The door to Kenny’s office is locked. The glass panel in the door is opaque, rippled and thick. Will says, “We’re going to have to pry the hinges off.”
But Harvey points to their brother at work four feet away, leaning close to the door that opens into the front office. Stevie has stuck a small suction cup to the clear glass and is now dragging a glass cutter around it in a slow circle.
“He’s just one surprise after another,” Will whispers.
Stevie smiles but says nothing. Finally he pockets the glass cutter, taps his knuckle around the circle he has cut, wiggles the suction cup until the circle of glass snaps free. Then he inches a gloved hand through the circle, feels for the door lock on the other side, gives it a twist. He swings the door open wide and says to Harvey, “Now will you ask around for me over at Jimmy Dean?”
And Harvey says, “I guess maybe I will.”
Just inside the front office he sets the duffel bag on the floor, zips it open, reaches inside for the spray paint. He hands one can to Will, extends the other toward Stevie.
“Gimme the magazines,” Stevie says. “I’m the one drove to Ohio to buy them, I’m the one should get to plant them.”
Harvey considers this for a few moments, then thinks, What the hell, and places the stack of magazines in his brother’s hands. “Not that it matters,” he says, “but why do you really want to go in there?”
Stevie grins. “That was Big-Ass Bole’s desk before it was Kenny’s, and I’ve been drinking water and saving up for this all day.” Harvey remembers Conrad Bole, too, the pear-shaped guidance counselor who told each of the brothers in turn to forget about college, don’t even consider it. He had recommended the army for Harvey, a two-year business school for Will. And he had recommended that Stevie, then in his junior year and a gifted portrait artist, a boy who had covered his bedroom walls with pen-and-ink likenesses of movie stars and famous singers but was too shy to show his work to anyone outside the family, Conrad Bole had recommended that Stevie drop out of school and fill the school’s new vacancy for a janitor.
“Have fun,” Harvey tells him. He and Will watch as Stevie crosses behind the front desk and makes his way toward the door in the rear of the room. There Stevie pauses, puts a hand on the doorknob, gives it a slow turn. The latch clicks. He swings the door open, turns back to his brothers, gives them a thumbs-up, and swaggers into Kenny’s office.
“Piece of cake,” Will says.
With their cans of paint he and Harvey scrawl neon orange epithets in three-foot letters on the corridor walls. Will writes Death To Teachers! and School Sucks! Harvey writes Fulton sucks dick! Both men giggle as they wield the cans in looping flourishes. Will paints in an evenhanded script, Harvey in thick, angry letters.
Harvey has finished his first composition and is contemplating his second, trying to envision Fulton is a pervert! emblazoned across the tile floor, when he hears Stevie’s hoarse whisper. “Hey, Harve! Harvey! You might want to come have a look at this!”
Harvey looks over his shoulder and sees Stevie leaning out the door to Kenny’s office. Will asks, “What’s wrong?”
And Stevie says, “You’re not gonna believe this.”
Will is closest to Kenny’s office and disappears inside. By the time Harvey crosses the threshold, Will is already coming toward him, hands outstretched to stop Harvey’s progress, nearly shouting over his shoulder at Stevie, “Get that shit off there!”
But Stevie, standing behind Kenny’s desk, unsure of what to do, looks from the glowing computer monitor to Harvey, and Harvey knows in an instant that he cannot let Will keep him out, and he shoves his brother hard, pushes past him, all but lunges toward the desk.
“I was just going through the drawers,” Stevie tells him, his words spilling out in a nervous torrent of self-acquittal, “when I came across one that was locked, and I figured if it was locked there must be something good in there, so I jimmied it open and I noticed this CD stuck clear in the back and I was just curious, you know? I swear I had no idea what was on it till I booted it up.”
Harvey grips the back of Kenny’s leather chair. All the air has gone out of his lungs. He is aware of nothing Stevie tells him, aware of no natural sounds whatsoever. The air is dead but for a buzzing growing louder and louder in his ears, burrowing deeper, a drill inside his brain.
