The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

Christopher Chambers Aardvark to Aztec

From Washington Square

Miranda Wheeler was against adultery in theory. She had been raised uptight and proper, if not churchgoing, her parents nominally Episcopalian or the like, and she had occasioned to sin far more in her mind than in practice. Though not a classic beauty like of film or supermarket fashion magazines, she was not bad to look at with almost always a pleasant smile. Her body attracted male notice and comment even now at thirty-one, and after one kid, causing her some embarrassment and an uneasy glow. Fit and curvy in all the right places, she carried herself with an awkward charm, as if her body were a new pair of shoes that did not quite fit. She worked during the school year as a teacher’s aide at Laurel Elementary, where little Duff Jr. would enter fourth grade in the fall.

Miranda ran into a clown outside the Krusty Kreme. She watched through the cracked windshield in disbelief as he stumbled in sad comedy in front of her car, tripping on his oversize shoes to sprawl with a sorry thud full length onto the sun-faded hood of the Nova. His orange wig lolled against the windshield for a moment like an obscene, alien fruit. Miranda stopped the car. She got out and touched hesitantly the gaudy shoulder of the prone buffoon, his Hot Now — Indulge! sandwich board underfoot. The manager appeared, sweating profusely, and most solicitous of Miranda. He fired the clown after determining he was unhurt. Miranda felt awful.

She offered to buy the clown, whose name was Josh, a cup of coffee at a neighboring franchise. And so Miranda sat at a concrete picnic table overlooking the frontage road, eating Krusty Kremes and drinking coffee with a surprisingly charming, though unemployed, clown. They talked about little or nothing as the world drove by. She could not remember when she had last laughed so.

When school let out the following week, Miranda drove Duff Jr. to her parents in Jackson for a break so she and Duff could work some things out. In the days that followed, Duff left for work, and Miranda cleaned the empty house and read paperback novels, waiting for Duff to come home. Some evenings they would fall asleep watching garishly colored classic films on their new big-screen television. As the days passed, she found herself thinking, and smiling at the memory, and wondering what had become of the clumsy clown.

Miranda’s husband, Duff, a former high school athlete, was senior sales consultant at a local car lot. Duff spent his days lounging among clean, expensive automobiles in a clean, well-lit showroom, getting people into cars. What would it take to get you into this car today? he’d ask. He typically draped the jacket of his pricey suit over a chair, rolled up the starched white sleeves of his shirt, and loosened the knot of his power tie. People are drawn to the appearance of success, he told Miranda, they are made comfortable by the image of a man at ease in his surroundings. And when they are comfortable, they buy.

Duff surreptitiously snorted cocaine in the stalls in the employee restroom throughout the day. He did not approve of illicit drug use in general, but had found the occasional toot gave him an edge in a keenly competitive marketplace. This was not recreation. This was business. Life or death, success or failure. No different than the gridiron and the steroids old Doc Highfield slipped to a few select starters on Laurel High’s state-champ football team in the glory years of the late seventies.

Josh, local college boy and ex-clown, working his way down the blistering street, came hopefully to Miranda’s door, as to all the others, peddling his encyclopedias. Miranda had just finished a lawyerly murder mystery when the knock came at the door. She peered judiciously out at the traveling salesman. Stared in disbelief. He shimmered like a mirage in the heat on her stoop.

“You’re that clown,” she finally said, though his shoes fit, proportional, and his hair was no longer orange. She invited him in. They could not afford a set of encyclopedias what with Duffs erratic sales record and her own meager unemployment check, but it was unbearably hot outside. The dead of June, most languorous month.

Josh stood inside the door, settling into the air-conditioning, his sweat cooling pleasurably. He accepted her offer of a cold drink.

From the kitchen, Miranda, pouring iced tea, called out to him. “Sweet or unsweet?”

“Sweet, please, ma’am,” he replied. This being the South, certain social graces endured.

“So, selling encyclopedias now?” Miranda returned to the room.

“Yes, ma’am.” Josh took the glass from her hand, thanked her, and drank deeply.

Josh was downright shy without the clown costume. The outfit had afforded him a joi de vivre which he was unable to muster as himself, and so he sorely missed his old job. He had not yet mastered the art of small talk, and made up for the lack of it with politeness and his unconscious youth. The conversation that ensued was borne by Miranda then, who tended to talk quickly and without stop when nervous, non sequitur ad infinitum. When she finally paused, she felt a bit lightheaded from her oratory. She fanned herself with a brochure. Josh’s glass was empty, the sample case of Encyclopedia Americanos forgotten at his sneakered feet. Miranda looked at Josh as if truly seeing him for the first time. He was of indeterminate ancestry, sunburned, tall, and handsome in an ungainly sort of way.

