The Best American Noir of the Century

by James Ellroy

  Mrs. Mahmood left the house in her black dress. Later, she phoned to tell Lourdes she had identified the body, spent time with the police, who had no clues, nothing at all to go on, then stopped by a funeral home and arranged to have Woz cremated without delay. She said, "What do you think?"

  "About what?" Lourdes said.

  "Having the fucker burned."

  She said she was stopping to see friends and wouldn't be home until late.

  One A.M., following an informal evening of drinks with old friends, Mrs. Mahmood came into the kitchen from the garage and began to lose her glow.

  What was going on here?

  Rum and mixes on the counter, limes, a bowl of ice. A Latin beat coming from the patio. She followed the sound to a ring of burning candles, to Lourdes in a green swimsuit moving in one place to the beat, hands raised, Lourdes grinding her hips in a subtle way.

  The two guys at the table smoking cigarettes saw Mrs. Mahmood, but made no move to get up.

  Now Lourdes turned from them and saw her, Lourdes smiling a little as she said, "How you doing? You look like you feeling no pain."

  "You have my suit on," Mrs. Mahmood said.

  "I put on my yellow one," Lourdes said, still moving in that subtle way, "and took it off. I don't wear yellow no more, so I borrow one of yours. Is OK, isn't it?"

  Mrs. Mahmood said, "What's going on?"

  "This is cumbia, Colombian music for when you want to celebrate. For a wedding, a funeral, anything you want. The candles are part of it. Cumbia, you should always light candles."

  Mrs. Mahmood said, "Yeah, but what is going on?"

  "We having a party for you, Ginger. The Colombian guys come to see you dance."

  CONTROLLED BURN

  2002: Scott Wolven

  SCOTT WOLVEN (1965–) was born in Fort Riley, Kentucky, where his father was stationed before going to Vietnam. He grew up in Saugerties and Catskill, New York. After earning a certificate in creative writing from Columbia University, he studied in the MFA program at Columbia. He worked as a logger, a project manager, and an instructor at Binghamton University (SUNY), and was a visiting writer at Indiana University and the University of Chicago.

  Wolven has the remarkable distinction of having appeared in seven consecutive editions of The Best American Mystery Stories. His first book, Controlled Burn: Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men (2005), collected several of these stories, as well as others, and was one of the most enthusiastically published books of the year. Among those who heaped praise on Wolven's debut are Richard Ford ("Wolven has turned raw, unreconciled life into startling, evocative, and very good short stories. He draws on a New England different from Updike's and even Dubus', but his fictive lives—no less than theirs—render the world newly, and full of important consequences"); Nelson DeMille ("Controlled Burn is good. Very good. Remarkable, actually. Tou gh, gritty, and honest—reminiscent of Hemingway with a little bit of John Steinbeck"); and George Pelecanos ("...tough, unsentimental, and completely earned. This is the most exciting, authentic collection of short stories I have read in years"). It had a starred review in Publishers Weekly; was named a "A Book to Remember" by the New York Public Library; and Amazon, Borders, and Barnes & Noble all selected it as a top ten fiction debut.

  Almost any story in Controlled Burn would fit comfortably between the covers of this book, but the lives depicted in this story, of people who chose "an easy way to make a hard living," as the author once described it, are especially deserving.

  "Controlled Burn" was originally published in the winter 2002 issue of Harpur Palate, and was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2003.

  ***

  IT WAS A BAD winter and a worse spring. It was the summer Bill Allen lived and died, the sweltering summer I landed a job cutting trees for Robert Wilson's scab-logging outfit near Orford, New Hampshire. June boiled itself away into the heavy steam of July. Heat devils rose in waves off the blacktop as timber trucks rolled in. By the end of July, we switched gears and started cutting stove wood. I was cutting eight cords a day while Robert worked the hydraulic splitter. Then we'd deliver it in one of our dump trucks. Some men drove to the woodlot to pick up their own. Some of them had white salt marks on their boots and jackets from sweat—some of them smelled like beer. Most of them smelled like gasoline. They didn't say much, just paid for their wood and left with it in their pickup trucks. They were either busy working or busy living their lies, which is work in itself. I knew about that. The hard work crushed one empty beer can day after another, adding to my lifetime pile of empties. Summer moved on, gray in spite of the bright sun.

