The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

Scott Wolven St. Gabriel

From Expletive Deleted

There are violent hurricanes all the time, in my world.

Five men tried to kill my younger brother over some logging rights money, but he lived. By the time I got to the hospital in Spokane, he was sitting up and eating solid food. Recovering. He talked to me about what had happened to him. The five men set him up, to rip him off. They hadn’t counted on his dog being so tough. He never went anywhere without his dog and she’d saved his life that night in the woods. She was dead. I got on the phone and the guys I knew in the Pacific Northwest and across Montana, guys who owed me favors, guys who sometimes paid me to move the index finger of my right hand less than an inch, depending on where the barrel was pointing — lots of eyes started to look for this group of five men. I took my brother home to Bozeman, to keep recovering.

The cost of pain and revenge finally dipped into a range I could afford. I got a late-night call, and when it was all said and done, there were Montana state police questions about five men and their sudden death with my name as the answer and the court decided my house should be made of concrete and steel for about eight years or more. That I should wear an orange jumpsuit. Very little proof let me get off light. Three of the men were shot from three football fields away, most likely the result of hunting accidents. Maybe bullets that overreached their animal mark and struck a human. The other two were shot at distances that were deemed impossible by the court forensic expert. No bullet could be accurate, at that range. That’s what the forensic expert said. I went to the private prison in Shelby and made my way to Deer Lodge, like everybody in Montana held accountable for their actions. I read the Bible, the most violent story I’ve ever known — an eye for an eye — and walked the yard when I could. I left when they told me to leave. It had all become one long night to me and that didn’t change when I got out. Things didn’t seem real to me anymore. My brother met me at my release, eight years and he was doing well, and after a month, we started to talk about money and work and the aspects of the normal world that needed to be attended to.

My brother and I delivered a load of big timber to Lethbridge and a trucker up there put us on to it.

“Biggest storm ever,” he said. “Going to wreck the whole Gulf Coast. Hurricanes, the real shit. Lots of work for loggers with their own gear. Big money in the cleanup. You boys headed south?”

My brother nodded. “We are now,” he said.

When we got back into Montana, we stopped in a bar in Bozeman and watched the storm develop on the bar TV. Sat drinking and watching those hurricanes sow the seeds of the future for everybody in the Gulf. People abandoning their homes, running to stay alive. For some of those folks, the wind and water would change everything. They’d move, they’d live a life in a part of the country they didn’t know existed, or that they hated. They’d be buried in cemeteries that didn’t have any stones with their last name already on them, far away from family. The whisper from a voice can make a train jump the rail. And this was a lot more than a whisper. The endless piles of torn trees were sacks of dollars, to me and my brother.

We drove back to our woodlot and rented house and started sharpening saws and collecting equipment into the big pickup truck.

“Do you want to say goodbye to your girl?” my brother asked.

“Not really,” I said. I’d been seeing a girl in town for three or four months.

“Okay,” he said.

I stood next to the truck. “I don’t have anything to say.”

“Sure,” he nodded.

We packed some guns too, the rifle and ammo, all in the lock box. Just in case trouble knocked and we wanted to knock back. The drive took us through Nevada and Texas. We stopped and drank with a couple of my brother’s friends. Driving into east Texas, the disaster started to show and by the time we hit the Louisiana line, it looked like God had been pretty mad that day. Houses torn from foundations, boats in the streets, abandoned cars everywhere, no power, no sewer, no drinking water. We got some papers that allowed us to work, through a connection of my brother’s, and we stayed in New Orleans — signed on to cut trees around high voltage at four hundred and fifty a day each, plus food and lodging. Anything we made on the side belonged to us and it was cash paid at the end of each day. It was tragedy for those folks, but it was a license to print money for the contractors. The whole city smelled, when we first got there. I thought of Sodom. And other things.