Tiled across the monitor are the photo files Stevie found on the CD, pictures he opened one by one and arranged neatly, working in a kind of stunned amazement until horror set in, four photos on top and four underneath, all of Harvey’s wife, Jennilee, gorgeous but appalling.
It is Will’s hand on Harvey’s shoulder that starts the fulmination in Harvey’s brain. Harvey jerks away and shoves the chair with such force that Kenny’s heavy desk is jarred several inches across the thick carpet. The monitor wobbles on its pedestal but doesn’t fall, so Harvey seizes it in both hands and rips it into the air, only to have the cable jerk it out of his hands again. It falls onto the edge of the desk, then capsizes to the floor, the glass and plastic housing shattering. The screen crackles and goes black.
Then Harvey seizes the desk itself and, driving hard, he shoves it across the floor, slides it crashing into a wall. Will grabs him by the arm, but again Harvey jerks away, lunges for the door, arms swinging blindly at everything in his way.
Will turns to Stevie now, who has retreated against a wall, eyes wide. “You get that CD,” Will tells him, “and everything we brought with us. And I mean everything! And then you get the hell out of here.”
Stevie nods in response, but Will doesn’t see it, he is already in pursuit of his brother.
A shattering of glass—a trash can hurled into the trophy case. Trophies heaved one by one against the cement-block wall. This time Will does not merely take hold of his brother’s arm or lay a hand upon his shoulder. This time Will runs at Harvey and tackles him around the waist, drives him well away from the broken glass and ringing metal, slams him against a wall.
“Listen to me!” Will shouts, his face two inches from his brother’s. “We have to get out of here, you understand? First we get out, and then we kill the son of a bitch!”
Now Harvey faces him, eyes flooded with furious tears. “She told me she got rid of those.”
At this Will draws back an inch, puzzled, unsure of what he has heard. Harvey shoves him aside and turns down the hallway, strides furiously toward a door marked EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY.
Will races after him, shouts “No! Come this way!” But Harvey continues on, and when he is close to the exit he kicks the lever bar running across the middle of it and the door pops open and the fire alarm shrieks. Will catches his brother on the run two steps outside the door, grips Harvey’s arm just above the elbow, and pulls him along despite Harvey’s wriggling to free himself.
But Will cannot let go, cannot surrender his brother to rage. “Run, damn it!” he shouts while the alarm shrieks and echoes down the empty hallways. “Goddammit, Harvey . . . Run!”
They cut across the practice field and through the yard behind an abandoned house. Stevie’s pickup is parked on the unlighted street in front of this house, a street lined with small homes in disrepair. They lean against the tailgate, Harvey bent forward toward the bed of the truck, Will watching in the opposite direction. After a few moments Will says, “Listen,” and they hold their breaths. In the distance a soft clanking noise, as rhythmic as footsteps. “Go ahead and get in the truck,” Will says. “I’ll be right back.” And he disappears into the darkness.
Will meets Stevie coming across the practice field, the extension ladder hung over one shoulder and clanking with each step. Will snatches the duffel bag from his brother’s hand. “I got everything but the rope,” Stevie tells him.
“Forget the rope.”
“Harvey didn’t have his gloves on when he came down it.”
“They can’t get fingerprints off a freaking rope,” Will says. “I’m pretty sure they can’t. How could they?”
On the
other side of the field, the alarm whines inside the school. Will calculates that the police won’t arrive for another three or four minutes. Only one deputy is on duty this late at night, either Ronnie Walters, all two hundred pounds of him and as lugubrious as a black bear in January, or his polar opposite, skinny Chris Landers, the one folks call Barney Fife because he is always patting his pockets, checking for his keys, a nervous talker always fiddling with his tie. In either case the deputy at this hour will be watching TV at the fire station, maybe playing euchre with a couple of volunteers who prefer to spend their nights away from home. Too far from the school to actually hear the siren, they won’t be alerted to the break-in until called by the county dispatcher.
They’re probably getting the call right now, Will thinks as he and Stevie slide the extension ladder onto the truck bed. “We’ll be fine,” Will says aloud, and Stevie answers as he heads for the driver’s door, “We will if we get the hell out of here.”
