The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (2 page)

My point is illustrated by a comparison of two stories, Randall Silvis's “The Indian” and Eileen Dreyer's “The Sailor in the Picture.” These stories could not be more different in almost every respect, except that they're both sensational stories, for exactly the same reasons.

Silvis's story begins with a man walking into a bar, which in itself is kinda brilliant, and Silvis tells us, without missing a beat, that the man, an angry truck driver named Harvey, wants to kill his brother-in-law in a dispute over a motorcycle, an Indian. Silvis's voice perfectly captures, if not epitomizes, a working-class taproom outside Pittsburgh, where the Pirates game is always on and the patrons drink Schlitz. The bar is tended by Harvey's mild younger brother, named Will, who admits that he's “nobody's genius,” even in a world populated by handymen, ditch diggers, and trash haulers.

So the central conflict is established on page 1 of the story, and before we know it, Harvey will suck Will into a plot to ruin his brother-in-law, during the commission of which the story's plot will twist in such a completely shocking manner that the blood is flowing only a few pages later, the motorcycle forgotten.

The story is not only lean, it's positively muscular, and the prose so clean that it borders on poetry. Even as the plot charges toward its horrific conclusion, Will's sleep is disrupted by a dream in which he's hunting and comes upon a deer. The hunter confronts the hunted, “the two connected by the invisible thread of the bullet about to fly.”

The dialogue is equally pithy, as well as doing double duty to inform character and advance plot. For example, Silvis tells you everything you need to know about Will when he writes that Will asks a group of golfers if they're ready for another pitcher “with the lift of his eyebrows.” The golfers answer, as they would, “We're good.” That's pitch-perfect dialogue, without a wasted word.

All this, plus two sex scenes in the first eleven pages!

What a story!

Now let's compare Silvis's story with “The Sailor in the Picture.” I am a huge fan of Eileen Dreyer's mysteries, which feature strong and smart women, and the story is classic Dreyer, though it takes place in a different time period, during World War II. The story's jumping-off point is the iconic picture of a sailor kissing a nurse on VJ Day, and Dreyer takes us into the world of that picture through the eyes of a bystander, one Peg O'Toole, who was “facing her own sailor” that very day in Times Square. He was her husband, Jimmy, home from the war, and Dreyer tells us that Peg now carries his memory “like a sharp shard of glass,” because that was the day he died.

Dreyer is skilled enough to make us feel instantly sympathetic for Peg's loss, then take us back to a time before Jimmy died, and we're happy at her upcoming reunion with him. In the process, Dreyer deftly brings to life wartime America, where women on the home front wear hairnets, “sturdy shoes and work pants,” and carry lunches, cigarettes, lipstick, and bus fare. They find a way to deal with the terrible grief when they lose a son or husband, and Dreyer describes the “quick stab of an envelope” when the dreaded Western Union telegrams are thrust into their shaking hands.

The war has taken Peg's dreams as well as her husband. She had dreamed of becoming a nurse, of wearing a white cap and a “gleaming white dress” and always looking “clean and bright,” but instead she has to work in a butcher shop for the war's duration, to support herself and her children. But Peg learns to enjoy the work, slicing meat, filling the parts bucket, and grinding hamburger until her back and arms ache. She's a practical woman, not a complainer, and her self-esteem grows. In just a few sentences, Dreyer makes Peg instantly relatable to every working mother, transcending space and time.

Dreyer's story moves to the day when Peg is going to Times Square to meet her returning husband, and the reader goes along as Peg makes the trip into New York City, with its “hard energy,” touching her savings-and-loan passbook as if it were a “talisman against temptation.” Once she gets there, she's kissed, “standing there flat-footed,” by the sailor in the iconic photo, then left behind when he moves on, kissing other women while the photographer snaps away. But as soon as Peg sees Jimmy in the crowd, she freezes, with “the instinctive reaction of all hunted animals,” and in that moment Dreyer's plot turns about-face and the unthinkable happens.

