Robert Alter - 100 Malicious Little Mysteries

“Maybe...”

Mr. Kelly held up his hand. “If they put you away you’d be back.” He nodded. “There isn’t any way to break you, Jamie.”

“We could play again,” Jamie said. “I’ve never had anyone before who could really play.” He searched within. “It was better than it’s ever been.” And it had been.

“Not ever again, Jamie,” Mr. Kelly said gently.

The fear came up in waves. “If you do anything they’ll find out somehow. You prosecuted me once. They’ll catch you.”

“Not about us,” Mr. Kelly said. “You’ve changed your name too many times.”

Jamie laughed and the fear went away and he was exultant with triumph. “My fingerprints haven’t changed. They took them then. They’ll take them again. They’ll use them and find out.”

Mr. Kelly smiled a curious smile and sniffed at the gasoline fumes.

“I thought about that, too.”

He lit a match.

When the screaming was all over, Mr. Kelly giggled.

Dillon whirled and shot the bully for the fifth time. Pauline clenched her teeth and said Miss, you bastard, but the marshal didn’t, his accuracy guaranteed by rerun inexorability. Arnold Summerly breathed a fifth sigh of relief, and Pauline said, “For God’s sake, Arnold, didn’t you know how it was going to turn out?” but Arnold was narcotized now by the commercial following the shoot-out.

Pauline reached out to tune in the seven o’clock news, but Arnold’s hand beat her to the dial and spun it to the local channel; it was their own shoot-out, re-enacted every night.

“Arnold, please!” Pauline said. “Let’s watch the news for once, just once. Anything could be happening. Greenland could have declared war on us. The world may be coming to an end. Anything!”

“If it happens, we’ll hear about it,” Arnold said.

“How? How? You never watch the news. You never read a paper. You care so little about the world, what difference would it make if it did come to an end?”

“This beer is warm,” Arnold said. “You’ve been putting the beer in the refrigerator door again. How many times do I have to tell you to put the beer inside?” The screen divided itself into the shape of a heart, and Arnold forgot his pique. The prospect of Lucy in the twentieth year of her pregnancy erased all rancor.

“You’re a vegetable,” Pauline said. “Do you know that, Arnold? You’re an office machine in the daytime and a vegetable at night. A head of lettuce sticking out of a shirt collar.”

At least he had the decency to get angry.

“All right! All right! You want to know why I don’t watch the news? Why I don’t read the paper? Because it’s all bad news. Nothing but bad news. That’s the reason so many people turn mean and rotten, they get to hear nothing but bad news from morning till night. There’s not one nice, decent, cheerful thing you ever hear about, not one thing you can feel good about. That’s why!”

“It’s not true,” Pauline said. “Maybe it seems that way, but it isn’t.”

“Yeah? Yeah? You want to bet? You want to bet, like, that new fur coat you want so bad? You want to bet that, Pauline, huh?”

“What do you mean, bet?”

“You heard me. Put your money where your big mouth is. You turn on the news, go ahead. And you hear one real good piece of news, you can quit saving for that fur coat, I’ll buy it for you. Tomorrow. You won’t have to wait another year, I’ll put it on your back right now!”

The coat was an ebony mink. Pauline’s Holy Grail.

“And if there isn’t any good news?”

Arnold grinned.

“You give me that money you been saving and we take the fishing trip.”

Pauline hated fishing trips. So she hesitated.

Arnold chuckled, both at her and at Lucy. Lucy thought the baby was coming. Desi was panicked. Pauline was simultaneously sickened at the thought of dead fish and exhilarated at the thought of mink.

“All right,” she said. “OK, Arnold. Turn on the news.”

Arnold gave Lucy a regretful smile and wrenched the dial.

Jensen looked so grim that Pauline’s heart wrenched, too.

“The prospect for a major conflict in the Middle East intensified tonight, after an Israeli commando raid into Lebanon followed a series of bombings in Tel Aviv that claimed ten lives...”

Arnold sucked loudly on his beer bottle.

“A new threat to the Vietnam truce was posed tonight as reports of a buildup...”

Arnold burped and chuckled and chortled.

“And now, here’s a film report on the fire that destroyed the ocean liner Marianna and cost the lives of thirty passengers and crewmen....”

Arnold enjoyed the account of the disaster almost as much as I Love Lucy.

“The strike of longshoremen, now in its third week, may cripple the economy of the entire Eastern Seaboard, according to a new study...”

Arnold basked in the blue light of the set.

“Another charge of corruption in Government came today from a high-placed official in the Justice Department...”

“After a week-long search, the mutilated body of seven-year-old Sharon Snyder was discovered in an abandoned tenement...”

“A tax rise forecast by both Federal and state economists brutally slain in apartment-house elevator the highest increase in food prices in ten years accident total now five hundred but expected to rise as floods sweep tornadoes struck hurricane winds rising to thirteen children dead twenty injured as train strikes school bus and protesters arrested on steps of mugging victim dies as new strain of flu virus thousands homeless as assassin forecasts rain for holiday weekend...”

Arnold was having a very good time.

“Well, how about it, how about it?” he said. “How’s about the news, Mrs. Current Events, you enjoying the show? And how’s about that fishing trip, you going to throw up again, like you did the last time, when I bring home the catch?”

“It’s still on,” Pauline said gratingly. “The news is still on, Arnold; will you at least let the man finish?”

“Sure,” said Arnold, smiling.

“And now,” said Jensen, not smiling, “repeating our first item, the state health authorities have issued an urgent warning concerning the danger of botulism in the canned mixed vegetables packed by Happy Lad Foods. Any can of Happy Lad mixed vegetables marked five-L-three is known to contain these deadly bacteria and should be destroyed immediately or returned to the place of purchase...”

The credits were beginning to roll and Pauline couldn’t bear Arnold’s chuckling noises a moment longer. Tears blurred her path between living room and kitchen. In the center of the tiled floor, she fought a wave of nausea (smell of dead fish, nonsmell of mink), and then she went to the cupboard and looked through her canned-food inventory, searching the labels for a can of Happy Lad mixed vegetables, series 5L3. Suddenly, she realized that all the news wasn’t bad that night. She had one.

She was a remarkable woman. Basil Willing recognized that the moment he saw her.

She opened the door of his beach cottage without knocking. Behind her a jagged streak of lightning split the night and vanished. Thunder roared above the steady drumming of the surf. An edge of white foam thrust its way up the sand; beyond, the ocean was a blackness — as void as if nothing were there, and never had been. Thunderstorms were rare in California, but when they came they were, like most things California, larger than life.

She was like a storm herself, all darkness and suddenness, all flash and tumult. Basil remembered that the words hurricane and houri have the same root.