The Best American Noir of the Century

by James Ellroy

  "Go on," I told him.

  Weller didn't look back to check up on me ... Faith, I guess. He kept walking real slow down toward the road.

  I felt funny, I'll tell you, and a couple of times when he went past some real shadowy places in the driveway and could disappear I was like, oh man, this is all messed up. I'm crazy.

  I almost panicked a few times and bolted for the Smitty but I didn't. When Weller got down near the sidewalk, I was actually holding my breath. I expected him to go, I really did. I was looking for that moment—when people tense up, when they're gonna swing or draw down on you or bolt. It's like their bodies're shouting what they're going to be doing before they do it. Only Weller wasn't doing none of that. He walked down to the sidewalk real casual. And he turned and looked up at the face of the Lookout, like he was just another weekender. Then he turned around. He nodded at me. Which is when the car came by. It was a state trooper. Those're the dark cars, and he didn't have the lightbar going. So he was almost on us before I knew it. I guess I was looking at Weller so hard I didn't see nothing else.

  There it was, two doors away, and Weller saw it the same time I did.

  And I thought, That's it. Oh, hell.

  But when I was turning to get the gun, I saw this like flash of motion down by the road. And I stopped cold.

  Could you believe it? Weller'd dropped onto the ground and rolled underneath a tree. I closed the door real fast and watched from the window. The trooper stopped and turned his light on the driveway. The beam —it was real bright—it moved up and down and hit all the bushes and the front of the house, then back to the road. But it was like Weller was digging down into the pine needles to keep from being seen. I mean, he was hiding from those sons of bitches. Doing whatever he could to stay out of the way of the light.

  Then the car moved on, and I saw the lights checking out the house next door and then it was gone. I kept my eyes on Weller the whole time, and he didn't do nothing stupid. I seen him climb out from under the trees and dust himself off. Then he came walking back to the house. Easy, like he was walking to a bar to meet some buddies.

  He came inside and shook his head. Gave this little sigh, like relief. And laughed. Then he held his hands out. I didn't even ask him to.

  I taped 'em up again with adhesive tape, and he sat down in the chair, picked up his scotch, and sipped it.

  And damn, I'll tell you something. The God's truth. I felt good. Naw, naw, it wasn't like I'd seen the light or anything like that. But I was thinking that of all the people in my life —my dad or Sandy or Toth or anybody else —I never did really trust them. I'd never let myself go all the way. And here, tonight, I did. With a stranger and somebody who had the power to do me some harm. It was a pretty scary feeling, but it was also a good feeling.

  It was a little thing, real little. But maybe that's where stuff like this starts. I realized then that I'd been wrong. I could let him go. Oh, I'd keep him tied up here. Gagged. It'd be a day or so before he'd get out. But he'd agree to that. I knew he would. And I'd write his name and address down, let him know I knew where him and his family lived. But that was only part of why I was thinking I'd let him go. I wasn't sure what the rest of it was. But it was something about what'd just happened, something between me and him.

  "How you feel?" he asked.

  I wasn't going to give too much away. No, sir. But I couldn't help saying, "I thought I was gone then. But you did right by me."

  "And you did right, too, Jack." And then he said, "Pour us another round."

  I filled the glasses to the top. We tapped 'em.

  "Here's to you, Jack. And to faith."

  "To faith."

  I tossed back the whiskey, and when I lowered my head, sniffing air through my nose to clear my head, well, that was when he got me. Right in the face.

  He was good, that son of a bitch. Tossed the glass low so that even when I ducked, automatically, the booze caught me in the eyes, and man, that stung like nobody's business. I couldn't believe it. I was howling in pain and going for the knife. But it was too late. He had it all planned out, exactly what I was going to do. How I was gonna move. He brought his knee up into my chin and knocked a couple of teeth out, and I went over onto my back before I could get the knife out my pocket. Then he dropped down on my belly with his knee —I remembered I'd never bothered to tape his feet up again—and he knocked the wind out, and there I was lying, like I was paralyzed, trying to breathe and all. Only I couldn't. And the pain was incredible, but what was worse was the feeling that he didn't trust me.

  I was whispering, "No, no, no. I was going to, man. You don't understand. I was going to let you go."

