The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (19 page)

And that’s what both of us did, side by side on top of the covers, while a rain shower swept across the lake and tinked on the windows and the cherry trees, and the orange
VACANCY
sign blinked on and off inside the fog.

Buddy and I got fired from the orchards and went to work for a man who made log houses and shipped them as kits all over the country. I got a driver’s license and we cut and hauled and planed trees north of Swan Lake, up in the timber and cattle country where he and I had always hoped to buy land and start up our own ranch. But Buddy wasn’t going to let go of his vendetta against Clint Wakefield. He made telephone calls to two or three newspaper reporters, who blew him off, then wrote a letter to a gossip columnist in Los Angeles and told her Wakefield was under investigation by the FBI for possible Communist activity.

I thought he was spitting into the wind. What kind of credibility did a pair like us have?

One month later big piles of monkey shit hit the fan for Clint Wakefield. The gossip columnist used professional snoops to look into his past. One of his ex-girlfriends was on the Hollywood blacklist; another said Wakefield’s mother was from Russia and had a picture of Joseph Stalin in her home. A male prostitute said Wakefield had invited him to a western movie set in San Bernardino, on a Sunday, for private riding lessons.

The Polson chapter of the American Legion flushed a Labor Day speech he was supposed to make. A reporter at the local newspaper called up Wakefield’s press agent and asked where he’d served during the war years. The press agent said Westfield had been deferred as the sole supporter of his family but had dedicated himself to doing volunteer work with the USO. Not in the South Pacific or even London. In Los Angeles.

On a Saturday afternoon in the last week of August, the boss paid us our salary and as an afterthought told us to deliver a truckload of fence posts and rails to a cherry grower on Flathead Lake. We picked up Bernadine at the motel and dropped off the fence materials and decided to take a ride down to Swan Lake and have dinner at a roadhouse where Bugsy Siegel and his girlfriend Virginia Hill used to hang out. The shadows of the ponderosas and fir trees were long across the two-lane highway, the lake glimmering like thousands of bronze razor blades in the sunset, the tips of Swan Peak at the south end of the lake white with fresh snow. It was a grand way to end the summer, with a case of longneck beer on the floor of the truck, chopped-up chunks of ice jiggling between the bottles, and Buddy snapping off the caps with an opener he’d tied on a string around his neck.

Up ahead, on a slope where a group of asbestos cottages were nestled in a grove of beech trees, we saw Wakefield’s movie cast and film crew eating their dinner at picnic tables. There were Indians in feathered bonnets and buckskin clothes, and cowboys in costumes no cowboy would wear, and women dressed like cowgirls with ribbons in their hair, and platters of fried chicken and dark bottles of wine on the tables. They made me think of carnival people, in the best way; there was even something lovely about them, like they had created something out of a West that had never existed. I suspected they were at the end of filming and were having a party to celebrate. We saw no sign of Wakefield.

“Keep going,” Bernadine said. She was sitting between us, a warm beer balanced on her knee.

Buddy drained his beer bottle and set it on the floor. “Pull over,” he said. “I want to talk to these guys.”

“Why borrow grief?” I said.

He opened the glove box and took out a sheaf of the same pamphlets that had gotten us fired from the orchards, and I knew Buddy was going up on that knoll and fix it so the whole house came down on all of us.

“If you’re not up to it, bag it down the road, R.B.,” he said. “I’m staying.”

“It’s a bad idea,” I replied.

“One big union,” he said.

After I slowed the truck to a stop, he got out and walked into the beech trees, his body bent forward, like he was leaning into a wind.

“I have to go with him,” Bernadine said.

“I don’t want to hear that.”

“He’s your friend.”

“That’s what I mean. My friendship with him keeps getting us in trouble.”

“Then why do you stay with him?”

“Because he’s the best guy I ever knew.”

That was the history of my life: trapped one way or another. I got out of the truck and slammed the door. Then I went around to the other side of the cab and helped Bernadine down.

“Most of these are union workers, aren’t they?” she said.

“Of course not. Film companies make movies in Canada or out in the sticks so they can use scab labor.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Am I the only sane person here?”

