Dr. Gaynor looked around. Attendance was sparse. Her brothers, Chris and Ted, sat with her in the front row of chairs, while behind were Chris’s latest wife and two of his four children. Ted had come with his partner; there were also several aides and colleagues from the nursing home. Their mother had put resuscitation orders on her advance directive, because, she wrote, she was Catholic and not to do so was a sin. Where she picked up this idea, her sons didn’t know, for she had only been an Easter-and-Christmas Episcopalian most of her life.
“Catholic?” Dr. Gaynor said in a tone of bemusement to her brother Chris, who had picked her up at the airport in his SUV that he was going to get rid of because of the gas, because of the bad times, because of his wife ruining its gears. As they drove directly from the airport to the funeral home, he went on and on in his explosive, bad-tempered way. Dr. Gaynor just repeated, “Catholic? Whatever put that in her mind?”
“At least she didn’t leave everything to the church!” her older brother snapped. “She was really getting loony at the end.”
“They had her on a lot of antidepressants and other medication,” Dr. Gaynor said, intending to explain how these affected the elderly, but Chris had already moved on to fulminate about some oxygen therapy expense the home had ordered for their mother without his consent.
Now, in the sanctuary, as the taped music poured over them, Dr. Gaynor said again to her brothers that she found it odd how her mother had died so quickly. It had been less than a week since Dr. Gaynor had called her; it had been the day that a rabid boy came to her hospital and died and she felt like calling her mother. Her mother hadn’t seemed herself then. Was the doctor visiting her on schedule? The nurses checking her vitals and giving her meds?
“Listen, we should be thankful!” said Chris, her older brother, testily. “They were going to have to move her up to the Alzheimer’s floor, and that would have cost us all double what we’ve been paying.”
Dr. Gaynor did not like her older brother’s complaining tone, which had begun to sound so much like her now-dead mother’s. “Why was that a problem? I was willing to pay. You know I’ve always been good for that!” she said curtly.
“You’re always good for the money. It’s the heavy hauling you run out on.” And on that sharp note, still resonating after the funeral and reception and after more sibling bickering, Dr. Gaynor flew back to Lilongwe, the capital. Yes, God bless everyone, no exceptions, as you would say, Robinson, she said to herself angrily as she thought about her brothers and thought about her mother and looked at the blank landscape of gray clouds from the plane window.
She had already made an international call to Michael, a fellow expat doctor working in Zomba, that she was stopping over in Lilongwe to pick up some supplies before going back to Chitipa and could he come up to see her. Michael and Dr. Gaynor had met at a medical symposium in Lilongwe a year ago and saw immediately they were kindred spirits; it had taken a while for them to sort out the personal aspects, the carnal side of the relationship lasting less than six months. Now they were just best friends, as they told one another, the best of best friends. And Mike was Dr. Gaynor’s best friend. She felt she could tell him anything, and had already told him about her stolen purse by someone called Hastings—Hastings! How the locals loved these English names!—and she had told him about the rabid boy and his fear of her, and how that somehow made her call her mother, who then died, not right after the call, but two days later. Michael had just laughed at her concern that these events could in any way be connected. None of her assistant Robinson’s God’s plan here, he said, just life as usual.
This Dr. Gaynor was thinking about, yes, life as usual, as here she was back in a cat’s whisker to the heat and bustle of Lilongwe, when she turned down Chilembwe Road to the newly refurbished Capital Hotel at the northern end of the city. It was a major hotel, with a long tree-lined driveway and portico under which taxis let out their customers, a doorman in white gloves opening the doors.
Lilongwe, even though the biggest city in Malawi, didn’t really have a center. Like many African cities, it had grown this way and that, from being no more than a cluster of vendors along the side of the road in precolonial times to an open-air market that added a craft market, then morphed into Asian-owned shops next to bus stations and Spar markets, finally now a jacaranda-lined, spread-out capital city, with glassy high-rises and grand-looking stone-and-brick government buildings, all interconnected by small shopping malls, so one either had to find a bus or grab a matola taxi to get from one part of the city to another.
It could become something like Calcutta in time, Dr. Gaynor thought as she walked back to the hotel, her large backpack now filled with boxes of real Band-Aids she had bought at the pharmacy in the small mall she had just visited. Her backpack also contained twelve boxes of rubber gloves, ten boxes of disposable needles, and other ordinary items taken for granted in stateside hospitals, items like the newer type of paper tape instead of the old-fashioned adhesive tape, which was an insult to the skin.
Pleased with her day’s shopping, and the small mall being so close to her hotel, she had decided to walk back instead of taking a taxi. So when the attack came, she was furious with herself. Everyone knew muggings were frequent near the fancy hotels and restaurants, where the mzungus came to spend money. However, since she could see the hotel’s driveway right ahead, she had no expectation that anyone would dare to mug her so close.
But they did, three young men, one of them behind and pulling her by the backpack straps so she fell down backward to the ground while another began cutting the straps to take off the backpack. A third, now that she was down, was on top of her and feeling her across her waist, where, from practice, he must have known most tourists still used money belts for their cash, credit cards, and passports.
