Laura Lippman - Baltimore Noir

Housewives left instructions in the milk box. Extra gallon of chocolate milk, please. Two dozen eggs next time. When are you getting the sugar donuts in again? Slink was shown the tooth knocked out in football, the newest edition to the family, he heard vacation plans, the great news about the new job. He caught the sometimes whiff of bourbon on Ellen Matthews’s breath, he got the updates on Hal Fenwick’s slow cancerous march to the grave. “Christ,” he used to say to the boys at the Pimlico clubhouse, “There’s this couple on my route. The Burtons? Damn marriage is coming apart right in front of my eyes. Personally, I think the guy is a jerk. Gotta say, I side with wifey on this one.”

Slink’s luck with the horses wasn’t all that great. He had about a half-dozen different systems for picking them, and they all pretty much stank. He ran feverish formulas on his racing form with his No. 2 pencil. You’d have thought he was splitting the atom. “Got it! High Commander to place. Hundred clams.” And High Commander would proceed to prance crookedly around the track like a lame Chinaman pulling a rickshaw. Afternoon regulars at Pimlico were accustomed to the sight of the skinny wavy-haired guy with the ripped bits of his losing tickets raining down on him like confetti.

But generally speaking, Slink enjoyed himself. He could never quite get a gal to hang on his arm for very long-which would have been nice-but he knew she was out there somewhere. Just a matter of time. Meanwhile he ran with a pretty fun crowd, had himself a nice collection of swizzle sticks. Holly’s Cocktail Lounge. The Chanticleer. The Blue Mirror. True, there were a few “debt sweat” episodes here and there-once he was mildly roughed up out back of the Belvedere, just as a friendly reminder-but on the whole, Slink was considered good people, looking to harm no one. If it’s true that he never met a mirror he didn’t like, well, there have been far more serious faults in far more flawed people.

Slink never had sex with a regular customer. Not even Ellen Matthews, despite the sometimes sloppy fall of her bathrobe. There had been one occasion. Sort of. Ginny Curry’s sister visiting from Morgantown. But that hadn’t been on the job. Just pure coincidence. The two had struck up a conversation at Sweeney’s Bar, sparring good-naturedly over the bitters-to-sugar ratio of old-fashioneds, and ended up on Slink’s red plaid blanket in the backseat of his Olds, parked up near Memorial Stadium. It was several mornings later that Slink spied the same woman sitting at the kitchen table with the Curry twins as he was dropping off milk and butter and eggs and cheese. Pure coincidence. Slink grinned and saluted the woman with his toothpick just as she’d turned in her chair and spotted him through the crack of the kitchen door, her red mouth forming a perfect O

And then Slink died.

Technically, it was the fault of the Brewster’s frisky Chesapeake Bay retriever, Sandy. And also a nameless squirrel. Sandy had been accompanying the children on their way to the school bus stop when she suddenly took off after the squirrel that was crossing directly in front of Slink Ridgely’s milk truck. Slink spun the wheel, but by mistake he slammed down on the accelerator pedal instead of the brake. The square truck broke through the picket fence of crabby Gus Fulton’s place, bounced across a corner of the yard (the perfect pile of raked yellow leaves going up like an explosion), and toppled over sideways at the roadside ditch just as the school bus was coming down that steep part of Caves Road way… too… damned… fast.

The milk truck was lying half on and half off the road. After the collision, it lay completely on the road, twice spun and partially crushed. Bottles of white milk and chocolate milk trundled along the pavement like errant bowling pins. As the crowd gathered, no one noticed the Brewster dog at the edge of Gus Fulton’s yard, happily lapping up milk and pebbles.

The kids in the bus were fine. Frightened out of their wits, but fine. The driver of the school bus suffered a bloody nose. But Slink Ridgely was dead. Crushed ribs. Broken neck. His arms were snaked so thoroughly through the spokes of the steering wheel that it was like solving a puzzle trying to get him freed up and out of the truck.

Seven-year-old Annie Brewster felt horrible. She’d been the one holding Sandy’s leash on the way to the bus stop, but she hadn’t held it tightly enough when the squirrel darted out from the trees. Now I’ve killed a man, she thought. I don’t deserve to live Children think this way. She stood saucereyed, staring at the dead milkman, while anguish planted itself deep, deep in her belly. He’d been at their house just fifteen minutes ago. He’d brought those sugar donuts. She remembered the toothpick the milkman was always chewing on. She remembered how he always tilted his cap back whenever he talked to her mom. That very morning he had turned to her-to Annie-and winked at her. And now he dead She felt her tiny heart being slipped into a box and the flaps being folded closed. She spotted something on the road and she reached down and picked it up. It was a toothpick, slightly gnawed on one end. She put it in her pocket and made a vow to keep it forever.

Slink saw all of this from his new vantage point. The dead one. He watched as his body was pulled from the truck and set down on Gus Fulton’s grass. He watched as the children were ushered off the bus, and he joined in the sense of relief that they all seemed fine. His eyes rolled as he spotted Ellen Matthews making her way down the street in her robe and worn fluffy slippers. The woman’s gait listed somewhat, and Slink worried that when her feet stopped moving she’d topple forward onto the pavement. But she didn’t. She came to an unstable stop some ten feet from Slink’s body, then folded her hands together and muttered a tearful prayer into the autumn air.

The funeral was held at Druid Ridge Cemetery three days later. Slink’s cronies were there. Pale Sally presented the wreath from Cloverland. A few of the drivers banded together to wear their uniforms to the grave site, which Slink thought was pretty classy. It was a beautiful crisp autumn day. Yellow leaves fell from the trees, cascading down like a rain of canaries. Slink watched the proceedings from several dozen angles, one of the many benefits of being dead that he was already catching on to. He was especially touched when little Annie Brewster, who had insisted to her parents in a foot-stomping fit that she be allowed to attend, stepped forward to add a single rose to the flowers already atop the casket. Annie hesitated after carefully placing the rose, then removed her black wool gloves and set them, palms down, next to the flower. She stepped back between her parents and thrust her hands into her coat pockets. There, in the left pocket, she fiddled with Slink’s toothpick as the color began to rise into her frowning face.

Her parents were already worried.

Slink took to his new condition like a kid to a sliding board. No problem. Being dead-he discovered-was a lot like dreaming. Or, for that matter, like the feeling that comes from a bellyful of old-fashioneds. The altered state. The affairs of the living were a lot more comical and nonsensical from the perspective of being dead, much the way dreams are freakish and pointless to the living. Tit for tat, figured Slink. And time-he also discovered-was completely irrelevant. The school bus had hit him twenty years ago, the school bus had hit him yesterday. No real difference. The borders between today and yesteryear were completely blurred and he could move back and forth at will. Studebakers and bigfinned Chevrolets in the Memorial Stadium parking lot? That would be Jim Gentile on first and the amazing Luis Aparicio filling the hole at short. The Light Rail pulling into the Camden Yards station? That would be the whole new set of over-priced bums.