by Louise Penny
I heard two car doors open and then close and then Arjoon was at the doorway, followed by a very large light-brown-skinned man with a curly Mohawk and a thick black beard. Arjoon grinned as he looked at me, revealing those crooked teeth.
“Mr. . . . Buon . . . fig . . . lio,” he said, drawing out my name with intended drama. “Very good of you to invite us here at this late hour. It has been a long day and I’m tired. I expected to be asleep by now in one of LuJean’s comfortable beds and dreaming about her famous breakfast.”
I kept my eye on the big man as Arjoon walked past me to the bar.
He glanced at the bar, staring at the breadfruits there. “I came to St. Pierre bearing breadfruit, a carton of twelve. I have accounted for ten—two went missing. Are those my missing breadfruits?”
I didn’t answer. “You didn’t have to do what you did to Mr. Grainey,” I said instead. Arjoon turned back to face me. I looked back at him.
“Oh, but we did. He had something that belonged to me and would not tell me where it was. We . . . well, not we, really, but my associate Parker here did his best to get him to tell us where we could find my property, but the old man just wasn’t much of a talker.” Arjoon was studying me—trying to read my expression. “I know you gave him what was mine. The poor man suffered because of what you did. But how would you know? You shouldn’t really blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault at all.”
His smile returned, and I felt my mouth go dry. I sensed the big man behind me. I wanted to get up from my chair. It took all I had to stay put.
“I’m hoping our business can conclude without more violence,” he said, again turning to the breadfruits on the bar. “I would very much like that. I would very much like to collect what is mine and leave this island. It was a mistake to come here, and I take full responsibility for that.”
He leaned against the bar and picked up one of the breadfruits, weighing it in his hand. He looked back at me. His smile was gone. He pulled out a knife from his pocket and opened it, the blade glinting from the lighting behind the bar. He slit the breadfruit open with the knife. Pulp and seeds spilled onto the bar. He quickly cut open the other—again just pulp and seeds. He shook his head as he looked at me and then glanced at the big man behind me.
Before I knew it I was lifted up off my chair and thrown hard against the side of the bar. I felt the air whoosh out of me. I tried to get onto my feet, but the big man, Parker, had me again; this time his fist was driving hard into my chest, knocking me back again.
I slowly tried to stand. Parker was moving toward me again. I needed to get to my feet. I had to get up. Arjoon moved in front of me and held out his palm, keeping Parker away from me. “This is no game, Mr. Buonfiglio,” he said, bending over me so close I could see the blackheads on his pockmarked face and smell the curry he ate for dinner on his breath. “Where is my property?”
I stood straight up now. My chest felt as if it had been hit by a sledgehammer. I kept my eyes on Arjoon. “You shouldn’t have hurt that man,” I whispered to him.
Arjoon just shook his head and pulled his hand back. Parker moved to me again. This time I set myself so I had one leg in front of the other, leaning back a bit on my rear, right leg. It had been a long time since I had done this. I hadn’t trained at all since I left New York. I never had the desire. That was part of my past; St. Pierre was my future, whatever was left of it. I didn’t think there would be a need for anything like this, but now there was. I flexed the ball of my left leg and, opening up my back right leg, swung up my left leg, whipping it around as fast and straight as I could, my shin driving hard into Parker’s neck, the roundhouse kick sending him backward and down onto one of the bar’s few tables, shattering it.
The kick stunned me as well; my leg was throbbing and the many nerves in my back buzzing like high-voltage jolts of electrical shocks. Parker was down, but the kick was not forceful enough to put him out. He got up surprisingly quickly and grabbed hold of me. He pinned my left arm against my chest tightly as he delivered jabs to my neck and jaw, but there wasn’t enough behind them to take me out. Still, each blow was like a shovel to my head. I wasn’t sure how much more I could take. He was much younger. He was much bigger. And my window was closing fast. He had his left arm tight around my own left arm and chest, holding me firm as he delivered his blows, but he had left my hips and legs free. Again, trying to draw on my training from years ago, I quickly swiveled, and almost leaving my feet, I drew the fist and elbow of my right arm up in a rapid motion, spinning it around at full force and driving it through Parker’s temple, just above his eye. The diagonal elbow strike stunned Parker, and his arms went lifeless now as they fell from my body. He went down again. I turned, poised now in a fighting position. But this time he didn’t get up.
