Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

by Donna Andrews

  Over the next week, the sadness stayed with me. I’d realized by then that it wasn’t just about Mom and Dad, it was about me and everything that had happened in the past couple of weeks. I tried Michele a couple more times. The second time she was real cold. You know how girls are when they aren’t happy to hear from you and just want to get you off the phone. After I hung up, I sat there in the silence with Churchill weighing a ton on my lap. I felt my cheeks burn. It was pretty embarrassing, the way she’d maneuvered me off the phone so fast.

  The next night, no longer gainfully employed, I walked across town to the library. I was reading the whole run of Robert Jordan fantasy novels. He was one of the best writers around.

  Even though the library had bought six copies of his new hardcover, they were all checked out. I picked up a collection of his short stories. He was good at those, too.

  On the walk back home, I saw them coming out of a Hardee’s. He had his arm around her. They were laughing. I was ready to fight now. Just walk right up to him and punch him in the freaking chops. He’d be the one sitting down on his butt this time, not me. And I’d remind her that she still owed me an apartment cleaning.

  Good ole Michele and good ole Bill. That’s the thing I’ve never understood about girls. Hard to imagine a guy more full of himself than Bill. But she obviously thought he was just fine and dandy. Otherwise she wouldn’t let him have his arm around her. He was going to sleep with her and then he was going to tell everybody. I wondered how she’d react if I told her.

  But I couldn’t. Much as I wanted to go over there and tell her what was really going on, I couldn’t make my legs move in that direction. Because I could live with my self-image as a geek, a loser, a boy-man, but I could never live with myself as a snitch.

  A few days later I signed up for computer classes at the community college. I gave up my room on the rent-due day and moved back home. The folks were glad to have me. I was being responsible. Dad said his buddy Mike could get me on at his supermarket and so he had.

  What I did for the next few nights, after bagging groceries till nine o’clock, was glut myself on the past. I still had boxes of old Fangorias and Filmfaxes in my closet and I hauled them out and spread them on the bed and just disappeared into my yesterdays, back to the time when there was no doubt that I was going to Hollywood, no doubt that I’d be working for Roger Corman, no doubt that someday I’d be doing my own films, and no doubt they’d be damned good ones.

  But my time machine sprung a leak. I’d get all caught up in being sixteen again and grooving on Star Wars and Planet of the Apes and Alien but then the poison gas of now would seep in through those leaks. And I’d start thinking about Michele and Bill and Spence and how my future seemed settled now — computer courses and a lifelong job in some dusty little computer store in a strip mall somewhere — and then I’d be back to the here and now. And not liking it at all.

  On a rainy Friday night, my mom knocked on my door and said, “Spence is downstairs for you, honey.”

  I hadn’t told my folks about the falling out Spence and I had had.

  I just said okay and went down to see him. He was talking to my dad. Dad was telling him how happy they were about my taking those computer courses.

  I grabbed my jacket and we went out. I hadn’t so much as nodded at Spence. In fact, we didn’t say a word until we were in his old Dodge Dart and heading down the street.

  “How you been?” he said.

  “Pretty good.”

  “Your Dad seems real happy about you being in computer classes.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t sound so happy, though.”

  “What’s this all about, Spence?”

  “What’s what all about?”

  “ ‘What’s what all about?’ What do you think it’s all about? You took Bill’s side on this whole thing. Now you come over to my house.”

  He didn’t say anything for a while. We just drove. Headlights and neon lights and streetlights glowed like watercolors in the rain. Girls looked sweet and young and strong running into cafes and theaters to get out of the downpour. His radio faded in and out. Every couple of minutes he’d slam a fist on the dash and the radio would be all right again for a few minutes. The car smelled of gasoline and mildewed car seats.

  “He’s getting really weird.”

  “Who is?”

  “ ‘Who is?’ Who do you think is, Jason? Bill is.”

  “Weird about what?”

  “About her. Michele.”

  “Weird how?”

  “He’s really hung up with Michele. He won’t tell me what it is but somethin’s really buggin’ him.”

  “I’m supposed to feel bad about it?”

  “I’m just telling you is all.”

  “Why? Why would I give a shit?”

  He glanced over at me. “I shoulda stuck up for you with Bill. The night he knocked you down, I mean. I’m sorry.”

  “You really pissed me off.”

  “Yeah, I know. And I’m sorry. I really am. I–I just can’t handle being around Bill anymore. This whole thing with Michele. She’s all he talks about and she won’t let him do nothin’. He says it’s like bein’ in sixth grade again.”

  I wasn’t up for just driving around. I’d done enough cruising in my high school years. I said, “You seen that new Wes Craven flick?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  “There’ll be a late show. We could still make it.”

  “So you’re not still pissed?”

  “Sure I’m still pissed. But I want to see the Wes Craven and you’re the only person I know who’s got a car.”

  “I don’t blame you for still bein’ pissed.”

  “I don’t blame me for still bein’ pissed, either.”