Like it or not, we followed Buddy into the trees. I had heard his speech before. The reactions were always the same: curiosity, amusement, sometimes a thumbs-up, and sometimes the kind of anger you don’t want to mess with. People don’t like to be told they’re selling out their principles by going to work at the only job that’s available to them. It’s not like what you’d call a mild yoke to drop on somebody. You got screwed by the bosses when you tried to feed your family, then a nutcase shows up and tells you you’re a traitor to the working class. That’s not what Buddy said, but I suspect that’s what they heard.

“Ginks” is the name union organizers gave heavies back in those days. They came out of the shade like flies on pig flop. I saw Clint Wakefield emerge from a cottage and stand on the porch and watch it all, his hands on his hips, the shoulders of his white satin cowboy costume embroidered with stars on a field of dark blue. I knocked a guy down with a rock and almost tore his ear loose, but that didn’t help us. They knocked me down and kicked me in the head and shoved Bernadine and me back onto the road and slapped me silly against the truck. They grabbed Buddy by his arms and stretched him across a picnic table and smashed the backs of his hands with wine bottles. They broke the windows in the truck and pushed me behind the steering wheel, then picked Bernadine up in the air and threw her in the passenger seat.

I could see Buddy struggling up the knoll, his T-shirt torn off his back. There was nothing I could do to help him. I got the truck started and into gear and gave it the gas, the frame lurching over some large rocks, the lake glittering with thousands of tiny metallic lights through the fractured windshield. There was spittle on Bernadine’s face and in her hair. Her eyes had a darkness in them that was like water at the bottom of a stone well.

One mile down the road, the needle on the oil pressure gauge dropped to zero and smoke poured from under the hood and streamed through the firewall into the cab. I had ripped out the oil pan on the rocks. We were both choking when we got out on the asphalt, our knees weak, the truck useless, all our means of escape taken from us. The sun had disappeared behind the mountain on the far side of the lake, and the wind was cold and cutting long lines across the water and smelled like fish roe, as though winter had descended unfairly upon us.

Then I saw Wakefield’s 1946 woody come down an embankment, skidding through saplings onto the asphalt, almost going into Swan Lake. The woody fishtailed, the rear tires burning rubber on the road surface, and came straight at us. I thought Wakefield had gone on a kamikaze mission and was about to take us out in a head-on collision and a blaze of gasoline. I should have known better. Wakefield was a survivor, not a self-destructive avenger. The woody skidded to a stop and Buddy leaned out the window, a lopsided grin on his face. “I boosted his car. Grab a few beers and pile in,” he said. “These guys are in a nasty mood.”

Nasty mood?

We roared northward, toward the top of the lake, the Merc engine humming like a sewing machine, the twin Hollywood mufflers rumbling on the asphalt. The sky had turned dark by the time we crossed the bridge over the Swan River and reached the highway that bordered the eastern rim of Flathead Lake. We could have turned right and kept going to the Canadian border, but somehow I knew Buddy would choose otherwise. Maybe for some people the book is already written and a person becomes more a spectator in his life than a participant. I’m not qualified to say. But we’d signed on with Buddy Elgin and I figured however it played out, we’d be together one way or another.

The ginks blocked the road halfway down the lake. We turned off on a gravel lane and headed toward the water. “What the hell are you doing?” I said.

He stopped the car and cut the lights but left the engine running. I could see small waves sliding up on a beach at the end of the lane. “You guys jump out,” he said. “Head back through the cherry trees and keep going north. They’ll be chasing me.”

“What are you doing, Buddy?”

“Watch.”

“Don’t leave us.”

“You don’t need me anymore. Take care of each other. Stomp ass and take names, R.B.”

“Listen to him,” Bernadine said, pulling on my arm.

And that’s the way he left us, powering down the lane, full throttle, the woody in second gear, the windows up, the high beams back on. When he dipped into the water the woody went straight down the incline, the exhaust pipes bubbling, the sediment from the lake bottom rising in a gray-green cloud.

