Майкл Коннелли - The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

“I didn’t,” I said.

He kicked the corpse right in the mouth and watched my face the whole time as he did it. “Does that bother you?” he asked. “I’m kicking your girl here.” He stared at me. “Play tough guy like it doesn’t bother you, but I’m going to kick her again.”

“She’s not feeling it,” I said.

He brought his foot back and kicked the head of the corpse three or four times, hard. The sound was a loud wet smack. The body moved up and down. Mud and fluid mixed on his shoes and the gray cuff of his pants.

“This isn’t the man we want,” the detective said to the other cops. He motioned at my brother. “Uncuff him and let’s go.” He walked back through the mud to the unmarked car. I was walking behind him for a couple steps. He turned to me, his face white and puffy. “If that’s her, and I think it is, you did us a favor.” He kept on walking, toward the cars, alone.

One of the cops came forward with keys and uncuffed my brother. The cops walked back to their car and drove off, leaving me and my brother standing there outside the facility. After we walked for half an hour, we hitched a ride with a guy, back into New Orleans.

The hurricane raged through the night and day. An older man in southern Louisiana woke up with a straight razor under his bed, with a pink ribbon on it, like someone might use for a little girl’s hair. His wife found her gas tank had been filled with pig’s blood. A young man in New Orleans who lived with his dad found the locks to the house glued. A guy from Illinois, a DJ, woke up with his shit in the street, and broken ribs. There was mercy all along, no revenge, no vengeance. That’s how you know a human did these things and not God. If it was God that had done them, the answer would all be the same. Death, death, death.

The work ended and we drove back to Montana. We hadn’t made millions.

I ask myself that now, am I St. Gabriel? Is the mercy that I once had long gone and who will show mercy on me? What a privilege it will be to die. We create ourselves, or so we believe, and we become locked in, we become afraid not to meet the same person each morning in the mirror. I am St. Gabriel and I will stand accountable for what I do and will hold others to account. I am the highest of God’s messengers and no Sodom will stand while I live.

Nobody asks a man why he drinks. Mixed in there with the private darkness of reasons, nobody wants to know the answer from the man who is already drunk. I was drinking to get a woman to come back to me, which is the worst reason of all. The cost of pain. When you see someone so bright, such a bright fire, a diamond, it stays with you and their image is on the inside of your eyelids when you close your eyes. I can still see her, she lights up the night of life. Who wouldn’t want her back? Her smile alone could cure you of whatever disease had got hold of you. Oceans of booze couldn’t put out that fire.

My brother saw her one time, in a bar, on TV, modeling in Milan. I was covered with sawdust and staggered in. “She’s coming,” he said. “She’ll be in the next clip.”

I stared at the screen as it changed. It was her. She walked like a princess and a queen all at once, she fucking owned that crowd and that show and I had to look away. I was proud, so proud of her and all she had done and there was a plan that had worked.

My brother knows better than to ever ask. You don’t ask about stuff, because then you can’t talk about it on the stand. He asked with his eyes, one night, late. We were standing in the cellar, throwing darts and doing laundry.

“Sure,” I said. “Part of it was me. And part of it was her.”

“It worked,” he said.

“It got her a new life,” I said. “She deserved that and more.”

“Do you think she misses you?” he asked.

“Not in the way you might think,” I said. “Like you might miss an old dog.”

“You might be wrong,” he said. “I miss my dog every day.” He took his shirt off to put it in the wash and even his scars were healing from his trauma. His tattoos always looked amazing. He pulled a clean T-shirt over his head from the dryer.

I drank some beer.

“I really think you’re wrong,” he said. “She’s going to come here and be with you.”

“Fuck,” I said. “I don’t want to be with me most days. What would make her want to be with me?”

“Who else would protect her like that?” he asked.

I nodded. “But I would protect her like that and she doesn’t have to be around. I’d do it anyway.”

“Does she know you feel like this?”

I shook my head. “Look,” I said. “I really don’t want to get into all this. Somebody who has kids and is living a life, they don’t need crap dumped on them. I can handle whatever I feel, regardless of the situation.” I drank my beer. “What does it matter what I feel? I’m a grown man.”

“What about being happy?” he asked.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Are you happy?” he asked. “Without her.”

I drank some more beer. “I’m a big boy,” I said. “I’m happy for her. That’s all that matters.” I shook my head again. “She’s under enough strain without me being an asshole.”

We threw some more darts and I walked upstairs and went to bed. It has been five years and she hasn’t shown up. She won’t. At first it was hard, but now it’s the same. Sometimes, when I’m in a crowd, if we go to Spokane or all the way to Seattle, my eyes hurt and I have a headache. Because I’ve been looking for her, all day, among the faces. After an eighteen-hour day of cutting and hauling big timber, even the work can’t erase her from my mind. Thinking of her keeps me alive some days. Some people would call that sad. They don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m lucky.

When I wake up, I am someplace else in my mind. But she is always there. And I’m happy for her. She died the fake death and will get to live the real life. I will wake up in my coffin underground and be comforted. I’ll wait for the hurricane to uproot me from my eternal rest and carry me off. To meet St. Gabriel, to whom I will show no mercy. Even if I am in hell, my aim will be true. Gravity pulls the bullet toward earth. There is friction, recoil energy, computed velocity, measured velocity, free-bore travel, resistance, ratio of powder charge. None of it will stop me, it didn’t stop me those nights in Montana when I had those five men in my sights and breathed easy and slowly increased the pressure on my finger until that hammer dropped. The cops of heaven can puzzle over the how and why and look for witnesses that don’t exist. Maybe she is my St. Gabriel, appearing briefly and now only in my dreams. At least one of us made it out of the night.

If it weren’t for her being alive in the world, I’d turn the gun on myself. Show myself the mercy I deserve. The chance to hear her voice keeps me on earth.

James Lee Burkewas born in 1936 in Houston, Texas, and grew up on the Louisiana-Texas coast. He attended Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now called the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) and later the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he received a B.A. and an M.A. in English literature.

Over the years he has published twenty-six novels and two short-story collections. The stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, The Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, the Southern Review, the Antioch Review, and the Kenyon Review. His novels Heaven’s Prisoners and Two for Texas were adapted as motion pictures.

Burke’s work has received two Edgar Awards for best novel of the year. He is also a Breadloaf fellow and a Guggenheim fellow and has been the recipient of an NEA grant. He and his wife of forty-eight years, Pearl Burke, have four children and divide their time between Missoula, Montana, and New Iberia. Louisiana.