The Best American Noir of the Century

by James Ellroy

  At the doctor's office the young surgeon frowned and removed his glasses when he told Kirxy that the cancer was advancing, that he'd need to check into the hospital in Mobile immediately. It was way past time. "Just look at your color," the surgeon said. Kirxy stood, thanked the man, put on his hat, and limped outside. He went by the post office and placed his order for the Tarzan books. He shopped for supplies in the Dollar Store and the Piggly Wiggly, had the checkout boys put the boxes in the front seat beside him. Coming out of the drugstore, he remembered that it was Saturday, that there'd be chicken fights today. And possible news about Frank David.

  At Heflin's, Kirxy paid his five-dollar admission and let Heflin help him to a seat in the bottom of the stands. He poured some whiskey in his coffee and sat studying the crowd. Nobody had mentioned Frank David, but a few old-timers had offered their sympathies on the deaths of Kent and Scott. Down in the pit the Cajuns were back, and during the eighth match—one of the Louisiana whites versus a local red, the tall bald Cajun stooping and circling the tangled birds and licking his lips as his rooster swarmed the other and hooked it, the barn smoky and dark, rain splattering the tin roof — the door swung open.

  Instantly the crowd was hushed. Feathers settled to the ground. Even the Cajuns knew who he was. He stood at the door, unarmed, his hands on his hips. A wiry man. He lifted his chin and people tried to hide their drinks. His giant ears. The hooked nose. The eyes. Bird handlers reached over their shoulders, pulling at the numbered pieces of masking tape on their backs. The two handlers and the referee in the ring sidled out, leaving the roosters.

  For a full minute Frank David stood staring. People stepped out the back door. Climbed out windows. Half-naked boys in the rafters were frozen like monkeys hypnotized by a snake.

  Frank David's gaze didn't stop on Kirxy but settled instead on the roosters, the white one pecking out the red's eyes. Outside, trucks roared to life, backfiring like gunshots. Kirxy placed his hands on his knees. He rose, turned up his coat collar, and flung his coffee out. Frank David still hadn't looked at him. Kirxy planted his cane and made his way out the back door and through the mud.

  Not a person in sight, just tailgates vanishing into the woods.

  From inside his truck, Kirxy watched Frank David walk away from the barn and head toward the trees. Now he was just a bowlegged man with white hair. Kirxy felt behind him for the .22 rifle with one hand while rolling down the window with the other. He had a little trouble aiming the gun with his shaky hands. He pulled back the bolt and inserted a cartridge into the chamber. Flicked the safety off. The sight of the rifle wavered between Frank David's shoulders as he walked. As if an old man like Kirxy were nothing to fear. Kirxy ground his teeth: that was why the bastard hadn't come to his deer massacre — an old storekeeper wasn't worth it, wasn't dangerous.

  Closing one eye, Kirxy pulled the trigger. He didn't hear the shot, though later he would notice his ears ringing.

  Frank David's coat bloomed out to the side and he missed a step. He stopped and put his hand to his lower right side and looked over his shoulder at Kirxy, who was fumbling with the rifle's bolt action. Then Frank David was gone, just wasn't there, there were only the trees, bent in the rain, and shreds of fog in the air. For a moment, Kirxy wondered if he'd even seen a man at all, if he'd shot at something out of his own imagination, if the cancer that had started in his pancreas had inched up along his spine into his brain and was deceiving him, forming men out of the air and walking them across fields, giving them hands and eyes and the power to disappear.

  From inside the barn, the rooster crowed. Kirxy remembered Wayne. He hung the rifle in its rack and started his truck, gunned the engine. He banged over the field, flattening saplings and a fence, and though he couldn't feel his toes, he drove very fast.

  Not until two days later, in the VA hospital in Mobile, would Kirxy finally begin to piece it all together. Parts of that afternoon were patchy and hard to remember: shooting Frank David, going back to the store and finding it empty, no sign of a struggle, the .30–06 gone, as if Wayne had walked out on his own and taken the gun. Kirxy could remember getting back into his truck. He'd planned to drive to Grove Hill—the courthouse, the game warden's office—and find Frank David, but somewhere along the way he passed out behind the wheel and veered off the road into a ditch. He barely remembered the rescue workers. The sirens. Goodloe himself pulling Kirxy out.