“I’m a doctor!” she cried out. “I don’t have anything but medical supplies in the backpack!” And she aimed a fist at the nose of the young man on top of her, scoring such a hit the nose began to bleed, and Hastings Chiume, yelling in pain, felt to see if the slag had broken it, then took out his knife even while she kept yelling, “Listen, for God’s sake, you idiots, I’m a doctor, I’m here to help you people!”
But it wasn’t until he was trying to cut, then yank off the chained purse around her neck that he recognized the woman in her T-shirt and sunglasses as the bitchy doctor who ran the hospital in Chitipa, whom he had bumped into that day two weeks ago in the town. The stupid lady with the bulging purse in her pocket! Then the doctor, suddenly thrusting her head up as she tried to shake him off, said with surprise, “You’re the one who stole my purse!” and, flattered, Hastings wanted to say something boastful to her, like, Hey, Doktorama, you’d better learn not to carry purses and backpacks when I am around, because see what could happen.
But people were beginning to run out of the hotel and down the driveway, and a taxi driver, stopped to let someone off, got out of his car, so Hastings and his friends knew it was time to go. After a few more yanks and jabs with the knife until the chain came apart, Hastings and his friends ran off, the loot later distributed in the rented room they shared with two others.
Meanwhile Dr. Gaynor—arterial blood spurting out from Hastings’s knife cuts, blood she was trying to stem with her hands—kept calling out more and more feebly, “Help me, call an ambulance, for God’s sake! I’m bleeding to death! I can pay! I can pay!”
The next morning Hastings was at his stand at the huge outdoor Wall Market, a place filled with hundreds and hundreds of tables and stalls, around which people milled and bargained. Hastings was squeezed on his left by Mr. Swembe, a sing’anga or witch doctor from Tanzania who was selling bat’s blood as a cure for AIDS. On the other side was Mrs. Champire’s stall; she ironed items brought to her by customers from the secondhand clothes market, using one of her three flatirons kept heated over a charcoal brazier.
On this day Hastings had laid out on his small table, two crates put together, the profits from his gang
’s raids the day before, which included wallets, purses, and Ray-Ban sunglasses, as well as a lot of capsule containers that the others gave Hastings because they had no use for them. He also got most of the stuff they got off Dr. Gaynor, who had really tried to hurt him. Let her suffer now like everyone else!
But she had been right. Her possessions were almost all practical and medical. He could sell the Band-Aid boxes and syringes, but maybe not the rolls of funny paper tape, because when he had tried using some of the tape for his bruised face, the tape broke too easily. There had also been bottles of pills that Hastings had never heard of before but decided to push as the newest brand to help men with problems down below.
Hastings was proud of his table, for he catered mostly to clients searching for things to make them feel better. He had a lot of stuff he got from the chemists’ shops, pills and cough medicines that had expired a long time ago, so they sold them cheap to vendors like him. Other wares came from tourists like the doctor. Tourists always carried a lot of pills on them to ward off death. Besides his medical supplies, Hastings also sold food cans—especially condensed milk cans whose expiration dates were long past—paperbacks either stolen or discarded by tourists, and stolen credit cards, which had to be used fast, before their owners reported the thefts.
A woman carrying a screaming baby on her back came and looked over Hastings’s wares. After a while Hastings couldn’t take it and asked her why was her baby yelling so, did it need to be fed? It wasn’t good for his business. Something had hurt her son on his head, the mother replied, unconcerned, examining the bottles, shaking one of them and watching it cloud up. So Hastings came out from his table and looked at the baby, who was trying to work himself out of the chitenge material holding him fast to his mother’s back. He could see the baby had been bitten by something on the head, causing a big ugly red abscess to fester above his left ear.
Hastings, who considered himself as knowledgeable as anyone about sicknesses, told the mother she should take the baby to see a doctor to have the abscess opened up and the poison let out. If a dog had bitten the baby, the mother should take it to the hospital to see if the baby had rabies, which would kill him and maybe her too if she didn’t act fast. Meanwhile he would use one of his powerful cleaning fluids on it, then bandage it with one of the new Band-Aids he had in stock. Some were Band-Aids for children and had little smiley faces on them.
“A doctor gave them to me to sell,” Hastings told the mother. “But I’ll let you have it free!” And as he painted the baby’s sore with the red stuff out of one of his bottles and put a yellow Band-Aid over the wound, he whistled cheerfully.
Let the Chitipa doctor see him now! I’m a doctor! Hastings mimicked to himself as the mother thanked him formally. Yes, God was good! No exceptions!
Later, did Hastings repent? Did he become a changed man, turn himself in, especially after the American Embassy offered a large reward of five thousand kwacha for information that led to the perpetrator or perpetrators of this unconscionable crime, the murder of Dr. Helen Gaynor?
Of course not. Hastings, after a year’s stay in Nairobi—until interest in the doctor’s death died down—moved on from his medicine table to a small pharmacy, then expanded to own several more, not just in Lilongwe but also in Blantyre, in the south. He married the daughter of a highly placed government official and had many children, for his life wasn’t some work of fiction. His life, and Dr. Gaynor’s, they were part of God’s great plan at work, as Dr. Gaynor’s former assistant Robinson said often and indignantly to the doubters, even back when he, with his now-dead boss’s office key finally in hand, swept and kept Dr. Gaynor’s office safe until the new doctor from Holland arrived.
