McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  “Up to a skylight,” Davis said, “and down to where?”

  “To another window, in the basement,” Bruno said. “Painted shut. Not messed with. The police used what I have read was a fine-tooth comb.”

  “She was gone,” Jeffers said. “When we saw the window we ran downstairs to the basement. There were four cases of wine stacked up against that window. They were dusty. She wasn’t there. We ran all the way up to the roof. The sun was coming up over the park, I’m telling you, the goddamn birds were singing but my wife was not on the roof and there’s no way she was ever on the roof.”

  Davis stopped wiping the table. “Afraid of heights?”

  “No,” Jeffers said. “You can’t open that marble thing. It’s old. Wesson didn’t build it to be opened.”

  “Who went up on the roof?” Davis said. “All of you? Gregor too?”

  “Gregor’s old,” Jeffers said. “He dozed in the other chair.”

  “The police have been with him a million times,” Bruno said. “That’s why they haven’t arrested Mr. Jeffers, I think. They believe that I’d help him murder somebody and hide a body, but not Gregor. They thought maybe they couldn’t shake me, but two hours with the cops and Gregor would cry like a baby.”

  “He lost his mom young,” Jeffers said. “That’s why he’s such a fucking baby.”

  “I really don’t like you,” Davis said. She walked back to the bar and ran a thoughtful hand down the wood, close to where I was sitting. I couldn’t help watching her even though it must have looked schoolboy. “A girl,” she said, “goes into a room with nothing in it but antique furniture and closed windows. Someone brings her a drink. Glass breaks. A tiny window that goes nowhere is broken. The other ones aren’t, and you’re sure, right? Because they’re tall. You might have missed a small break at the top.”

  “When we got back from the roof I ripped those drapes down myself,” Jeffers said.

  “Which hasn’t helped your case,” Bruno said. “He trashed that whole room and then had to tell the cops that nothing had been broken but the window. We got an Italian guy doing the wiring and an old man with a shop in his garage. He’s the only man who can fix a Wesson chair, so he says.”

  “Yes,” Jeffers said. “I threw the chair.”

  “The chair that broke the door?” Davis asked.

  “No,” Jeffers said. “Another chair. The chair by the desk. It was like a throne but I lifted it and I snapped it over the desk.”

  “So there was another chair in the room,” Davis said. “What else?”

  “Papers in the desk,” Jeffers said. “I don’t know. Nothing. A letter opener, maybe? When I tipped it over I didn’t notice anything missing.”

  “The drink,” Bruno said.

  “What?” Davis asked.

  “The Delmonico,” Bruno said. “The tray was there and the little shaker full of melting ice. But the glass and the drink were gone. Gin, vermouth, brandy, dash of bitters.”

  “An invisibility potion,” Jeffers said. “Like I said. Gone like her.”

  “Mr. Jones,” Davis said, “put something on the jukebox.” She handed me two of Callahan’s unearned dollars. He glared at me. I walked to the jukebox and chose Chet Baker, which is what I do often.

  “What was she wearing?” Davis asked.

  “A necklace,” Jeffers said. “A lot of money around her neck. Diamonds and I think sapphires, I don’t know. A vintage thing somebody found for me. A present after a fight. And a silk dress I ripped. And her shoes, but her shoes were sitting on the desk, right next to the phone which I ripped out of the wall. Just tell me where the fuck she is or stop with the stupid questions. I’m so tired of this. The cops ask all the same things, what was she wearing, like I would have forgot to mention jet-pack.”

  “I’m going to pour you one more Scotch,” Davis said. “And you’ll drink it and I’ll tell you something and you’ll leave. And you’ll pay for another bourbon for Mr. Jones.”

  “Who the hell is Mr. Jones?” Jeffers asked.

  “A customer who doesn’t give me any trouble,” Davis said, her back to the bottles. She poured, and then she reached up and coaxed two martini glasses from a rack above her head. I always forget about that. The gentlemen sipped and I sipped and she filled the two glasses with ice and left them on the bar, while she busied herself with a shaker. Gin. Brandy. You know where this is going. She trembled the bitters bottle over the shaker, stirred, and shut the lid. The ice shifted in the glass. The jukebox played.