Dreyer's prose is as heartfelt as Silvis's is spare, but the voice of her Peg O'Toole resonates with such truth and power that the heroine's plight, problem, and solution make absolute sense, and you'll find yourself cheering her on. Both stories, Silvis's and Dreyer's, pack a dramatic wallop, and both explore families, relationships, and the deep hatred that can come only from the deepest love—the weightiest of themes, in mere pages.

Both stories are page-turners, and I think you'll race through them and the other ones in the collection. Read them all in one sitting and your head will be spinning. Read them again, more slowly, to examine the skill, talent, and artistry it takes to write stories that fire with the speed of an automatic weapon and are over just as fast.

That's what's between these covers, pure explosive fiction.

Otto Penzler sure knows his stuff.

And so did Abe Lincoln.

L
ISA
S
COTTOLINE

TOM BARLOW

FROM
Needle

 

The young girl walked into the Waffle House, alone, at 3
A.M
. on a Thursday morning. We all looked up from our coffee and cigarettes, waffles, sausage and hash browns. She stood on her tiptoes to take a seat on a counter stool, picked up a menu and held it close to her face, like one of the 6
A.M
. retirees without his bifocals.

Sandy, the night shift waitress, looked at me and raised her eyebrows. I knew the look; she gave it to me four or five times a week. It meant,
Do you think I should call the cops?

I considered the idea. The girl looked no more than twelve, black, slim, but composed. Her hair was plaited so tight I wondered if they tugged at her eyebrows. Her perfume, spicy with a hint of sandalwood, cut through the onion and batter odors of the diner. She wore clean, well-fitted jeans, a pink fuzzy sweater over a lime green top, and new-looking Nikes. Gold chain, oversized plastic watch. Not enough clothes for February.

She displayed no fear or uncertainty, which struck me as odd. Twelve-year-olds are always uncertain around adults.

I turned to look outside. The day manager had finally replaced the broken lights in the lot, so our cars were brightly lit. There were none I didn't recognize, and I would recognize a new one. I'd been running into the same people at the same hour of the night for almost three years, and had come to know them by their cars, the sound of their nasal congestion, and their bathing habits. We rarely spoke.

“What you doing here this time of morning?” Sandy asked the girl.

“I'm here for the atmosphere,” the girl said, keeping her nose in the menu. The sarcasm in her voice sounded bitter as a fifty-year-old's.

Sandy looked at me again. This time she was asking me if it would be okay if she dumped a pot of hot coffee on the girl's head. Sandy's skin got pretty thin by 3
A.M
.

I shook my head. “The lady's just trying to be friendly,” I said to the girl. “No need to be rude.”

The other regulars stared at their plates and cups, but I could tell their ears were locked in, the same way they had been a couple of weeks before when the place was held up.

“Mind your own business, old man.” The girl pronounced it
bidness
.

Sandy laughed. She knew the “old man” would piss me off. “I like that, Tim. From now on I'm calling you ‘old man.'”

“You suppose you could take my order?” the girl said to her. Not a hint of a smile to soften her words.

“What'cha want, honey?” Sandy said. “Lucky Charms? Count Chocula?”

“Two waffles, hash browns smothered and covered, coffee with cream, bacon, crisp.” She folded the menu and stuck it back in the chrome holder next to the napkins.

Sandy didn't write it down. “You got money, honey?”

The girl shook her head in disgust, reached two fingers into her back pocket, pulled out a Visa card, and flashed it toward Sandy like she was trying to blind her with a hand mirror.

Sandy rolled her eyes toward me but turned to the grill. Otilio had gone outside for a cigarette ten minutes ago, but this time of night, it often took him forty-five minutes. His girl, who worked at the Wal-Mart next door, took her break about then as well, and they liked to pooch up in his old Chevy van.

The show apparently over, I returned to my book, the last one Ed McBain wrote before he passed. I read another ten pages and drank another half cup of coffee before I heard a car horn outside. I looked up to see a bright red Escalade parked as close to the front door as the curb would allow. Through the heavily tinted windshield I could make out the driver, a white man, bald, fortyish, tan coat with a thick white wool collar. His nose and right ear were pierced.

The girl seemed to expect the car. She made eye contact with the driver, smiled, pointed to her plate, and crammed a piece of bacon in her mouth. The rest of us stared at the car.