  That Friday, I was Bill Allen. I was Bill Allen all that summer. Bill Allen was what caused me to jump every time the phone rang. I was Bill Allen from Glens Falls, New York, and I was taking a summer off from college. I repeated that story as often and as loudly as possible. And each ring of the phone might be someone asking me to prove I was Bill Allen, which was out of the question. Back in December, in the middle of another, different lie, I tried to rob a gas station near Cape May, New Jersey. It was off-season then, nobody around, and I thought it would be easy. It fit the person I'd lied about being. A high school girl was behind the counter. I wore a ski mask and carried a cheap, semiautomatic pistol. I must have touched the trigger, because the gun went off. Maybe she lived. I really couldn't say. I left fast. My brain was on fire, I hadn't meant to shoot her. But it was too late for that. I took a roll of bills and ended up at Robert's. Robert paid cash at the end of the week, didn't bother with Uncle Sam, didn't ask for references, and had plenty of backbreaking work that needed doing, without his son around to help him. Bill Allen was just the man for the job, and every day I was Bill Allen to the best of my ability. It didn't help —my grim yesterdays cast the longest shadows in the Connecticut River Valley. I watched every car, studied every face. Bill Allen never knew a peaceful day. If it hadn't been for the marathon workload Robert demanded, Bill Allen never would have slept. I'd have probably shot Bill Allen myself if I hadn't been working so hard to keep him going. Some days, he lives on with different names. Allen Williams, Al Wilson, Bill Roberts. Bill Allen probably died in a fire that summer. Leave it at that, with questions about Bill Allen.

  ***

  The phone at the woodlot rang around noon that Friday. I heard it, had been hearing it most of August. Robert's son John was in jail in Concord, awaiting trial for murderous assault, so there were a lot of phone calls. Robert had rigged the phone with two speakers—one bolted to the stovepipe that stuck out of the roof of our headquarters shack and the other attached by some baling wire to the sick elm on the end of the lot. The sudden scream of the phone spiked my heart rate at least twice a day. Echoing in the alleys between the giant piles of long logs. The woodlot sat surrounded by low, field-grass hills and trees in a natural bowl, just off the highway north of Hanover. Robert's house was on the top of the hill, built with its back to the woodlot, facing a farm field. On a still day, the beauty of the Connecticut River drifted the quarter mile over the farm field and quietly framed all the other sounds, the birds, the trees in the breeze. I was never a part of those days.

  The phone rang over the diesel roar of my yellow Maxi-lift, the neardead cherry picker we kept around to police up the yard. I was working, sweating in the sun, busy shifting a full twelve-ton load of New Hampshire rock maple to the very back of the drying mountains of timber, heat against next year's winter. The phone rang again, not that anyone wanted to talk to me. Most times I'd shut the equipment down, run across the yard, slam into the shed, pick up, and get "Robert there?" and they'd hang up when I said no. Or they wouldn't say anything, just hang up when they knew I wasn't Robert. And I could breathe again, because it wasn't someone looking for me. Just locals, as if I couldn't take a wood order. Or it would be the mechanical jail operator, would I please accept a collect call from inmate John Wilson at the Merrimack Correctional Facility. Then I'd say yes and have to go get Robert anyway. Nobody wanted to talk to m
e, and I didn't want to talk to anyone, so I let it ring. Robert would get it. Or he wouldn't. They know where to find me, he'd say. Working in the same place for thirty years, if they can't find me, what the hell would I want to talk to them for, he'd say. Must be stupid if they can't get hold of me. Robert's voice was a ton of gravel coming off a truck, years of cigarettes mucking up the inside of his barrel chest. There was no sign at the dirt road entrance to the woodlot. It was Robert Wilson's woodlot, and everyone knew without asking.

  Robert came out of the shed and waved at me to shut the cherry picker down. I flipped a switch, turned the keys back a click, and cranked the brake on. I walked over to the shed. Robert had his jean coveralls on. He squinted against the sun, nodded, and spoke.

