The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

by C. J. Box

  I loved my mother. She stuck up for poor whites and people of color, and was generous to a fault with the little money we had. But I avoided looking into her eyes and the memories from her own life that were buried there. The same with my father. He was an educated and genteel man from South Louisiana who went over the top five times in what he called the Great War. He was an extremely intelligent and perceptive man, and consequently doomed to a life of emotional and intellectual loneliness. Mother’s depression and frigidity did not help, and I thought it no wonder my father’s most loyal companions had become his beer at the icehouse and the whiskey he hid in the garage.

  “What are you studying on?” Grandfather said.

  “Why do you call the Mexicans wets?”

  “Good question. You could walk across the Rio Grande on your hands. We’re going outside. Find you a hat in the hall. That wind has no mercy.”

  He was right. It was dry and full of grit and as cold and mean and ugly as a witch’s broom. We ran for the barn. There must have been eight or nine Mexicans sitting in the straw, and maybe more back in the darkness. The chickens were trying to hide in the loft. I don’t think I ever saw people as hungry or lean. The baby I saw sucking at its mother’s breast looked made of sticks and a hank of skin and hair. Grandfather passed out the ham and biscuits and went out to the windmill and unhitched the chain and used a clean syrup can to catch the water under the pipe that fed the stock tank.

  When he returned, he passed the syrup can among the Mexicans and told them he would get them more water when the can was done. The wind was puffing under the roof, straining the tin roof against the beams and storm latches. From outside I could hear the sound of a car engine and metal rattling and bouncing. Grandfather put his eye to a crack in the door. He spoke without taking his eye from the crack. “Aaron,” he said.

  “Yes, sir?” I replied, aware of the change in his voice and the fact he had used my christened name.

  “Keep these people inside. Don’t open the door. Not for any reason.”

  “What’s wrong, Grandfather?”

  He slipped a shovel loose from a barrel of tools. “I try to avoid confrontations with white trash, but sometimes they don’t give you no selection.”

  He pushed open the door and stepped out into the cold. I felt a solitary raindrop strike my eyeball, as bright and hard as a chip of glass. Then Grandfather shut the door. I squinted through the crack and saw him approach a Model T Ford in the middle of a dry streambed that led down to the river. A tall man as thin as a lizard stepped out on the ground, his tie lifting in the wind, his suit flattening against his body. He had a long, unshaved face and tubular nose, shadowed by a John B. Stetson hat. He had to shout to be heard. “Fixing to take a shit in the woods, Mr. Holland?”

  “I don’t abide profanity on my property, Mr. Watts.”

  “I’m here out of respect. I’m also here to avoid trouble.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mr. Watts. I’m sure the failing is mine.”

  The man named Watts looked at Mother’s car and at the dust on the running boards and the swaths of it on the windshield. The wind flapped his coat back, exposing the brass star on his belt and the holster and sidearm on his hip. “Miss Wynona is visiting?”

  “What’s the nature of your visit, Mr. Watts?”

  “We think there’s infiltrators coming up from the border.”

  “Infiltrators?”

  “To be specific, Japs.”

  “The Japs are fixing to bomb Yoakum, Texas?” Grandfather said. “That’s what you’re saying?”

  Mr. Watts’s face made me think of soil erosion. His eyes were as flat and black as watermelon seeds under his hat brim. “I never spoke badly of you, Mr. Holland. I know what whiskey can do. There’s a seat in our church anytime you want it.”

  “I know your preacher well. I saw him at a cross-burning once. He was setting fire to the cross. I was writing down license numbers.”

  “Jesus didn’t choose to be born a colored man. There wasn’t any on the Ark, either.”

  “I got a theory on some of that,” Grandfather said. “Know why God made certain kinds of white people?”

  “No, and I’m not interested. I been sent out here by federal authorities.”

  “He was sending a message to the nigras about the superiority of white intelligence.”