Four minutes later, Stevie slows to make the turn into the alley beside Will’s bar, but Will tells him, “Don’t. Just pull over and let us out.”
Stevie pulls close to the curb, keeps his foot on the brake. Will slides out and holds the door wide for Harvey, who without a word heads into the alley. “You sure you got everything?” Will asks his younger brother, and Stevie tells him again, “Everything but the rope.”
“I’ll call you sometime tomorrow,” Will says, closes the door as softly as he can, and turns away.
The moment the truck disappears around the corner Will can hear Harvey retching at the end of the alley. Harvey is on his knees beside the dumpster, his face to the wall. Will stands over him, a hand on his brother’s back. He can feel the rigidity of Harvey’s spine, the way his shoulder blades quiver. Will has never before felt so helpless. Every breath is redolent with dumpster stink.
Harvey climbs to his feet finally, shaking, and allows himself to be steadied by his brother’s hand. Will says, “We better get back inside.”
Harvey wipes his mouth and nods.
“Wait here by the door. I’ll check things out first.”
Will walks softly through the kitchen, peeks out behind the bar. Giffy and Eight-Ball are seated at a table facing the big-screen TV, watching a boxing match on ESPN, two Hispanic featherweights slamming away at each other. A pitcher of beer, nearly empty, sits in the middle of the table, accompanied by a couple of bags of potato chips.
Will tiptoes back to the door and ushers Harvey inside. Harvey sneaks around to the front of the bar, slides onto a stool while Will silently lifts two bottles of Schlitz from the cooler, twists off the caps, and hands a bottle to his brother. They settle into position as if they have been there all night.
Overhead, footsteps hurry back and forth. Will knows that Lacy has been awakened from her sleep either by the police scanner or by a telephone call. Now she is throwing on a pair of jeans and a shirt, making sure she has fresh batteries for her digital camera, sitting on the bed to tie her shoelaces. It isn’t long before Will hears the quick patter of her footsteps on the back steps, then coming through the kitchen. When she appears on the threshold to the bar, Will asks, “Where’s the fire tonight?”
She digs around in a cooler for the coldest bottle of Coke. “Break-in over at the high school.”
“Kids,” Will says, and shakes his head. “They bitch about having to be there, and then what do they do but break back in over summer vacation.”
Harvey stares at the bottle in his hand.
“Molly still asleep?” Will asks.
“She was thirty seconds ago.” Lacy gives him a peck on the cheek. “I shouldn’t be long.”
“Take a lot of pictures,” Will says.
“I always do.”
“And hey.”
She turns at the door. He points to the front of her blouse, sleeveless yellow cotton with a rounded collar. She looks down, sees that it is buttoned incorrectly, one side of the shirt higher than the other.
“Geez,” she mutters as she yanks open the door, unbuttoning on the run.
Now Will notices that Giffy is looking his way. Will says, “Anything you fellas need back there?”
“Where the hell did you two come from?”
“Been here quite a while, Giff. Not that you two would’ve noticed, drinking up all my profits the way you’ve been doing.”
Giffy grins. “These two little Cuban guys are pretty good. They’re pounding the shit out of each other.”
“We’ve been watching,” Will tells him. “My money’s on the one in red trunks.”
At that moment the boxer in red trunks, Morales, having driven his opponent into a corner, delivers a mad flurry of punches to the midsection, then caps it with an unexpected hook to the head. The referee shoves the two boxers apart and gets in between them, pushing Morales back. His opponent collapses against the ropes just as the bell signals the end of round seven.
“I don’t think I’m going to take that bet,” Giffy says.
Twenty minutes later, Will and Harvey are alone inside the bar. Will thinks of Molly asleep upstairs, dreaming sweet dreams. Dreaming of bright possibilities. He wishes he could hand them to her on a platter, pave her path with the softest of carpets, remove every thorn from every rose she will ever pluck. He feels very tired suddenly with the knowledge that he can do none of that for her, can never shield her from disappointments or failure, can offer her nothing more than his own helpless love.
He gazes down at Harvey then, only forty-three years old. He looks ancient sitting there. He looks beaten.
“What can I get for you?” Will asks.