The pain from the blow to Parker’s head shot through my elbow down my arm and back up to my neck. It was a numbing tingle that made my legs sway. I was about to turn to Arjoon when I felt the cold gun muzzle against the back of my head. “Put your head on the bar,” he commanded. I did as he said. “Very impressive, Mr. Buonfiglio. But now it’s over. I have no more time for any of this. I will kill you. And though I liked meeting and chatting with you earlier, now I don’t like you at all and will take enormous pleasure in seeing your brains splattered on your shiny bar. So one last time before I take my leave from this backwater island: where is my property?”
With my head pressed to the bar, I heard his words, but I wasn’t thinking about them. They were just fading background noise. Instead I thought about how heavy the smoke was and how it singed my throat as I made my way up those stairs on that June morning. I was as close to death then as I was now. But I kept moving. I survived and helped others survive. I didn’t do it to be a hero. I had my own selfish—dishonorable—reasons. But they said I was a hero. And that was my curse. I survived that day and many times wished I hadn’t. Did I want to survive this one? I wasn’t sure.
“Okay now.” I heard him grunt and then I heard what sounded like a shot. I expected pain. But all I felt was the force of his body on top of mine.
I pulled myself out from under him. The back of his head was caved in; even that unsightly male hair bun was matted with blood and indented into his skull.
I slowly turned around. Tubby was there. In his hand was a cricket bat, the blood from Arjoon’s skull discoloring its wooden finish. I fell back onto one of the barstools. My body was a painful throb that wouldn’t stop.
“I see a move like that on TV once,” he said. “Muay Thai?” His eyes were on me in a combination of awe and pity.
I looked at him but didn’t answer. I could hear my heart pounding in my chest. I was too tired to talk.
“You go to my ma’s house and take her breadfruit,” Tubby said to me, his eyes on the beat-up mess in front of him. “Next time ask me and I bring the breadfruit to you. Next time you’ll know better than to hide de stuff from your partner.”
Next time? There better not be a next time, I thought to myself. I gave him a weary nod. “Yeah, Tubby, I will,” I mumbled while I continued to try to suck air back into my lungs.
When my heart slowed enough for me to speak more clearly, I pointed to the door to the back. “Tubby, go out to the smoker,” I said. “There’s a big jar in it. Bring it here.”
He put down the bloody cricket bat. I stared at it while I waited. A few moments later he returned, holding a half-gallon jar filled with the brown packets of powder. “Dis what dat man come for? He bring it in the breadfruit?” He laughed to himself and shook his head. “Dem think of everything.”
The sound of McWilliams’s police car siren was slowly getting louder as it made its way up the hill.
“One more favor, Tubby,” I asked, looking up at him. I still couldn’t move from where I was.
He put the jar on the bar next to the split breadfruits and looked at me, waiting to see what it was I wanted.
“Make me one of those rum punches of yours.”
A small smil
e began to form on his face. “‘One parts sour, two parts sweet,” he rhymed. “Three parts weak . . . and four parts . . . strong.”
I was able to finally smile.
He kept his eyes on me and continued the rhyme as he went behind the bar and ducked under to grab a bottle of rum. “Drink it all . . .” He stood back up and pulled a glass from the drainer. “. . . and you’ll know that you belong.”
I drank it all.