  The wind gusted, rattling the blades on the windmill. Mr. Watts gazed at the barn door. “You calving early this year?”

  “My cows were gone in ’31. My grandson and I were gathering up some eggs.”

  “You wouldn’t go upside my head with that shovel if I looked inside your barn, would you?”

  “No, sir. But I’d file charges against you if you did it without a warrant.”

  “I see. Tell your daughter hello for me,” Mr. Watts said. He turned his face so it caught the light. He winked, a grin at the corner of his mouth.

  I saw Grandfather’s right hand twitch, as though stung by a bee. “Come back here,” he said.

  Mr. Watts drove back down the streambed, the tires of his Model T rolling over fat white rocks that were webbed with algae and that crackled loudly when they were heavily pressed one against the other.

  * * *

  We fed the Mexicans and went back in the house. It had a second story and dormers, but it was a tinderbox and creaked with the wind and had bat and squirrel pellets all over the attic. At one time Grandfather had owned five farms and ranches, one of them on the green waters of the Guadalupe River outside Victoria. But his love of cards and liquor and outlaw women created numerous graves that had no marker and children who had no father.

  He never got religion, at least not in the ordinary sense. I also doubted if he dwelled long on the men he shot, since most of them were killers and not worth the dirt it took to bury them. The children he had abandoned were another matter. He could not ignore the despair in my mother’s face when the afternoon sun began to slip below the horizon and evening shadows dropped like wild animals from the trees and crept across the yard in order to devour her heart. In those moments there was no way to shake the terror from her face.

  She found a substitute for her father when she was seventeen, but no one was ever sure who. There were many soldiers in town, and also traveling salesmen. Some said her lover died in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Whoever he was, he disappeared from her life and she quit high school and went to Houston. Three months later she returned and picked cotton with the darkies, and later went to night school and learned shorthand. For the rest of her life the one subject she would never discuss was abortion and would leave a room if anyone alluded to it.

  After Mr. Watts had gone and Grandfather and I came back into the house, Mother kept staring at the barn and the trail of white rocks in the gulley that used to be a streambed. Her skin was still clear and youthful, her amber hair thick and full of lights, piled on her head like a 1920s woman would wear it. Her dress was paper-thin, printed with tiny red roses, and washed almost colorless. “What’s going to become of the Mexicans?” she said.

  “I know a man in Victoria who’s hiring,” Grandfather said. “He can pick them up tonight.”

  “There’s an enormous hypocrisy about all this,” she said.

  “In what way?” he said.

  “In good times we bring them in by the truckload. When there’s drought, the Mexicans are the devil’s creation.”

  He watched her eyes and the way they followed the streambed through the trees down to the river. “Was it Watts?”

  She turned her glare upon him. “I have no dealings with Mr. Watts. I suggest you don’t either.”

  “If it was him, Wynona, I need to know.”

  She sat down at the piano and began to play “Malagueña,” by Ernesto Lecuona. She played and played and played, hitting the keys harder and harder, until Grandfather stuffed his fingers in his ears and walked out of the room. Then she stopped and stared at me. “Get your coat,” she said.

&n
bsp; “Where we going?”

  “To town.”

  “To the matinee?” I said.

  “We’re going to buy some milk.”

  We walked past Grandfather in the kitchen. He was at the window, his back to us, framed in the gray light, his right hand opening and closing at his side, as though he were squeezing a rubber ball, the knuckles ridging.

  * * *

  Mother and I drove down a dirt road into the county seat and parked at a grocery store on a side street, next to an icehouse and a cinder-block building where chickens were butchered. It was Saturday and both the grocery store and the icehouse were crowded. She pressed a nickel into my palm. “Go get you a Grapette, Aaron, but drink it in the car,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. Are we breaking the law?”

  “Who told you such a thing?”

  I picked at my hands. “It’s the way we’re acting.”

  I said we instead of you. She kissed me on the head. “You’re a good boy. Don’t be speaking bad of yourself or me either.”

