The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

John Dufresne The TIMING of unfelt smiles

From Miami Noir

At 9:15 on Thursday morning, June 4, while Jordan Delreese was bludgeoning his two young children to death, I was sitting in Dr. Hamburger’s consulting room at the Sunny Isles Geriatric Clinic with my father, who was just then at a loss for words. He had been trying to explain to the doctor why he no longer felt comfortable being in the same room with his shadow. He’d said, If light can pass through the universe, why can’t it pass through me? But now he could only manage to hum and to shake his head. I highlighted a speech in my script. Dad’s contention, as near as I could figure it, was that light had a mind of its own and had taken to behaving arbitrarily and recklessly in the last six months or so. After Dr. Hamburger clicked off his desk lamp, Dad took off his eyeshade, blinked, rubbed his rheumy eyes, and asked me who I was. Dr. Hamburger tapped the side of his prescription pad on his desk blotter, leaned back in his squeaky Posture-Tech office chair, cast me a glance, raised his articulate brow, and lifted his upper eyelids. Lid-lifters tend to be a tad melodramatic.

Dr. Hamburger had diagnosed Dad with Alzheimer’s. Dad said he was merely closing up shop. He hadn’t lost his ability to make metaphor, not yet. And he did have his lucid moments. He was in and out, however, and he was hard to read. His expressions were often without nuance or blend. He was extremely angry, extremely happy, or extremely vacant. He could remember what he had for breakfast on June 15, 1944, in Guam (gumdrop candy, two cookies), but not that he just turned on the gas without lighting the pilot; which is why I had to move him into an all-electric, assisted-living facility.

Jordan Delreese walked down to the kitchen after slashing his wife’s throat and changing out of his blood-soaked pajamas and into a maroon polo shirt and khaki chinos. He clapped his hands and told Davenport and Darchelle to finish up their Cap’n Crunch quick like bunnies. Darchelle said she thought she heard Mommy screaming before, but then it stopped.

Jordan said, You did, dumpling. Mommy and Daddy were playing Multiply and Replenish again.

In the morning? she said. That’s silly.

Jordan asked the kids if they wanted to play a game too. They sure would. Okay, then you have to clean up your mess, put the bowls in the sink and the spoons in the dishwasher, handles up. Davenport wanted to know what the game was called. Just Rewards, Jordan said.

The kids giggled when Jordan blindfolded them. He told Darchelle to wait in her room and to count to two hundred. One Mississippi, she said. He locked her door and led Davenport to the children’s bathroom. The tub was full. He asked Davenport to lie on his back on the floor. Yes, I know the tile is cold, but it won’t be for long. Jordan took the hammer from the ledge of the tub, raised it above his shoulder, and brought it down on his son’s right eye, and then the left eye, the mouth, the forehead, the forehead again. He wiped the slick face of the hammerhead on an aqua hand towel and walked to Darchelle’s room. One hundred and eleven Mississippi, she said. Darchelle lay on the floor like her daddy asked her to. Jordan said, I saved you for last, dumpling, because you are my special angel. She did not get to say, Goody! or, Thank you, Daddy.

And then, to be extra certain that his buddy and his dumpling did not wake up in pain, Jordan laid the children face down in the bathtub. He washed his hands with antibacterial soap, singing “Happy Birthday” twice while he did. Dr. Sanjay Gupta on CNN said that’s how long it takes to wash your hands properly. Jordan went downstairs and made himself breakfast. Scrambled eggs on a blueberry Pop-Tart, sausage links, a box of grape Juicy Juice. While he ate and read the Sun-Sentinel, he called his mother and asked her if she and Dad would be home this afternoon. He’d like to pay a visit. Do I have to have a reason? His mom told him she’d make gingerbread and whipped cream. Jordan said, I’ll be there one-ish.

Jordan lifted the children out of the tub and dried them off. He noticed a small mole on Darchelle’s left hip, examined it, touched it, figured it was probably nothing. He tucked them both into Davenport’s bed, pulled the sheets to their chins, covered their faces with the lace doilies from Darchelle’s vanity. He nestled cuddly toys next to their bodies and read them the Bible story about Abraham and Isaac. He sang their favorite lullaby. Sweetest little baby, everybody knows. Don’t know what to call her, but she’s mighty like a rose. He choked back tears. Jordan decided to drive to North Beach in Hollywood, stare at the ocean, clear his head. And then maybe surprise his parents by showing up early. He’d drive by Whole Foods and pick up lunch. Some of that tabouli he likes so much. And the grilled portobellos. He cleared the table, started the dishwasher, went up to the master bath, and hopped in the shower.