  I couldn't see nothing and couldn't really hear nothing either, my ears were roaring so much. I was gasping, "You don't understand you don't understand."

  Man, the pain was so bad. So bad ...

  Weller must've got the tape off his hands, chewed through it, I guess, cause he was rolling me over. I felt him tape my hands together, then grab me and drag me over to a chair, tape my feet to the legs. He got some water and threw it in my face to wash the whiskey out of my eyes.

  He sat down in a chair in front of me. And he just stared at me for a long time while I caught my breath. He picked up his glass, poured more scotch. I shied away, thinking he was going to throw it in my face again, but he just sat there, sipping it and staring at me.

  "You... I was going to let you go. I was."

  "I know," he said. Still calm.

  "You know?"

  "I could see it in your face. I've been a salesman for twenty-five years, remember? I know when I've closed a deal."

  I'm a pretty strong guy, 'specially when I'm mad, and I tried real hard to break through that tape but there was no doing it. "Goddamn you!" I shouted. "You said you weren't going to turn me in. You, all your goddamn talk about faith..."

  "Shhhh," Weller whispered. And he sat back, crossing his legs. Easy as could be. Looking me up and down. "That fellow your friend shot back at the drugstore. The customer at the counter?"

  I nodded slowly.

  "He was my friend. It's his place my wife and I are staying at this weekend. With all our kids."

  I just stared at him. His friend? What was he saying?

  "I didn't know—"

  "Be quiet," he said, real soft. "I've known him for years. Gerry was one of my best friends."

  "I didn't want nobody to die. I—"

  "But somebody did die. And it was your fault."

  "Toth..."

  He whispered, "It was your fault."

  "All right, you tricked me. Call the cops. Get it over with, you goddamn liar."

  "You really don't understand, do you?" He shook his head. Why was he so calm? His hands weren't shaking. He wasn't looking around, nervous and all. Nothing like that. He said, "If I'd wanted to turn you in, I would just've flagged down that squad car a few minutes ago. But I said I wouldn't do that. And I won't. I gave you my word I wouldn't tell the cops a thing about you. And I won't."

  "Then what do you want?" I shouted. "Tell me." Trying to bust through that tape. And as he unfolded my Buck knife with a click, I was thinking of something I told him.

  Oh man, no ... Oh, no.

  "Yeah, being blind, I guess. That'd be the worst thing I could think of"

  "What're you going to do?"

  "What'm I going to do, Jack?" Weller said. He cut the last bit of tape off his wrists with the Buck, then looked up at me. "Well, I'll tell you. I spent a good bit of time tonight proving to you that you shouldn't kill me. And now..."

  "What, man? What?"

  "Now I'm going to spend a good bit of time proving to you that you should've."

  Then, real slow, Weller finished his scotch and stood up. And he walked toward me, that weird little smile on his face.

  FAITHLESS

  1997: Joyce Carol Dates

  JOYCE CAROL OATES (1938–) was born and raised in rural upstate New York and graduated valedictorian of her class at
Syracuse University (where she won the 1959 college short story contest sponsored by Mademoiselle). She received her MA at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she met her future husband of forty-seven years, Raymond Smith. After teaching at the University of Detroit and the University of Windsor (Ontario), she became a professor of creative writing at Princeton University in 1978, a position she still holds.

  She wrote relentlessly from the age of fourteen, producing novels and then throwing them away as she honed her talent. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), has been followed by more than fifty others, as well as more than thirty short story collections, ten volumes of poetry, a dozen collections of essays and criticism, eight novellas, eight collections of plays, and eight books for children and young adults. Although some critics fault her for her prolificacy (as they might have Dickens in another era), few cavil with her excellence. She has been a deserving candidate for the Nobel Prize for a quarter century, only her lack of strident political views denying it to her. She has been nominated for an astonishing six National Book Awards, winning for the novel them in 1970. Generally regarded as among her greatest works are A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967); Black Water (1992), a fictional version of the Chappaquiddick incident, in which Senator Ted Kennedy caused the death of a campaign aide; We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), a national bestseller when it was picked for Oprah's Book Club; and Blonde (2000), a fictional account of the life of Marilyn Monroe. Her book-length essay On Boxing (1987) has been called the best writing on any sport by anyone. Much of Oates's work deals with crime and violence, notably the psychological suspense novels written under the pen names Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

  "Faithless" was originally published in the winter 1997 issue of Kenyon Review. It was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 1998 and served as the title story for Oates's 2001 collection Faithless: Tales of Transgression.