  Later that night two coon hunters had stumbled across Wayne, wandering along the river, his face and shirt covered in blood, the .30–06 nowhere to be found.

  When Goodloe had told the semiconscious Kirxy what happened, the storekeeper turned silently to the window, where he saw only the reflected face of an old, failed, dying man.

  And later still, in the warm haze of morphine, Kirxy lowered his eyelids and let his imagination unravel and retwine the mystery of Frank David: it was as if Frank David himself appeared in the chair where Goodloe had sat, as if the game warden broke the seal on a bottle of Jim Beam and leaned forward on his elbows and touched the bottle to Kirxy's cracked lips and whispered to him a story about boots going over land and not making a sound, about rain washing the blood trail away even as the boots passed. About a tired old game warden taking his hand out of his coat and seeing the blood from Kirxy's bullet there, feeling it trickle down his side. About the boy in the back of his truck, handcuffed, gagged, blindfolded. About driving carefully through deep ruts in the road. Stopping behind Esther's empty house and carrying the kicking boy inside on his shoulder.

  When the blindfold is removed, Wayne has trouble focusing but knows where he is because of her smell. Bacon and soap. Cigarettes, dust. Frank David holds what looks like a pillowcase. He comes across the room and puts the pillowcase down. He rubs his eyes and sits on the bed beside Wayne. He opens a book of matches and lights a cigarette. Holds the filtered end to Wayne's lips, but the boy doesn't inhale. Frank David puts the cigarette in his own lips, the embers glow. Then he drops it on the floor, crushes it out with his boot. Picks up the butt and slips it into his shirt pocket. He puts his hand over the boy's watery eyes, the skin of his palm dry and hard. Cool. Faint smell of blood. He moves his fingers over Wayne's nose, lips, chin. Stops at his throat and holds the boy tightly but not painfully. In a strange way Wayne can't understand, he finds it reassuring. His thudding heart slows. Something is struggling beside his shoulder and Frank David takes the thing from the bag. Now the smell in the room changes. Wayne begins to thrash and whip his head from side to side.

  "Goddamn, son," Frank David whispers. "I hate to civilize you."

  Goodloe began going to the veterans' hospital in Mobile once a week. He brought Kirxy cigarettes from his store. There weren't any private rooms available, and the beds around the storekeeper were filled with dying ex-soldiers who never talked, but Kirxy was beside a window and Goodloe would raise the glass and prop it open with a novel. They smoked together and drank whiskey from paper cups, listening for nurses.

  It was the tall mean one.

  "One more time, goddamn it," she said, coming out of nowhere and plucking the cigarettes from their lips so quickly they were still puckered.

  Sometimes Goodloe would wheel Kirxy down the hall in his chair, the IV rack attached by a stainless steel contraption with a black handle the shape of a flower. They would go to the elevator and ride down three floors to a covered area where people smoked and talked about the weather. There were nurses and black cafeteria workers in white uniforms and hairnets and people visiting other people and a few patients. Occasionally in the halls they'd see some mean old fart Kirxy knew and they'd talk about hospital food or chicken fighting. Or the fact that Frank David had surprised everyone and decided to retire after only a month of quiet duty, that the new game warden was from Texas. And a nigger to boot.

  Then Goodloe would wheel Kirxy back along a long window, out of which you could see the tops of oak trees.

  On one visit, Goodloe told Kirxy they'd taken Wayne out of intensiv
e care. Three weeks later he said the boy'd been discharged.

  "I give him a ride to the store," Goodloe said. This was in late May and Kirxy was a yellow skeleton with hands that shook.

  "I'll stop by and check on him every evening" Goodloe went on. "He'll be OK, the doctor says. Just needs to keep them bandages changed. I can do that, I reckon."

  They were quiet then, for a time, just the coughs of the dying men and the soft swishing of nurses' thighs and the hum of IV machines.

  "Goodloe," Kirxy whispered, "I'd like you to help me with something"

  Goodloe leaned in to hear, an unlit cigarette behind his ear like a pencil.

  Kirxy's tongue was white and cracked, his breath awful. "I'd like to change my will" he said, "make the boy beneficiary."

  "All right," Goodloe said.