We moved off into the trees and continued to watch as the ginks ran to the water’s edge and stared in disbelief at the headlights crossing the lake bottom. But what Bernice and I saw next was not the same thing the ginks saw, or at least what they later claimed they saw. They said the woody never made it to the other side of the lake, that it was dredged out of the water the next morning by a wrecker, full of mud and weeds. They said Buddy had drowned and that his body was still at the bottom, probably near Wild Horse Island. I saw the woody come out on the far shore, the high beams still on, water spilling out of the exhaust pipes. Buddy had said there were ancient highways under the lake, and I knew that’s how he had crossed over and that one day he’d show up just as sure as the sun comes over the mountain.

That’s why Bernadine and I live way up here in Alberta, where the golden poppies grow on Lake Louise, and the wind and the animals drift through the grass, just like they would in a dream. We didn’t cross Jordan, but at least we made it to Canada.

FROM
The Harvard Review

T
HE DETECTIVE WANTED
to know if Aida was the sort of girl who would run away from home. He’d asked to talk to me alone in the living room. My parents stood around the kitchen with the lady cop and the other detective, an old man who looked to be on his last days of the job. They were telling my parents Aida would walk through that front door any minute now. She probably just got distracted, wandered off with some friends. Our mother wasn’t crying yet but she was close. I sat in the middle of the sofa, my thighs parting the cushions. The detective sat on the armchair our mother recently had reupholstered with a fleur-de-lis print because the cat had clawed through the previous paisley.

He looked young to be a detective. He wore jeans with a flannel shirt under a tweed blazer even though it was August. He wanted to know if Aida ever talked about leaving, as if she had plans beyond this place, something else waiting for her somewhere.

I shook my head. I didn’t tell him that since we were eleven, Aida and I had kept a shoebox in the back of our closet that we called our Runaway Fund. The first year or two we added every extra dollar we came across, and when our piles of bills became thick and messy we took them to the bank and traded them for twenties. We planned to run away and join a group of travelers, sleep under bridges beside other refugee kids and form orphan families like you see in movies and Friday night TV specials. Those were the days before we understood how much our parents needed us. Aida insisted on taking the cat with us. Andromeda was fat but could fit in her backpack. Aida had lied to our parents and said she found the cat alone one day by the river behind the soccer field, but she’d really bought her at the pet shop with some of our runaway savings. I didn’t mind. The cat always loved her more than me, though.

“Does she have a boyfriend? Somebody special?”

She didn’t. Neither did I. Our parents told us boys were a big waste of time and we kept busy with other things. School. Sports. Jobs. Painting classes for Aida and piano lessons for me. Our parents said just because we were girls who lived in a small town didn’t mean we had to be
small-town girls
.

“Did she have any secrets?”

“Not from me.”

“Even twins have secrets from each other.”

He made me tell him all over again what happened, even though I’d gone through it several times in the kitchen while the old man detective took notes and the lady cop leaned against the refrigerator, arms folded across her blockish breasts. The young detective said he’d keep whatever I told him in the strictest confidence. “If there’s something you left out because your parents were around, now is the time to tell me, Salma.”

“There’s nothing,” I said, and repeated all I’d already told them. How Aida was coming off her summer job as a gift-wrapper at the children’s department store at the bottom end of Elm Avenue, while I was sweeping and cleaning the counters before closing at the coffee shop on the top end, where I worked the pastry case. We had this routine: whoever finished their shift first would call to say they were on their way to the other. Or we’d meet halfway at our designated third bench on the sidewalk in front of Memorial Park and we’d walk home together. That night, a little after seven, Aida had called and said, “Sal, I’ll come to you.” When she didn’t show up, I took my purse and walked across the intersection to the park. I sat on our bench for a few minutes before walking the periphery of the park to see if maybe she’d run into some kids from school. Aida was friendly with everyone. Even the dropouts most everyone in town avoided, though they hung around the bus station and liquor store and you couldn’t walk through the park without getting a whiff of their weed. Aida had a smile for everyone. People liked her. Sometimes I got the impression they just tolerated me because we were a package deal.