Contributors’ Notes
In the words of the New York Times, Louis Bayard “reinvigorates historical fiction,” rendering the past “as if he’d witnessed it firsthand.” Bayard’s affinity for bygone eras can be felt in both his recent young adult novel, the highly praised Lucky Strikes (named one of Amazon’s top 2017 titles), and his string of critically acclaimed adult historical thrillers: Roosevelt’s Beast, The School of Night, The Black Tower, The Pale Blue Eye, and Mr. Timothy.
A New York Times Notable author, he has been nominated for both the Edgar and the Dagger Award. He is also a nationally recognized essayist and critic whose articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Salon. An instructor at George Washington University, he is on the faculty of the Yale Writers’ Conference and was the author of the popular Downton Abbey recaps for the New York Times.
• How did I go from writing about history to writing about the imminent future? It goes back to the day my mother asked me about my father.
By then Dad had been dead for three years, and my own memories of him were colored by the Alzheimer’s that in his final days had swallowed him whole. Mom’s dementia, by contrast, was gentler and more incremental, and if she sometimes blanked on the names of her grandchildren or forgot something that had happened to us when we were kids, she was able to find some other memory to cling to, even create new ones here and there.
So when she began quizzing me about my dad, I took it at first for minor fact-checking. But then the questions began to run deeper. What did he do for a living? What did he look like? What did he sound like? What was he like? The man with whom she’d spent half a century, the man she’d grieved for so wantonly three years earlier, had simply vanished.
From that realization, a new kind of grief—and, perhaps by way of understanding, a pair of thought experiments.
#1: Imagine learning on unimpeachable authority that from here on out your life will be a continuous cognitive decline. You will go from forgetting people’s names to forgetting people. The smiles and faces dearest to you in the world will, sooner or later, be utterly lost to you, and there will be no reversal, no appeal, no reprieve. Do you get out now? While the going’s good? I suspect most of us wouldn’t. Living is a hard habit to kick, after all, so we would probably muddle along, congratulating ourselves on what we were still able to recall, and by the time the shadows had well and truly descended, it would be too late. We would no longer even be able to mourn our losses, because we would have no memory of what we’d lost.
#2: Now imagine that someone offers to make the call for you—gauge the exact moment when you have slipped into oblivion and afford you the release you no longer have the capacity or awareness to effect for yourself. Do you take them up on it? Knowing that you won’t recall having made the transaction? If so, what will your criterion be? The point beyond which you will not suffer yourself to slip?
Those are the end-of-life questions that haunt “Banana Triangle Six.” It goes without saying that they haunt me too.
Andrew Bourelle is the author of the novel Heavy Metal and coauthor with James Patterson of Texas Ranger. His short stories have been published widely in literary journals and fiction anthologies. This is his second story selected for inclusion in a volume of The Best American Mystery Stories. Bourelle lives in Albuquerque with his wife, Tiffany, and two children, Ben and Aubrey. He teaches writing at the University of New Mexico.
• Rhonda Parrish asked me to contribute to an anthology she was editing titled D Is for Dinosaur. Each author was assigned a letter of the alphabet and was asked to write a story about dinosaurs using that letter. I looked up dinosaurs whose names began with Y and came across the Yangchuanosaurus, otherwise known as the Yangchuan Lizard. I kicked around some ideas for a few months, but I couldn’t think of anything that I was in love with. Then, as the deadline loomed, I had a strange dream that provided the premise for the story. I can’t remember much of the original dream. It certainly wasn’t as coherent as the story turned out to be. But the dream gave me my idea: a drug made of dinosaur bones. I wrote the first draft in a rush. It was one of those magical writing experiences where you have just the seed of an idea and the rest of the story grows during the act of writing.
I’m indebted to Rhonda Parrish for publishing the story and for her helpful edits. And thanks to Otto Penzler and Louise Penny for including “Y Is for Yangchuan Lizard” in this volume of The Best American Mystery Stories.
