by James Ellroy
"Lotta things deserve to die, don't they?"
Blue smiled. "Well, I wasn't quite thinking along those lines, but now you bring it up ..."
Elgin said, "Who deserves to die, buddy?"
Blue laughed. "You got something on your mind, don't you?" He hoisted himself up on the table, cradled the rifle in his lap. "Hell, boy, who you got? Let's start with people who take two parking spaces."
"OK." Elgin moved the chair by the table to a position slightly behind Blue, sat in it. "Let's."
"Then there's DJs talk through the first minute of a song. Fucking Guatos coming down here these days to pick tobacco, showing no respect. Women wearing all those tight clothes, look at you like you're a pervert when you stare at what they're advertising" He wiped his forehead with his arm. "Shit."
"Who else?" Elgin said quietly.
"OK. OK. You got people like the ones let their dogs run wild into the highway, get themselves killed. And you got dishonest people, people who lie and sell insurance and cars and bad food. You got a lot of things. Jane Fonda."
"Sure." Elgin nodded.
Blue's face was drawn, gray. He crossed his legs over each other like he used to down at the drainage ditch. "It's all out there." He nodded and his eyelids drooped.
"Perkin Lut?" Elgin said. "He deserve to die?"
"Not just Perkin," Blue said. "Not just. Lots of people. I mean, how many you kill over in the war?"
Elgin shrugged. "I don't know."
"But some. Some. Right? Had to. I mean, that's war—someone gets on your bad side, you kill them and all their friends till they stop bothering you." His eyelids drooped again, and he yawned so deeply he shuddered when he finished.
"Maybe you should get some sleep."
Blue looked over his shoulder at him. "You think? It's been a while."
A breeze rattled the thin walls at the back of the house, pushed that thick dank smell into the kitchen again, a rotting stench that found the back of Elgin's throat and stuck there. He said, "When's the last time?"
"I slept? Hell, a while. Days maybe." Blue twisted his body so he was facing Elgin. "You ever feel like you spend your whole life waiting for it to get going?"
Elgin nodded, not positive what Blue was saying, but knowing he should agree with him. "Sure."
"It's hard," Blue said. "Hard." He leaned back on the table, stared at the brown water marks in his ceiling.
Elgin took in a long stream of that stench through his nostrils. He kept his eyes open, felt that air entering his nostrils creep past into his corneas, tear at them. The urge to close his eyes and wish it all away was as strong an urge as he'd ever felt, but he knew now was that time he'd always known was coming.
He leaned in toward Blue, reached across him, and pulled the rifle off his lap.
Blue turned his head, looked at him.
"Go to sleep," Elgin said. "I'll take care of this a while. We'll go see Shelley tomorrow. Perkin Lut too."
Blue blinked. "What if I can't sleep? Huh? I've been having that problem, you know. I put my head on the pillow and I try to sleep and it won't come and soon I'm just bawling like a fucking child till I got to get up and do something."
Elgin looked at the tears that had just then sprung into Blue's eyes, the red veins split across the whites, the desperate, savage need in his face that had always been there if anyone had looked close enough, and would never, Elgin knew, be satisfied.
"I'll stick right here, buddy. I'll sit here in the kitchen and you go in and sleep."
Blue turned his head and stared up at the ceiling again. Then he slid off the table, peeled off his T-shirt, and tossed it on top of the fridge. "All right. All right. I'm gonna try." He stopped at the bedroom doorway. "'Member—there's beer in the fridge. You be here when I wake up?"
Elgin looked at him. He was still so small, probably so thin you could still wrap your hand around his biceps, meet the fingers on the other side. He was still ugly and stupid-looking, still dying right in front of Elgin's eyes.
"I'll be here, Blue. Don't you worry."
"Good enough. Yes, sir."
Blue shut the door and Elgin heard the bedsprings grind, the rustle of pillows being arranged. He sat in the chair, with the smell of whatever decayed in the back of the house swirling around his head. The sun had hit the cheap tin roof now, heating the small house, and after a while he realized the buzzing he'd thought was in his head came from somewhere back in the house too.