“We should have taken that CD.”
“I’m pretty sure Stevie grabbed it.”
“You think he did?”
“I’m pretty sure of it.”
“Christ, I hope so.”
Will leans back against the cash register, the hard metal edge across his spine. The beer tastes bitter this late at night, it sours in his stomach. He thinks he can hear a police siren across town, but he isn’t certain, it might be nothing more than the residue of the school’s alarm still ringing in his brain. He thinks about locking the front door but knows that nobody will be coming in anyway. He thinks of several things he might say to his brother, but he doesn’t say any of them because what good would they do, clumsy phrases, useless; there is no magic in words.
It is Harvey who breaks the silence. “The two of us were over at the Ramada one night,” he says. He picks at the label on his beer bottle, tears off tiny pieces and leaves them lying on the bar. He speaks haltingly, in no hurry to hear this or to be heard.
“This was just a month or so after we’d gotten engaged. We were dancing, drinking, having fun. And then this band-geek friend of Kenny’s, he comes over and keeps trying to drag Jennilee out on the dance floor. He’s so shitfaced he can barely stand up. She sees I’m getting kind of hot about it so she excuses herself and goes off to the ladies’ room. But the guy still won’t leave. Suddenly I’m his best buddy in the whole damn world and he’s telling me how she’s got the nicest body he’s ever laid eyes on, all that kind of crap. I’m just about ready to deck the guy when he up and asks me if Kenny’s still got those nude photos of her he had in college.”
“Jeezus,” Will says.
“I just went cold.”
“So . . . what happened then?”
“Soon as Jennilee came back, I dragged her outside. We sat in the car and . . .” He tears the last of his label free. Scratches a fingernail over the rough smear of glue.
“At first she denied it,” he says. “Claimed she didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. So I threatened to haul that geek in the bar outside there with us and beat the truth out of him. Funny, but she didn’t seem to mind that idea. So then I said, ‘No, no, on second thought I think there’s somebody else who needs it even more.’ So I started the engine and peeled out of the parking lot. I must’ve laid rubber for fifty yards down the road, I was so pissed.”
“The somebody else meaning Kenny.”
“She made it sound like it was all so innocent, you know? Like something brothers and sisters do all the time. Just fooling around, she called it. She’d let him take pictures and maybe touch her once in a while, but she swore up and down that it never went any further than that.” He looks at his bottle as if he is considering taking a drink, then changes his mind, too weary to raise it to his lips.
“So I drove her over to Kenny’s and told her either she went in and got those pictures or I did. And if it was me, I was more than likely to turn her into an only child.”
Will waits for the rest.
“She used the cigarette lighter from the car and burned them right there along the curb. Then she used her bare hand to sweep the ashes down into the sewer drain.”
And you probably thought that was touching, didn’t you? Will thinks. Jennilee’s beautiful, perfect hand sweeping away the ashes. You poor helpless son of a bitch.
Will says nothing for a while. Then, “So now what?”
“Now?” Harvey asks, and looks up finally, his eyes as fierce as embers. “Now I kill him whether she wants me to or not. And this time nobody is going to stop me.”
“Hell, brother,” Will tells him. “I’m not going to stop you. I’m going to load the revolver and drive the getaway car.”
Harvey smiles, though there is not a trace of happiness in his expression. He holds out a hand to Will. Will takes it, grips it hard.
“But first we wait,” Will says.
Harvey jerks his hand away. “Wait? Wait for what?”
We wait for you to cool down, Will thinks. He says, “News gets out about those magazines in Kenny’s drawer, a lot of people around here are going to want his hide.”
“Yeah? So?”
“So in the meantime, you don’t say a word about any of this to Jennilee. We can’t say a word to anybody. You think you can do that?”
“The same goes for you and Stevie, you know.”
“It goes for all of us. What we have to do is just stand back and let the shit fly on its own. Hell, we might wait a year before we do anything. Because by then, at the least Kenny will have lost his job and be living somewhere else. Us, we’re just going on with our lives same as always. Until that one night, a long time from now, when we pay Kenny a long overdue visit.”
The Best American Mystery Stories 2013 Page 40