The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  He’d just made a misstep.

  The prison, or, as Moultrie labeled it so carefully on the return address of his letter, the correctional facility, turns out to be in a field that might’ve once grown corn or cotton. Its location falls somewhere between country and town, and it could be located anywhere, in fact probably is; there have to be a thousand places just like this all over the country. It could be a school or a sewage treatment plant or rehab facility or any of a number of vaguely institutional things. The gravel parking lot is already almost full by the time James pulls into it, a fact that reminds him this is podunk minimum-security stuff. He’d expected something more—the Big House and the Pen and cinematic lockdowns.

  The line to check in at the guard box at the edge of the lot snakes back five yards or more, consists almost entirely of girls who look too young. Possibly too young to have finished high school, certainly too young to drink, or to possess the babies half of them hold in their arms. He takes his place in their midst, is surreptitiously looked over and then ignored. At the front of the line, the security wand dips and crackles, passing over the Baggie of change and car keys a girl with hair combed into an elaborate up-do clutches in one hand, then over the apparent self-portrait drawn in ballpoint on lined notebook paper she holds in the other. The envelope of photographs she also wants to bring in apparently will require permission from someone higher up, a sergeant.

  “I’m going to have to wand you, little man,” the guard says, bending toward the toddler who’s wandering blithely toward and then away from the gate. The guard reaches out and tugs gently at the straps at the back of the little boy’s overalls: the wand in his hand passes over the tiny tennis shoes, their laces tied in neat bows; over the dingy blue plush stuffed animal hugged in one hand.

  James waits his turn, wondering if the real punishment of jail might lie in the complete tedium of it. Everyone is bored—the girls standing in line with their arms folded and their hips lazily cocked, some of whom holler across him about the Greyhound bus they took to get here; the guards, who over and over again in a monotone explain rules everyone already understands.

  But everyone seems to know each other, and the guards are less uptight than Security at the Houston airport.

  “How you doing, Miz Cantrell?” the guard in the booth says to the elderly woman in front of James. He extends his clipboard for her to sign. Everybody else knew to put their coins for the vending machines into Zip-loc Baggies, but James is going to have to toss his loose change into a bowl before he walks through the metal detector.

  “Moultrie Woodruff,” he announces when he gets to the window of the booth. It’s so simple, like a password. One second, he’s out in the free world, then the security wand blesses him with a flourish, and there he is—on the inside.

  There’s nothing high-tech about his entrance. He just signs in, walks the thirty feet into the squared-off cinder-brick building, is buzzed through one small waiting area and into the next like livestock moving through a chute. Each group of guards waves him on with an astounding lack of suspicion; they don’t even bother to prevent him from noticing, when he puts pen to paper at his second stop, that no one’s been to see Moultrie in months. Somewhere, behind another set of closed doors, he can hear a loudspeaker summoning his stepbrother.

  Moultrie’s long ponytail has been cut off; what’s left of his hair has gone gray. All the other inmates being visited seem to be the same age as the girls who’ve come to see them—as far as James can tell, they’re all mere babies being visited by babies.

  “James, man,” Moultrie says, moving forward.

  James steps back.

  “Hey, it’s not like it’s catching or something,” Moultrie says, his voice loud. “Not like if you touch me they won’t ever let you back out again.” Their second try at an embrace dissolves into an awkward bumping of shoulders. “Let’s just sit down, bro’,” he says.

  James realizes he’d expected—planned on—a pane of plastic between them. Where are the phones, the surveillance cameras? What the room resembles most is a school cafeteria, one where the folding chairs Moultrie indicates have been arranged in rows along the sides like bleachers. The vending machines are at the back.

  “Can’t sit facing each other,” Moultrie explains as they sit down shoulder to shoulder. “You might pass something off to me. How are you?”

  “Okay,” James says. The wall in front of him looks mirrored, but he knows it’s not, that there must be more bored-seeming, pokerfaced guards behind it. All around them, family groups have begun to settle in in a way that makes him realize they’re going to sit here like this for the entire five visiting hours, the long haul.