  "That was Frank Lord. He wants his wood tomorrow." Robert took twenty-five dollars out of his pocket and handed it to me. That was our deal—fifty dollars if I had to work on Saturday, twenty-five up front. "You can fix his load today."

  I nodded. "What does he get?"

  "Two cord, plus half a cord of kiln-dried."

  Robert had converted an old singlewide trailer into a kiln and most of his customers ordered mixed loads of both air-and kiln-dried. Kiln-dried wood burns hotter than air-dried. Mixing a kiln-dried log in with every fire produces more heat, allows the air-dried wood to burn more efficiently. People with woodstoves got as much heat out of two air-dried cords mixed with half a cord of kiln-dried as people who burned four straight cords. When a single woodstove is the primary heat source for a whole house, each log has to do its job. Robert charged more for the kiln-dried and nobody kicked about the price.

  I took my Texaco ball cap off. "If you don't want it mixed, we'll have to take two trucks." Lord's farm was thirty-five miles north and slightly west, just on the Vermont side of the Connecticut River, near Newbury. The river came straight down through the Northeast Kingdom, and just past Wells River, it made an oxbow, flowing briefly north in a U-shaped collar before returning to its southern course. Lord's farm encompassed all of the oxbow, stretching from Route 5 all the way east to the river, which was the Vermont-New Hampshire border. It was the most beautiful spot on earth, the most amazing fields and woods and sky that Bill Allen had ever seen. Robert and I had driven past once that summer, on the way to Wells River to pick up a chain saw. Looking out of the truck as we drove up Route 5 and seeing Lord's white farm buildings and fields, I thought maybe I could make it through Bill Allen and still have a life, somewhere. On the way back, the view of the green fields sweeping out into the bend of the river made everything stop. I didn't hear the engine of the truck, nor the gears. We floated along the road as my mind took picture after picture, of the farm and the fields and the blue sky with the sun setting. That bend in the river. I came alive for a minute, and as the farm slowly passed by I died again, back into the zombie lie of Bill Allen.

  Robert was talking to me, shaking his head. "He's got some extra work. Stobe can drive the small rig."

  Stobik lived south of the woodlot, in White River Junction, and did odd jobs for Robert. Stobik's wife was as big as the house they lived in. He didn't have a phone—if Robert needed him for something, I'd drive down first thing in the morning and pick him up. Just pulled my beat-up Bronco into his dooryard and sat there till he came out. Sometimes, a thin, white hand would appear in the dirty window, waving me away. Too drunk to work. He lived in a culvert on the woodlot for about a month when things got tough with his wife. He was skinny as a rail, hadn't showered in about a week, month, year. His teeth were broken brown stumps and his fingers were stained from tobacco. But he could cut and stack firewood faster than two men, and at half the price.

  "I'll pick him up in the morning" I said.

  "That's OK. I'll get him tonight and let him sleep on the porch," Robert said. "I want to make sure he can work tomorrow." He walked back inside the shed. I fixed Frank Lord's load of wood for the next day and went to the loft of a barn I called home.

  Next morning, I was at the woodlot at five-thirty. It was pitch black. Robert was already there, sitting in his pickup truck, drinking coffee and eating a hard-boiled egg. He had the running lights on. I drove slowly over to the open driver's side window.

  "Thought you overslept," he said.

  I climbed out of the Bronco and got into the big white rig. Stobik got behind the wheel of the small one. Robert was driving the big rig.

  The floor of the white rig was taken up with logging chains. The last job Robert had used it for was a semicommercial haul, and he'd left the chains in. He had a whole barn full of them up by his house. He'd load them in the truck and then get weighed, toss them out at the job and then leave them there. The customer paid the difference. How many people paid for those chains, only God knows. The fuse box was open on the passenger's side, so that any metal that jumped up during the ride could cause a spark or worse. It made for a tense ride.

  We started the drive up to North Haverhill on the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River. It was beautiful. The sun began to shine. The truck could only make thirty-five fully loaded. Stobik was always right behind us, with the flashers on. Robert wrestled the gears up a hill. Then he lit a cigarette and spoke.

