“You couldn’t possibly.”
“You’re wondering how a nice girl like me ended up like this.” When Marie didn’t answer, she added, “Why do you keep doing that?”
“What?”
“That.” The girl pointed to Marie’s hand, which was making absent semicircles over her stomach. “You pregnant?”
“No,” Marie said, withdrawing her hand. But she had been, shockingly, for most of the summer; during John’s final weeks at home, she had been pregnant. Back then her hand had gone automatically to the womb, that strange, unpredictable vessel, as she and Ernie nuzzled in bed, dazzled by their change in fortune. For nights on end they made their murmured plans, lost in a form of drunkenness, waiting for John to skulk through the back door long past curfew, when they would rise from their nestled sheets to face him — their first child now, not their only — his splendid blue eyes glassy with what she hoped were the normal complications of adolescence, equal parts need and contempt.
They did not tell him about the pregnancy, and by the first of September it was over prematurely, Marie balled into a heap on their bed for three days, barely able to open her swollen eyes. “Maybe it’s for the best,” Ernie whispered to her, petting her curled back. They could hear John ramming around in the kitchen downstairs, stocking the cupboards with miso and bean curd and other things they’d never heard of, counting off his last days in the house by changing everything in it. As Ernie kissed her sweaty head, Marie rested her hand on the freshly scoured womb that had held their second chance. “It might not have been worth it,” Ernie whispered, words that staggered her so thoroughly that she bolted up, mouth agape, asking, “What did you say, Ernie? Did you just say something?” Their raising of John had, after all, been filled with fine wishes for the boy; it was not their habit to acknowledge disappointment, or regret, or sorrow. As the door downstairs clicked shut on them and John faded into another night with his mysterious friends, Marie turned to her husband, whom she loved, God help her, more than she loved her son. Take it back, she wanted to tell him, but he mistook her pleading look entirely. “She might’ve broken our hearts,” he murmured. “I can think of a hundred ways.” He was holding her at the time, speaking softly, almost to himself, and his hands on her felt like the meaty intrusion of some stranger who’d just broken into her bedroom. “Ernie, stop there,” she told him, and he did.
It was only now, imprisoned on her own property by a skinny girl who belonged back in chemistry class, that Marie understood that she had come here alone to find a way to forgive him. What did he mean, not worth it? Worth what? Was he speaking of John?
Marie looked down over the trees into the lake. She and Ernie had been twenty years old when John was born. You think you’re in love now, her sister warned, but wait till you meet your baby — implying that married love would look bleached and pale by contrast. But John was a sober, suspicious baby, vaguely intimidating; and their fascination for him became one more thing they had in common. As their child became more and more himself, a cryptogram they couldn’t decipher, Ernie and Marie’s bungled affections and wayward exertions revealed less of him and more of themselves.
Ernie and Marie, smitten since seventh grade: it was a story they thought their baby son would grow up to tell their grandchildren. At twenty they had thought this. She wanted John to remember his childhood the way she liked to: a soft-focus, greeting card recollection in which Ernie and Marie strolled hand in hand in a park somewhere with the fruit of their desire frolicking a few feet ahead. But now she doubted her own memory. John must have frolicked on occasion. Certainly he must have frolicked. But at the present moment she could conjure only a lumbering resignation, as if he had already tired of their story before he broke free of the womb. They would have been more ready for him now, she realized. She was in a position now to love Ernie less, if that’s what a child required.
The shadow of the spruces arched long across the dooryard. Dusk fell.
Tracey got up. “I’m hungry again. You want anything?”
“No, thanks.”
Tracey waited. “You have to come in with me.”
Marie stepped through the door first, then watched as Tracey made herself a sandwich. “I don’t suppose it’s crossed your mind that your boyfriend might not come back,” Marie said.
Tracey took a big bite. “No, it hasn’t.”
“If I were on the run I’d run alone, wouldn’t you? Don’t you think that makes sense?”
Chewing daintily, Tracey flattened Marie with a luminous, eerily knowing look. “Are you on the run, Marie?”
“What I’m saying is that he’ll get a lot farther a lot faster without another person to worry about.”
Tracey swallowed hard. “Well, what I’m saying is you don’t know shit about him. Or me, for that matter. So you can just shut up.”
“I could give you a ride home.”
“Not without your keys, you couldn’t.” She opened the fridge and gulped some milk from the bottle. “If I wanted to go home, I would’ve gone home a long time ago.”
It had gotten dark in the cabin. Marie flicked on the kitchen light. She and Ernie left the electricity on year-round because it was more trouble not to, and occasionally they came here in winter to snowshoe through the long, wooded alleys. It was on their son’s behalf that they had come to such pastimes, on their son’s behalf that the cabin had filled over the years with well-thumbed guidebooks to butterflies and insects and fish and birds. But John preferred his puzzles by the fire, his long, furtive vigils on the dock, leaving it to his parents to discover the world. They turned up pine cones, strips of birch bark for monogramming, once a speckled feather from a pheasant. John inspected these things indifferently, listened to parental homilies on the world’s breathtaking design, all the while maintaining the demeanor of a goodhearted homeowner suffering the encyclopedia salesman’s pitch.
