Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine Page 4

  And I swear my heart flew up to her there where we watched Laura struggle against the noose pushed down over her head. Mama screamed Laura’s name, holding up baby Lotil, whose eyes were blinking awake, as high as she could. And then Mama screamed her name again. And I swear in that moment Laura stopped struggling and wailing for L. W. who would now never get those roller skates to skate him away from the world of whites and she faced out, looking toward us in the shivering night. Mama held up baby Lotil for her to see. Held her right up. And me and Mama and Laura and baby Lotil were the only ones perfectly alive and still in the light of all those scattered lanterns, and I needed to believe in those seconds before several hands lifted her into the air, she saw.

  As the singing crowed Onward then ye people, join our happy throng, Laura was flung off the bridge and once again that roar of satisfaction went up loud in the godforsaken night, like an unnatural waterfall flowing up, up to whatever dark place it came from, as Laura’s weight against the noose snapped her neck. In her calico print dress, with her good and capable hands at her sides, like L. W. before her, she finally came to a stop.

  In the glare of light from the lanterns and the moon, Laura’s mouth was closed and set, and her brow was wrinkled, like she was studying hard on a problem. Maybe about how to attack that kudzu. Or whether baby Lotil would find some white luck and get a different life—or even just a life. Or maybe my Laura was studying hard on wickedness itself, and for that she’d require more time than she was getting.

  The first day afterwards, Mama waited for the law or the Odd Fellows, who like to keep things orderly, to cut them down, but none came. The second day, Mama waited for just common decent folk to cut them down, but none came. Which is not to say the bridge didn’t draw a crowd of gawkers, women in white dresses with parasols, men with starched collars, and a photographer who set up his box camera just a little ways downriver and motioned with his arm for them all to gather round more closely over the place where the corpses hung, so no one’s left out. On the third day, me and Mama got two men from Dark Town to come help with Laura and L. W. Pretty soon traffic would start up again on this bridge over the Canadian River, but for now there was only us, and I ran halfway across and went down on my knees.

  Grunting, I sawed the ropes with a skinning knife, saw one of the men wading into the river, swiping sweat off his head with his forearm, muttering how I shouldn’t be looking at poor L. W., it wasn’t decent. As Mama worked a pikestaff to pull Laura’s body closer to shore she told him that anyone looking at L. W.’s pants is paying attention to the wrong thing. The men agreed to bury them on the Nelson farm and Mama offered them Gorgeous and the chickens, which the men appreciated, and then Mama suggested that the Nelson farm might make a good home for a new family. The man who mentioned about L. W.’s pants halfway smiled when he said something about there being a whole passel of strangle vine at Nelsons’ place but it’s just a matter of keeping on top of it, for sure, elsewise there’s no light or air or rain gets through.

  Me and Mama watched as they loaded the soaked and swollen bodies of Laura and L. W. Nelson into their wagon, and I started to cry, pushing my fists against my own chest, howling about their missing shoes. As the wagon bumped its way back up to the road, I yelled I’d make it right, I swore I’d make it right, I’d tell that magistrate whenever he got here what I saw. I swore I’d tell.

  There’s no making it right, said Mama, holding my arms and making me look her in the face.

  But we know what happened!

  We’ve got two dead Negroes and a little white Yankee girl. We’ve got nothing they care about.

  But, Mama—

  We’ve got nothing.

  June 3

  I pull my arm away from my mouth and stand listening to the sounds here by the Canadian River, remembering Laura’s studying expression, the last on her face in this lifetime. I’m studying, too, listening to the vireos call back and forth to each other out of sight high in the hackberry trees, and I’m studying the wheep of a call and the hollow hammering of a woodpecker. There is just a little breeze now, fluttering the leaves of the skunkbushes that have their own soft song on this very last day I can look for Laura and L. W.’s shoes before we leave Okemah for good, me and Lotil and Mama, who has arranged for the man worried about me and L. W.’s pants to take us all the way to Tulsa in Laura’s wagon, pulled by Gorgeous, who will get us to the train bound for Philadelphia just fine. I know I’ll never find those shoes. I am resigned.