  There’s something about this I’m not telling right. How nasty Jeffers was, maybe, or the sheer implausible mess of a circus wife, a thuggish friend, a tale of an old butler and a locked-up room. The gorgeous shadow of the Slow Night while outside the sun sank, and the quiet of an early drink you didn’t deserve. You do not meet people very often like Davis, with a smile from nowhere and a wavering frown, thinking things over so beautifully just to watch her was beauty enough, like the lilt in a good jazz singer, the curve of a good lyric like a secret closing in on itself. This suspense is killing me. I can’t stand uncertainty. Tell me now. I’ve got to know whether you want me to stay or go. Love me, or leave me and let me be lonely. You won’t believe me. I love you only. I’d rather be lonely than happy with somebody else. You might find the nighttime the right time for kissing, but nighttime is my time for just reminiscing, regretting instead of forgetting with somebody else. There’ll be no one unless that someone is you. I intend to be independently blue. I want your love, but I don’t want to borrow—to have it today, to give back tomorrow. For my love is your love. There’s no love for nobody else.

  When the song ended Jeffers lifted his glass to drain it. It finished, and the sliver of lemon hit his grimacing mouth. “Well?” he said, and pointed to the icy glasses. “What’re those?”

  “Delmonicos,” Davis said. “Like the one that vanished. But it didn’t vanish. She threw the glass at the window. Both broke. You couldn’t tell one from the other.”

  Jeffers turned his glass over. This wasn’t polite. The Scotch was on the rocks, and the bar got wet with the slop of his ice. The puddle stopped before the two glasses, the ice ghosting into water, that Davis had ready for I couldn’t imagine who. “And my wife?”

  “That I can’t tell you,” Davis admitted. She opened her palm and brushed the pile of money, very slowly, into the puddle of Callahan’s drink. “Time to go, fellas.”

  “She’s not smart,” Jeffers said to Bruno, pointing at him and sneering. “She doesn’t know.”

  “I’m smart enough,” Davis said. “If you don’t stand up and leave I will walk out of this bar myself. Across the street is a roomful of drunk cops. I’ll tell them that Callahan Jeffers, a man finished in this town, is harassing me.”

  It was true. Funny thing: Davis lets cops drink for free, but hardly anybody ever takes her up. Across the way, O’Malley’s lets them drink for half price, and by closing there’s a whole platoon staggering outside. Bruno grabbed Callahan’s shoulder. Callahan put on his hat. When the door swung open the light was almost gone, and when it swung shut Davis poured the ice out of the glasses and drained the cocktails from the shaker. “Join me,” she said. “I haven’t had one of these in years.”

  I put my bourbon aside. “It’s not a drink for beginners,” I said.

  “You’re not a beginner,” she said. She’d overmeasured, or maybe some of the ice had melted—the glasses were brimming full. Carefully, carefully, she walked them both over, nearly teetering. “All those fishbowls I had to carry in Miss Brimley’s class,” she said. “Finally coming in handy. To us, Mr. Jones. To our good health.”

  I didn’t drink. “Where is she?” I said.

  Davis shrugged, which was a sight to see, each shoulder rising and falling like a sheet in the wind. “I don’t know. Probably in some summer cottage of Timothy Speed’s. Dyeing her hair or however that goes. Everybody wants to join the circus when they run away from home, but that might be too easy. He’d look for her t
here, maybe. But a dead girl’ll need money.”

  “Speed could help her sell the necklace,” I said.

  “That’d be a start,” she said, and sighed. “When did you figure it?”

  “When you reached for those glasses,” I said. “Nobody ever remembers to look up. The drink broke the window and made them look the wrong way. Just the time she needed. They took a trip to the basement, they took a trip to the room, and by the time they got back from the roof she was out the front door like a person. Speed left a car maybe.”

  “And Gregor? Really dozing, you think?”

  “Really dozing, I think,” I said. “Without shoes she could tip-toe past him. Or maybe he could lie to the cops after all. Maybe he watched her swing down from that chandelier, as skinny as she was, and let her go after all the fights he saw. She must have been very scared.”

  “Scared?” Davis said. “She hatched a plan to ruin her husband. It’s like he said. They’ll never charge him but he’ll never be mayor, either. He’ll just be a rich guy who got away with murder.”