I told Dad I was still Wylie, the same old Wylie.

“Well, you look a little like my boy Winston.”

“Winston was your bulldog.”

“Like Cameron, I mean.”

“Cameron’s dead. I’m all you got.”

“Where’s Birute?”

“Mom’s dead.”

“I know she’s dead. That’s not what I asked you.”

Dr. Hamburger had Dad take off his shirt — easier said than done — and climb up on the examining table. I turned my script toward the window light and read Willis’s next speech. It’s like you’re in ninth grade, and you die and go into high school. That’s all death is. I was playing Willis Harris in the Gold Coast Theatre’s production of Trailerville. Willis is a true believer. I’m not. It was one week till dress rehearsal. Or maybe you’re humming along in a big rig, and you see a long straightaway up ahead and you shift gears and jam that pedal, and just like that the hum of the engine’s an octave higher. Dying’s like that, like shifting into a higher gear. My cell phone vibrated. I excused myself and stepped out into the hall. Dr. Hamburger was trying to unknot Dad’s T-shirt from around his neck.

The call was from my friend, Detective Carlos O’Brien of the Hollywood Police Department, requesting my immediate services. He had a situation in the Lakes. Three bodies, two weapons, one missing suspect, much blood. “I need you here, Coyote. Now.”

“I’ll have to take my dad.”

“How’s he doing?”

“He’s not himself.”

“Ten minutes.”

I couldn’t leave Dad in the car with the keys in the ignition, so I opened the windows and gave him a Fifteen Puzzle, told him to slide the numbers around until they were all in order.

“In order of importance?” he said.

“In numerical order.”

I’m not a police officer. That morning I was a forensic consultant. Sometimes I work for lawyers who are trying to empanel the appropriate jury for their clients. Sometimes I sit in my office and help my own clients shape their lives into stories, so the lives finally make some sense. A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety. And that’s when I call myself a therapist. And that’s what it says on my business card: Wylie Melville, MSW, Family and Individual Counseling. Carlos uses me, however, because I read minds, even if those minds aren’t present. I say I read minds, but that’s not it really. I read faces and furniture. I look at a person, at his expressions, his gestures, his clothing, his home, and his possessions, and I can tell you what he’s thinking. I’ve always been able to do it. Carlos calls me an intuitionist. Dr. Cabrera at UM’s Cognitive Thinking Lab tells me I have robust mirror neurons. I just look, I stare, I gaze, and I pay attention to what I see.

Carlos showed me the framed wedding photo they’d found on the slain wife’s body. No, I said, I’d prefer not to see the victims. The photographer had posed the couple with Jordan’s cheek on — “applied” might be a better word — with Jordan’s cheek applied to Caroldean’s temple, and he’d canted the shot at a thirty-degree angle. I wondered what he saw that suggested the pressure and the slant. Jordan’s smile was thin, yet wide, as wide as he knew was appropriate to the occasion and pleasing to the photographer. Adequate but unfelt. His eyes were eager, yet slightly squinted. I guessed that the obvious accompanying brow lines had been Photoshopped out. You can’t trust photos to tell you the truth anymore. Caroldean wore a diamond stud in her left ear and a thin silver necklace. She had a dimple on her right cheek, like she was used to smiling out one side of her face. This ingrained unevenness suggested a lifetime of feigned emotion.

Jordan River Delreese was a thirty-five-year-old graduate of FIU’s College of Business Administration and the CEO of, and the creative force behind, Succeedingly Wealthy, Inc., a company that produced and sold motivational artwork. Like there’s this photo of crashing waves on a rocky, forested coast, and beneath it, in case you think this is just an empty, if dramatic landscape, are Jordan’s words: Sometimes amidst the waves of change, we find our true direction. Or maybe there’s a lighthouse, its beacon shining above a roiling sea, and Jordan has printed: The savage sea can pull our customers in many directions. Our duty is to light their way to safety — before the competition does. Above his desk in his office at the back of the house hung his company’s best-selling framed photo, a shot of a golf green in the brilliant light of early morning, dew still on the grass. The photo is titled Success and beneath the photo, Jordan’s inspiring words: Some people only dream of success… other folks wake up early and work at it.