“Why don’t you want to go home?” Marie asked. “Really, I’d like to know.” She was remembering the parting scene at the airport, John uncharacteristically warm, allowing her to hug him as long as she wanted, thanking her for an all-purpose “everything” that she could fill in as she pleased for years to come. Ernie, his massive arms folded in front of him, welled up, nodding madly. But as John disappeared behind the gate Ernie clutched her hand, and she knew what he knew: that their only son, their first and only child, was not coming back. He would finish school, find a job in California, call them twice a year.
“My father’s a self-righteous blowhard, if you’re dying to know,” Tracey said. “And my mother’s a doormat.”
“Maybe they did the best they could.”
“Maybe they didn’t.”
“Maybe they tried in ways you can’t know about.”
Tracey looked Marie over. “My mother’s forty-two,” she said. “She would’ve crawled under a chair the second she saw the knife.”
Marie covered the mustard jar and returned it to the fridge. “It’s possible, Tracey, that your parents never found the key to you.”
Tracey seemed to like this interpretation of her terrible choices. Her shoulders softened some. “So where’s this son of yours, anyway?”
“We just sent him off to Berkeley.”
Tracey smirked a little. “Uh-oh.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Marie asked. “What do you mean?”
“Berkeley’s a pretty swinging place. You don’t send sweet little boys there.”
“I never said he was a sweet little boy,” Marie said, surprising herself. But it was true: her child had never been a sweet little boy.
“You’ll be lucky if he comes back with his brain still working.”
“I’ll be lucky if he comes back at all.”
Tracey frowned. “You’re messing with my head, right? Poor, tortured mother? You probably don’t even have kids.” She folded her arms. “But if you do have a kid, and he’s at Berkeley, prepare yourself.”
“Look, Tracey,” Marie said irritabl
y, “why don’t you just take my car? If you’re so devoted to this boyfriend of yours, why not go after him?”
“Because I’d have no idea where to look, and you’d run to the nearest police station.” Tracey finished the sandwich and rinsed the plate, leading Marie to suspect that someone had at least taught her to clean up after herself. The worst parent in the world can at least do that. John had lovely manners, and she suddenly got a comforting vision of him placing his scraped plate in a cafeteria sink.
“The nearest police station is twenty miles from here,” Marie said.
“Well, that’s good news, Marie, because look who’s back.”
Creeping into the driveway, one headlight out, was a low-slung, mud-colored Valiant with a cracked windshield. The driver skulked behind the wheel, blurry as an inkblot. When Tracey raced out to greet him, the driver opened the door and emerged as a jittery shadow. The shadow flung itself toward the cabin as Marie fled for the back door and banged on the lock with her fists.
In moments he was upon her, a wiry man with a powerful odor and viselike hands. He half-carried her back to the kitchen as she fell limp with panic. Then, like a ham actor in a silent movie, he lashed her to a kitchen chair with cords of filthy rawhide.
“You wanna tell me how the fuck we get rid of her?” he snarled at Tracey, whose apparent fright gave full flower to Marie’s budding terror. That he was handsome — dark-eyed, square-jawed, with full, shapely lips — made him all the more terrifying.
“What was I supposed to do?” Tracey quavered. “Listen, I kept her here for a whole day with no —”
“Where’s your keys?” he roared at Marie.
“Here, they’re here,” Tracey said, fumbling them out of her pocket. “Let’s go, Mike, please, let’s just go.”
“You got money?” he asked, leaning over Marie, one cool strand of his long hair raking across her bare arm. She could hardly breathe, looking into his alarming, moist eyes.
“My purse,” she gasped. “In the car.”
He stalked out, his dirty jeans sagging at the seat, into which someone had sewn a facsimile of the American flag. He looked near starving, his upper arms shaped like bedposts, thin and tapering and hard. She heard the car door open and the contents of her purse spilling over the gravel.
“The premed was a lie,” Tracey said. “I met him at a concert.” She darted a look outside, her lip quivering. “You know how much power I have over my own life, Marie?” She lifted her hand and squeezed her thumb and index finger together. “This much.”
He was in again, tearing into the fridge, cramming food into his mouth. The food seemed to calm him some. He looked around. He could have been twenty-five or forty-five, a man weighted by bad luck and a mean spirit that encased his true age like barnacles on a boat. “Pick up our stuff,” he said to Tracey. “We’re out of this dump.”
Tracey did as he said, gathering the sleeping bag and stuffing it into a sack. He watched her body damply as she moved; Marie felt an engulfing nausea but could not move herself, not even to cover her mouth at the approaching bile. Her legs were lashed to the chair legs, her arms tied behind her, giving her a deeply discomfiting sensation of being bound to empty space. She felt desperate to close her legs, cross her arms over her breasts, unwilling to die with her most womanly parts exposed. “I’m going to be sick,” she gulped, but it was too late, a thin trail of spit and bile lolloping down her shirtfront.