  “That’s what he is anyway,” I said. “That’s why she was scared. Scared to fall. If she fell it’d be the end of her—maybe from hitting the floor, or maybe from her husband hitting her. It was a risk. Even an acrobat. Even someone who’d whittled herself away to almost nothing.”

  “Then she had almost nothing to lose,” Davis said. She took a sip and pursed her lips. It’s a bitter drink, or maybe bitter’s not what I mean. It’s sharp and sour. It’s complicated. It’s difficult to get down unless that’s the sort of thing you like. “I feel that way myself sometimes,” she said. “Almost nothing, or maybe that’s just Chet Baker nudging me to say that. You think I was wrong not to tell him.”

  “You told him where the drink went,” I said. “That’s enough for someone like that. Without a body they won’t charge him. He’ll never know for sure. Maybe Timothy Speed will even blackmail him.”

  “Or just keep overcharging him for furniture,” Davis said. “Wesson never made any rugs. The whole point of a Wesson is the sheer lines of the place. The floors are bare so you can see the wood.”

  “Callahan Jeffers,” I said, “would never see the wood.”

  “Not for the trees,” Davis agreed. She put her drink down and walked to the jukebox with one of Jeffers’s damp bills. She punched a number in and her hair just slayed me in the red lights shining inside the machine that sits in the Slow Night waiting for people to ask it to sing. I tried the drink myself but didn’t like it, but I liked watching the tilt of the surface of the drink as I moved the glass, like water too cold to swim in. When we’re alone like this the room sinks in a bit, like we’re locked away from all the people. There are some who can’t stand to stay in a room like that but this is my regular spot, right here at the bar where I can see her. Time and time I want to tell Davis that I love her, but of course she’s so smart—of course she is—there’s no way she hasn’t figured it out already.

  THE SCHEME of THINGS

  by CHARLES D’AMBROSIO

  LANCE VANISHED behind the white door of the men’s room, and when he came out a few minutes later he was utterly changed. Gone was the tangled nest of thinning black hair, gone was the shadow of beard, gone, too, was the grime on his hands, the crescents of black beneath his blunt, chewed nails. Shaving had sharpened the lines of his jaw and revealed the face of a younger man. His shirt was tucked neatly into his trousers and buttoned up to his throat. He looked as clean and bland as an evangelist. He bowed to Kirsten with a stagy sweep of his hand and entered the station. All business, anxious over yet another delay, he returned immediately with the attendant in tow, a kid of sixteen, seventeen.

  “This here’s my wife, Kirsten,” Lance said.

  Kirsten smiled.

  “Pleased,” the kid said. He crawled under the chassis of the car and inspected the tailpipe.

  “Your whole underside’s rusted to hell,” he said, standing up, wiping his hands clean of red dust. “I’m surprised you haven’t fallen through.”

  “I don’t know much about cars,” Lance said.

  “Well,” the kid said, his face bright with expertise, “you should replace everything, right up to the manifold. It’s a big job. It’ll take a day and it’ll cost you.”

  “You can do it?” Kirsten asked.

  “Sure,” the kid said. “No problem.”

  Lance squinted at the oval patch above the boy’s shirt pocket. “Randy,” he said, “what’s the least we can do?”

  “My name’s Bill,” the kid said. “Randy’s a guy used to work here.”

  “So Bill, what’s the least we can get away with?”

  “Strap it up, I suppose. It’ll probably hold until you get where you’re going. Loud as hell, though.”

  The kid looked at Kirsten. His clear blue eyes lingered on her chest.

  “Let’s get it fixed,” she said, feeling transparent.

  “We’ll have to make do,” Lance said. He ran his tongue into the gap between his teeth. “We represent a charity.” Lance handed the kid one of the printed pamphlets, watching his eyes skim back and forth as he took in the information. “Outside of immediate and necessary expenses, we don’t have much money.”

  “Things are sure going to hell,” the kid said. He shook his head, returning the pamphlet to Lance.

  “Seems that way,” Lance said.