He wondered if he had the strength to open the fridge. He wondered if he should call Perkin Lut's and tell Perkin to get the hell out of Eden for a bit. Maybe he'd just ask for Shelley, tell her to meet him tonight with her suitcases. They'd drive down 95 where the dogs wouldn't disturb them, drive clear to Jacksonville, Florida, before the sun came up again. See if they could outrun Blue and his tiny, dangerous wants, his dog corpses, and his smell; outrun people who took two parking spaces and telephone solicitors and Jane Fonda.
Jewel flashed through his mind then, an image of her sitting atop him, arching her back and shaking that long red hair, a look in her green eyes that said this was it, this was why we live.
He could stand up right now with this rifle in his hands, scratch the itch in the back of his head, and fire straight through the door, end what should never have been started.
He sat there staring at the door for quite a while, until he knew the exact number of places the paint had peeled in teardrop spots, and eventually he stood, went to the phone on the wall by the fridge, and dialed Perkin Lut's.
"Auto Emporium," Shelley said, and Elgin thanked God that in his present mood he hadn't gotten Glynnis Verdon, who snapped her gum and always placed him on hold, left him listening to Muzak versions of the Shirelles.
"Shelley?"
"People gonna talk, you keep calling me at work, boy."
He smiled, cradled the rifle like a baby, leaned against the wall. "How you doing?"
"Just fine, handsome. How 'bout yourself?"
Elgin turned his head, looked at the bedroom door. "I'm OK."
"Still like me?"
Elgin heard the springs creak in the bedroom, heard weight drop on the old floorboards. "Still like you."
"Well, then, it's all fine then, isn't it?"
Blue's footfalls crossed toward the bedroom door, and Elgin used his hip to push himself off the wall.
"It's all fine," he said. "I gotta go. I'll talk to you soon."
He hung up and stepped away from the wall.
"Elgin," Blue said from the other side of the door.
"Yeah, Blue?"
"I can't sleep. I just can't."
Elgin saw Woodson sloshing through the paddy, the top of his head gone. He saw the pink panties curling up from underneath Blue's bed and a shaft of sunlight hitting Shelley's face as she looked up from behind her desk at Perkin Lut's and smiled. He saw Jewel Lut dancing in the night rain by the lake and that dog lying dead on the shoulder of the interstate, kicking its leg like it was trying to ride a bicycle.
"Elgin," Blue said. "I just can't sleep. I got to do something."
"Try," Elgin said and cleared his throat.
"I just can't. I got to... do something. I got to go ..." His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. "I can't sleep."
The doorknob turned and Elgin raised the rifle, stared down the barrel.
"Sure, you can, Blue." He curled his finger around the trigger as the door opened. "Sure you can," he repeated and took a breath, held it in.
The skeleton of Eden Falls still sits on twenty-two acres of land just east of Brimmer's Point, covered in rust thick as flesh. Some say it was the levels of iodine an environmental inspector found in the groundwater that scared off the original investors. Others said it was the downswing of the state economy or the governor's failed reelection bid. Some say Eden Falls was just plain a dumb name, too biblical. And then, of course, there were plenty who claimed it was Jewel Lut's ghost scared off all the workers.
They found her body hangi
ng from the scaffolding they'd erected by the shell of the roller coaster. She was naked and hung upside down from a rope tied around her ankles. Her throat had been cut so deep the coroner said it was a miracle her head was still attached when they found her. The coroner's assistant, man by the name of Chris Gleason, would claim when he was in his cups that the head had fallen off in the hearse as they drove down Main toward the morgue. Said he heard it cry out.
This was the same day Elgin Bern called the sheriff's office, told them he'd shot his buddy Blue, fired two rounds into him at close range, the little guy dead before he hit his kitchen floor. Elgin told the deputy he was still sitting in the kitchen, right where he'd done it a few hours before. Said to send the hearse.