  The cows, wherever in their sturdy ways they are, have moved on while I stand here studying Sheriff Tom Darnley half dead with drink in the rotten skiff that belongs to nobody anymore. I think about Ella Joy who I hardly recognized the day after the deputy died, her arm in a sling and a patch of her blonde hair pulled clean out of her scalp. And I think about George Loney who might not have been the truest husband this side of the Mississippi but who called Laura “ma’am” and had no reason to think he wasn’t turning unarmed toward a friend that day in Laura’s yard.

  And I think about the hymn singing and the lanterns held up that night so nobody would miss a thing, that thing the photographer was now selling around town as picture postcards to send to your friends and family in other places to show them about Oklahoma law and the latest fashions. And I think about the eggs hitting our windows after it got around we cut down what Mama’s fifth graders called “them niggers.”

  But mostly, as I study just how big those gaping holes are in the skiff holding the sheriff, and just how far away the deepest, fastest part of the Canadian River is from where I’m standing, I think about kudzu. I really do. And I see my Laura with a hatchet, keeping after the strangle vine that keeps out all the light and air and rain from everything else that grows. I untie the long strong rope pulled taut that holds the skiff to the trunk of a black walnut tree set well back from the water. Then I loop the end around the low-hanging branches of a buckbrush close to the riverbank, just to be sporting, wondering while the vireos sing to me whether I’ve done enough studying.

  We’ve got nothing, Mama told me after we cut them down, but I find myself sorely doubting that. Then I dig my feet in hard at the bow of the skiff and I set to work, putting all my strength into slowly shoving the sheriff out on the river.

  Copyright © 2012 Shelley Costa

  * * *

  BIG ROCKS, LITTLE ROCKS

  BOB TIPPEE | 3046 words

  Reston Boyle surprises me by saying, yeah, he’ll let me buy lunch, both of us knowing it can’t be anything fancy on account of we’re volunteers, not the big-shot political donors we feed off, and everybody’s got more work than time. I’m thinking that’s something, Reston and me suddenly with so much in common. So we meet at Jody’s, a deli across from headquarters where workers on the reelection campaign of Senator Jonathan Tewell go when they’re too hungry for McDonald’s and too broke for anything better.

  “Good man, Tewell,” I say just for conversation while we shake hands, Reston looking me over like always, with hair a little grayer than the last time I saw him but the rest of him taut as ever. He’s wearing gray slacks and a navy blazer over a white shirt and tie striped with blue and gold. I don’t think he owns anything else.

  “Good man,” he says.

  We hit the line early so it’s not too long, chicken Caesar salad for Reston, pastrami on rye for me, two coffees. We find a table by the front window where we can watch colleagues hustle in and out of headquarters with briefcases and armloads of flyers, young mostly, younger than Reston and me. We talk about how close the race is, God knows why. And only two months before the election.

  “Larry West calls it throat-cutting time,” I say.

  “Who’s Larry West?” Reston asks, forking a chunk of white meat dripping dressing, studying it, eating it. How can he not know who Larry West is? Larry West is into everything. Larry West gets things done. Then I remember.

  “Right,” I say. “So are you, like, investigating the other side, scraping slime of
f walls, that kind of thing?”

  Reston shrugs. “Whatever the senator wants.”

  I chuckle. “Shouldn’t be hard,” I say. “Everybody knows Victor Angleton doesn’t keep a padlock on his zipper.”

  Reston laughs. He works on his salad. He finishes his coffee.

  When we’re both done I say, “Anyway, we’ve both got more important things to worry about than whatever might have happened between us in the past.”

  “Getting Senator Tewell reelected,” Reston says.

  I smile. We shake hands.

  Only one thing can keep me from staying late at headquarters, working the phones, being a real person asking other real people to vote for Jonathan Tewell, not some recording like the Angleton campaign uses, the cheap phonies. Her name is Ellen Bixby. We meet at Arnie’s, for old time’s sake. We kiss—my lips, her cheek.

  “Remember?” I ask after guiding her to the table farthest from the door, behind the bar, quiet.