  The kid hurried into the station and brought back a coil of pipe strap. While he was under the car, Lance sat on the warm hood, listening to the wind rustle in the corn. Brown clouds of soil rose from the fields and gave the air a sepia tint. Harvest dust settled over the leaves of a few dying elms, over the windows of a cinder-block building, over the trailers in the courtyard across the street. One of the trailer doors swung open. Two Indians and a cowgirl climbed down the wooden steps.

  “You got a phone?” Lance asked.

  “Inside,” the kid said.

  Lance looked down and saw the soles of the kid’s work boots beneath the car, a patch of dirty sock visible through the hole widening in one of them. He walked away, into the station.

  The kid hadn’t charged them a cent and they now sat at an intersection, trying to decide on a direction. The idle was rough. The car detonated like a bomb.

  “Here’s your gum,” Lance said.

  He emptied his front and back pockets and pulled the cuff of his pants up his leg and reached under the elastic band of his gym socks. Pink and green and blue and red packages of gum piled up in Kirsten’s lap. He pulled a candy bar from his shirt pocket and began sucking away at the chocolate coating.

  “One pack would’ve been fine,” Kirsten said. “A gumball would have been fine.”

  “Land of plenty, sweetheart,” he said.

  Kirsten softened up a piece of pink gum and blew a large round bubble until it burst and the gum hung like flesh from her nose.

  “Without money, we’re just trying to open a can of beans with a cucumber,” Lance said. “It doesn’t matter how hungry we are, how desirous of those beans we are—without the right tools, those beans might as well be on the moon.” Lance laughed to himself. “Moon beans,” he said.

  Kirsten got out of the car. The day was turning cold, turning to night. She leaned through the open window, smelling the warm air, wafting unpleasantly with the mixed scent of chocolate and diesel.

  “What’s your gut feel?” Lance asked.

  “I don’t know anymore, Lance.”

  She walked toward the intersection. Ghosts and witches crossed from house to house, holding paper sacks and pillowcases. The street-lights sputtered nervously in the fading twilight. With the cold wind cutting through her T-shirt, Kirsten felt her nipples harden. She was small-breasted and sensitive and the clasp on her only bra had broken. She untucked the shirt and hunched her shoulders forward so the nipples wouldn’t show but still the dark circles pressed against the white cotton. The casual clothes Lance had bought her in Key Biscayne, Florida, had come to seem a cost
ume and were now especially flimsy and idle and ridiculous in Tiffin, Iowa.

  A young girl crossed the road, and Kirsten followed her. She thought she might befriend the girl and bring her home, a gambit, playing on the gratitude of the worried parents Kirsten always imagined when she saw a child alone, parents whose concern she conjured out of a lifetime of indifference and neglect. The pavement gave way to gravel and the gravel to dirt and finally a narrow dusty path in the weeds dipped through a dragline ditch and vanished into a cornfield. The girl was gone. Kirsten waited at the edge of the field, listening to the wind, until she caught a glimpse of the little girl again, far down one of the rows, sitting and secretly eating candy from her sack.

  “You’ll spoil your dinner,” Kirsten said.

  The girl clutched the neck of her sack and shook her head. Entering the field felt to Kirsten like wading from shore and finding herself, with one fatal step, out to sea, each row was so identical, angling away to infinity. She sat in the dirt, facing the girl. The corn rose over their heads and blew in waves, bending with the wind, giving off a swollen sigh.

  “Aren’t you cold?” Kirsten said. “I’m cold.”

  “Are you a stranger?” the girl asked.

  “What’s a stranger?”

  “Somebody that kills you.”

  “No, then, I’m not a stranger.”

  Kirsten picked a strand of silk tassel that hung in the little girl’s hair.

  “I’m your friend,” she said. “Why are you hiding?”

  “I’m not hiding. I’m going home.”

  “Through this field?” Kirsten said.

  “I know my way,” the little girl said.

  The girl was dressed in bibbed overalls and dirty pink thongs but Kirsten wasn’t quite sure it was a costume. A rim of red lipstick distorted the girl’s mouth grotesquely, and blue moons of mascara gave her eyes an unseeing vagueness.

  “What are you supposed to be?” Kirsten asked.

  The girl squeezed a caramel from its cellophane wrapper, and said, “A grown-up.”