“Then we forget it.”
Lourdes waited while the woman thought about it smoking her Virginia Slim, both of them smoking, until Mrs. Mahmood said, “If I give you close to twenty thousand in cash, today, right now, you still want to forget it?”
Now Lourdes had to stop and think for a moment.
“You have that much in the house?”
“My getaway money,” Mrs. Mahmood said, “in case I ever have to leave in a hurry. What I socked away in tips getting guys to spot their pants and that’s the deal, twenty grand. You want it or not? You don’t, you might as well leave, I don’t need you anymore.”
So far in the few weeks she was here, Lourdes had met Dr. Mahmood face-to-face with reason to speak to him only twice. The first time, when he came in the kitchen and asked her to prepare his breakfast, the smoked snook, a fish he ate cold with tea and whole wheat toast. He asked her to have some of the snook if she wished, saying it wasn’t as good as kippers but would do. Lourdes tried a piece; it was full of bones but she told him yes, it was good. They spoke of different kinds of fish from the ocean they liked and he seemed to be a pleasant, reasonable man.
The second time Lourdes was with him face-to-face he startled her, coming out of the swimming pool naked as she was watering the plants on the patio. He called to her to bring him his towel from the chair. When she came with it he said, “You were waiting for me?”
“No, sir, I didn’t see you.”
As he dried his face and his head, the hair so short it appeared shaved, she stared at his skin, at his round belly and his strange black penis, Lourdes looking up then as he lowered the towel.
He said, “You are a widow?” She nodded yes and he said, “When you married, you were a virgin?”
She hesitated, but then answered because she was telling a doctor, No, sir.
“It wasn’t important to your husband?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Would you see an advantage in again being a virgin?”
She had to think — it wasn’t something ever in her mind before — but didn’t want to make the doctor wait, so she said, “No, not at my age.”
The doctor said, “I can restore it if you wish.”
“Make me a virgin?”
“Surgically, a few sutures down there in the tender dark. It’s becoming popular in the Orient with girls entering marriage. Also for prostitutes. They can charge much more, often thousands of dollars for that one night.” He said, “I’m thinking of offering the procedure. Should you change your mind, wish me to examine you, I could do it in your room.”
Dr. Mahmood’s manner, and the way he looked at her that time, made Lourdes feel like taking her clothes off.
He didn’t come home the night Lourdes and Mrs. Mahmood got down to business. Or the next night. The morning of the following day, two men from the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office came to the house. They showed Lourdes their identification and asked to see Mrs. Mahmood.
She was upstairs in her bedroom trying on a black dress, looking at herself in the full-length mirror and then at Lourdes’s reflection appearing behind her.
“The police are here,” Lourdes said.
Mrs. Mahmood nodded and said, “What do you think?” turning to pose in the dress, the skirt quite short.
Lourdes read the story in the newspaper that said Dr. Wasim Mahmood, prominent etc., etc., had suffered gunshot wounds during an apparent carjacking on Flagler near Currie Park and was pronounced dead on arrival at Good Samaritan. His Mercedes was found abandoned on the street in Delray Beach.
Mrs. Mahmood left the house in her black dress. Later, she phoned to tell Lourdes she had identified the body, spent time with the police, who had no clues, nothing at all to go on, then stopped by a funeral home and arranged to have Woz cremated without delay. She said, “What do you think?”
“About what?” Lourdes said.
“Having the fucker burned.”
She said she was stopping to see friends and wouldn’t be home until late.
One a.m., following an informal evening of drinks with old friends, Mrs. Mahmood came into the kitchen from the garage and began to lose her glow.
What was going on here?
Rum and mixes on the counter, limes, a bowl of ice. A Latin beat coming from the patio. She followed the sound to a ring of burning candles, to Lourdes in a green swimsuit moving in one place to the beat, hands raised, Lourdes grinding her hips in a subtle way.
The two guys at the table smoking cigarettes saw Mrs. Mahmood, but made no move to get up.
Now Lourdes turned from them and saw her, Lourdes smiling a little as she said, “How you doing? You look like you feeling no pain.”
“You have my suit on,” Mrs. Mahmood said.
“I put on my yellow one,” Lourdes said, still moving in that subtle way, “and took it off. I don’t wear yellow no more, so I borrow one of yours. Is OK, isn’t it?”
Mrs. Mahmood said, “What’s going on?”
“This is cumbia, Colombian music for when you want to celebrate. For a wedding, a funeral, anything you want. The candles are part of it. Cumbia, you should always light candles.”
Mrs. Mahmood said, “Yeah, but what is going on?”
“We having a party for you, Ginger. The Colombian guys come to see you dance.”
2002
SCOTT WOLVEN
CONTROLLED BURN
Scott Wolven (1965-) was born in Fort Riley, Kentucky, where his father was stationed before going to Vietnam. He grew up in Saugerties and Catskill, New York. After earning a certificate in creative writing from Columbia University, he studied in the MFA program at Columbia. He worked as a logger, a project manager, and an instructor at Binghamton University (SUNY), and was a visiting writer at Indiana University and the University of Chicago.
Wolven has the remarkable distinction of having appeared in seven consecutive editions of The Best American Mystery Stories. His first book, Controlled Burn: Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men (2005), collected several of these stories, as well as others, and was one of the most enthusiastically published books of the year. Among those who heaped praise on Wolven’s debut are Richard Ford (“Wolven has turned raw, unreconciled life into startling, evocative, and very good short stories. He draws on a New England different from Updike’s and even Dubus’, but his Active lives — no less than theirs — render the world newly, and full of important consequences”); Nelson DeMille (“Controlled Burn is good. Very good. Remarkable, actually. Tough, gritty, and honest — reminiscent of Hemingway with a little bit of John Steinbeck”); and George Pelecanos (“…tough, unsentimental, and completely earned. This is the most exciting, authentic collection of short stories I have read in years”). It had a starred review in Publishers Weekly; was named a “A Book to Remember” by the New York Public Library; and Amazon, Borders, and Barnes & Noble all selected it as a top ten fiction debut.
Almost any story in Controlled Burn would fit comfortably between the covers of this book, but the lives depicted in this story, of people who chose “an easy way to make a hard living,” as the author once described it, are especially deserving.
“Controlled Burn” was originally published in the winter 2002 issue of Harpur Palate, and was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2003.
It was a bad winter and a worse spring. It was the summer Bill Allen lived and died, the sweltering summer I landed a job cutting trees for Robert Wilson’s scab-logging outfit near Orford, New Hampshire. June boiled itself away into the heavy steam of July. Heat devils rose in waves off the blacktop as timber trucks rolled in. By the end of July, we switched gears and started cutting stove wood. I was cutting eight cords a day while Robert worked the hydraulic splitter. Then we’d deliver it in one of our dump trucks. Some men drove to the woodlot to pick up their own. Some of them had white salt marks on their boots and jackets from sweat — some of them smelled like beer. Most of them smelled like gasoline. They didn’t say much, just paid for their wood and left with it in their pickup trucks. They were either busy working or busy living their lies, which is work in itself. I knew about that. The hard work crushed one empty beer can day after another, adding to my lifetime pile of empties. Summer moved on, gray in spite of the bright sun.