  "I'm obliged," whispered Kirxy. He closed his eyes.

  Near the end he was delirious. He said he saw a little black creature at the foot of his bed. Said it had him by the toe. In surprising fits of strength, he would throw his water pitcher at it, or his box of tissues, or the TV Guide. Restraints were called for. His coma was a relief to everyone, and he died quietly in the night.

  In Kirxy's chair in the store, Wayne didn't seem to hear Goodloe's questions. The sheriff had done some looking in the Grove Hill library—"research" was the modern word— and discovered that one species of cobra spat venom at its victim's eyes, but there weren't such snakes in southern Alabama. Anyway, the hospital lab had confirmed that it was the venom of a cottonmouth that had blinded Wayne. The question, of course, was who had put the venom in his eyes. Goodloe shuddered to think of it, how they'd found Wayne staggering about, howling in pain, bleeding from his tear ducts, the skin around his eye sockets dissolving, exposing the white ridges of his skull.

  In the investigation, several local blacks including Euphrates Morrisette stated to Goodloe that the youngest Gates boy and his two dead brothers had molested Euphrates' stepdaughter in her own house. There was a rumor that several black men dressed in white sheets with pillowcases for hoods had caught and punished Wayne as he lurked along the river, peeping in folks' windows and doing unwholesome things to himself. Others suggested that the conjure woman had cast a spell on the Gateses, that she'd summoned a swamp demon to chase them to hell. And still others attributed the happenings to Frank David. There were a few occurrences of violence between some of the local whites and the blacks—some fires, a broken jaw—but soon it died down and Goodloe filed the deaths of Kent and Scott Gates as accidental.

  But he listed Wayne's blinding as unsolved. The snake venom had bleached his pupils white, and the skin around his eye sockets had required grafts. The doctors had had to use skin from his buttocks, and because his buttocks were hairy, the skin around his eyes grew hair, too.

  In the years to come, the loggers who clear-cut the land along the river would occasionally stop in the store, less from a need to buy something than from a curiosity to see the hermit with the milky, hairy eyes. The store smelled horrible, like the inside of a bear's mouth, and dust lay thick and soft on the shelves. Because they'd come in, the loggers would feel obligated to buy something, but every item was moldy or stale beyond belief, except for the things in cans, which were all unlabeled so they never knew what they'd get. Nothing was marked as to price either, and the blind man wouldn't talk. He just sat by the stove. So the loggers paid more than what they thought a can was worth, leaving the money on the counter by the telephone, which hadn't been connected in years. When plumper, grayer Goodloe came by on the occasional evening, he'd take the bills and coins and put them in Kirxy's cash drawer. He was no longer sheriff, having lost several elections back to one of his deputies, Roy or Dave. Now he drove a Lance truck, his routes including the hospitals in the county.

  "Dern, boy," he cracked once. "This store's doing a better business now than it ever has. You sure you don't want a cracker rack?"

  When Goodloe left, Wayne listened to the sound of the truck as it faded. "Sugarbaby," he whispered.

  And many a night for years after, until his own death in his sleep, Wayne would rise from the chair and move across the floor, taking Kirxy's cane from where it stood by the coat rack. He would go outside, down the stairs like a man who could see, his beard nearly to his chest, and he would walk soundlessly the length of the building, knowing the woods even better now as he crept down the rain-rutted gullyside toward the river whose smell never left the caves of his nostrils and the roof of his mouth. At the riverbank, he would stop and sit with his back against a small pine, and lifting his white eyes to the sky, he would listen to the clicks and hum and thrattle of the woods, seeking out each noise at its source and imagining it: an acorn nodding, detaching, falling, its thin ricochet and the way it settles into the leaves. A bullfrog's bubbling throat and the things it says. The soft movement of the river over rocks and around the bases of cattails and cypress knees and through the wet hanging roots of trees. And then another sound, familiar. The soft, precise footsteps of Frank David. Downwind. Not coming closer, not going away. Circling. The striking of a match and the sizzle of ember and the fall of ash. The ascent of smoke. A strange and terrifying comfort for the rest of Wayne Gates's life.