Mike lifted his forearm, dirty with tattoos, and chopped it down across Marie’s jaw. She thumped backward to the floor, chair and all, tasting blood, seeing stars, letting out a squawk of despair. Then she fell silent, looking at the upended room, stunned. She heard the flick of a switchblade and felt the heat of his shadow. She tried to snap her eyes shut, to wait for what came next, but they opened again, fixed on his; in the still, shiny irises she searched for a sign of latent goodness, or regret, some long-ago time that defined him. In the sepulchral silence she locked eyes with him, sorrow to sorrow. He dropped the knife. “Fuck this, you do it,” he said to Tracey, then swaggered out. She heard her car revving in the dooryard, the radio blaring on. Now her eyes closed. A small rustle materialized near her left ear; it was Tracey, crouching next to her, holding the opened blade.
“Shh,” Tracey said. “He’s a coward, and he doesn’t like blood, but he’s not above beating the hell out of me.” She patted Marie’s cheek. “So let’s just pretend I’ve killed you.”
Marie began to weep, silently, a sheen of moisture beading beneath her eyes. She made a prayer to the Virgin Mary, something she had not done since she was a child. She summoned an image of Ernie sitting on the porch, missing her. Of John scraping that plate in the college cafeteria. With shocking tenderness, Tracey made a small cut near Marie’s temple just above the hairline. It hurt very little, but the blood began to course into her hair in warm, oozy tracks. Tracey lifted the knife, now a rich, dripping red. “You’ll be okay,” she said. “But head wounds bleed like crazy.” The horn from Marie’s car sounded in two long, insistent blasts.
“You chose a hell of a life for yourself, Tracey,” Marie whispered.
“Yeah,” Tracey said, closing her palm lightly over the knife. She got up. “But at least I chose.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“Ditto. Take care.”
For much of the long evening Marie kept still, blinking into the approaching dark. She had to pee desperately but determined to hold it even if it killed her, which she genuinely thought it might. She was facing the ceiling, still tied, the blood on her face and hair drying uncomfortably. She recalled John’s childhood habit of hanging slothlike from banisters or chair backs, loving the upside-down world. Perhaps his parents were easier to understand this way. She saw now what had so compelled him: the ceiling would make a marvelous floor, a creamy expanse you could navigate however you wished; you could fling yourself from corner to corner, unencumbered except for an occasional light fixture. Even the walls looked inviting: the windows appeared to open from the top down, the tops of doors made odd, amusing steps into the next room, framed pictures floated knee-high, their reversed images full of whimsy, hard to decode. In time she got used to the overturned room, even preferred it. It calmed her. She no longer felt sick. She understood that Ernie was on his way here, of course he was, he would be here before the moon rose, missing her, full of apology for disturbing her peace, but he needed her, the house was empty and their son was gone, and he needed her as he steered down the dirt road, veering left past the big boulder, entering the dooryard to find a strange, battered car and a terrifying silence.
“Oh, Ernie,” she said when he did indeed panic through the door. “Ernie. Sweetheart. Untie me.” In he came, just as she knew he would.
And then? They no longer looked back on this season as the autumn when they lost their second child. This season — with its gentle temperatures and propensity for inspiring flight — they recalled instead as that one autumn when those awful people, that terrible pair, broke into the cabin. They exchanged one memory for the other, remembering Ernie’s raging, man-sized sobs as he worked at the stiff rawhide, remembering him rocking her under a shaft of moonlight that sliced through the door he’d left open, remembering, half laughing, that the first thing Marie wanted to do, after being rescued by her prince, was pee. This moment became the turning point — this moment and no other — when two long-married people decided to stay married, to succumb to the shape of the rest of their life, to live with things they would not speak of. They shouldered each other into the coming years because there was no other face each could bear to look at in this moment of turning, no other arms they could bear but each other’s, and they made themselves right again, they did, just the two of them.
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~ * ~
Contributors’ Notes
Born and raised in northern Michigan, Doug Allyn studied the Chinese language at Indiana University and served in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.
Returning to school on the GI Bill, Allyn studied creative writing and criminal psychology at the University of Michigan while moonlighting as a guitarist and a poet and lyricist in the rock group Devil’s Triangle. He later taught creative writing at Mott Community College and presently reviews books for the Flint Journal while maintaining a full writing schedule.
From the beginning, critical response to Mr. Allyn’s work has been remarkable. His first published story won the Robert L. Fish award from the Mystery Writers of America. Subsequent works have won the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the American Mystery Award, the Derringer Award for best novella, and the Ellery Queen Readers’ Award five times. His career highlights include drinking champagne with Mickey Spillane and waltzing with Mary Higgins Clark. The Allyns live in frenetic bliss in Montrose, Michigan.
■ “The Jukebox King” is based on the reality of the Detroit nightclub scene. Rap didn’t introduce gangsters to the music business; the Mob has been in the game since Prohibition. Drawn to the nightlife and easy money, hoods had financial interests in dance clubs, jukeboxes, and even recording studios.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2003 Page 40