Due to the fact that Perkin Lut had no real alibi for his whereabouts when Jewel passed on and owing even more to the fact there'd been some very recent and very public discord in their marriage, Perkin was arrested and brought before a grand jury, but that jury decided not to indict. Perkin and Jewel had been patching things up, after all; he'd bought her a car (at cost, but still...).
Besides, we all knew it was Blue had killed Jewel. Hell, the Simmons boy, a retard ate paint and tree bark, could have told you that. Once all that stuff came out about what Blue and Big Bobby'd been doing with the dogs around here, well, that just sealed it. And everyone remembered how that week she'd been separated from Perkin, you could see the dream come alive in Blue's eyes, see him allow hope into his heart for the first time in his sorry life.
And when hope comes late to a man, it's quite a dangerous thing. Hope is for the young, the children. Hope in a full-grown man—particularly one with as little acquaintanceship with it or prospect for it as Blue—well, that kind of hope burns as it dies, boils blood white, and leaves something mean behind when it's done.
Blue killed Jewel Lut.
And Elgin Bern killed Blue. And ended up doing time. Not much, due to his war record and the circumstances of who Blue was, but time just the same. Everyone knew Blue probably had it coming, was probably on his way back into town to do to Perkin or some other poor soul what he'd done to Jewel. Once a man gets that look in his eyes—that boiled look, like a dog searching out a bone who's not going to stop until he finds it—well, sometimes he has to be put down like a dog. Don't he?
And it was sad how Elgin came out of prison to find Shelley Briggs gone, moved up North with Perkin Lut of all people, who'd lost his heart for the car business after Jewel died, took to selling home electronics imported from Japan and Germany, made himself a fortune. Not long after he got out of prison, Elgin left too, no one knows where, just gone, drifting.
See, the thing is—no one wanted to convict Elgin. We all understood. We did. Blue had to go. But he'd had no weapon in his hand when Elgin, standing just nine feet away, pulled that trigger. Twice. Once we might been able to overlook, but twice, that's something else again. Elgin offered no defense, even refused a fancy lawyer's attempt to get him to claim he'd suffered something called posttraumatic stress disorder, which we're hearing a lot more about these days.
"I don't have that," Elgin said. "I shot a defenseless man. That's the long and the short of it, and that's a sin."
And he was right:
In the world, case you haven't noticed, you usually pay for your sins. And in the South, always.
THE PAPERHANGER
2000: William Gay
WILLIAM GAY (1941–) was born in the rural town of Hohenwald, Tennessee, and after joining the Navy and serving in the Vietnam War, he lived in New York and Chicago before returning permanently to his hometown in 1978. He did not receive a formal college education, but read voraciously and began writing at the age of fifteen. He earned a living in the construction trade as a drywall hanger, painter, carpenter—"whatever worked" as he once stated it. For an author of such singular talent, it is astonishing to note that Gay did not sell any of his literary output until 1998, when literary magazines bought two of his stories.
The following year, his novel The Long Home was published to outstanding reviews and won the James A. Michener Memorial Prize. Like his other work, it is clearly in the Southern Gothic tradition of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Cormac McCarthy. He also was influenced by the works of such great American crime writers as Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, though his stories are not set in California, as theirs are, but are placed in the rural South, their dark, weird, violent landscapes populated by seemingly ordinary working-class people. He also published Provinces of Night (2000), a short story collection, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down (2002), and Twilight (2006).
"The Paperhanger" grew out of a story Gay had heard years before he wrote it, told to him by a plumber. It was first published in the February 2000 issue of Harper's Magazine. It was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2001, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2001, and The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century.
***
THE VANISHING OF the doctor's wife's child in broad daylight was an event so cataclysmic that it forever divided time into the then and the now, the before and the after. In later years, fortified with a pitcher of silica-dry vodka martinis, she had cause to replay the events preceding the disappearance. They were tawdry and banal but in retrospect freighted with menace, a foreshadowing of what was to come, like a footman or a fool preceding a king into a room.