  LIKE A BONE IN THE THROAT

  1998: Lawrence Block

  LAWRENCE BLOCK (1938–) was born and raised in Buffalo, New York. After attending Antioch College in Ohio, he moved to New York City, working as an editor at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, then at Whitman Publishing Company. His career as a professional writer began early, with his first story, "You Can't Lose," being published in 1957, when he was nineteen, and his first novel, Death Pulls a Double Cross, in 1961, when he was twenty-three. As prolific as he is talented and versatile, he can be ranked with such contemporaries as Evan Hunter (Ed McBain) and Donald E. Westlake in all three categories. They all reached the hundred-book mark, under their own names and numerous pseudonyms; Block's pen names include Chip Harrison, Jill Emerson, and Paul Kavanagh. His bibliography illustrates his versatility: his finest work, the hard-boiled mysteries featuring Matthew Scudder; the much softer and funnier series about a bookstore-owner-cum-burglar, Bernie Rhodenbarr; espionage stories (as Kavanagh); outlandish humor in the Evan Tanner thrillers; soft-core erotica (as Emerson); fantasy (Ariel, 1980); and nonfiction books about the writing craft. His excellence as a writer has resulted in numerous honors, including eleven Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations. He has won the Edgar four times: once for Best Novel, A Dance at the Slaughterhouse (1992), and three times for Best Short Story, the only writer to win three times in that category. In 1994 he was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, for lifetime achievement.

  "Like a Bone in the Throat" was first published in the anthology Murder for Revenge (New York: Delacorte, 1998). While it is surely the most noir of his stories (can you imagine a darker one?), readers should also seek "By Dawn's Early Light," which won the Edgar in 1985 and is one of the modern classics of the mystery genre. It was written specifically for the first Private Eye Writers of America anthology, The Eyes Have It (New York: Mysterious Press, 1984), but first appeared two months earlier in the August 1984 issue of Playboy.

  ***

  THROUGHOUT THE TRIAL, Paul Dandridge did the same thing every day. He wore a suit and tie, and he occupied a seat toward the front of the courtroom, and his eyes, time and time again, returned to the man who had killed his sister.

  He was never called upon to testify. The facts were virtually undisputed, the evidence overwhelming. The defendant, William Charles Croydon, had abducted Dandridge's sister at knifepoint as she walked from the college library to her off-campus apartment. He had taken her to an isolated and rather primitive cabin in the woods, where he had subjected her to repeated sexual assaults over a period of three days, at the conclusion of which he had caused her death by manual strangulation.

  Croydon took the stand in his own defense. He was a handsome young man who'd spent his thirtieth birthday in a
jail cell awaiting trial, and his preppy good looks had already brought him letters and photographs and even a few marriage proposals from women of all ages. (Paul Dandridge was twenty-seven at the time. His sister, Karen, had been twenty when she died. The trial ended just weeks before her twenty-first birthday.)

  On the stand, William Croydon claimed that he had no recollection of choking the life out of Karen Dandridge, but allowed as how he had no choice but to believe he'd done it. According to his testimony, the young woman had willingly accompanied him to the remote cabin, and had been an enthusiastic sexual partner with a penchant for rough sex. She had also supplied some particularly strong marijuana with hallucinogenic properties and had insisted that he smoke it with her. At one point, after indulging heavily in the unfamiliar drug, he had lost consciousness and awakened later to find his partner beside him, dead.

  His first thought, he'd told the court, was that someone had broken into the cabin while he was sleeping, had killed Karen, and might return to kill him. Accordingly he'd panicked and rushed out of there, abandoning Karen's corpse. Now, faced with all the evidence arrayed against him, he was compelled to believe he had somehow committed this awful crime, although he had no recollection of it whatsoever, and although it was utterly foreign to his nature.

  The district attorney, prosecuting this case himself, tore Croydon apart on cross-examination. He cited the bite marks on the victim's breasts, the rope burns indicating prolonged restraint, the steps Croydon had taken in an attempt to conceal his presence in the cabin. "You must be right," Croydon would admit, with a shrug and a sad smile. "All I can say is that I don't remember any of it."

  The jury was eleven-to-one for conviction right from the jump, but it took six hours to make it unanimous. Mr. Foreman, have you reached a verdict? We have, Your Honor. On the sole count of the indictment, murder in the first degree, how do you find? We find the defendant, William Charles Croydon, guilty.