfiring, where porch lights might blink on and screen doors swing open at one in the morning.

“Nah, they had a reading tonight. I was one of the readers.” I lit another cigarette. “It was even listed in the paper; they ran my picture.
Homecoming for Local Author
.”

“A reading?” He was confused. Good. Maybe a little drunk, too. I hoped he'd have to be to kill his own brother in cold blood, never mind having to kill me, too. “Like, people just sit there and read?”

“No, Uncle Peter; we read aloud. It's like a show. It's for Kerouac's memorial anniversary. They do one every October at Gunther's.”

“Was Louie there? Jess?”

I shook my head. “Nah, the regulars clear out when the poets hit the stage. You know how Northport is...” I waved my right hand, the cherry of my cigarette bobbing along in the shadows, so he didn't see what I reached for until my old extendable baton telescoped out and smacked him right in the shin. Uncle Peter was still a large man—it's like trying to chop down a tree with a baseball bat.
Something he would say!
But he was old and slow, and I got up and swung the baton down on his head three, four times, and I shouted. I shouted, “I love my mother! I love my mother! I love my mother and father!” No porch lights went on. No screen doors swung open, except for the one behind me.

“Pete...” my father said, his mouth heavy with wine. I didn't know which of us he meant.

 

The Cadillac is eating Pennsylvania for breakfast by the time the sky lightens. My father's next to me, leaning his head out the window like a dog. His son's crazy, the craziest man he's ever known, but he's alive. Alive and free and on the road. Forget property taxes, chemicals on the lawns to keep them green. Forget the police, forget the families of New York, who are all dying or senile or in prison or watching better versions of themselves on the television and saying to themselves,
Yeah, yeah. Al Pacino, that's me
. Forget Long Island, that little turd hanging off the end of America.
California, here we come!
We have a suitcase full of unmarked bills my father had hidden behind the drywall in the garage, my bandaged-up uncle in the trunk banging away on the lid. We have nothing to lose, everything to live for, my father and I. Dad figures his brother will calm down by the time we get to Ohio; then we can let him out and have a little “sit-down” about his future. I hope Uncle Peter decides to come with us. We'll fall asleep and wake up again a million times. In the West, the sun peeks out distantly on the horizon, a great white pearl.

EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL

FROM
Venice Noir

 

Ponte dei Sospiri

 

When zoë's husband died she decided to travel. She was twenty-eight years old and had seen very little of the world, and this seemed like the best possible moment to leave Michigan. A friend from art school had been to the Arctic in the summertime once and she'd told Zoë about the landscape's clear beauty, the wildflowers, ice-blue lakes, and slate mountains. Now it wasn't summer, but that was almost the point. Zoë boarded a series of flights to the Northwest Territories and found herself in a lunar kingdom of shadows and ice, scoured landscape. The sun behaved strangely. The days were short.

“Trying to lose yourself?” Zoë's brother asked, when she called from a hotel in Inuvik to tell him where she'd gone. Zoë's husband, Peter, had been dead for four weeks. She had given up the apartment, sold or given away all of her belongings. People were concerned.

“Trying to find myself,” she said, which wasn't at all true but had the desired effect of slightly reassuring her family. Losing herself wasn't enough. Zoë wanted to erase herself. She wanted extremity. She wanted to be eradicated, but she didn't want to die. When she left the hotel she felt swallowed up by the landscape, by the absolute cold. By night she stared through the hotel room window at the northern lights, colors shifting across the breadth of the sky. She liked it here, but she was restless and she'd heard of a town that was even farther north: Tuktoyaktuk, on the edge of the Beaufort Sea.

“The ice road just opened,” a man behind the counter in a coffee shop told her when she asked about it. “Should have no problem getting up there.” He looked at her doubtfully. “You got a four-by-four?”

“No,” Zoë said. She'd sold her car before she left Michigan.

“I know a guy who's going up tomorrow. Probably take you with him if you split the cost of gas. I'll ask him if you want.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it.” What she truly appreciated was the way the man in the café didn't ask why she'd want to go to Tuktoyaktuk this time of year, or what she was doing in the far north in the first place. Over the weekend she agreed on a fee for gas expenses and got into a truck with a silent man in his fifties who navigated them seamlessly down a ramp onto the frozen MacKenzie River.

Zoë had heard the phrase
ice road
in the café without thinking about what it might mean. It meant driving on ice. Driving in slow motion with chains on the tires, fifteen kilometers an hour with the lights of enormous rigs shining ahead and behind them in the four
P.M
. darkness. They drove up the river to the northern edge of the world and then turned right and drove for a time over the frozen Beaufort Sea.

The village itself was like Inuvik, only smaller, darker, more utilitarian, little windows shining bright in the permanent twilight. Daylight lasted four hours, but the stars here were brighter than any she'd ever seen. She felt that she'd traveled beyond the edge of the world and landed on some colder planet farther from the sun. Aurora borealis in the sky most nights, shifting vapors of green and yellow that she watched by the hour, sitting alone by the hotel window wrapped in blankets with the lights out. On the third day she rented a snowmobile, got a cursory driving lesson from the man who ran the rental business, and drove a little way out of town.

Zoë liked the sound of the machine, the din and the forward momentum, but it wasn't a smooth ride and she felt as if her bones were rattling. She stopped by the sea. She could go no farther. She climbed off the machine and walked a few paces to look out at the horizon, blue shadows of icebergs. The sun was low above the ice, the few scattered lights of Tuktoyaktuk shining in the near distance.

“I am not unafraid,” she whispered, to Peter, to herself. She had said this first, in the dazed weeks just after the diagnosis, when they were trying to come up with words to frame the catastrophe. They had repeated it to each other in the final nine months that followed, a private phrase that conveyed hope and stoicism and terror in equal measure. The cold was getting to her now, her fingers numb inside her gloves. She turned, and for a fraction of a second Peter was standing there beside the snowmobile, smiling at her in the fading light. He was gone in less than a heartbeat, less than a blink.

“Oh God,” Zoë whispered, “oh no, please, please...” It took a moment to restart the snowmobile; she kicked at it frantically, not daring to look up. There was movement at the edge of her vision, faint as a curl of cigarette smoke. She heard Peter's voice as though from a long way off, but couldn't make out what he was saying. The cologne he used to wear on special occasions hung sweet and clear in the freezing air. The snowmobile jerked into motion and her tears froze on her face. She left all the lights on in the hotel room that night and packed up to leave the north in the morning, a slow process at this time of year, performed in increments over a number of weeks. There were several runways that had to be navigated to get from the Arctic Circle to the warmer parts of the continent, and most of them were frozen over. There were long delays in northern airports, sometimes for days at a stretch. She slept on benches, ate out of vending machines, washed in public restrooms, and felt somewhat deranged. Her reflection was pale and hollow-eyed in mirrors and darkened windows, hair standing up in all directions. It wasn't until she was sitting in the airport in Edmonton two and a half weeks later, drinking coffee after a sleepless night and staring out at an airplane that would take her farther south as soon as a storm cleared, that it occurred to her to wonder why she'd been afraid of Peter's ghost.

 

Zoë arrived in the Toronto airport and spent some time considering flights back to Michigan, but she had no desire to return just yet, and the situation seemed to call for a new continent. Zoë and Peter had made a good living dealing coke to college students and she still had a few thousand dollars at her disposal, so she flew from Toronto to Paris and lived for some time in a marginal neighborhood, trying unsuccessfully to learn French. But the lines and beauty of Paris reminded her too much of the architectural paintings Peter had been working on when they'd met at art school and her money dwindled rapidly there, so she left France and began a slow, directionless slide across the continent, heading mostly south and east.