  “What’s up?” he says, hands on his knees, because it’s what he has always said, since he was fifteen and his mother and Moul­trie’s father had just merged households and he used to get home from school and knock on Moultrie’s bedroom door, and sometimes Moultrie would let him shake the seeds from the weed into the crease of Quadrophenia’s double jacket before he cleaned and bagged it. James asks it even though it feels like saying to some cancer patient How are you? The answer can’t be good.

  “Thanks for coming, man,” Moultrie says formally beside him. “It’s been a long time. Directions get you here okay?”

  “Yeah.” Had those directions been so detailed, and Moultrie’s handwriting so careful, just because it was another way to fill up time? The five hours ahead of them stretch into eternity. Driving here, James had imagined he’d stay for an hour or two; that maybe he’d be able to make it back to Houston before midnight, only half his weekend wasted. What can they possibly do here?

  “What’s your day like?” he asks finally, clearing his throat.

  Moultrie pauses. “I read,” he says. “Read a lot. We got a group that reads the paper after dinner.”

  “There a decent library here? What kind of stuff are you reading?”

  “Elmore Leonard. Tom Clancy. Lot of the guys read romance novels.” Moultrie’s lip curls. “But I just finished Notes from Underground. Dostoevsky. He’s got it down, man.”

  “What down?” James asks.

  “This.” Moultrie waves an encompassing hand at the room. “Before that I read The Fountainhead. I keep to myself,” he adds abruptly.

  James sits back. Maybe now the prison movie he’d imagined will start, and Moultrie’ll say something like I keep my nose clean.

  “Got a job,” he says instead. “Mom tell you?”

  James remembers hearing something about work in the kitchen. Framed by his mother’s eternally optimistic voice as something good, something Moultrie could use later. On the outside. She has always looked on the bright side, at least as far as Moultrie is concerned.

  “That one didn’t work out.” Moultrie sighs. “I was real fucking depressed, those first few months, about my situation.”

  There it is: the situation. The reason James is sitting here, the reason he can’t think of a single thing to say.

  “I’m in the shop now,” Moultrie says. He turns so he can look James full in the face, careful to keep both feet on the floor. He sounds awake for the first time since James arrived. “Painting signs.”

  “Signs?” James says. The clatter of chairs scraped back on the linoleum is threaded through with the wails of fretful kids and the thud of a soda can as it rattles into the chute in the vending machine. He feels defeated by the clamor of so much important information needing to be conveyed so fast—five hours isn’t much, when you’ve got a life you’re sealed away from and a family out there doing stuff they need to tell you about.

  “You brought change, man?” Moultrie asks, interrupting himself hopefully. As early as it is, everybody around them’s drinking Coke like coffee, even the guard sitting, yawning, by the door. “I could use something to drink.”

  “Sure.” James digs in his pocket.

  “You’ve got to go get it. We can’t both go. You might be handing something off to me. You know.”

 
; “Oh,” James says, disconcerted. “What do you want?”

  A Coke, a Baby Ruth bar, some vinegar and salt potato chips, maybe some Twinkies. As Moultrie lists them, James realizes Moultrie didn’t ask him to bring change because he wanted to be as much of a host as possible and have a way to offer something, but more because whatever James brings back from the machines will be out of the ordinary, an unexpected entertainment. What’s it like to be bored so shitless?

  “Yeah, I know,” Moultrie says when he gets back. “I’m going to start working out again a couple of months before my date comes up.” He peels back the wrapper on his candy bar.

  “So you’ve got this job in the sign shop,” James says. “You just going to let yourself turn to shit, man?”

  “Huh? Like, you know, you’ve seen those signs they put up when there’s going to be some kind of big meeting? About a piece of property? Like so somebody can make changes to it?”

  “Oh,” James says. “Like for zoning hearings.”

