More trucks and cars rumbled by. Some horns were honked in a joyful fashion, signaling no more war, no more death, no more waiting to hear bad news.
Leon said, “Cat got your tongue? For real? Let’s talk about real. The last thing I ever heard from my boy”-and damn it, right then, his voice broke, and he hated sounding like a weepy old man-“was a letter from him, sent before Bataan fell. I must have read and reread that one sheet of paper a thousand times over the year. Never heard anything else. Then MacArthur invaded the Philippines and the main POW camp was liberated back in January. I waited, and I waited, and then I got that telegram from the Red Cross. You know what it said?” Delano started to walk away, but Leon got right in front of him. “It said my Jimmy had died one month before the camp was freed. One month. Thirty damn days!”
Leon’s throat constricted again. “So, I’ll let you be. Only if you answer one question.”
“I don’t have to answer a damn thing, old man.”
“Maybe. But maybe it’ll be in your best interest to answer, sonny. Maybe you answer this question, I leave you be, so you can keep on being a parasite.”
Delano tugged at his jacket, straightened his flashy necktie. “Ask your damn question.”
Leon nodded. “Ever since Pearl Harbor, ever since that day… you ever feel sorry, or guilty, about what you did? How you lived off the war, how you let other sons and fathers take your place? Sons and fathers who might have bad eyes, or flat feet, or bad hearing, but were still called up and drafted because they didn’t have your connections, your way of doing things. You ever feel guilty about that?”
Delano reached into an inside jacket pocket, took out a pack of Camels and a gold lighter. He lit off the cigarette, took a deep puff, and returned the cigarettes to his coat; he did the same with the lighter after snapping it shut with one satisfying click.
“No,” he said, smirking. “Not for a goddamn minute. I lived and those dopes died, and that’s all right by me.”
Leon just nodded again, went back to his trash cart, reached down inside, and from a crumpled-up paper bag-the bag the sanitation worker had thankfully overlooked-he took out a.45-caliber Colt model 1911 pistol with a tube silencer screwed onto the end.
“Wrong answer,” Leon said, pointing it at Delano’s chest.
BRENDAN DUBOIS, of New Hampshire, is the award-winning author of seventeen novels and more than 135 short stories. His latest novel is Blood Foam, part of the Lewis Cole mystery series. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century (2000) and The Best American Noir of the Century (2010). His stories have twice won the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and have earned three Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations from MWA. He is also a Jeopardy! game-show champion. Visit his website at BrendanDuBois.com.
SERIAL BENEFACTOR by Jon L. Breen
To start with, I’m a centenarian, Sebastian Grady by name, and still fully marbled. My current address is Plantain Point, a retirement home on the California coast with a lot of residents from the entertainment world. To give you an idea, the president of our association is called the Top Banana, though most of the vaudevillians have died off.
As you can imagine, I’ve seen many younger generations come of age, and the current lot don’t seem too anxious to make the transition to adulthood. Don’t ask me if I blame them.
Evan is my favorite great-granddaughter. I never expected to be so fond of a girl with a guy’s name, but in this century of yours-mine was the last one-I guess one size fits all. I hadn’t seen her since she was an infant when she turned up one day to interview me for a school genealogy assignment, I being the oldest relative available. But once the paper was done and graded, she kept coming back. She seems to enjoy my company.
She’s a mature sixteen by current standards. In some ways, she’s typical of her generation, including being constantly connected to every portable communication device that comes along, but she’s a smart girl, rarely says “like” except as a verb expressing approval or a preposition with a discernible object. She has an active social life, some of it with live people, does sports, gets good grades, loves puzzles, and likes a challenge. Her mind is always on the move. I’d unhesitatingly back her in a timed Sudoku contest.
On one recent visit, we were sitting on my eighth-floor deck looking out at the Pacific Ocean. Family news and current events exhausted, I said casually (but with an ulterior motive), “I’ve got a puzzle for you, honey.”
“Great. What is it?”
“There’s a list of sentences I want you to look up for me, tell me what they mean, where they came from, what they have in common, if anything. You can go on the Internet for this, look ’em up on Giggle or Garble or whatever it’s called. Shouldn’t take you long.”
She gave me that big, braced-teeth grin that always melted my heart. She knew I wasn’t quite as ignorant as I pretended to be. She’d taught me to use the Internet when she was eight years old; I have my own computer, and Plantain Point has Wi-Fi. “Does this have anything to do with one of your investigations?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Gramps, I know you’re an amateur detective.”
“No such thing, except in books.”
“Don’t forget I’ve read all your memoirs.”
Just the published ones, and there were some unpublished ones I hoped she’d never see. Maybe when she was older.
“Okay, you got me. There is a mystery connected to this list, and I’ll tell you all about it when you’ve identified the items.”
I passed it over, neatly printed in my still steady hand:
Massachusetts is a long way from New York.
She’ll start upon a marathon.
You don’t even know a hazard from a green.
You can’t stop the weather, not with all your dough!
She got herself a husband but he wasn’t hers.
That ain’t the highest spot.
“Any of that ring a bell?” I asked.
“Nope, not at all. So what’s my deadline?”
“Try to get it done while I’m still alive.”
“Gramps, you’re full of it.”
“Get it done, and I’ll tell you the wildest story you ever heard, and every word of it true.”
“I’ll be back with the answers tomorrow,” she promised, and I knew she would. In the meantime, I let my mind drift back to the only century where I really felt at home anymore.
Now that I’ve passed a hundred myself, my old buddy Danny Crenshaw doesn’t seem quite so amazing as he used to. He only made it to ninety-four. But the last time I saw him, 1978 it was, same year he died, he seemed as happy and busy as ever.
I first met Danny in the late 1920s. He was among the Broadway headliners lured west by the advent of talking pictures. A little guy with tons of nervous energy, he always played younger than his age and never seemed to change much as the years went by. Multitalented as Danny was-actor, singer, dancer, songwriter-they never seemed to know how to use him in pictures, and he was homesick for New York.