The guy opened the car door, slid off the seat and onto the curb. When he closed the door, I could see his beefy shoulders, leather pants, sharp-toed cowboy boots. He wore a Fu Manchu mustache that had overgrown his chin and hung loose like a couple of air roots.

When he first pulled up, I'd assumed daughter and grandfather, but she didn't appear to have any white blood, and he didn't show any black. Everyone but Sandy, the girl, and me stared down at their tabletops as the guy entered, probably sensing the same threat vibe I had. An old couple, Vernon and Viv, regulars—she the western omelet woman, whole wheat toast, dry, he the pecan waffle, sugar-free syrup, two link sausages, decaf—began buttoning up the layers of shirts and coats they wore until midsummer.

The man ignored us and walked to the girl's stool. She swiveled to face him, still chewing her toast. He leaned over until his mouth was at the level of her ear. I could hear him saying something, couldn't make out the words, but the tone sounded tense—not commanding, not pleading, something in between.

Sandy retreated behind the swinging door to the storage room and office and watched through the window in the door. When she saw me looking, she held up the cordless phone. She obviously sensed something wrong about the guy.

I shrugged my shoulders. I was slowly easing my way to the edge of my booth, my hand lightly holding the glass ketchup bottle.

As I shifted my weight, though, I could feel the stiffness in my knee. My shoulder, the one not completely fixed by surgery, creaked, and the roll of fat around my middle wedged me between the tabletop and the booth seat. And I had so much money tied up in my new bifocals that I couldn't afford to replace them.

Still, if the girl had appeared frightened rather than pissy, if she'd shrunk away from the man, if she'd looked around for help, I'd have stepped in. I'm sure I would have helped.

Instead, she stood up, not looking at any of us. He pulled out the wallet chained to his belt and threw a ten on the counter. As she walked out he followed so close behind her it looked like they were glued together, back to chest.

He kept his hand on her back as she climbed into the Escalade, shut the door behind her before getting in the driver's side. Before he drove off, he turned to me, winked, and gave me a two-finger salute from his temple, like a Boy Scout.

Sandy wrote down the license plate.

“Should we call the cops?” she said, refilling my coffee. I noticed her hand was shaking. Her hair, usually neatly pulled back and pinned with one of a variety of barrettes, had escaped and hung loosely on the shoulder of her yellow and black uniform.

“Tony'll be here in half an hour,” I said. Tony and his partner usually took their breakfast break about 5 every morning. We all felt comfortable when their cruiser was in the lot.

Sandy nodded. “She wasn't much older than Iris would have been.” The comment caught me by surprise. Our daughter would have been twelve, but I carried a picture from Iris's eighth birthday party, so I tended to remember her as that age.

Tony stopped by a short time later with a cadet on ride-along, a fish-faced woman who couldn't sit still. She kept swinging on the counter stool. At this hour of the night, we saw a lot of speed freaks at the Waffle House, and cops weren't immune. Especially ones new to night shift.

Tony listened to our story, took the license plate info, and handed it to the cadet. She returned to the cruiser to call it in.

Tony worked on his waffle and bacon, chatting quietly with Sandy. I figured they were working their way toward a half-assed affair. I'd seen it before, from both of them.

The cadet returned a moment later, her hand resting on the grip of her pistol in its holster. She stared at Sandy until she walked away from Tony, picking up the coffeepot to take a refill swing through the dining room. Fishface then whispered in Tony's ear.

He whispered back, finished his coffee in a single gulp, and pulled a tablet and pen out of his breast pocket.

“Nobody leaves till we talk to you, okay?” he said to the room in general.

The young guy in the corner who spent every night muttering and writing in a ratty spiral notebook muttered a little faster.

Tony told us the girl had been spotted jumping out of the Escalade at a light at the Hague Road exit to the freeway, on the other side of Columbus. The driver chased her on foot to the top of the overpass. Just as he was about to grab her, she jumped over the railing and landed on the freeway right in front of an eighteen-wheeler hauling corn syrup. From the timing, the whole thing, from the time they left, must have been a matter of half an hour.