  “Yeah. And sometimes highway signs. You know, the big green and white ones.”

  “People paint those?”

  James never thought about where they came from, had assumed they were printed somehow, stamped out by some giant machine, and this is Moultrie, for Chrissakes, who could’ve gone to LSU, who could’ve done anything.

  “Yeah,” Moultrie says simply. “I’m the best at it in here, so now it’s mostly just me. Pretty cool. I get the shop to myself. There’s a radio. Everybody else they tried at it, they just slopped the paint all over the place.”

  His obvious pride doesn’t seem manufactured; besides, there’s no way anybody else can hear them: the din’s almost enough to stop their conversation in its tracks.

  “Oh,” James says.

  Moultrie leans over. “Look at him,” he whispers abruptly, with a jerk of his chin indicating a young guy sprawled out in a chair. The guy’s girlfriend or wife or lady or whoever she is leans solicitously toward him. James recognizes her as the one at the front of the line who’d carried in the drawing that looked like something she’d done at her desk at the back of math class. The envelope of photos that held up the whole line must’ve made it through somehow, because she’s handing each of them over and then taking them back like a handful of cards she’s been dealt. Bee-Bee, she say tell you hey, she says. Over there’s La-Keisha. The names ride the current of noise toward them. Coconut cake for dessert, she adds. Wish I could’ve brung some.

  “Let me tell you, that fucker was on my ass when I first came in,” Moultrie says. “This might as well be his living room or something. He’ll be here his whole fucking life. In and out.”

  Unlike Moultrie, who just last Christmas looked mainly like some placid hippie type and now has lost it all—his supply, his beautiful long braid, his dirty house so comfortable for hanging out in—and doesn’t even have anybody to visit him every weekend like these other guys do.

  “What about you?” Moultrie says. “What’s going on in Houston? Got a girlfriend?”

  James shakes his head.

  “What about that little brown-eyed girl, what was her name, that one you brought home that time us three drove down to New Orleans for the weekend?”

  “May-Beth?” James says repressively. “You know her name, man. Shit, I ain’t seen her in two years.”

  When May-Beth had come to Baton Rouge with him, she and James and Moultrie had stood in the wind on the observation platform at the top of the state capitol and stared at the muddy Mississippi. James still remembers the way her curly brown hair had escaped from its ponytail, the way she pushed it away from her face with her fingers.

  “That’s right,” Moultrie says. “May-Beth.”

  Such a typical Moultrie move, to pretend he doesn’t remember. May-Beth had joked that she wanted to touch her fingers to a bullet hole left from the barrage fired at Huey P. Long, so they’d taken the elevator, all three of them, down to the basement, and after that Moultrie had driven them on what he called his guided tour of the city, which consisted mostly of slowing the car at houses where he got stuff. That night, when May-Beth folded herself into the narrow twin bed in James’s old bedroom with him, she’d sleepily pronounced Moultrie a trip and a half, and James should have known what was coming. The next night, she’d danced with them both in turn in the Quarter, Moultrie more than him. And then she had linked arms with them both as they stumbled their way back, tipsy, through the empty streets toward their car.

  And that, as they say, had been that.

  “So who all’s come to see you?” James says pointedly. He knows from his quick glance at the guard’s clipboard that the answer’s Nobody.

  A girl he’d been sort of dating when he went in, Moultrie says without much regret in his voice. She came once at the very beginning.

  “I asked her to pack up the rest of my shit and get it to Mom. Did she do it? She hasn’t ever wrote me.”

  “What shit?” James asks.

  “Huh? I got somebody to hold on to all the furniture, but this was like, little things. Books and pictures. Stuff you could fit into a suitcase. You know.”

  “You didn’t figure out what to do with it before? It’s not like you didn’t know you’d end up here.”

  “Mom,” Moultrie says, ignoring him. “Mom was somebody who came to see me. I couldn’t let her come again after the first time. Just couldn’t take it, the way it made her so upset.”

