Джеффри Дивер - The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

“Don’t get too high,” Vladdy told Eddie in Czech.

“I won’t,” Eddie said back. “I’m just a little scared, if that’s all right with you. This helps.”

“I wish you wouldn’t wear that hat,” Vladdy said. “You don’t look professional.”

“I look like Marshall Mathers, I think. Slim Shady,” Eddie said, touching the stocking cap that was pulled over his eyebrows. He sounded a little hurt.

“Hey, dudes,” the driver said over his shoulder to his passengers in the back seat, “speak American or I’m dropping you off on the side of the road. Deal?”

“Of course,” Vladdy said, “we have deal.”

“You going to tell me what’s in the briefcase?” The driver asked, smiling to show that he wasn’t making a threat.

“No, I think not,” Vladdy said.

Vladimir and Eduard were branded “Vladdy” and “Eddie” by the man in the human resources office for Yellowstone in Gardiner, Montana, when they showed up to apply for work three weeks before and were told that there were no job openings. Vladdy had explained that there must have been some kind of mix-up, some kind of misunderstanding, because they had been assured by the agent in Prague that both of them had been accepted to work for the official park concessionaire for the whole summer and into the fall. Vladdy showed the paperwork that allowed them to work on a visa for six months.

Yellowstone, like a microcosm of America, was a place of wonders, and it sought Eastern Europeans to work making beds, washing dishes, and cleaning out the muck from the trail horses, jobs that American workers didn’t want or need. Many Czechs Vladdy and Eddie knew had come here, and some had stayed. It was good work in a fantastic place, “a setting from a dream of nature,” as Vladdy put it. But the man at human resources said he was sorry, that they were overstaffed, and that there was nothing he could do until somebody quit and a slot opened up. Even if that happened, the non-hiring man said, there were people on the list in front of them.

Vladdy had explained in his almost-perfect English, he thought, that he and Eddie didn’t have the money to go back. In fact, he told the man, they didn’t even have the money for a room to wait in. What they had was on their backs — cracked black leather jackets, ill-fitting clothes, street shoes. Eddie wore the stocking cap because he liked Eminem, but Vladdy preferred his slicked-back hair look. They looked nothing like the other young people their age they saw in the office and on the streets.

“Keep in touch,” the hiring man had told Vladdy. “Check back every few days.”

“I can’t even buy cigarettes,” Vladdy had pleaded.

The man felt sorry for them and gave them a twenty-dollar bill out of his own wallet.

“I told you we should have gone to Detroit,” Eddie said to Vladdy in Czech.

Vladdy pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the van window as they drove. The metal briefcase was on the floor, between his legs.

He had not yet seen the whole park since he had been here, and it was something he very much wanted to do. He had read about the place since he was young and watched documentaries on it on television. He knew there were three kinds of thermal activity: geysers, mud pots, and fumaroles. He knew there were over ten thousand places where the molten core of the earth broke through the thin crust. He knew that the park was the home of bison, elk, mountain sheep, and many fishes. People from all over the world came here to see it, smell it, feel it. Vladdy was still outside of it, though, looking in, like Yellowstone Park was still on a television show and not right in front of him. He wouldn’t allow himself to become a part of this place yet. That would come later.

Eddie was talking to the driver, talking too much, Vladdy thought. Eddie’s English was very poor. It was embarrassing. Eddie was telling the driver about Prague, about the beautiful women there. The driver said he always wanted to go to Prague. Eddie tried to describe the buildings but was doing a bad job of it.

“I don’t care about buildings,” the driver said. “Tell me about the women.”

The girl, Cherry, would be angry with him at first, Vladdy knew that. While she was at work at the motel that day, Vladdy had sold her good stereo and DVD unit to a man in a pawn shop full of rifles for $115, less $90 for a .22 pistol with a broken handgrip. But when she found out why he had done it, he was sure she would come around. The whole thing was kind of her idea in the first place, after all.

Vladdy and Eddie had spent that first unhappy day after meeting the non-hiring man in a place called K-Bar Pizza in Gardiner, Montana. They sat at a round table and were so close to the human resources building that when the door to the K-Bar opened they could see it out there. Vladdy had placed the twenty-dollar bill on the table and ordered two tap beers, which they both agreed were awful. Then they ordered a Budweiser, which was nothing like the Czechoslovakian Budweiser, and they laughed about that. Cherry was their waitress. She told Vladdy she was from Kansas, some place like that. He could tell she was uncomfortable with herself, with her appearance, because she was a little fat and had a crooked face. She told Vladdy she was divorced, with a kid, and she worked at the K-Bar to supplement her income. She also had a job at a motel, servicing rooms. He could tell she was flattered by his attention, by his leather jacket, his hair, his smile, his accent. Sometimes women reacted this way to him, and he appreciated it. He didn’t know if his looks would work in America, and he still didn’t know. But they worked in Gardiner, Montana. Vladdy knew he had found a friend when she let them keep ordering even though the twenty dollars was spent, and she didn’t discourage them from staying until her shift was over.

Cherry led them down the steep, cracked sidewalks and down an alley to an old building backed up to the edge of a canyon. Vladdy looked around as he followed. He didn’t understand Gardiner. In every direction he looked, he could see only space. Mountains, bare hillsides, an empty valley going north, under the biggest sky he had ever seen. Yet Gardiner was packed together. Houses almost touched houses, windows opened up to other windows. It was like a tiny island in an ocean of... nothing. Vladdy decided he would find out about this.

She made them stand in the hallway while she went in to check to make sure her little boy was in bed, then she let them sleep in the front room of her two-bedroom apartment. That first night, Vladdy waited until Eddie was snoring and then he padded across the linoleum floor in his bare feet and opened Cherry’s bedroom door. She was pretending she was asleep, and he said nothing, just stood there in his underwear.

“What do you want?” Cherry asked him sleepily.

“I want to pleasure you,” he whispered.

“Don’t turn on the light,” she said. “I don’t want you to look at me.”

Afterward, in the dark, Vladdy could hear the furious river below them in the canyon. It sounded so raw, like an angry young river trying to figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up.

While Eddie and Vladdy checked back with the non-hiring man every morning, Vladdy tried to help out around the house since he had no money for rent. He tried to fix the dripping faucet but couldn’t find any tools in the apartment besides an old pair of pliers and something cheap designed to slice potatoes. He mopped the floors, though, and washed her windows. He fixed her leaking toilet with the pliers. While he did this, Eddie sat on the couch and watched television, MTV mostly. Cherry’s kid, Tony, sat with Eddie and watched and wouldn’t even change out of his pajamas and get dressed unless Vladdy told him to do so.