Doug Allyn - The Best American Mystery Stories 1997

“Y’all cat up,” Bailey said. “What’s left belongs to the niggers.” Old Russell, standing off to one side of the barbecue table, sort of shifted his weight and blinked, still looking out over the lake. Bailey saw this and pulled his lips tight over his teeth. “Sorry, Russell,” he mumbled. Russell, his eyes fixed on the lake’s far shore, appeared unfazed. Bailey got up, went inside, and came back out with the bottle of Knob Creek. He poured some into his mint julep cup and drank it.

“Well, finally, I followed him one day, and I watched him meet her in the parking lot of the Yacht Club, and I followed them way out here, down to the Deer Lick landing. I’d cut my lights, and I parked up the road, and then I walked down. I had my .38 pistol with me, but I wasn’t going to kill them. I had me some blanks, and I’d screwed a little sealing wax into that little depression at the end of the blanks. You ever noticed that, that little depression? When I got down there they weren’t in the car. I looked around and saw a couple standing down on the beach, just shadows in that darkness, so I walked down there. They looked around when I walked up to them, and when they realized it was me it scared them pretty bad, me showing up. I stepped up to him and said, ‘I told you to give it up. Reid,’ and that’s when he hit me, almost knocked me down. I guess he wanted to get the first lick in, for once. I went back at him, and it was a real street fight, pulling hair and wrestling and kicking and throwing a punch every now and then, and hell, Maryella might have been in on it for all I know. I finally threw him down onto the sand, and his shirt ripped off in my hands. Maryella was standing with her feet in the water, with her hands over her face, and I was standing there over Reid, out of breath and worn out. And he looked up then and said, ‘You’re going to have to kill me to get rid of me, Bailey. I love her.’ So I pulled out the pistol from my pocket and said, ‘All right.’ And I shot him. All five rounds.”

We were all quiet as ghosts. The squeals from the boy and the playful growling of Junior and the good-natured barking of Buddy all wafted up from the lake. The ball arced out over the water, and the dogs leapt after it with big splashes.

“Well, he hollered like he was dying,” Bailey said. “I imagine it hurt, wax or not, and scared the holy shit out of him. It was loud as hell. I saw these dark blotches blossom on his skin. You know Reid always was a pale motherfucker. When he saw the blood, his head fell back onto the beach sand.

“Maryella said. ‘You killed him.’ By God, I thought I had, too. I thought, Jesus Christ. I am so addled I forgot to use the blanks, I have shot the son of a bitch with real bullets. I jumped down there and took a look, and in a minute I could see that I hadn’t done that. The pieces of wax had pierced the skin, though, and he was bleeding from these superficial wounds. He’d fainted.

“And Maryella panicked then. She started to run away. I tackled her and dragged her back to Reid to show her he was all right, but she wouldn’t quit slapping at me and screaming, ‘You killed him, you killed him!’ over and over again. She said she loved him, and she’d never loved me. I shoved her head under the shallow water there at the beach, but when I pulled her up again she just took a deep breath and started screaming the same thing again, ‘You killed him, I hate you!’ And that’s when Reid jumped onto my back and shoved me forward. I still had a hold on Maryella’s neck, see, and my arms were held out stiff, like this,” and he held his arms out, his hands at the end of them held in a horseshoe shape, the way they would be if they were around a neck. Bailey looked at his hands held out there, like that.

“I felt her neck crack beneath my hands,” he said. “Beneath our weight, mine and Reid’s.” He didn’t say anything for a minute. I heard his boy, Lee, calling him from down at the lake. No one answered him or looked up. We were all staring at Bailey, who wasn’t looking at anything in particular. He looked tired, almost bored.

“Anyway,” he said then, “I couldn’t let Reid get away with causing that to happen. I found the gun and hit him over the head with it. And then I held him under until he drowned.”

Bailey swirled what was left in his mint julep cup, looking down into the dregs. He turned it up and sucked at the bits of ice and mint and the soggy sugar in the bottom. Then he sat back in his chair, poured more bourbon into the cup, and said in a voice that was chilling to me, because I recognized the method of manipulation behind it, taking the shocked imagination and diverting it to the absurd: “So when I brought them back here, that’s when Russell’s boys skinned ’em up and put ’em over the coals.”

There was silence for a long moment, and then McAdams. Bill Burton, Hoyt, Titus, and Skeet broke into a kind of forced, polite laughter.

“Shit, Bailey,” McAdams said. “You just about tell it too good for me.”

“So gimme some more of that human barbecue, Russell,” Titus said.

“‘Long pig’ is the Polynesian term. I believe,” Skeet said.

Their laughter came more easily now.

The boy, Lee, came running up to the porch steps.

“Daddy,” he said. He was crying, his voice high and quailing. Bailey turned his darkened face to the boy as if to an executioner.

“Daddy, Junior’s trying to hurt old Buddy.”

We looked up. Out in the lake, Buddy swam with the ball in his mouth. Junior was trying to climb up onto Buddy’s back. Both dogs looked tired, their heads barely clearing the surface. Junior mounted Buddy from behind, and as he climbed Buddy’s back, the older dog, his nose held straight up and the ball still in his teeth, went under.

He didn’t come back up. We all of us stood up out of our chairs. Junior swam around for a minute. He swam in a circle one way, then reversed himself, and then struck out in another direction with what seemed a renewed vigor, after something. It was the blue ball, floating away. He nabbed it off the surface and swam in. He set the ball down on the bank and shook himself, then looked up toward all of us on the veranda. He started trotting up the bank toward the boy standing stricken in the yard.

Bailey had gone into the house and come out with what looked like an old Browning shotgun. He yanked it to his shoulder, sighted, and fired it just over the boy’s head at the dog. The boy ducked down flat onto the grass. The dog stopped still, in a point, looking at Bailey holding the gun. He was out of effective range.

“Bailey!” Skeet shouted. “You’ll hit the boy!”

Bailey’s face was purplish and puffed with rage. His eyes darted all over the lawn. He saw his boy Lee lying down in the grass with an empty, terrified look in his eyes. He lowered the barrel and drew a bead on the boy. The boy, and I tell you he looked just like his mama, was looking right into his daddy’s eyes. He will never be just a boy again. There was a small strangled noise down in Bailey’s chest, and he swung the gun up over the grove and fired it off, boom, the shot racing out almost visibly over the trees. The.sound caromed across the outer bank and echoed back to us, diminished. Junior took off running for the road, tail between his legs. The boy lay in the grass looking up at his father. Titus stepped up and took the shotgun away, and Bailey sat down on the pinewood floor of the veranda as if exhausted.

“Well,” he said after a minute. His voice was deep and hoarse and croaky. “Well.” He shook with a gentle, silent laughter. “I wonder what I ought to do.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t know who else to ask but you boys.” He struggled up and tottered drunkenly to the barbecue table, put together a sandwich of white bread and meat, and began to devour it like a starving man. He snatched large bites and swallowed them whole, then stuck his fingers into his mouth, sucking off the grease and sauce. He gave that up and wiped his hands on his khakis, up and down, as if stropping a razor. “Russell,” he said, looking around, seeming unable to focus on him, “get another round, some of that Mexican beer, maybe. We need something light to wash down this meal.” He ran his fingers through his hair.