You can lie with your possessions, of course. I suppose we all do this a bit, stash the Enya CDs in a drawer and leave the Chet Baker and the Louis Prima conspicuously on the coffee table. Jordan had lined his office bookshelf with the hundred-volume set from the Franklin Library of The Collected Stories of the World’s Greatest Writers, from Aesop to Thomas Wolfe. Each book had gold decor on leather boards, gilt page edges, silky end pages, and a ribbon bookmark. None of the spines had been broken; none of the pages in those volumes I checked had been thumbed.

The neatness of the office, the precise arrangement of items on Jordan’s desk — laptop computer, family photo, cherry wood and punched-black metal desk organizer, matching Rolodex and pencil cup, stapler, tape dispenser, wire mesh paper clip holder — told me that he was a man with a firm handshake, a pumper, not a wrist-grabber, a man who numbered his arguments, asked and answered his own questions, and was given to proverbial expression. Tucked into the side rail of his mocha desk pad, a note on pink “while-you-were-out” message paper, presumably to himself: Stumbling isn’t falling. I took a business card from the leather card holder. The “S” in “Succeedingly” was a dollar sign.

In the family photo, our four Delreeses are posed casually, sitting on a white rug against a white backdrop. They wear white, long-sleeved oxford shirts, white casual slacks, and white socks. Jordan’s in the middle, one hand on his leg, looking up at Darchelle, who smiles back at him. Caroldean — there’s that dimple again — has her arm around Davenport. His is the smile of a child about to drift away to sleep. You can always tell a happy marriage. People in love begin to acquire each other’s traits, each other’s styles — they begin to look and act alike. They want to please. They admire each other and, naturally enough, want to become what they esteem and cherish. That had not happened with the Delreeses.

Carlos handed me a sheet of lime-green stationery. “He left a note.”

Jordan’s writing was half-print, half-cursive; his words began with a flourish and ended with a flat line.

I told Carlos that no person who has ever tried to be honest for even one second of his life could think like this.

Carlos said, “He’s a deacon in his church.”

“Of course he is. And he’s probably a scoutmaster.”

“Soccer coach.”

“There you go.”

“So you think the volunteer work is pretense? You don’t think he’s sincere?”

I shook my head. “I think sincerity is his honesty. And I think you’d better find Mr. Delreese soon. He’s not finished. The family was just the flourish. He’ll kill again. My guess is he’s killed before.”

Back at the car, I nudged Dad awake, strapped him in his seat belt, closed the windows, cranked up the AC, and drove toward Federal Highway. I told Dad about the victims, omitting the gruesome details. He shrugged. “Life is nothing,” he said.

“But it’s all we’ve got.”

“Nothing’s plenty for me.”

“Did you finish your puzzle?”

“The zero was missing.”

“So what did you do?”

“Killed some time.” He picked up my script, fanned the pages, found a highlighted speech, and fed me my cue. “You want to lose her too?”

“A man belongs with his family, Arlis. Where we come from, the elderly are not discarded like old rags.”

“Are you listening to yourself?”

“That’s not in the script, Dad.”

“What was her name?”

“Who?”

“Your ex-wife.”

“Georgia. What about her?”

“On my mind is all. You lost her.”

“She found someone else.”

“So she’s dead to you.”

I dropped Dad at Clover House in North Miami, told him I’d pick him up on Sunday for the Marlins game.

On the way to rehearsal I took a chance. I checked Delreese’s business card and called his cell. I told him who I was and said I was hoping he could design me a piece of art I could hang in my office. What I had in mind was one of those Hubble shots of distant space, maybe the one of the eagle nebula or some radiant spiral galaxy, and it’ll say, I love the light for it shows me the way. I endure the dark for it shows me the stars. Something like that.

Jordan Delreese told his parents that the kids were swell, fit as fiddles, never been better. He asked his mother to pass the tabouli. She told him to leave room for dessert. Caroldean’s busy with her scrapbook project, he said. He told them that when he was at the beach earlier he saw this cloud that looked like an angel. Did they see it too? Like Michael the archangel. They hadn’t seen it. What do you think it means? he said.

Rain, his father said.