  I didn’t hear from Spence till nearly a week later. After the Craven flick, which was damned good, he started talking about other things we could do but I just told him I was busy. Sometimes, friendships, even long ones, just end. One thing happens and you realize that the friendship was never as strong as you’d thought. Or maybe you just realize that you’re one cold, unforgiving prick. Whichever it was, I wasn’t up for seeing Spence or Bill or Michele for a long time. Maybe never.

  I went my glum way to computer classes and my even glummer way to the supermarket.

  He was in the supermarket parking lot waiting for me when I got off work. I walked over to his car. It was a warm, smoky October night. Big-ass harvest moon. I wanted to be a kid again in my Halloween costume. I could barely — just quite — remember what it had been like to go trick-or-treating before the days when perverts and sadists hid stick pins and razor blades in candy apples.

  I walked over to the driver’s side of his car. I wanted to walk home. October nights like this were my favorites.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  “You doin’ anything special?”

  “Yeah. Nicole Kidman called. She wants to go get a pizza with me. She said she’ll pay for it. And the motel room afterward.”

  “Remember to bring a condom.”

  “She’s got me covered there, too. She bought a big box of them.”

  We just looked at each other across an unbreachable chasm of time and pain. He’d been a part of my boyhood. But I wasn’t a boy anymore. Not a man yet, to be sure. But not a boy, either.

  “He’s pretty screwed up.”

  “We talking about Bill?”

  “Yeah. Had the day off. Drinking beers with whiskey chasers.”

  “Good. We need to drink more. Make sure we’re winos before we hit twenty-five.”

  “I think maybe we should go over to Michele’s place.”

  “Why?”

  He stared at the passing cars. When he looked back at me, he said, “You better get in, Jason. This shit could be real bad.”

  It was one of the little Silverstream trailers that are about as big as an SUV. Except, given its condition, this one should have been called Ruststream. It sat between
two large oak trees on a corner where a huge two-story house had been torn down the summer before. The rest of the neighborhood blazed with laughter and throbbing car engines and rap music and folks of both the black and white persuasion filling porches and sidewalks, most of them trying to look and sound like bad-asses. Her trailer was a good quarter block from its nearest neighbor.

  Bill’s motorcycle leaned against one of the trees. No lights, no sound coming from the trailer.

  “Maybe he’s getting the job done,” Spence said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  The door was open half an inch. I opened it wide and stuck my head in.

  “What the hell you think you’re doin’?”

  I couldn’t see him at first, couldn’t see anything except vague furniture shapes. Smells of whiskey and cigarettes. A cat in the gloom, crying now.

  “Get out of here, Jason.”

  “Where’s Michele?”

  “Where you think she is, asshole?”

  “I wanna talk to her.”

  “I told you once, Jason. Get out of here. I knocked you on your ass once. And I can do it again.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  Two steps led up to the trailer floor. I was about to set my right foot on the second step when he came at me. My mind had time to register that he was wearing jeans, no shirt, no socks, and he had a whiskey bottle in his hand.

  He tackled me and drove me all the way to the ground. He meant to hit me with the whiskey bottle, but I had the advantage of being sober. He smelled of puke and booze and sex and greasy food, maybe a hamburger.

  As the bottle arced downward, I rolled to the right, moving slowly enough to slam my fist hard into the side of Bill’s head. The punch dazed him, but not enough to keep him from trying to get me again with the bottle. This time I didn’t have time to move away from it. All I could do was grab the wrist and slow the bottle as it descended. It connected, but not hard enough to knock me out. Or to stop me from landing another punch on the same side of his head as before. This one knocked him loose from me. His straddling legs loosened enough to let me buck him off. He went over backwards. He was drunk enough to be confused by all this happening so quickly. Now it was my turn to straddle him. I just wanted to make his face bloody. I hit him until my hands started to hurt, and then I stood up, grabbed him by an arm, and started dragging him to his motorcycle.

  “Go get his stuff from inside, okay?” I said to Spence.

  He nodded and ran over to the trailer. He didn’t need to go inside. Michele was in the doorway, dropping Bill’s shoes, socks, shirt, and wallet one by one into Spence’s hands. She wore a white terrycloth robe. She had a cigarette going. “You stay with me for a while, Jason?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  By now, Bill was on his motorcycle, roaring it to raucous life. Spence handed him his belongings.

  Spence said, “Looks like her nose is busted, man. You do that?”

  “Shut up, Spence,” Bill said. Then he made his bike louder than I’d ever heard it before. Bill glared at Spence for a long time and said, “I don’t know what I ever saw in a pussy like you, Spence. Don’t call me anymore.”

  “You beat her up, man. You don’t have to worry about me callin’ you.”

  He roared away, grass and dirt churning from beneath his back wheel. He got all the way down the block before I said anything. “I’ll just walk home later, Spence.”

  “Wait’ll you see her, Jason. He beat the shit out of her.”

  He walked back to the street and drove away.

  The light was on in the front part of the trailer now. She was gone from the door. When I sat down at the small table across from her, she pushed a cold can of Bud my way. I thanked her and gunned an ounce or two. My head hurt from where Bill got me with the bottle. She’d fixed up her trailer just the right way — so that you forgot you were in a trailer.

  Her delicate nose didn’t look broken, as Spence had said, but it was badly bruised. She had a black eye, a bloody, swollen mouth and her left cheek was bruised.