She had been quarreling with the paperhanger. Her four-year-old daughter, Zeineb, was standing directly behind the paperhanger where he knelt smoothing air bubbles out with a wide plastic trowel. Zeineb had her fingers in the paperhanger's hair. The paperhanger's hair was shoulder length and the color of flax and the child was delighted with it. The paperhanger was accustomed to her doing this and he did not even turn around. He just went on with his work. His arms were smooth and brown and corded with muscle and in the light that fell upon the paperhanger through stained-glass panels the doctor's wife could see that they were lightly downed with fine golden hair. She studied these arms bemusedly while she formulated her thoughts.
You tell me so much a roll, she said. The doctor's wife was from Pakistan and her speech was still heavily accented. I do not know single-bolt rolls and double-bolt rolls. You tell me double-bolt price but you are installing single-bolt rolls. My friend has told me. It is cost me perhaps twice as much.
The paperhanger, still on his knees, turned. He smiled up at her. He had pale blue eyes. I did tell you so much a roll, he said. You bought the rolls. The child, not yet vanished, was watching the paperhanger's eyes. She was a scaled-down clone of the mother, the mother viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, and the paperhanger suspected that as she grew neither her features nor her expression would alter, she would just grow larger, like something being aired up with a hand pump.
And you are leave lumps, the doctor's wife said, gesturing at the wall. I do not leave lumps, the paperhanger said. You've seen my work before. These are not lumps. The paper is wet. The paste is wet. Everything will shrink down and flatten out. He smiled again. He had clean even teeth. And besides, he said, I gave you my special cockteaser rate. I don't know what you're complaining about.
Her mouth worked convulsively. She looked for a moment as if he'd slapped her. When words did come they came in a fine spray of spit. You are trash, she said. You are scum.
Hands on knees, he was pushing erect, the girl's dark fingers trailing out of his hair. Don't call me trash, he said, as if it were perfectly all right to call him scum, but he was already talking to her back. She had whirled on her heels and went twisting her hips through an arched doorway into the cathedraled living room. The paperhanger looked down at the child. Her face glowed with a strange constrained glee, as if she and the paperhanger shared some secret the rest of the world hadn't caught on to yet.
In the living room the builder was supervising the installation of a chandelier that depended from the vaulted ceiling by a long golden chain. The builder was a short bearded man dancing about, showing her the featu
res of the chandelier, smiling obsequiously. She gave him a flat angry look. She waved a dismissive hand toward the ceiling. Whatever, she said.
She went out the front door onto the porch and down a makeshift walkway of two-by-tens into the front yard where her car was parked. The car was a silver-gray Mercedes her husband had given her for their anniversary. When she cranked the engine its idle was scarcely perceptible.
She powered down the window. Zeineb, she called. Across the razed earth of the unlandscaped yard a man in a grease-stained T-shirt was booming down the chains securing a backhoe to a lowboy hooked to a gravel truck. The sun was low in the west and blood-red behind this tableau and man and tractor looked flat and dimensionless as something decorative stamped from tin. She blew the horn. The man turned, raised an arm as if she'd signaled him.
Zeineb, she called again.
She got out of the car and started impatiently up the walkway. Behind her the gravel truck started, and truck and backhoe pulled out of the drive and down toward the road.
The paperhanger was stowing away his T-square and trowels in his wooden toolbox. Where is Zeineb? the doctor's wife asked. She followed you out, the paperhanger told her. He glanced about, as if the girl might be hiding somewhere. There was nowhere to hide.
Where is my child? she asked the builder. The electrician climbed down from the ladder. The paperhanger came out of the bathroom with his tools. The builder was looking all around. His elfin features were touched with chagrin, as if this missing child were just something else he was going to be held accountable for.
Likely she's hiding in a closet, the paperhanger said. Playing a trick on you.
Zeineb does not play tricks, the doctor's wife said. Her eyes kept darting about the huge room, the shadows that lurked in corners. There was already an undercurrent of panic in her voice and all her poise and selfconfidence seemed to have vanished with the child.
The paperhanger set down his toolbox and went through the house, opening and closing doors. It was a huge house and there were a lot of closets. There was no child in any of them.