St. Gabriel only appears four times in the Bible. Some scholars of God say St. Gabriel is an archangel, on the same plane as Michael, and deals in vengeance and death. St. Gabriel is credited with having destroyed Sodom. Others say St. Gabriel is the angel of mercy, one of God’s highest, maybe the highest, messenger. I don’t claim to know. Somewhere it says that St. Gabriel never really appeared, that all references to St. Gabriel are actually dreams that God had and St. Gabriel is mercy come to life through God’s dreams and that mercy isn’t what we understand it to be. Dying can be a privilege, I came to understand that in prison, as much as living can be its own gift. Mercy can be flowers, or making sure your aim is true. Dreams die hard. I know mine did. I don’t imagine God’s died any differently. Maybe St. Gabriel will appear again sometime.

I met her and it was like meeting life for the first time. She opened the eyes of my heart. In any other city she’d have been a model, not a dancer.

After, I asked her if she wanted me to go get some cigarettes. So she could smoke and go to sleep.

“Yeah,” she said. “That would be nice.” She smiled in the dark, hugging the pillow. She was all curves and so alive. Beyond beautiful. A for-real woman. We had talked for hours before this, about everything. She was without a doubt the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Inside and out. Her voice wasn’t that sweet sickly Southern crap — she was Cajun, spoke her mind and had a good laugh. She lived like she meant it.

I put on jeans, a shirt, and my light jacket and walked out into the New Orleans night. The fog was there, the storms had just ended. Crushed cars sat on Canal Street, but on Bourbon it was business as usual. I bought the cigarettes and a lighter and headed back.

She was gone when I got back to the room. No note, nothing. The sheets were still warm from her body, the pillow smelled of her. And I tried to take it like a good thing, that maybe she felt like I did and the possibility of getting closer was much more frightening than she could say. Or that she had a man to get home to and leaving was polite — my karma had come back on me from Montana and I put the cigarettes in a drawer with the lighter.

The mess from the destruction went on and on. My brother and I burned through chains and gas and oil. We’d go out and check downed lines or move them with hot-line tools. Then we’d start cutting, so the scoops and chippers could come along and take care of what we left. When the humidity rose, my shirt was wet all day. The sawdust bounced off my safety glasses. We were cutting hundreds of years of growth. It was all the same to us.

She was at the room when I got back that one day. She was a little drunk, high. She had on a red top and jeans over those long legs. That didn’t last. We fucked like champs and kept going. Beyond where we’d been before. She made my cock so hard it hurt and my mouth ached from being on her, everywhere. Hours. We smoked and talked in bed. Drank some beer. She was having problems in town, within the city. The cops were harassing her, her ex was harassing her. The guy she lived with turned out to be friends with dealers. The cops were watching her. They wanted to kill her, as revenge on her man. And she wanted to leave. She had children, two young boys, and wanted to give them a better life and she wanted a better life for herself. We came up with a plan that fit the hurricane. We made a hurricane of our own.

There is a town in Louisiana called St. Gabriel. It’s a new town, only been around a couple years. After the hurricane, it was the morgue for all of New Orleans. The women’s prison is in St. Gabriel too, they hold all the security classifications together under one roof. Women from Sodom, you might say, kicked out of New Orleans for their crimes. I doubt that anyone at the prison even knows who St. Gabriel is or was supposed to be. And the number of dreams that have died within those walls, countless thousands, even dying now. It could make your soul cry, if you were a sentimental person.

My brother didn’t show two mornings later and when he hadn’t come around in the afternoon, I went looking. He wasn’t at the bar we hung out at. I finally walked over to the police station about two in the afternoon and talked to them. They had grabbed him, thinking he was me.

“Who are you again?” the black cop behind the bulletproof glass asked me. He had the NOPD fatigues on and his gun sat smart at his right side.

“I’m his brother,” I said. “I’d like to see him.”

“We’d all like things,” the cop said.

“Can I see him?”

The cop studied the sheet in front of him. “Lots of charges here,” he said. People went in and out of the station house with a dazed look.

“What’s the bail?”

“No bail,” he said. “Just charges.”

“What charges?”

He shook his head. “Felonies.” Then he went and got the detectives.