  “After we saw The Bourne Identity,” she says. “You loved it.”

  A leggy barmaid in shorts cut for deep water, barely old enough to sell drinks by the looks of her, glides over, lights the candle, and removes the RESERVED sign I made sure Arnie put there an hour earlier.

  “Remember after?” I ask.

  “Whiskey sour,” Ellen tells the barmaid.

  “Scotch neat,” I say.

  The barmaid sways away—old enough, now that I’ve had a closer look.

  “Thanks for driving over,” I say.

  Ellen studies me with eyes that can melt iron, blonde hair short and layered, perfect like always. She doesn’t smile. “You said you had something to tell me.”

  I clear my throat and lower my voice into the register I use for importance. “Remember I told you I’ve been volunteering in the Tewell campaign?”

  She nods. The drinks come. She sips. I speak.

  “Looks like it’ll turn into something permanent.”

  I lift my drink like I’m toasting her, take a sip, and watch her over the rim of the glass. She watches me watch her, expecting elaboration. I set down my glass, waiting her out.

  She yields. “I don’t think anything’s permanent in politics.”

  “Right!” I say and take another drink. This is going well. “You’re always right. Nothing’s permanent. Anyway, there’s this guy—he’s into everything—the guy who recruited me. We’re meeting tomorrow. About an opportunity, he said.”

  Ellen licks her lower lip and takes another drink. “The last opportunity you got this excited about almost put you in jail.”

  “A misunderstanding,” I say and wave away the subject. “I’m thinking it’ll be in finance, with my experience and all.”

  “Look, Bax,” Ellen says, cuddling her glass in both hands, looking down at it instead of up at me. “The reason I agreed to come over here is to tell you—well, I’m seeing somebody.”

  This shouldn’t surprise me. Beautiful woman, technically unattached. The news kicks me in the gut anyway, probably because it comes straight from Ellen instead of the usual way, from some mutual friend mentioning it incidentally like everybody knows, in case I don’t.

  “Hey,” I say, “that’s great.”

  “His name’s Don Weller,” she says. “Owns a car dealership.”

  This answers a question I didn’t plan to ask. I need to show interest. I ask, “New or used?”

  Those eyes slash me like I said something wrong. Ellen starts to answer then stops herself and sighs. “So it’s a big day tomorrow,” she says, proving she’s been listening, making my gut feel better. “I guess you’ll either be off on a political career or back to selling insurance.”

  Hearing Ellen say “political career” makes me feel like I run the world, makes me want her more than ever.

  “I own the agency,” I remind her.

  Ellen shrugs, her drink now down to ice cubes. “You’re a lucky man,” she says.

  I say, “So I was thinking maybe you and I—you know, we had something special going—”

  “I’ve got to go,” Ellen says, sliding out of her seat. “Thanks for the drink.”

  “I’ll give you a call,” I say.

  “Thanks for the drink,” she says again, leaving.

  Larry West has told me more than once, beginning with when he recruited me, that he doesn’t exist. Doesn’t appear on any roster. Doesn’t talk to the press. Doesn’t draw a salary.

  I asked him about that no-salary business once. “Politicians take care of people who take care of them,” he said.

  He might not exist, but he’s everywhere: finding quick-draw subs when volunteers can’t work the phones because they have doctor’s appointments or PTO meetings and forget to call until fifteen minutes past way too late, or finding a bare-knuckles PR outfit to fix a rumor about Tewell owing tax money (untrue), or commandeering the only banquet hall in a nowhere town so Tewell can speak on short notice about farm policy and managing to make the displaced veterans’ group feel patriotic for rescheduling their awards dinner. Larry attends every policy meeting, reviews each of Tewell’s speeches, edits all press releases, and decides who meets anonymously with which reporter when something important needs to be leaked.

  Larry works out of a cubicle that barely exists. It has a metal desk, two chairs, a laptop, and stacks of newspapers, nothing else—no landline phone, no nameplate.

  “You’ve got what it takes, Bax,” he tells me, grinning, wrinkles framing his mouth and narrow, almond-colored eyes. He’s a bald former Marine with wire glasses and a voice that comes from deep inside a broad chest.