  "When I was fifteen, I ran away and ended up on Frank Lord's farm" He looked over at me.

  "I didn't know that," I answered.

  "Frank Lord worked me so hard I thought I was going to drop. But it straightened me out. Best thing that ever happened to me."

  "What was wrong with you?" I asked.

  "Bad temper," Robert answered. "Bad temper and drinking" We passed a broken-down barn.

  "At fifteen?"

  Robert nodded. "Back then, fifteen was like thirty-five. You had a job, a car—they made you live life back then, and if you didn't like it, get the fuck out." He took a drag off his cigarette. He was silent, smoking, for the rest of the ride.

  Frank Lord was standing in his driveway as we pulled up. He looked as though we'd just been there yesterday. He had an oxygen mask on and a green tank marked OXYGEN in white letters standing next to him. The fields stretched out behind him all the way to the river. The big white farmhouse behind him needed a coat of paint. There were a couple of barns and buildings. They needed paint too. Parked alongside the main house was a brand-new pickup truck. On top of the main house was a black wrought iron weather vane, the silhouette of a big black stallion. The weather vane pointed north.

  "What are you going to do, make something out of yourself or what?" His voice was muffled behind the clear plastic mask. His breath made it fill with mist. He pointed over toward the nearest barn. "Put it over there," he said through the mask. "Don't mix it together." He and Robert walked slowly toward the main house and sat on the porch in kitchen chairs. Stobik and I unloaded and stacked the wood. Stobik worked fast. His stacks were the straightest I've ever seen. His face seemed frozen in a perpetual grin as we worked in silence. The stacks came out perfectly. We went back over to Robert and Frank on the porch. It was just around noon.

  "We've got some other work to do," Frank said. He held out a piece of paper.

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "Yesterday, in the morning, Judge Harris stopped over here. Unofficially. I've known his family for probably, oh, fifty years." The breeze tossed the tops of the corn. "He told me that the state police got a tip I was growing marijuana. They were trying to get a warrant to search my house and my fields." He held out the paper. "Harris dropped this off". I read the paper. It was a one-day special permit for a controlled burn.

  "What do you want us to do?" I asked.

  "Burn it, all of it. Right back to the river. I don't want a single thing left alive." He stared at the porch and then looked straight at Stobik and me. "Just in case there's a little Mexican hay that got mixed in with my corn somehow."

  Robert came down off the porch to supervise. He and I rigged up a sprayer with some gas and soaked a good portion of the front field. We left a wide strip in the middle completely dry. Then we drove the
tractor through a thin line of trees, and there was a huge cornfield that stretched all the way to the river. In the middle of the field, probably six hundred yards away, was a small white shack. Robert spoke up.

  "That's where my first wife and I lived" He looked at it.

  I looked over at him. "I never think about you being married"

  He nodded. "Well I was, for a while." He pointed his chin at the shack. "People that live in places like that don't very often stay married" He stared at the white shack. "I had a bad temper then."

  I nodded. "Should we burn it?"

  "Oh yeah." Robert wiped his forehead with a red kerchief. Sweat had run down from his forehead and got into his eyes and on his chin.

  "What if there are people in it?" I looked over at the shack.

  "Then fuck 'em, let 'em burn. Their name isn't Lord and they don't belong on this property." Robert spit into the field. "Frank said burn it, and that's what we're going to do." He looked across the rows of corn toward the river. "Hotter than Hades." He looked over at me. "You'll never be cold again, after this." He started to drive the tractor toward the white shack with me on the back of his seat. "Here, watch this" he shouted over the tractor.

  We pulled up next to the shack. The windows on the one side had been broken, but the chicken wire in the glass remained, rusted from the weather. I heard a faint hum.

  "Watch this," Robert said. He took the nozzle from the gas sprayer and aimed a fine stream at the window. I saw some wasps beginning to fly out of the broken window. Robert pointed his chin at them and talked above the noise of the tractor. "Wasps," he said. "They're the worst." Some moved slowly, clinging to the chicken wire. I could see their insect heads, sectioned bodies, and stingers. They were getting soaked with gas. "Throw a match" Robert said.