In considerable silence, they sat upon the sofa, which had come to Miranda from her parents. She’d covered the horrible thing — upholstered in Civil War battle scenes, a dark brocade — with a cheery yellow blanket. Miranda reached out and touched the boy’s face, a gesture more maternal than seductive. And yet he shivered involuntarily and she felt the shiver course through her like a fond memory, or a low-voltage electrical current. For Josh, this moment seemed his highest dream come true. A full-grown woman in a cool faint before him, her cotton summer dress slightly askew. This was not Playboy, or Hustler even. She was real. Flesh and blood, as they say. There was a moment more of silence. Trembling, Josh wound up and reached out to touch lightly a coffee-colored mole on the low inside of Miranda’s left leg. She sighed in spite of herself.

“No. Please, don’t,” she said, “stop.” But she did not move away.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s like I’m under your spell.” Josh looked away, as if to fight his awful urges. He was painfully aroused, and lyrics from pop songs suddenly true came unbidden into his mind. A high-fidelity system gleamed in the corner, bought on credit from Circuit Circus. “Nice stereo, ma’am.”

“Call me Miranda,” said Miranda. She stood unsteadily and walked across the room. Inhaled deeply. She drew closed the draperies. The cheap sandals on her feet felt awkward and cheap. She kicked them off, sending them sailing into a lamp and Duff s La-Z-Boy, respectively. Miranda selected Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, a recording by the Atlanta Philharmonic. As a child she’d studied briefly the violin, and she still loved the strings. She returned to the sofa slowly, her bare feet gripping the shag, the great hopeful swelling of the first movement all around her. Spring, was it? She had been in school for physical therapy, spring semester, when she got pregnant with Duff Jr.

Duff cringed at the ringing of the phone on his desk. The conversation was brief and hushed. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand, and warily eyed the office door.

“Listen...”

“Yeah, but...”

“Aw, man...”

“All right, all right...”

“But...”

“O.K. All right. Friday.”

“Friday. I swear.” Duff replaced the receiver, clenched his teeth, and mopped his beaded brow. “Son-of-a-bitch.”

He searched his shelves for something small to break, hefted but replaced unharmed his golfing trophy, a dusty Salesman of the Week plaque. He picked up the framed glossy of Miranda and little Duff Jr. He gazed upon his lovely wife and his only issue, chip off his block. There was one thing he could do. He fogged the nonglare glass with his shaky breath, buffed it to a shine with his shirttail, and replaced it to its place of prominence on his desk. Duff straightened up, the old fighting spirit rising in him. It was time to sell cars.

Miranda sat beside Josh and kissed him abruptly on the mouth. Then looked him eye to eye.

“I’m not, I don’t ever, don’t do things like this,” she said truthfully. “I can’t, well, you know. But if you want, if we’re careful, we can, maybe, sort of. Only so far.”

“Okay,” said Josh.

He was on her at once, eager to please, his hands and his mouth here and there, careful, lightly and firm, grasping, finessing. He had studied for this moment. Miranda pushed aside her awkward childhood, her rumbling guilt. Plenty of time for that later, she thought. Time only now for this traveling heaven. Josh knelt on the floor and kissed her on both knees, and then the mole that she always had hated. His mouth moved up her leg, his hot breath saying something profound to her on a cellular level, though his words were too muffled to make out. Miranda thanked god she’d taken a shower that morning, and buried her hands in his hair, guiding his enthusiasm onward and upward.

Duff, across town in a stall in the men’s room at Jeff Davis Honda, snuffed with vigor. He licked his finger, and wiped the paper bindle clean of its powdery residue and paused. He peered at the small, unfolded piece of paper, the glossy image of a fleshy cheek or inner thigh, a curve of breast perhaps. The Frenchman folded his gram bindles from the pages of skin mags. Pervert, thought Duff, dropping the piece of paper into the toilet bowl. He rubbed his gums, depressed the handle of the toilet with a polished wingtip, and exited the stall.

In his office waited a distinguished professor from the college and his youthful second wife, teetering on the brink of a new red D’Accord LX. Duff consulted his granddaddy’s pocket watch and sniffed again, admiring the smooth, ancestral sweep of the second hand, and savored the metallic drip at the back of his throat. He’d give them another five minutes. Enough time to call the wife. He would close this sale and knock off early, play the back nine at the public course, and maybe celebrate with happy hour at Maxi’s Lounge.

Duff called home from an empty office, and got his own voice on the answering machine. Annoyed, he hung up on himself. In the next office, the professor and his wife discussed options and finances in intimate whispers. Duff counted down, took a deep breath, and burst in beaming.