They took us in a cop car and another unmarked car out to St. Gabriel prison. Nobody spoke on the way out. We drove around the facility and pulled up in a parking lot, near the edge of some trees. They had my brother cuffed. We walked out through the mud, until we could see something on the ground in front of us at the very edge of the woods, covered with some dirt and leaves. Half in the woods. It was a woman. In a red top and jeans. A large-caliber shell had passed through her rib cage.

“Do you know her?” the cop asked. The detectives stood back, watching us.

“Not really,” I said. It looked like her, but not if you knew her. Up close, like I did.

“She’s been shot at long range. We think she was trying to escape and during the hurricane, someone had it in for her and shot her.” He shrugged. “Or something.”

“That’s a good theory,” I agreed.

“You wouldn’t happen to know any boys from Montana, that have a reputation as long-shot artists, would you?” he asked with a New Orleans slow drawl.

“No,” I said. “I honestly don’t.”

“That’s funny,” the one cop said. “Because after we ran your sheet and came up with some facts, we kind of thought it might have been you that pulled the trigger.”

“I’ve never shot a woman,” I said in truth.

“People change,” the other cop said.

“Not that much,” I said.

“We were looking for this woman, in New Orleans,” the one cop said. “We were watching you.”

“She was here,” I said, pointing at the ground.

“You know,” the one cop said, “during the hurricane, some bad folks in New Orleans disappeared.”

“Must have got caught up in the storm,” I reasoned.

“Certainly,” the other cop said. “That stuff happens.”

“This woman here,” the one cop said. “This woman got caught by someone else.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” I said. “I don’t know why you have us out here.”

The head detective walked over to the corpse and kicked it in the head as hard as he could. He watched me. “I’ve got y’all out here,” he said, “because we think you were together and you’re a killer. We have established that. What we haven’t established is who this woman is. She was just printed the other day and that got destroyed in the storm. If she’s the woman from the prison. On the other hand, if she’s this woman we were looking for from New Orleans, the one hooked up with that dealer, then we can call that off, because we’d have done this to her anyways.” He drew his foot back and kicked the head of the corpse again as hard as he could. The whole body moved off the ground a foot. “So which is it?”

“I know who it is,” I lied. “I know her.”

“Why’d you kill her?” the detective asked. “Did she owe you money? Drugs?”

“I didn’t,” I said.

He kicked the corpse right in the mouth and watched my face the whole time as he did it. “Does that bother you?” he asked. “I’m kicking your girl here.” He stared at me. “Play tough guy like it doesn’t bother you, but I’m going to kick her again.”

“She’s not feeling it,” I said.

He brought his foot back and kicked the head of the corpse three or four times, hard. The sound was a loud wet smack. The body moved up and down. Mud and fluid mixed on his shoes and the gray cuff of his pants.

“This isn’t the man we want,” the detective said to the other cops. He motioned at my brother. “Uncuff him and let’s go.” He walked back through the mud to the unmarked car. I was walking behind him for a couple steps. He turned to me, his face white and puffy. “If that’s her, and I think it is, you did us a favor.” He kept on walking, toward the cars, alone.

One of the cops came forward with keys and uncuffed my brother. The cops walked back to their car and drove off, leaving me and my brother standing there outside the facility. After we walked for half an hour, we hitched a ride with a guy, back into New Orleans.

The hurricane raged through the night and day. An older man in southern Louisiana woke up with a straight razor under his bed, with a pink ribbon on it, like someone might use for a little girl’s hair. His wife found her gas tank had been filled with pig’s blood. A young man in New Orleans who lived with his dad found the locks to the house glued. A guy from Illinois, a DJ, woke up with his shit in the street, and broken ribs. There was mercy all along, no revenge, no vengeance. That’s how you know a human did these things and not God. If it was God that had done them, the answer would all be the same. Death, death, death.

The work ended and we drove back to Montana. We hadn’t made millions.

I ask myself that now, am I St. Gabriel? Is the mercy that I once had long gone and who will show mercy on me? What a privilege it will be to die. We create ourselves, or so we believe, and we become locked in, we become afraid not to meet the same person each morning in the mirror. I am St. Gabriel and I will stand accountable for what I do and will hold others to account. I am the highest of God’s messengers and no Sodom will stand while I live.

