As it does in life, evil abounds here in a variety of presentations. We expect to see it in a psychotic stalker, hut not necessarily in a band of Texas volunteers on their way to battle the Mexican army of Santa Anna in 1836. Brent Spencer’s “The True History” is one of the most chilling pieces in this anthology, and there’s virtually nothing for a reader to sort out.
“Let it be said here and now that a Texian has no taste for discipline,” the story begins, and soon it’s as plain as day: something truly ugly is about to happen, and all we can do is he swept along with mounting dread.
No less powerful is Chris Adrian’s “Stab,” in which an autistic boy is first befriended and then recruited by a budding serial killer who moves “as slowly as the moon does across the sky.” The search for a missing child leads to a sack of riled poisonous snakes in “Jakob Loomis,” Jason Ockert’s sinuous account of crossed paths and black luck. And in “The Timing of Unfelt Smiles.” John Dufresne arranges the ultimate counseling session between a family therapist and a fellow who’s just murdered his wife, his kids, and his parents. Obviously there are issues.
Sometimes there is no villain to blame, only fate or frailty — an accident of lust, distraction, or rotten judgment. Peter Blauner’s “Going, Going, Gone” is about a man named Sussman who is separated from his six-year-old son on the subway — a parent’s urban nightmare. Watching the boy’s face in a window of the departing train, Sussman fills with desperation and thinks: I have lost the only thing that matters.
For those who prefer conventional pump fakes and behind-the-back passes, there’s the redoubtable Lawrence Block and his droll, likable hit man. Keller. Having a killer for hire as a recurring protagonist must be challenging at times, but it doesn’t hurt that this one lives in Greenwich Village, loves spicy food, and collects stamps as a hobby.
In “Keller’s Double Dribble,” he is sent to whack somebody in Indianapolis and finds himself killing time at a Pacers game, which for most assassins would be a pleasant diversion. However, basketball depresses Keller, so his attention wanders to other matters, such as why the stranger who hired him would kick in for two $96 seats. As Keller soon discovers, it was not an innocent gratuity.
Back in New York, a squad of detectives employs creative methods of interrogation on a Japanese businessman suspected of tossing a hooker from the window of his hotel room, in Robert Knightly’s “Take the Man’s Pay.” Far away, in western Montana, a man oils his Winchester and prepares to hunt down the three marauding bikers who killed his sorrel mare. The rifle is brand-new, purchased at a Wal-Mart, and does not comfortably fit the hands of the avenging rancher in James Lee Burke’s fine contribution, “A Season of Regret.”
In “Meadowlands,” Joyce Carol Oates takes us to a messy afternoon at the Jersey track, where the animals that break down are of the two-legged type. More gambling adventure is at play in “Pinwheel,” Scott Wolven’s story of an ex-con who takes a job at a private and very illegal Nevada racetrack where each day millions are won and lost. Mostly lost.
To the east, a peripatetic pimp known as Shank and a teenage prostitute called Meg contemplate the roaring enigma of Niagara Falls, in David Means’s “The Spot.” And in St. Louis, where Ridley Pearson sets “Queeny,” a famous author of horror tales is trapped in a real one after his wife vanishes while jogging.
Up in Minnesota, territory long claimed by John Sandford, a golf pro turns up dead and plugged in a sand trap, making for a difficult lie in “Lucy Had a List.” And way down in my own stomping grounds of South Florida, the most reliable freak show in America, a professional poker player gets lucky, laid, and then nearly lit up in “T-Bird,” John Bond’s hot deal on the Miami River.
All these pieces were originally published in story anthologies, distinguished magazines, and literary quarterlies that recognized them as fine fiction, not just fine mysteries. No single genre holds a special claim on grittiness and irony, blood-letting and remorse, betrayal and redemption — these are universal ingredients of art, and of the front page of your hometown newspaper; daily soul scrapings from back alleys, penthouses, suburbs, and farmlands.
Pulp is life. We are drawn to so-called mystery stories not only for anticipated thrills and surprises, but for the raw and reportorial light they shine on the human condition, which is mysterious indeed.
Carl Hiaasen
Chris Adrian
Stab
From Zoetrope: All-Story
Someone was murdering the small animals of our neighborhood. We found them in the road outside our houses, and from far away they looked like the victims of careless drivers, but close up you saw that they were plump and round, not flat, and that their bodies were marred by clean-edged rectangular stab wounds. Sometimes they lay in drying pools of blood, and you knew the murder had occurred right there. Other times it was obvious they had been moved from the scene of the crime and arranged in postures, like the two squirrels posed in a hug on Mrs. Chenoweth’s doorstep.
Squirrels, then rabbits, then the cats, and dogs in late summer. By that time I had known for months who was doing all the stabbing. I got that information on the first day of June 1979, two years and one month and fourteen days after my brother’s death from cancer. I woke up early that morning, a sunny one that broke a chain of rainy days, because my father was taking me to see Spider-Man, who was scheduled to make an appearance at the fourth annual Leukemia Society of America Summer Fair in Washington, D.C. I was eight years old and I thought Spider-Man was very important.
In the kitchen I ate a bowl of cereal while my father spread the paper out before me. “Look at that,” he said. On the front page was an article detailing the separation of Siamese twin girls, Lisa and Elisa Johansen from Salt Lake City. They were joined at the thorax, like my brother and I had been, but they shared vital organs, whereas Colm and I never did. There was a word for the way we and they had been joined: thoracopagus. It was still the biggest word I knew.
“Isn’t that amazing?” my father said. He was a surgeon, so these sorts of things interested him above all others. “See that? They’re just six months old!” Colm and I were separated at eighteen months. I had no clear memories of either the attachment or the operation, though Colm claimed he remembered our heads knocking together all the time, and that he dreamed of monkeys just before we went under from the anesthesia. The Johansen twins were joined side by side; my brother and I were joined back to back. Our parents would hold up mirrors so we could look at each other — that was something I did remember: looking in my mother’s silver-handled mirror, over my shoulder at my own face.
Early as it was, on our way out to the car we saw our new neighbor, Molly Matthews, sitting on the front steps of her grandparents’ house, reading a book in the morning sun.
“Hello, Molly,” said my father.
“Good morning, Dr. Cole,” she said. She was unfailingly polite with adults. At school she was already very popular, though she had been there for only two months, and she had a tendency to oppress the other children in our class with her formidable vocabulary.
“Poor girl,” said my father, when we were in the car and on our way. He pitied her because both her parents had died in a car accident. She was in the car with them when they crashed, but she was thrown from the wreck through an open window — this was in Florida, where I supposed everyone always drove around with their windows down and never wore seatbelts.
I turned in my seat so I was upside down. This had long been my habit; I did it so I could look out the window at the trees and telephone wires as we passed them. My mother would never stand for it, but she was flying that day to San Francisco. She was a stewardess. Once my father and I flew with her while she was working and she brought me a cup of Coke with three cherries in it. She put down the drink and leaned over me to open up the window shade, which I had kept closed from the beginning of the flight out of fear. “Look,” she said to me. “Look at all that!” I looked and saw sandy mountains that resembled crumpled brown paper bags. I imagined falling from that great height into my brother’s arms.