“Good news, folks,” he began. “I just talked to my boss, and he says I can knock two bills off the luxury package. This one time.” Duff paused significantly to let the full import sink in. “You can’t tell a soul,” he went on with a conspiratorial wink. “I’m taking a beating on this. Because I know you want to get into this car today. What do you say?”

They signed the papers, the tweedy intellectual and his young missus. Duff awarded them the keys and firmly shook their hands, a little extra squeeze for the little lady. What does she see in this stuffy old fart, he wondered, a typical pinhead up on his Dante and Shakespeare but unable to change a flat or sink a ten-foot putt. And they looked happy. Duff hustled them out the door, chalked his sale up on the big board, and headed for the links in his Interlude demo. En route, pumped up victorious, he called home again on the cellular, this time recording a message on the machine.

“Miranda, baby. Made a big sale, and hard working on yet another. I’ll be late, so don’t wait up. Oh yeah. Don’t forget my dry cleaning. Love ya.” A kissing noise.

Miranda, sufficiently satiated and repositioned by this time, heard Duffs distant disembodied voice in the other room, and paused in her ministrations, her head in Josh’s lap. The machine clicked off. Like in a dream she was. She had forgotten the dry cleaning. She had forgotten much of the past ten years in the recent throes of Josh’s tireless exuberance. Indeed, she had almost forgotten. How much fun. It had only seemed fair to reciprocate.

The erstwhile clown was now sprawled back on the yellow-blanketed sofa, limbs outstretched as if he’d been hit by a bread truck. They were nearing the moment of truth, the fork in the road that Miranda recalled from her brief honeymoon, dates with Duff, and a few other early intimate encounters with males of the species. She had never much liked this part of things, so was surprised to find an odd thrill in bringing this polite young man to apparently new heights of ecstasy. He did not touch her, as if he were afraid of breaking the spell, and she felt in complete control of him by virtue of simple manipulations of his proud appendage. The mixture of power and pleasing was an intoxicating one. But, the decision.

On the one hand, no pun, there was the imminent mess to consider — her hand, the sofa cover, her dress, perhaps even her hair. And further then, the evidence of guilt, feelings of foolishness, and deep regret intensified by the chore of cleanup. Her idly stroking hand stopped as she pondered, and Josh returned reluctantly to the world.

“Please,” he implored in a voice weak with want. “Miranda, oh, please.”

“Mmm,” said Miranda. “Okay...” And she, eyes closed, again hungrily, as if savoring the last fresh forbidden pastry in the box. He whispered endearments in quick, shallow breaths. Miranda persisted, and, and, and, oh, primly swallowed.

Josh, overwhelmed, hugged her, and kissed her, but Miranda only tucked in his shirt and pushed him gently toward the door.

“That was so, I mean, I think,” he stammered, “I think I love, and must see you again. Oh, Miranda.”

“Don’t be silly.” Miranda handed him his sample case, and opened the door. The breathtaking heat walloped them. “This should not have happened, and never did. I hope you sell some encyclopedias. And never give up on your dreams. Now go.”

Josh stepped back onto the stoop and attempted again to express his jumbled feelings.

“Miranda, I understand, but I must, you see...”

“Good-bye, Josh.”

The door closed on him and he was left alone in the heat of the afternoon. The sweat began again on his brow, and down below this new ache. Josh got into his car, dazed, and drove home. He could no longer sell encyclopedias today. He needed to think. He had plans to return to State in the fall, to finish that degree in Marketing, again pursue the perpetually cheerful, perky coeds, and so on. But all that seemed dull now in the wake of this moment with Miranda, his first true taste of earth and heaven. A future without Miranda seemed no future at all.

Josh paced the floor of his efficiency down by the tracks, clutching the fateful lead he’d received with the others just that morning — Leach, Miranda and Duff, one child, address and phone. He authored great fantasies in which he rescued Miranda from her suburban limbo, from the boorish Duff who no doubt took for granted his inimitable wife, forcing her to cook and deliver dry cleaning for him, to live in a modest ranch house, its walls decorated with duck-hunting prints in gilt frames.

In Josh’s elaborate fantasies, a balding, pot-bellied Duff wore a dirty, sleeveless undershirt and needed a shave. Poor Miranda, distraught in a simple blue dress that accentuated her fine form, was torn between her vows to this ruffian and her true new love for Josh. Our hero appeared on the scene righteous and reassuring, sometimes here quoting scripture, and the greatest of these is love, and there dispatching Duff with an honest haymaker to his stubbly chin. Sometimes he, Duff, merely belched drunkenly from his La-Z-Boy, and dismissed them both without looking away from the Braves game.