  ***

  1

  THE LAST TIME my mother Cornelia Nissenbaum and her sister Constance saw their mother was the day before she vanished from their lives forever, April 11, 1923.

  It was a rainy-misty morning. They'd been searching for their mother because something was wrong in the household; she hadn't come downstairs to prepare breakfast so there wasn't anything for them except what their father gave them, glutinous oatmeal from the previous morning hastily reheated on the stove sticking to the bottom of the pan and tasting of scorch. Their father had seemed strange to them, smiling but not-seeing in that way of his like Reverend Dieckman too fierce in his pulpit Sunday mornings, intoning the Word of God. His eyes were threaded with blood and his face was still pale from the winter but flushed, mottled. In those days he was a handsome man but stern-looking and severe. Gray-grizzled side-whiskers and a spade-shaped beard, coarse and grizzled too with gray, but thick springy-sleek black hair brushed back from his forehead in a crest. The sisters were fearful of their father without their mother to mediate among them, it was as if none of them knew who they were without her.

  Connie chewed her lip and worked up her nerve to ask where was Momma? and their father said, hitching up his suspenders, on his way outside, "Your mother's where you'll find her."

  The sisters watched their father cross the mud-puddled yard to where a crew of hired men was waiting in the doorway of the big barn. It was rye-planting season and always in spring in the Chautauqua Valley there was worry about rain: too much rain and the seed would be washed away or rot in the soil before it could sprout. My mother Cornelia would grow to adulthood thinking how blessings and curses fell from the sky with equal authority, like hard-pelting rain. There was God, who set the world in motion, and who intervened sometimes in the affairs of men, for reasons no one could know. If you lived on a farm there was weather, always weather, every morning was weather and every evening at sundown calculating the next day's, the sky's moods meant too much. Always casting your glance upward, outward, your heart set to quicken.

  That morning. The sisters would never forget that morning. We knew something was wrong, we thought Momma was sick. The night before having heard— what, exactly? Voices. Voices mixed with dreams, and the wind. On that farm, at the brink of a ten-mile descent to the Chautauqua River, it was always windy — on the worst days the wind could literally suck your breath away!—like a ghost, a goblin. An invisible being pushing up close beside you, sometimes even inside the house, even in your bed, pushing his mouth (or muzzle) to yours and sucking out the breath.

  Connie thought Nelia was silly, a silly-baby, to believe such. She was eight years old and skeptical-minded. Yet maybe she believed it, too? Liked to scare herself, the way you could almost tickle yourself, with such wild thoughts.

  Connie, who was always famished, and after that morning would be famished for years, sat at the oilcloth-covered table and ate the oatmeal her father had spooned out for her, devoured it, scorch-clots and all, her head of fair-frizzy braids lowered and her jaws working quickly. Oatmeal sweetened with top-milk on the very edge of turning sour, and coarse brown sugar. Nelia, who was fretting, wasn't able to swallow down more than a spoon or two of hers so Connie devoured that, too. She would remember that part of the oatmeal was hot enough to burn her tongue and other parts were icebox-cold. She would remember that it was all delicious.

  The girls washed their dishes in the cold-water sink and let the oatmeal pan soak in scummy soapsuds. It was time for Connie to leave for school but both knew she could not go, not today. She could not leave to walk two miles to the school with that feeling something is wrong, nor could she leave her little sister behind. Though when Nelia snuffled and wiped her nose on both her hands Connie cuffed her on the shoulder and scolded, "Piggy-piggy."

  This, a habit of their mother's when they did something that was only mildly disgusting.

  Connie led the way upstairs to the big bedroom at the front of the house that was Momma and Pappa's room and that they were forbidden to enter unless specifically invited; for instance if the door was open and Momma was cleaning inside, changing bedclothes so she'd call out Come in, girls! smiling in her happy mood so it was all right and they would not be scolded. Come in, give me a hand, which turned into a game shaking out sheets, fluffing out pillowcases to stuff heavy goose-feather pillows inside, Momma and Connie and Nelia laughing together. But this morning the door was shut. There was no sound of Momma inside. Connie dared to turn the doorknob, push the door open slowly, and they saw, yes, to their surprise there was their mother lying on top of the unmade bed, partly dressed, wrapped in an afghan. My God, it was scary to see Momma like that, lying down at such an hour of the morning! Momma, who was so brisk and capable and who routed them out of bed if they lingered, Momma with little patience for Connie's lazy-tricks as she called them or for Nelia's sniffles, tummyaches, and baby-fears.