  “That was nice of you,” James says. “Of course it made her upset.”

  Moultrie takes a quick, furtive look around. “Hey, James, chill,” he says. “I didn’t think I was going to end up here.”

  “Where the fuck did you think you were going to end up?” James hisses. “No way was some junkie ever going to pack up your shit and get it to Mom’s house.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Moultrie says, looking affronted.

  “Like what?” James says. “You mean it was all hearts and flowers?”

  “Hey, James, take it easy,” Moultrie says again, simply. He pauses. “Let’s not fight. You and Mom are just about all I got now.”

  “Cut the sad song and dance,” James says, standing up. “I already know what you want to ask. Mom already said. How you need me to tell the parole board I’ll let you live with me once you get out. That you’ve turned over some new leaf.”

  “Hey, calm down, it’s cool, bro’,” Moultrie says, looking stricken.

  It’s just another family squabble, business as usual for this place. The girl who drew the portrait of herself in ballpoint pen is crying, fat tears running down her face. The scarred linoleum on the floor beneath James’s feet, the folding chair he’s sitting on, the thump and clank of the vending machines, all enrage him.

  “Just admit it for once,” he leans over and hisses to Moultrie. “Okay? Just admit you were so fucking dumb you had a backpack full of heroin lying there on your living room floor and the front door unlocked. That’s all I’m asking.”

  “Huh?” Moultrie says.

  “Are you fucking deaf?”

  “Yeah,” Moultrie says simply. “A little. It gets to you, in here. The noise.”

  “Jesus,” James says. “Why bother lying to me? What’s the point?”

  “No,” Moultrie says stubbornly. “I don’t know how that stuff got there.”

  He looks away.

  Nobody here is guilty of anything. Everybody was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. All it was was bad luck or circumstance. Connections that went bad, and deals that went sour.

  “Aw, shit,” James says. He sits back down. “You dumb fuck.”

  In the end, he retraces his steps out of the gravel lot and past the field shored up with barbed wire. Past the stand of curving pines, and then along the corridor of strip mall—Home Depot and the KY Fry, and all the other buildings Moultrie hadn’t listed in his directions, a Citgo and a yogurt shop and a place for to-go Chinese food. The road in front of James is glinting wet windshields from the afternoon rain. Ever
ybody in this town seems to be going somewhere, and the wide flat lots in front of all the restaurants are starting to fill up. With couples, and families stopping for their big meal of the day, still so country that behind the big plate-glass windows they’re clasping their hands and bending their heads to bless the food set on the plastic tablecloths in front of them.

  The interstate is a looming comfort he can spot from the trajectory of the access road. The coffee he stops for at the last-chance McDonald’s wedged into the on-ramp is hot enough to scald him back to Houston. It makes the car smell like home.

  All the newness he remembers from the morning has burned off the day, and the two right-hand lanes are clogged with truckers, not a single good citizen among them. The trucks are all chrome and heat and glow, impatient to get somewhere before dark, and it’s just as easy for them to box James in as not to.

  All it was was a suitcase, Moultrie said when he turned to leave; and there were just a couple of places it might be.

  These trucks are never going to let James merge without a fight; they’ll never give him a courtesy blink to remind him that in the rain that’s started beating down again he ought to put his lights on.

  “So what am I looking for?” he’d asked, turning back to his stepbrother, jingling the change left in his pocket.

  “Some other stuff’s in there, too,” Moultrie had said, looking pained. He cleared his throat. “If nobody found it. Just flush it.”

  The trucks press close on either side of James in a dangerous lumbering embrace. Green-and-white reflective signs Moul­trie could’ve painted nudge at his right shoulder. He forces his way into the middle lane. How quick your reflexes have to be, he thinks as he merges, rejoicing. A moment’s hesitation and all might be lost.

  LOU MANFREDO

  Soul Anatomy

  FROM New Jersey Noir