From here the fantasies soared. Josh and Miranda living, scantily clad, in a beach hut on Dauphin Island or some equally exotic locale. Josh and Miranda with their own Chik-Fee-Lay franchise, working side-by-side in sanitary whites, pores slick with vegetable oil, returning home nightly for endless lovemaking in their high-rise condo. Josh and Miranda et cetera. Yet all the while, understandably, tragically, Josh overlooked one important character, young Duff Jr., who was at the moment engaged in electronic mayhem at Mamaw and Papaw’s in Jackson, unleashing an awful, vicarious firepower, joystick clutched in his innocent paw, the inevitable carnage piling up.

Duff ordered the chicken breast sandwich and grinned at the waitress in her faux French maid’s uniform. He tipped her a dollar for his next Coke and bourbon. He wondered how old she was, and idly wondered, if he were single again. Oh, but, he did love Miranda, he thought, mildly maudlin. The commission on the D’Accord would hold them to the end of the month, and keep the Frenchman off his back for a while. Though Duff would still be into him for almost a grand.

He had hoped to sell most of the last eight ball to cover his own, and maybe make a little on top. But it had been a tough week on the sales floor at Jeff Davis. And he’d traded one gram to a black guy in the service department for a snubnose .38 Special. He didn’t quite know why. Except perhaps that the Frenchman, a gap-toothed goon who’d played left wing one season for the Winnipeg Jets, gave him no respect. The revolver made Duff feel dangerous, like a body worthy of respect. He knew he would never use the piece, but the comfort of its weighty little bulk, its combat grips, in the Honda’s glove box put some resolve in his step.

Miranda brushed her teeth and gargled with minty-fresh mouthwash. She appraised herself in the mirror. A few gray hairs amongst the brown, crow’s-feet at the corner of her dark eyes. She missed Duff Jr. and Duff, who was never home, it seemed. She tried to smile, and only shook her head saying no, no, no, no, no, never again. I must put this out of my head, and never, never again. She wondered if perhaps she should have bought the encyclopedias for Duff Jr. Or the first volume anyway. Perhaps she could call Josh. But she knew that would not do. She needed to get away. A weekend on the Gulf. A real family vacation. She resolved to make her appeal to Duff and collect her son from the folks.

Josh tried to watch the television, but he could not concentrate. His mind runneth over with Miranda. He turned off the set. He tried to recall her words, but they were lost already, and she herself was fading with them. He could not see her face complete. Perhaps the eyes, her crinkled smile. He could see her dress, the vague shape of her, but only clearly the mole, and the sweet, woodsy smell of her. He had to see her again, if only to commit her forever to his memory. He sat at his little desk to write. He poured it all out onto page upon page. His great, illicit love. The sun sank, but the heat remained in the near dark, lingering like a villain. Josh, freshly showered, dressed in his best white tee and khaki chinos. He pulled on the orange wig for courage, and strode to his car.

Duff finished the tasty chicken breast sandwich, one last Coke and bourbon. He paid with a credit card, and halfheartedly invited the waitress aside for a blast, a snort, a pick-me-up. She politely declined, the way she always did. And Duff left alone. Some relieved, if truth be told. Savoring his lonesome liquored blues. In the parking lot, a quick line for the road. He dreaded to go home these days, and as often wondered why. How could this have come to pass? he wondered. And so, vintage Black Sabbath in the optional tape deck, Duff pounded the dashboard as he drove, the righteous beat of his yearned-for youth, and wailed along with the awful words.

Miranda showered and dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. The yellow throw off the sofa and into the washer with an extra splash of cleansing Tide. She remembered Duff s dry cleaning, and rushed off in the old Chevy. The dry cleaner would close soon. The heat of the day, only slightly diminished, came in through the car’s open windows like a free sample of hell. A strange glow of sunset about the town. Otherworldly, Miranda thought. And as she maneuvered through the evening traffic, she willed them all together in a beachfront timeshare. Duff, herself, and spunky Duff Jr.

Josh drove a secondhand Mustang, ragtop, car of his dreams. Bought and paid for. In the back seat, his livelihood, a carton of Encyclopedia Americana, volume one. Aardvark to Aztec. Gold-em-bossed blue leatherette. Riding shotgun, his letter explaining himself to Miranda, handwritten on lined yellow paper, folded neatly in thirds. He would give it to her inside the complimentary copy of volume one that he’d neglected in all the excitement to leave this afternoon. Tucked arbitrarily into the page for Amaryllis. A flower and name from some forgotten studies. A pretty word, illustrated, for this thing between them. The rest would be up to her.