  “Maybe you should go to an ER,” I said.

  “I’ll survive.” She made an effort to laugh. “I let him sleep with me but that wasn’t enough for him.”

  “What the hell else did he want?”

  “Well, he slept with me, but I wouldn’t take my bra or my blouse off. I said I had my reasons and I wanted him to respect them. In some weird way, I’d started to like him. Maybe I was just lonely. I never could pick men for shit. You should’ve seen some of the losers I went out with in L.A. My girlfriends always used to laugh and say that if there was a serial killer on the dance floor, he’d be the one I’d end up with for the night.”

  “So you made love and—”

  “We made love. I mean, it wasn’t the first time. The last couple of weeks, we’d been sleeping together. And he tried real hard to deal with me not taking my top off. I wouldn’t let him touch my breasts.” She smiled with bloody teeth. “My scream-queen breasts.” She shook her head. Or tried. She was halfway through turning her head to the left when she stopped. She had a bad headache, too, apparently. “It was building up. His thing about my breasts. And tonight, afterwards, he just went crazy. Said if I really loved him I’d be completely naked for him. I liked him. But not enough to trust him. You know, with my secret.”

  She lighted a cigarette with a red plastic lighter. She looked around a bit and then back at me and said, “It’s why I left L.A.”

  “What is?”

  “I don’t have breasts anymore. I had this really bad kind of breast cancer. I had to have both of them removed.” She exhaled through bloody lips. “So how would that be? A scream queen known for her breasts doesn’t have any anymore? I went to Eugene, Oregon to get the diagnosis. I kind’ve suspected I had breast cancer. I didn’t want anybody in L.A to know. I paid cash, gave a fake name, they didn’t have any idea who I was. I had the double mastectomy there, too. I had some money saved and I used it to disappear. I just couldn’t’ve handled all the publicity. All the bullshit about my breasts inspiring all these young boys — and then not having them anymore. You know how the tabloids are. And then do a couple of weepy interviews on TV. So I’ve just been traveling around. And I’ll be doing more traveling tomorrow. Because I know Bill will call some reporter or tabloid or somebody like that. I just don’t want to face it.”

  She said, “C’mere, okay?”

  I stood up and walked over to her. My knees trembled. I didn’t know why.

  She took my right hand and guided it to her chest and then slid it inside the terrycloth so that I could feel the scarring from the mastectomy. I wanted to jerk my hand away. I’d never felt anything like that before. But then a tenderness came over me and I let my hand linger and then she eased my hand out of her robe and kissed my fingers, as if she was grateful.

  Then she started sobbing, and it was pretty bad, and I said everything I knew to say but it didn’t do any good so I steered her into bed and just lay with her there in the darkness and we held hands and she talked about it all, everything from the day she first felt the tiny lump on the underside of her left breast to being so afraid she’d die from the anesthetic — she’d had an uncle who died while being put under, died right there on the table — and how she went through depression so bad she lost twenty-five pounds in three months and how that then turned around and became the opposite kind of eating disorder, this relentless urge to gorge, which she was battling now.

  In the morning, I helped her load her car. She didn’t have all that much. I told her I’d pay the rent off with the money she gave me and return the key. She kissed me then for the first and only time — the kind of kiss your sister would give you — and then she was gone.

  The story hit one of the supermarket papers three weeks later. She’d been right. The story dealt with the irony of a girl who’d been made into a scream queen at least partly because of her beautiful breasts losing them to cancer. A minister somewhere said that it was God’s wrath
, exploiting your body for filthy Hollywood money, and then getting your just desserts. You know how God’s people like to talk.

  As for me... tomorrow I’m flying to L.A. My dad has a friend out there who owns a video company that produces training films for various companies. Not exactly Paramount pictures, or even Roger Corman. But a start. My folks even gave me five thousand dollars as seed money. They’re pretty sure that in a year I’ll be back here. And maybe they’re right...

  It’s funny about Michele. I watch her old videos all the time. That’s how I prefer to remember her. It’s not because of her breasts. It’s because of that lovely girly radiance that was in her eyes and her smile back in those days.

  I still watch them and I’m sure Spence does, too. He got a job in Chicago and moved there a couple months back. Bill joined the Army. I wonder if he still watches them.

  But most of all I wonder if Michele ever watches them. Probably not.

  Not now, anyway. But maybe someday.

  A Chance to Get Even

  by Lawrence Block

  © 2007 by Lawrence Block

  Art by Mark Evans

  Lawrence Block, novelist and short story writer par excellence, was also the editor, in 2006, of one of Akashic’s city-themed titles, Manhattan Noir. Said Booklist: “The volumes are uneven, but when the right editor sits at the desk, the results can be well worthwhile, as is the case here.” Mr. Block’s latest novel is Lucky at Cards (Hard Case Crime).

  ❖

  A little after midnight, Gordon Benning, a balding gastroenterologist with a perpetually dyspeptic expression on his long face, announced as he dealt the cards that his next deal would be his final hand. Several players indicated their agreement, and one, a CPA with a propensity for stating the obvious, said, “So this is the last round.”