Contributors’ Notes
Megan Abbott is the Edgar Award–winning author of seven novels, including Dare Me, The Fever, and her latest, You Will Know Me. Her stories have appeared in several collections, including Detroit Noir, The Best American Mystery Stories 2015, and Mississippi Noir. She is also the author of The Street Was Mine, a study of hardboiled fiction and film noir. She was the 2015 winner of the International Thriller Writers and Strand Critics awards for best novel. “The Little Men” was nominated for a 2016 Edgar Award. She lives in Queens, New York.
• The idea for “The Little Men” sprang from real life, a decades-old bit of Hollywood lore. Years ago I read about the sad fate of one of the most successful and charismatic booksellers of Tinseltown’s golden age. His untimely death in 1941 took place in his apartment in one of those lovely courtyard bungalows that loom so large in Hollywood tales, from In a Lonely Place to Day of the Locust to Mulholland Drive. Over the years I remained haunted by the real-life story, and I’m generally a sucker for Hollywood tales anyway—especially ones with dark twists. So when Otto Penzler asked me to set a story with a bookstore/bookseller focus, I finally had my chance to dive deep into that jacaranda-scented world of golden-age Hollywood where everything is beautiful and, quite possibly, deadly.
Steve Almond is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the New York Times bestseller Against Football. His short stories have appeared in the Best American and Pushcart anthologies. His most recent story collection, God Bless America, won the Paterson Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Story Prize. His journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. Almond cohosts the podcast Dear Sugar Radio with Cheryl Strayed. He lives outside Boston with his wife and three children.
• “Okay, Now Do You Surrender?” emerged from one of those thought experiments endemic to the domesticated suburban husband: what would happen if one’s spousal missteps were monitored by mafiosi rather than marriage counselors? It would be idiocy to deny that personal authorial guilt played a formative role. I had no intentions of writing a whodunit, but the moment the mobsters waylaid our hero outside his workplace, the die was cast. We’re all living under surveillance at this point—and always have been. Our conscience does the legwork. It’s what sets us apart from the serpents and the badgers and the whatnots. I’m just happy to have found an unorthodox way to write about marital anguish. It remains one of the essential human mysteries.
Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Scrapper, a Michigan Notable Book for 2016. His previous novel, In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award and an Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year Honor recipient, as well as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. He is also the author of two collections of fiction and a nonfiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II. His next story collection, A Tree or a Person or a Wall, is a fall 2016 publication. A native of Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
• The finding of the boy in “Toward the Company of Others” came to me after a couple months of writing about Kelly scrapping metal in the abandoned buildings of Detroit. I’d wanted to write about metal scrapping and about the urban abandonment in my home state for a while, but I knew very little else when I started. For most of those early weeks, Kelly didn’t even have a name: he was simply “the scrapper,” and I knew very little about him other than his occupation, his deep isolation and loneliness. I went forward with two rules: I would keep him acting, describing the work he did, and I would try to learn who he was by the way he saw the empty schools and churches and houses he gutted for steel and copper. (Most revealing in those days was the habit he had of seeing the abandoned parts of the city as the zone.) I wrote this episode much the way the reader experiences it: I wrote Kelly scrapping the house, unaware there was a boy held in the basement; I then wrote a few sentences where it seemed that Kelly had already found the boy, splitting him into a person who had and had not yet done so, an awareness the reader (and the writer) would share for a moment; and then I wrote the saving of the boy. It was a surprise, but it changed everything else I wrote about Kelly: How would this loner be transformed by saving another person?
What new responsibilities would he take on, and how would he discharge the duties they suggested? And if he came to love the boy in the days to come, might he learn that the boy was still in peril, and then how far would he be willing to go to keep the boy safe?
Bruce Robert Coffin began writing seriously in 2012, several months before retiring from the Portland, Maine, police department. As a detective sergeant with twenty-eight years of service, he supervised all homicide and violent crime investigations for Maine’s largest city. Following the terror attacks of 9/11 he worked for four years with the FBI, earning the Director’s Award (the highest honor a nonagent can receive) for his work in counterterrorism. Coffin’s short fiction has been shortlisted twice for the Al Blanchard Award. He is the author of the John Byron mystery series. He lives and writes in Maine.
• I wrote this story several years ago while trying to finish my first novel. As so often happens, ideas creep in and take hold of the creative reins. I’ve learned not to fight it when this happens. Setting the novel aside, I began to write the tale of an ill-contrived escape attempt from the former Maine State Prison in Thomaston. The story was written in only two sittings, followed by untold hours of rewrites and edits, until eventually it became “Fool Proof.”
Lydia Fitzpatrick was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2012 to 2014. She received an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was a Hopwood Award winner, and she was a 2010–2011 fiction fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is also a recipient of an O. Henry Award and a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her work has appeared in One Story, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, and Opium. Lydia lives with her husband and daughter in Los Angeles. She is working on her first novel.
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