Блейк Крауч - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, No. 5. Whole No. 813, May 2009

Don’s mother had been a distant woman who spent her days in Bible study and charity work, though she never seemed to share her dedication with Don. He married Dale in part because she seemed so different from his mother, attentive and devoted to him and their home. But after Donny was born, her attentions shifted to her son, and the interest she had once saved for him never returned. Once he fell for Mary, Don gradually withdrew from Dale, finding either exhaustion or frustration or both stealing any desire he might have felt for her. There was little pleasure when he went to her in the darkness of their bedroom, no newness in her body. And not a word from her, as if she were merely fulfilling a duty. Don knew too that Dale would not do the things Mary did, never unearth in him the bliss buried within for so long. Don wondered with some irritation whether she was watching the same idiocy on television.

He still hadn’t forgiven her asking him for The Beatles tickets. What in hell could she hear in that so-called music? She had been dizzy with excitement — seen usually upon the gift of a new appliance — when she asked him. Can you, Don? Can you get me those tickets? I’ll do just anything to see The Beatles in Atlanta . And then, when the God-awful noise came over the transistor radio by her bed, she turned it up so loud his whole mood was ruined. A gift from him, too, that radio. He endured the same foolishness from Donny, but it was Mary’s request that sent his uppers and lowers into a grinding clash so his neck and jaw troubled him the next day. He would have to put his foot down about the music, a small favor she could surely do for him. Hadn’t she had her eye on a jadeite-green waffle iron from Rival?

Mary Hooks, age twenty-two, stone supply clerk and Beatles fan, convinced her lover Don Palmer, Senior, to get tickets for her and a girlfriend when The Beatles played the new stadium in Atlanta. At first he had refused, upset with her over the small request. But Mary Hooks had learned at fifteen how to quiet men. And Don was no different. Don was a real puppy dog, though he could hardly look her in the eyes afterwards. She knew he believed God looked down on them with displeasure, that what they did was a sin. She also knew Don would not resist, just as she could not resist the spark of joy she recognized in his eyes when she came to him. There was goodness in Don, such that she let herself believe him when he offered promises of marriage, a life together one day — so often made as he searched her naked body with his eyes, reluctant, it seemed, to touch her, as if she were some hallowed ground that might disappear if his eyes left her.

Other men she had known were all as easily quieted. As a teenager there had been boys in high school, a few from the junior college in Columbus, and one from the chemical supply. There were strangers, too, older men of business on the road. Mary was eager to indulge a few restless nights when it felt okay, less of a sin under the light of loneliness, her father long gone, her mother dead, the aunt who raised her always too tired to be any sort of genuine company. And then Don: such a serious man in brown trousers and starched white shirt, always a tie, who came undone with the slightest affection, who claimed his love like no other could. He bought her things. He got her tickets to see The Beatles in Atlanta. All she had to do in return was a few small favors.

“I want to hear The Beatles, please,” Donny told Mary from the other side of the screen door, rain coming down around him. When he looked at her with watery blue eyes, Mary Hooks knew she was going to cross a line that was about more than maintaining small favors and finding a new Featherweight sewing machine in the mail.

“I’m supposed to be getting my hair cut, and my dad gets back tonight,” Donny added before stepping up into Mary’s two-bedroom bungalow, as if with this information she might reconsider letting him inside. “He’s going to kill me if I don’t do what he asked,” Donny said, still inside the doorway.

Mary wondered herself what Don might do. Over the course of their love affair, now six months deep, she had endured endless complaints about his son. She wondered why such little things like a haircut and electric guitar music were worth souring a relationship with your only son.

“I’m sure he’ll come around. He’s just... I mean, I’m sure he’s just old-fashioned, that’s all. Give him time.” She held out her hand. “You’re soaked. Let me get you a towel.”

“Thanks. You want a cherry sour?” Donny offered her the bag.

“Aren’t you sweet,” Mary said, taking the bag from him, a few of the candies spilling to the kitchen floor.

“Now, that towel. You want something to drink? Iced tea, milk? I got chocolate syrup.”

“No, I mean... no, thank you. I just want to hear The Beatles, please. You said I could hear The Beatles.” Donny shuffled from foot to foot, nearly dancing before the music had been played.

Mary brought Donny a towel that smelled of jasmine. “You want to sit down?”

Donny ran the towel over his head and arms, and sat down on Mary’s Chippendale sofa, faded rose damask more at home in her aunt’s house. But as soon as she had put the needle down on the A-side of The Beatles’ new single, “Paperback Writer,” Donny stood to dance. He moved with an abandon she had rarely seen from folks in Lake Claire. She marveled at the freedom the boy, so nervous in her doorway with his bag of cherry sours, displayed in her living room, hardly aware, it seemed to her, he was in a stranger’s house. Donny’s arms, legs, and feet moved wildly, his head bounced as if it might fly off at any minute, and his eyes remained shut. His face revealed an easy joy Mary recognized as the same she had seen from Don when she kissed him. The stereo needle lifted automatically from the record, and Donny beamed at Mary, sweat glistening on his smooth, hairless face.

“Play it again.”

Mary obliged, replacing the arm of her Magnavox stereo console, a present from Don three months earlier. She returned to the sofa and watched Donny dance again, his long blond hair whipping in the air, his eyes closed as he absorbed the music. When the song had finished again, Mary put on the B-side, “Rain,” and moved with the rhythm of the otherworldly song, enjoying the sense of a previously unimagined place far from Lake Claire, the jangle and thump of guitar and drum, the drone of ghostly voices in harmony like she had never ever heard. With thoughts of otherworldly rain, so unlike the dismal steady soaking that came down around them, Mary reached carefully for the boy, finding behind girlish bangs the same hunger she had seen in his father’s eyes, the same hunger that drew her to them all.

Can you hear me? John Lennon sang in a voice of vapor and mystery.

Driving southwest along Interstate 85 from Atlanta, Don Senior’s thoughts were on Mary Hooks as he hummed Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” and indulged in thoughts of her rosy skin, her dark hair, the curve of her lips, the way her pants fit her narrow hips, and the false eyelashes she had begun to wear that reminded Don of Brigitte Bardot. He had picked up the Sinatra single for Mary in Atlanta; he planned to play it for her when he stopped by as a surprise before going home. A steady drizzle kept the summer dusk gray, but Don had the car window down. He enjoyed the cool, wet breeze, one Tareyton after another, and a bottle of Old Crow he had planned to open with Mary but, in a good mood, opened early, taking long drinks from the quart bottle. Don wasn’t a drinker, but he knew Mary liked a taste now and then, and, like his father, he believed the occasional nip good for the body. By the time he turned off of I-85 onto a two-lane state road, however, Don had finished a third of the Old Crow and smoked half a pack of cigarettes. With the easy rhythms of the Sinatra song in his head, the warmth of bourbon in his belly, and the idea of Mary waiting for him, Don smiled, right hand on the wheel, his left holding a cigarette out the window as a cool mist fell across his arm.