  "Momma?"—Connie's voice was cracked.

  "Mom-ma?"—Nelia whimpered.

  Their mother groaned and flung an arm across one of the pillows lying crooked beside her. She was breathing hard, like a winded horse, her chest rising and falling so you could see it and her head was flung back on a pillow and she'd placed a wetted cloth across her eyes mask-like so half her face was hidden. Her dark-blond hair was disheveled, unplaited, coarse and lusterless as a horse's mane, unwashed for days. That rich rank smell of Momma's hair when it needed washing. You remember such smells, the sisters would say, some of them not-so-nice smells, all your life. And the smell in their parents' forbidden room of — was it talcum powder, sweaty armpits, a sourish-sweet fragrance of bedclothes that no matter how frequently laundered with detergent and bleach were never truly fresh. A smell of bodies. Adult bodies. Yeasty, stale. Pappa's tobacco (he rolled his own crude paper cigarettes, he chewed tobacco in a thick tarry-black wad) and Pappa's hair oil and that special smell of Pappa's shoes, the black Sunday shoes always kept polished. (His work boots, etc., he kept downstairs in the closed-in porch by the rear door called the "entry"') In the step-in closet close by the bed, behind an unhemmed length o
f chintz, was a blue-speckled porcelain chamber pot with a detachable lid and a rim that curled neatly under it, like a lip.

  The sisters had their own chamber pot—their potty, as it was called. There was no indoor plumbing in John Nissenbaum's farmhouse as in any farmhouse in the Chautauqua Valley well into the 1930s and in poorer homes well into the 1940s, and even beyond. One hundred yards behind the house, beyond the silo, was the outhouse, the latrine, the "privy." But you would not want to make that trip in cold weather or in rain or in the pitch-black of night, not if you could help it.

  Of course the smell of urine and a fainter smell of excrement must have been everywhere, the sisters conceded, years later. As adults, reminiscing. But it was masked by the barnyard smell, probably. Nothing worse than pig manure, after all!

  At least, we weren't pigs.

  Anyway, there was Momma, on the bed. The bed that was so high from the floor you had to raise a knee to slide up on it, and grab on to whatever you could. And the horsehair mattress, so hard and ungiving. The cloth over Momma's eyes she hadn't removed and beside Momma in the rumpled bedclothes her Bible. Faced own. Pages bent. That Bible her mother-in-law Grandma Nissenbaum had given her for a wedding present, seeing she hadn't one of her own. It was smaller than the heavy black family Bible and it was made of limp ivory-leather covers and had onionskin pages the girls were allowed to examine but not to turn without Momma's supervision; the Bible that would disappear with Gretel Nissenbaum, forever.

  The girls begged, whimpered. "Momma? Momma, are you sick?"

  At first there was no answer. Just Momma's breath coming quick and hard and uneven. And her olive-pale skin oily with heat like fever. Her legs were tangled in the afghan, her hair was strewn across the pillow. They saw the glint of Momma's gold cross on a thin gold chain around her neck, almost lost in her hair. (Not only a cross but a locket, too: when Momma opened it there was, inside, a tiny strand of silver hair once belonging to a woman the sisters had never known, Momma's own grandmother she'd loved so when she was a little girl.) And there were Momma's breasts, almost exposed!— heavy, lush, beautiful almost spilling out of a white eyelet slip, rounded like sacs holding warm liquid, and the nipples dark and big as eyes. You weren't supposed to stare at any part of a person's body but how could you help it? — especially Connie who was fascinated by such, guessing how one day she'd inhabit a body like Momma's. Years ago she'd peeked at her mother's big milk-swollen breasts when Nelia was still nursing, jealous, awed. Nelia was now five years old and could not herself recall nursing at all; would come one day to believe, stubborn and disdainful, that she had never nursed, had only been bottle-fed.