Miranda, Duff, and Josh, three residents of one town, on the road. Theirs was not a small town, but not big either. It is certainly conceivable that three cars leaving different places for the same destination could cross paths, perhaps even collide, given the poor driving skills of most on the road. But they did not. Duff arrived home first, parked in the drive, and noticed that the Chevy was gone. A late-model Mustang in fair condition pulled up across the street. A convertible with the V-8 option. Duff looked in the rearview mirror, but could not clearly see the wild-haired driver in the feeble light. That dent in the front left quarter panel would sure reduce the trade-in value. No one got out of the car, and Duff began to sweat. A henchman of the Frenchman, he wildly imagined. He tried to calm himself, but took the pistol from the glove box nonetheless, and slipped it into the waistband of his slacks.

Josh sat in his car, his heart pounding wildly. He watched a well-dressed man get out of a new Honda and walk toward Miranda’s door. The man stopped and turned to peer across the street. Josh was sitting motionless in the dark car praying when he was momentarily lit up in her headlights. Stricken, you might say. Like an armadillo on the centerline.

The old Chevy approached, pulled in the drive, and parked beside the Honda. Miranda emerged from the car with a load of dry cleaning. Duff walked out to meet her.

“The Gulf, Duff, this time of year,” she began.

Josh got out of his car and stepped into the street.

“I must,” he called out. “Just one moment, please. This cannot wait.” He used his firmest voice.

“You leave her out of this,” Duff yelled in reply, brushing past Miranda. “I told him Friday.”

Miranda looked at Duff, and Josh. She put a hand on Duffs arm, to steer him into the house.

“It’s some crazy kid. Let’s go inside.”

Josh stepped closer.

“You think I’m scared of you?” said Duff. “Think again, punk.” But Duff was scared — scared of losing, scared of pain, scared of growing older in a world devoid of meaning, a world inhabited by violent ex-hockey players and their psychotic, orange-haired thugs.

Miranda took Duff s arm. He shrugged her off a bit roughly. She dropped the dry cleaning. She felt suddenly very small, in the midst of big, big events spinning ever out of control around her.

“I have something for you,” Josh called to Miranda, continuing on.

“No,” said Miranda.

“I got something for you, too, you fuck,” replied Duff.

Miranda afterwards recalled being knocked to the parched lawn by the scuffle, the smell of the soil, and Duffs stiff, clean shirts blue-white in the dim streetlight. The clumsy sounds of struggle, and exhalations. And then a gunshot. How strange, she thought, that she knew immediately it was a gunshot, having never heard one before, except at the movies and on TV. And like on TV, the porch lights came on, up and down her street, and soon there were sirens in the distance. The world became new, her life important. Newsworthy

Miranda stood then, and gathered herself and the dry cleaning. She walked over to Duff and handed him his shirts, but one. He stood as if struck deaf and dumb.

“Go call an ambulance, honey.”

She knelt next to the young man who lay wide-eyed on their lawn with his hand wetly to his stomach. She cradled his head in her lap, gently straightened his wig, and pressed a clean white shirt to the dark wound.

“Go on, Duff.”

And Duff went dumbly. The front door closed behind him, and the sirens came louder.

“I’m dying, aren’t I?” said Josh.

“Yes,” said Miranda, who believed in being truthful at times like this.

“I had to see you again.”

“I wish that you hadn’t.”

“The first volume,” said Josh, “is yours to keep, and, I think, I love you.”

Miranda picked up the book from where it had sprawled on the lawn, and with it, the letter and all it contained.

“Thank you, Josh,” she said. She brushed gently the blue leatherette. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

But she knew that everything would not. Those were only words from a song she used to know. Miranda once more touched his face. She held him as she would Duff Jr. until an ambulance came and took the boy away. She went inside, carrying Aardvark to Aztec. On the empty front lawn, a blue-white shirt, darkly stained, forgotten.

Miranda made a pot of coffee for Duff, and for the cops when they arrived. In the living room they asked Duff the perfunctory questions, sympathetic of a man in defense of his wife and his home. One had played ball with Duff back at High. They talked. The old, good times. The wanton state of kids today. Firepower and home defense. A compliment on the elaborate martial pattern of the sofa.

Miranda, meanwhile, sat on the back steps, thinking about Australia, its climate, economy, quality of education. She smoked one of Duff s cigarettes, the first volume of the encyclopedia in her lap, heavy with facts and possibility. She thought and smoked, and carefully burned the handwritten letter in the barbecue grill, gently feeding it into the small blue flame one page at a time.