Doug Allyn - The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

Whittemore gave him his handkerchief, which Eisner used to dry his fingers and then his eyes. And when he could see again, he looked out his window, away from the river into Fairmount Park. “During the war,” he said, “there were supposed to be Japs that lived back in there in cardboard boxes and ate people’s dogs...” It was quiet for a little while, and then he said, “I guess they decided they’d rather take their chances in the park.”

Against his will, Whittemore began thinking about his visit to the doctor before he left Seattle. The doctor was Japanese — which is what brought it to mind — and said he didn’t think the memory lapses were anything to worry about, that they were related to stress. The doctors in Seattle saw a lot of stress, of course, all those fucking owls to worry about, domestic partners who couldn’t get on the major medical at Boeing. Whittemore had noticed that it was about twelve years ago when the doctors quit saying You’re fine. Now it was always I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. Which smelled of insurance. Every day, he saw the world dividing itself into a billion insurance policies, everybody trying to set things up in some way that made them safe.

“Myself, what I don’t like is hotels,” Eisner said. “Strange mattresses, peepholes in the doors, somebody’s always got their hand out. People drool on the pillowcase, it soaks through, even a hundred-dollar hotel.” He dabbed at his nose with the handkerchief and said, “Rich people drool as much as anybody else, maybe more, when you think about it. And the strangers walking up and down the halls? No reflection on you, but the more human beings I see from out of state, the less hope I have for the future.”

Whittemore had frozen, though, at the mention of hotel pillows. How could he have missed that? It seemed dangerous in some way that the old man had thought of it and he hadn’t. Ahead of them, a Rolling Rock delivery truck dropped into a pothole that must have broken half the bottles inside.

“You care to know how this happened?” the old man said a little later.

Whittemore began to say no, that it wasn’t any of his business. The old man was popping his toast every two minutes as it was. Instead, he shrugged. He’d been having queer feelings again, even before he left Seattle, like it was all out of his hands.

“There wasn’t any reason,” the old man said. “That’s the big joke. I’m seventy-six years old; they don’t have anything I want. Nothing. No reason but the twins themselves. The future-is-ours, dot-com-generation, bastard twins.” He looked at him quickly and said, “Kids, I’m talking about. Nothing personal. You want a cough drop?”

Whittemore shook his head no and wondered for the next mile why the old man would think he needed a cough drop.

“Paul and Bonnie, I would cut off my right hand before I took a cent. But then they crashed their car on the Black Horse Pike — going to the shore for a weekend in the middle of winter, for Christ’s sake, just like that, they’re gone — and the twins take over before they’re even in the ground. Forty-two years these people were my friends, they were like my family, but the truth is they didn’t spend enough time at home. The business was too important. That’s all I’ll say about it, end of story. They didn’t spend enough time at home.”

Whittemore nodded, as if he agreed with that, although he hadn’t met the boys himself. That wasn’t the way it was done. He worked for himself. There were people in the middle, and everything went through them — the money and the jobs. It was cleaner all the way around.

“Cheating people who’ve been coming into the store forty years, that’s how this happened. Cheating young people come in to buy a wedding ring. Ruining their parents’ good reputation. What’s that worth? What’s the price these days on a good reputation?”

They’d been in the car half an hour now, and the houses in the distance were bigger and had rolling lawns and iron fences. Then a golf course. “You play golf?” the old man said, and a moment later Whittemore grabbed at his knee and ran the outside wheels off onto the shoulder of the road.

The sensation wasn’t painful as much as eerie. Like something in there was being unscrewed. It happened on airplanes and in the movies, anywhere Whittemore had to sit still. He took vitamins, rode his bicycle three times a week, did sixty pushups every morning, and never got through the rest of the day without a twinge somewhere, without thinking this might be it.

“You know I taught these little bastards how to play? Did they tell you that?” The old man was warming to the subject now. “They got to have the best clubs, right from the first day. New leather bags, new shoes. God forbid they should play in tennis shoes. Fourteen years old, and they’re riding around in carts like old men...”

Eisner wiped at his eyes again and then stared out the window, watching someone swing, just wanting to see a golf swing, moving a little in his seat as the swell of the fairway began to eclipse the golfer. “Cheat?” he said. “They embarrass you to death.”

The course disappeared, and Eisner sneezed again. Some of it blew out beneath the handkerchief and spotted his pants. “Did you say you played? I get nervous, I can’t remember what people tell me.”

“A little. I used to play a little.”

“Then you know what I’m talking about.”

They passed into Lancaster County, and a few minutes later turned off the highway onto a road so faded that there was hardly a road left. Weeds were growing in the lane markers. They saw an Amish pulled to the side who had broken an axle on his buggy. He was up front, calming the horse; a woman was nursing a baby in the shadows of the back seat.

“I hear Titleist is coming out with a new ball, twenty extra yards off the tee,” Eisner said.

Whittemore saw the dirt road that he’d picked earlier and began slowing for the turn. The old man’s voice was shaking so badly, he could hardly get this out: “Myself,” he said, “I wouldn’t mind trying it. You get up in years like me, you can use the extra distance.”

And that was as close as he came to asking for anything.

Whittemore pulled the car to the side of the road and sat still a minute, thinking it over. “What if you had to go away?”

“Me?” Eisner said. “Where am I going to go?”

“Someplace else,” Whittemore said. “The other side of the world.”

The old man took a minute putting it together. “You mean like the Poconos?” he said.

Whittemore went to Seventh Street that same afternoon to return the five thousand in person. That was the only chance he saw, to talk to them in person. Something like this — but not exactly this — had happened once before and been negotiated. That was the word the people in the middle used, negotiated. It meant they waited three or four months, gave you enough time to think maybe they’d forgotten, and then a couple of guys who laughed at everything came around with their softball bats and their twenty-pound biceps and pimples on their shoulders and brought you back into the world of hospitals and medical science. He couldn’t remember now exactly what it had been like. This time, though, unless he could head it off, things would have to be explained, which was a more serious word to the people in the middle.

The jewelers took him upstairs to their office — they seemed to be in a hurry to get him off the showroom floor — and while one of them closed the door, the other one took off his coat, dropped into the chair behind his desk, hung his health-club arms over the sides — the kid wanted him to notice his arms — and stared at him as if he were trying to make up his mind. He was the one who did the talking.