  I went inside the icehouse and pulled a Grapette from the cold box and paid at the counter. Through the side windows I could see the rear lot of the slaughterhouse and a sloping rivulet of feathers and chicken guts that had merged and congealed with the runoff from the ice-maker.

  The men around me were bundled up and drinking beer and smoking or chewing tobacco, their clothes sour with the odor that sweat makes when it’s trapped inside wool. They were talking about the American sailors who had been drowned inside the Arizona, a subdued anger as thick as spit in their throats.

  “What you doin’ in here, little fellow?” said a voice behind me.

  I looked up at the silhouette of Mr. Watts. “Drinking a Grapette,” I said. “But I’m supposed to drink it in the car.”

  “Where’s your mama at?”

  “The grocery store,” I said. “Across the street,” I added, not knowing why.

  “Getting y’all a mess of eats, is she?”

  “Not really,” I replied. “Grandfather gets by on the preserves he puts up in the fall.”

  “Bet she’s buying milk. Right or wrong?”

  I knew somehow he had bested me and caused me to give up a secret, but I wasn’t sure how or what. He smiled down at me and stuck a long, thin cigar in his mouth, then took a kitchen match from his shirt pocket and scratched it on the butt of his revolver. He puffed on the cigar, his eyes hazy, and fitted his hand like a starfish on my head and worked his palm and fingers in my hair. “You don’t like that? If so, just say. Don’t be giving adults mean looks.”

  I went back across the street with my Grapette and climbed into my mother’s car. I felt dirty all over. She came out of the store with a big grocery bag clutched against her chest. She set it on the seat between us. Inside it were three sweaty bottles of milk and two cartons of Cream of Wheat.

  “What’s wrong, Aaron?”

  “Nothing.”

  She hadn’t started the car. She twisted around and looked through the rear window. Mr. Watts was crossing the street, his Stetson slanted sideways, his cigar poked back in his jaw. “Did that man say something or do something to you?” she said.

  “He put his hand on my head, like he was wiping it on me.”

  She looked straight ahead, her face tight. She started to turn the ignition, her hand shaking on the keys. The keys fell to the floor. She reached under the seat and pulled out a leather quirt. “Stay in the car.”

  She opened the door and stepped outside, her hair blowing, her profile cut out of tin.

  “You haven’t changed,” Mr. Watts said, tipping his hat. “As fresh as the dew, no matter the season.”

  “You touched my son?”

  “I don’t know rightly what you mean by touched.”

  “Don’t you put on airs with me,” she said.

  “I thought we were friends.”

  She slashed the quirt across his face and laid open his cheek.

  “Lord, woman, you flat cut loose, don’t you?” he said. He pressed the back of his wrist against the cut and looked at the smear of blood on his skin. “Warn me next time and I’ll stay out of your way.”

  She began to thrash him, raining blows down on his head and shoulders, weeping at her own rage and impotence and shame while two men grabbed her by the arms and dragged her back on the sidewalk, easing the quirt out of her hand.

  “It’s all right, everybody,” Mr. Watts said to the onlookers. “Miss Wynona is distraught. She didn’t mean no harm.”

  People patted him on the back and shook his hand and told him what a kind and Christian man he was. I ran to my mother and hugged her around the waist, as though we were the only two people on earth.

  * * *

  The man from Victoria who was supposed to pick up the Mexicans never arrived. Mother fed the Mexicans and Grandfather cussed out the man from Victoria on the phone. “You’re going to he’p the war effort by not hiring wets?” he said. “I got a better way for you to serve your country. Shoot yourself.”

  The sun went down and so did the glow of lights from town that sometimes reflected on the bottoms of the clouds. In the general store at the crossroads the radio with the tiny yellow dial broadcast stories about the Japanese dropping parachutes loaded with incendiary devices into our forests and grasslands. There were also reports of pamphlets that floated out of the sky and burst into flame when children picked them up. Street mobs were attacking Japanese businesses in Los Angeles.

