Eugene pulls down the door handle, but Junior says, “You don’t want to do that.”
A phrase like scared shitless takes on new meaning at a time like this.
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see something dark and shiny pressing against the back of Eugene’s neck. In a pinch, it seems, even a karate expert wants to have firepower on his side.
“He wasn’t a bad man, my dad,” Junior says.
I pull on the passenger-side door handle, and immediately feel something cold against the back of my neck.
“Stay where you are, Mailbox Man.”
“I had nothing to do with your father’s death,” I say.
“Sure, and I never touched your freaking mailboxes.”
Eugene looks at me.
I shrug.
“I tried to save your dad,” Eugene says. “Believe me, I did everything possible.”
“Yeah, after you killed him.”
“It was an accident,” Eugene says.
“When I blow your freaking brains out that will be an accident.” The cold object is no longer pressed against my neck.
“He fell... he hit his head,” Eugene says.
The gun — again focused on Eugene — makes a clicking noise, loud as a cannon in that small space. Cocked, I guess.
“You gain nothing by killing me,” Eugene says.
“I gain satisfaction,” Junior says. “My dad made mistakes, but you two — all you cared about was your mailbox and snooping and spreading rumors and calling the cops and playing golf... Call yourself neighbors? Neighbors?” He starts to laugh.
Right after that the gun goes off, spraying the contents of my friend’s head around the interior of the Lexus.
And right after that — although I wasn’t aware of it at the time — Junior Lamour, making his escape, hits my mailbox with his back bumper, wiping it out for the last time.
I don’t mind admitting it, it takes awhile to recover from losing your best friend.
A year later I still get these ringing sounds in my head, which is a problem for someone in my line of work. My wife jumps a mile every time a truck backfires — she’s gained a ton, too. I have bad dreams, take medication. (My therapist says I’ve got some kind of post-traumatic stress condition.) And of course, since my provisional membership ran out, it’s goodbye golf at the Lake Meewaulin Club.
And I’ve got nobody to sue.
The neighborhood’s different now, with Meads and Lamours gone. Junior gone, too, as it turned out, having managed for a few days to avoid capture but not, finally, death (ramming his beater into the back end of a semi full of Chinese imported toys). A guy who’s in insurance bought Lamour’s place, but only after it had been on the market for six months. Eugene’s is still for sale — we don’t know where Marie’s gone.
The insurance couple seems nice enough, but — as Margie points out — with three kids they’re not at the stage of life we are. And maybe we’ve been snake-bit when it comes to friendship. Fact is, I don’t know about friendship. You get close to people — you get invested in them. You think you understand them. Spend all that time together — going out to dinner, vacations, et cetera. Trust them entirely. And then after twenty years, they do something crazy. They screw up and they want to involve you in their screw-up. Not that I don’t miss Eugene — I do. All the good times we had together. It’s just that, well, Margie and I agree, it’s going to be a long time before we’re able to trust anybody again. I mean, for me — now — the whole concept of having a best friend is, I don’t know, tainted.
Anyway, Margie wants to move, she says she’s had it with Pinecrest Lane, too many bad memories. Not me, I tell her, now that the war between the Lamours and the O’Dells is finally over.
(c)2007 by John Goulet
Peter in St. Paul’s
by Sabina Naber
Sabina Naber began her career in theater, where she worked as an actress and director, and a writer of musicals and song lyrics. In 1996, she began to do some screenwriting as well, and also turned her hand to prose fiction, first with stories for anthologies. Her first novel, The Namesake, was published in 2002 and was followed by 2003’s The Circle and 2005’s The Debutante. Her story for us received the renowned Friedrich Glauser Prize for best short crime fiction of 2007.
Translated from the German by Mary Tannert
The tourist bus was coming straight at her. Or was she moving toward it? Think! 280 feet from the ground, dizziness seized Antonia. Think! Don’t feel, think! Breath tried desperately to get through her throat. 280 feet down and the few, maybe 150, that were horizontal, that was a2 times b2 — the CO2 burned in her chest. Pythagoras. Exactly how many feet away was that damned bus, anyway? Her sweaty hand slipped off the smooth stone wall next to the door, her arms flailed wildly and at the last second made contact with the railing of the spiral staircase behind her that she had climbed to get to the topmost observation platform. The movement was uncontrolled and her hand struck the iron hard; the pain from the blow made fear loose its death grip on her throat. She sucked in air with a whistling noise.
She was the stupidest person on earth.
A small girl pushed past Antonia, squealing with joy, and ran across the platform, which was only a couple of feet wide. She leaned over, leaned right out over the railing! Just like that! She chattered excitedly in some kind of Spanish at a plump woman who was dragging herself, gasping, up the last stairs of the spiral staircase. Mama was supposed to hurry. But Mama just leaned, smiling benevolently, against the stone wall, fanning herself. Why didn’t she do something? Didn’t she realize her child was practically looking death in the face? Just then, the little girl bent her head over the balustrade again. Antonia forced herself to the stone doorway and took a step out onto the platform, her hand stretched out to grab the girl’s T-shirt and pull her to safety, but as soon as she did, the square in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral came rushing at her again. Her mouth formed meaningless signs and the air in her lungs became very scarce. As if acting on its own orders, her other hand closed over the frame of the door opening and pulled the rest of her body away from the waist-high railing back into the protective darkness of the small domed room.
A drop of sweat tickled Antonia’s nose. The mother joined her little girl and together they practiced spitting over the balustrade into thin air. Antonia leaned against the banister at the top of the spiral staircase and waited for the blackness in her head to stop whirling.
She was the stupidest person on earth.
The man down in the church wasn’t Peter. And he couldn’t have been; Peter was dead. She had followed a doppelganger up to the Golden Gallery. And because of him, because of this chimera, she was risking her life.
She was truly the stupidest person on earth.
The woman in the security guard’s uniform had begun to scrutinize her more and more closely. Antonia forced herself to smile vacuously and assume a friendly but slightly bored expression at all the people arriving, panting painfully, at this highest point in St. Paul’s. Only a few stayed next to the stone wall of the tower, the rest went and looked curiously over the railing downward. But that wasn’t what had begun to make Antonia nervous. Of all those people who’d forced their way past her through the narrow doorway onto the platform, none had come back her way! First it was just a vague feeling that came over her while she was still fighting her panic and just looking down the spiral staircase made her sweat twice as much. But then she confirmed her suspicion by monitoring the movements of a fat man in a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, and the realization fought its way into her consciousness, though it came with such potential for panic that Antonia involuntarily refused to entertain it. The man had been on the platform for twenty minutes already, and that alone wasn’t normal. And to top it off, meanwhile at least fifty people had come up after him and gone out onto the Golden Gallery. They couldn’t possibly all have fit out there. The only logical explanation was that there was an exit you only reached by going out onto the platform.