Nobody asks a man why he drinks. Mixed in there with the private darkness of reasons, nobody wants to know the answer from the man who is already drunk. I was drinking to get a woman to come back to me, which is the worst reason of all. The cost of pain. When you see someone so bright, such a bright fire, a diamond, it stays with you and their image is on the inside of your eyelids when you close your eyes. I can still see her, she lights up the night of life. Who wouldn’t want her back? Her smile alone could cure you of whatever disease had got hold of you. Oceans of booze couldn’t put out that fire.

My brother saw her one time, in a bar, on TV, modeling in Milan. I was covered with sawdust and staggered in. “She’s coming,” he said. “She’ll be in the next clip.”

I stared at the screen as it changed. It was her. She walked like a princess and a queen all at once, she fucking owned that crowd and that show and I had to look away. I was proud, so proud of her and all she had done and there was a plan that had worked.

My brother knows better than to ever ask. You don’t ask about stuff, because then you can’t talk about it on the stand. He asked with his eyes, one night, late. We were standing in the cellar, throwing darts and doing laundry.

“Sure,” I said. “Part of it was me. And part of it was her.”

“It worked,” he said.

“It got her a new life,” I said. “She deserved that and more.”

“Do you think she misses you?” he asked.

“Not in the way you might think,” I said. “Like you might miss an old dog.”

“You might be wrong,” he said. “I miss my dog every day.” He took his shirt off to put it in the wash and even his scars were healing from his trauma. His tattoos always looked amazing. He pulled a clean T-shirt over his head from the dryer.

I drank some beer.

“I really think you’re wrong,” he said. “She’s going to come here and be with you.”

“Fuck,” I said. “I don’t want to be with me most days. What would make her want to be with me?”

“Who else would protect her like that?” he asked.

I nodded. “But I would protect her like that and she doesn’t have to be around. I’d do it anyway.”

“Does she know you feel like this?”

I shook my head. “Look,” I said. “I really don’t want to get into all this. Somebody who has kids and is living a life, they don’t need crap dumped on them. I can handle whatever I feel, regardless of the situation.” I drank my beer. “What does it matter what I feel? I’m a grown man.”

“What about being happy?” he asked.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Are you happy?” he asked. “Without her.”

I drank some more beer. “I’m a big boy,” I said. “I’m happy for her. That’s all that matters.” I shook my head again. “She’s under enough strain without me being an asshole.”

We threw some more darts and I walked upstairs and went to bed. It has been five years and she hasn’t shown up. She won’t. At first it was hard, but now it’s the same. Sometimes, when I’m in a crowd, if we go to Spokane or all the way to Seattle, my eyes hurt and I have a headache. Because I’ve been looking for her, all day, among the faces. After an eighteen-hour day of cutting and hauling big timber, even the work can’t erase her from my mind. Thinking of her keeps me alive some days. Some people would call that sad. They don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m lucky.

When I wake up, I am someplace else in my mind. But she is always there. And I’m happy for her. She died the fake death and will get to live the real life. I will wake up in my coffin underground and be comforted. I’ll wait for the hurricane to uproot me from my eternal rest and carry me off. To meet St. Gabriel, to whom I will show no mercy. Even if I am in hell, my aim will be true. Gravity pulls the bullet toward earth. There is friction, recoil energy, computed velocity, measured velocity, free-bore travel, resistance, ratio of powder charge. None of it will stop me, it didn’t stop me those nights in Montana when I had those five men in my sights and breathed easy and slowly increased the pressure on my finger until that hammer dropped. The cops of heaven can puzzle over the how and why and look for witnesses that don’t exist. Maybe she is my St. Gabriel, appearing briefly and now only in my dreams. At least one of us made it out of the night.

If it weren’t for her being alive in the world, I’d turn the gun on myself. Show myself the mercy I deserve. The chance to hear her voice keeps me on earth.