T. C. Boyle is the author of twenty-eight books of fiction, including, most recently, The Relive Box and Other Stories (2017), The Terranauts (2016), and the forthcoming novel Outside Looking In. He has published his collected stories in two volumes, T. C. Boyle Stories (1998) and T. C. Boyle Stories II (2013), and was the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award in Short Fiction in 1999 and the Rea Award for the Short Story in 2014. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
• Over the course of my career I’ve taken it as a challenge to inhabit the points of view of characters of diverse ethnicity, gender, and age, attempting, like most artists, to examine the human condition from every angle possible. Early on, when I wasn’t nearly so close in age as I am now to Mason Alimonti, I got a letter from my grad-school mentor praising me for my insight into the worldview of the elderly in my stories and novels, and that praise meant as much to me as any prize or blue ribbon. I figured I must have been doing something right, because he was old and I was young, and if anybody knew how the elderly perceive things, he certainly did. But then for me, for all of us, it’s an act of imaginative projection to enter that limbic world of the aged—barring accident or disease we will all someday get there, and when we do there will be predators like Graham Shovelin awaiting us.
I received a letter very similar to the one Mason did—in fact, I even lifted certain phrases from it for the sake of authenticity. It was so obviously a fraud I was amazed that anyone could be taken in by it, but then the news is chock-full of stories about people who have been. I didn’t have to look too far. A friend of mine fell for a similar scheme, which cost him everything he had—his business, his family, his friends—and no amount of evidence or reasoning could ever persuade him that he’d been taken. Once you invest—financially, yes, but emotionally, in the deepest repository of hope and expectation—you’re hooked. And once you’re hooked, you’re going to be landed, just like Mason.
Michael Bracken is the author of eleven books, including the private-eye novel All White Girls, and more than twelve hundred short stories in several genres. His short crime fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Espionage Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and in many other anthologies and periodicals. A recipient of the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for lifetime achievement in short mystery fiction, Bracken has won two Derringer Awards and been shortlisted for a third, and he has received numerous awards for advertising copywriting. Additionally, Bracken has edited six crime fiction anthologies, including the three-volume Fedora series and the forthcoming The Eyes of Texas. He lives, writes, and eats barbecue with his wife, Temple, in Central Texas.
• Each time we visit my wife’s parents, we spend much of the three-hour drive brainstorming story ideas while Temple notes them on a legal pad. Shortly before one such trip, I read the submission call for Noir at the Salad Bar, which sought stories that “feature food or drink, restaurants, bars or the culinary arts,” and during that trip my wife filled two handwritten pages with every food-related
story idea we could imagine.
Then she suggested barbecue.
By the time we arrived at her parents’ home, I knew the story’s setting and primary characters. While Temple visited with family, I filled several more pages of the legal pad with notes, and I created a rough outline. But after inspiration comes perspiration, and the story required several drafts before becoming “Smoked.”
James Lee Burke is the author of thirty-six novels and two collections of short stories. He and his wife, Pearl, live in western Montana.
• I wrote “The Wild Side of Life” in part as a tribute to Jimmie Heap, the man who recorded the original of the most famous song in the history of country music. The postwar era marked our entry into neocolonialism and the building of a petrochemical empire, but the vision of those who worked in oil exploration was confined to coastal swamps dotted with cypress and gum trees and live oaks strung with Spanish moss, and beer joints and honky-tonk bands on the levee and jukebox music that played until two in the morning.
People who used to pick cotton and break corn now worked on drilling rigs and strung pipe, and had money and felt an independence they’d never experienced. The southern oligarchy had been broken. Unfortunately, an equally dark reality lay just beyond our ken. Oil companies don’t pick fights, but they don’t take prisoners either. The bombing I describe took place in South America in 1956.
I’ve never gotten Jimmie Heap out of my head. Or Kitty Wells, who sang the rebuttal to Jimmie’s lament. It was a grand time to be around. Anyone who says otherwise has no idea what he’s talking about.
Previously a television director, theater technician, and law student, Lee Child is the author of the globally best-selling Jack Reacher series, evaluated by Forbes magazine as the strongest brand in contemporary fiction. He was born in Britain and lives in New York City.