  Sitting in the spare chair, I shrug and say, “I believe in what I’m doing.”

  He nods three, four times, his standard gesture of approval. “Tough few weeks ahead,” he says. “Everything depends on advertising.”

  I wait, thinking I could do advertising. I’d be better at finance. But I’m seeing it already: Bax Rogers, Advertising Director. Ellen would like it.

  “Expensive,” Larry says, shaking his head. “Expensive as hell. Finance will get tricky.”

  I nod. Bax Rogers, Finance Director. That feels better.

  “Somebody’s got to keep track of the money,” Larry says.

  “I’ve got experience,” I say. “I own an insurance agency—”

  “I’m glad you brought it up,” Larry says. “That business a few months ago with the Insurance Commission, them saying you got cozy with a judge who likes plaintiffs and big settlements—”

  “Went away,” I say. “No problem. They didn’t have a case. Happens all the time.”

  “Make the press?” Larry asks.

  I shake my head, thinking not even Ellen would have known about it if I hadn’t told her. I shouldn’t have told her.

  Larry says, “‘Went away,’ you said.”

  I get it. Reston Boyle joined the campaign and started talking. I don’t blame him. He got his hand slapped, learning the hard way not to chase fast rabbits down long holes.

  “Every agent has clients file borderline claims,” I say. “Insurance companies always cry fraud. Why wouldn’t they? They don’t want to pay any more than they have to. So there was this company investigator, aggressive guy, wants to be a state prosecutor. He thinks he sees a pattern and comes after me. That’s all.”

  Larry raises his eyebrows. “All?”

  “All except he’s working on this campaign,” I say. “Reston Boyle.”

  Larry chuckles and does his nod thing. “You okay with that?”

  “Why not? He came after me and got nothing but a scolding from the commission. If there’s any raw skin it’s his, not mine. We talked. I bought him lunch.”

  Larry looks at me over the tops of his glasses and asks, “Why’d the commission stiff him?”

  I lean back and say, “He didn’t have a case.”

  “You had help,” Larry says.

  “So I made a few calls,” I say. “I didn’t need to. They didn’t have a case.”

  �
��You had help,” Larry says again. “Let me tell you what I’ve got in mind.”

  As he talks I think about Bax Rogers becoming a permanent member of the staff of Senator Jonathan Tewell: Bax Rogers, a former small-time insurance agent who dedicated himself to the campaign of a candidate he believed in, then to public service, then to the woman whose love he never gave up on, the woman who just needed to see what he could do. How will they make the announcement? Press release? Maybe a press conference? Either way, Ellen will be impressed.

  It turns out, five weeks later, to be a press conference.

  “Don’t miss it,” Larry said before he disappeared. It’s been two days now, and nobody’s seen or heard from him. His mobile phone’s gone dead. But the campaign’s humming like a boomtown bank, especially the advertising blitz. TV spots show Tewell with his family, Tewell speaking about individual liberty, Tewell standing on the steps of the Capitol lecturing reporters about free enterprise. The other campaign can’t keep up. A few of the skankier newspapers have run stories about sightings of a boozy Victor Angleton in clubs without his wife—but so far no disclosures about extramarital dalliance. Tewell’s been giving five speeches a day and sounding better than ever. Larry’s the reason everything’s going so well, and now he’s just disappeared. I guess he figures his work’s done.

  I can’t sweat about Larry. My future’s set. A few days ago Larry told me this would be it, the biggest announcement of my life, details secret until the press conference. What’s important now is that when I stand after the senator makes the announcement and nod once, frowning like this kind of thing happens every day of my life, then quickly sit, I’ll know I earned it.

  Only two questions remain: what my title will be and whether Ellen shows up.

  I’m in a folding metal chair with a dozen other campaign hustlers on a platform of tear-down risers inside a shopping mall near headquarters. Know-it-all reporters huddle close with their notepads and recorders. Four cops perform unnecessary crowd control with bored looks and tough-guy postures. The crowd of thirty, maybe forty, is big enough. But it doesn’t include Ellen.