  Grandfather put on his canvas coat and tied on his wide-brimmed hat with a scarf and walked his fences with a lantern, out of fear not of the Japanese but of the evil potential of Mr. Watts, or maybe in bitter recognition that his era had passed and the injury he had done to his family could not be undone and the moral failure that characterized his life had poisoned everything he touched and saw.

  That night I helped Mother and Grandfather in the barn with the Mexicans. She gave her greatest care to the woman breastfeeding her infant and held it in her arms while the mother used the outhouse. The Mexicans were a sad lot, their skin as gray as the fields, their faces like mud masks, their clothes and hair sprinkled with bits of hay that had turned yellow.

  Back in the kitchen Grandfather told me the Mexicans had crossed the Rio Grande far south of us, then had been betrayed by an illegal contractor who was supposed to drive them to San Antonio.

  “He took their money and left them with the clothes on their backs,” he said.

  “What’s going to happen to them?” I asked.

  “They’ll get caught and sent back. The government calls them ‘deportees.’”

  “That little baby is mighty thin,” I said.

  “Your mother worries me.”

  “Sir?”

  “I let her down,” he said. “She blames herself for something that wasn’t her fault.”

  “She never speaks bad of you, Grandfather. Not ever.”

  “Past is past. Wait here.” He went into the living room and picked up a deep cardboard box from behind the couch and carried it back into the kitchen. I heard scraping sounds inside the cardboard.

  “I got this from a lady friend of mine. Take a peek.”

  The pup could have walked right off a Buster Brown promotion in a shoe-store window—​chunky as a fireplug, his brown eyes as round and big as quarters, his stub of a tail swishing against the box.

  I picked him up and breathed his clean puppy smell and felt his tongue on my face. “He looks just like Tige.”

  “I declare, you and him make quite a pair.”

  * * *

  Two weeks went by, then Wake Island fell and supposedly a Japanese submarine fired artillery shells into a California oil field. Some of the Mexicans went away on their own, single men who hopped a freight or women without children looking for work as cooks and cleaning maids. A half dozen stayed with us, including the woman with the infant. Her name was Maria; her child’s was Jesus. Her husband had died of a snake bite in Coahuila, just before they cros
sed the river into Texas.

  As we entered the new year, Grandfather incrementally gave jobs to the remaining Mexicans so their visibility would grow a little each day, until a passerby might think they had always been with us, patching the barn roof, washing clothes on the porch, burning tumbleweeds in the ditches, harrowing a field for the spring. I don’t know what he paid them. I’m sure it wasn’t much, if anything, for he had very little money. But the Mexicans didn’t seem to mind. My mother bought baby clothes for Jesus and started teaching Maria English. Toward the end of January Mother received a postcard from my father. He said he was returning to Houston and hoped she and I would rejoin him in our little ivy-covered brick bungalow on Hawthorne Street.

  “We’re going home, aren’t we, Mother?” I said.

  “I suspect,” she said. “Directly, anyway.”

  “What’s directly mean?”

  “It means directly.”

  She twisted her fingers idly in my hair, her gaze just this side of madness.

  * * *

  Two days later we drove to town with Grandfather. He had never learned to drive a car and always looked upon a ride in a car as a treat. We parked at the open market by the train depot and got out. I had forgotten my bad experience with Mr. Watts, as though it were a bad dream that fell apart in the daylight. A locomotive with a caboose and only two passenger cars on it had pulled into the station, the engine hissing steam. Mother was browsing through some open-air clothes racks and Grandfather was buying a piece of cactus candy from a booth when we saw Mr. Watts ten feet away, eating caramel corn from a paper sack while he watched us.

  “Good morning,” he said. He was wearing a black suit with a silver shirt and a vest and a string tie. “A friend of yours on the train would like to say hello.”