Jordan said, He makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.

Amen, his mother said.

Jordan’s BlackBerry played “You Are the Wind Beneath My Wings.” He checked the number and punched Ignore.

Emotions don’t lie, but you can lie about them. Of course, lying about them’s not so easy. You’re angry, but you say, I’m not angry, but then just for a moment, you draw your eyebrows down and together, flash those vertical wrinkles on your forehead, and press your lips together. Or maybe it’s your body that leaks the truth. Your natural-born liar understands that everyone is watching his transpicuous face, and he knows that an easy smile is the cleverest mask. Gestures, however, may belie that smile. He brushes a nonexistent piece of lint from his slacks, drums his fingers, leans forward.

You can’t command emotions to appear, but you can coax them, summon them. I learned that in acting class. Stanislavsky said if you move your hands in a tender way, you’ll begin to experience tenderness. You move with the quality of tenderness, in other words, and the movement will evoke the sensation of tenderness, and that sensation will lead you to the true emotion, and now you’re feeling it. No pretense. Change your expression and you change your nervous system. And you can use your own life experiences and your remembered feelings to help you understand your character. Work from an aroused emotion back to the source of it. In other words, to lie on stage, you need to be honest with yourself.

I was working on feeling Willis’s exhilaration, his joy about life after death and the promise of eternal salvation. Easy enough to slap on the brilliant smile, brighten the bountiful eyes. I stood on my toes like I couldn’t hold the good news inside, like I was bursting with beatific energy. I started hopping, pounding my fists in the air. Hiroshi, our director, asked me to take it down a notch, or several. “It’s only life everlasting, Wylie; it’s not a weekend with Madonna.” I wondered if I had any exhilaration in my past to call on. When had I ever been so deliriously excited? Maybe on my wedding day, but the failure of that whole enterprise got me sad like it always does. When I was five or six I ran everywhere. I ran to school, ran to the kitchen. I couldn’t wait to get to wherever I was going. And I was happy wherever I was. I ran down the stairs, over to the park. I ran to the swings. I ran to church. So what happened when I was seven? Hiroshi put his wrist to his forehead and told me he couldn’t take another interruption. I said, “I’m ready,” and then I saw Carlos backstage waving me over.

Jordan Delreese asked his father Calbert to tie him to the cyclone fence in the backyard. Calbert smiled and turned on the TV. Let’s Make a Deal on the Game Show Network. Jordan said how that would be the best thing for all of us. Calbert told the contestant, a man in a hoop skirt and red baloney curls, to just take the cash and be happy with it. Cripes, he said, people don’t know when they have it good. Calbert sucked on a sour ball. The contestant went with whatever was behind Door #3. Greed, Calbert said. Jordan said, I have no way to control my stress. Jordan’s mother said she’d like to serve dessert out by the pool. Calbert said, Put on your sunscreen, Vernal. The contestant seemed delighted with his six-piece gray mica bedroom suite, complete with platform bed and Serta Perfect Sleeper mattress and box spring. Jordan said, That way I won’t fly way. Calbert said, What way? Tied to the fence with baling wire, Jordan said. And you’d better do it now.

While they ate, Jordan brought up the time his father had caught him masturbating into a tube sock while he was watching Bewitched. His mother said now what she had said then. About Onan spilling his seed. And the thing which he did displeased the Lord: wherefore He slew him also. Calbert said he couldn’t remember what happened after he’d caught Jordan abusing himself, so Jordan reminded him. You took the TV cord off the old Motorola, plug and all, wet it, ran it through the sandbox, and put it in the freezer. Bringing back any memories, Dad? Then Mom filled a tub with ice-cold water and had me sit in it. Then you had me stand naked in the kitchen; you took out the cord and whipped me with it. I’ve still got the scars. Calbert said he wasn’t proud, but it had to be done. You were committing an abominable sin, son. You were no better than a viper. And look how you’ve turned out, Jordan. A success. A God-fearing, law-abiding man, a solid citizen, and a pillar of the community. You should thank me. Jordan poured his parents two glasses of sweet iced tea and proposed a toast to discipline. Calbert said, You might want to try a little tough love with your own kids, Jordan. That grandson of mine has a sassy mouth on him.

Jordan finished his gingerbread and then his mother’s gingerbread and his father’s. He talked while his parents nodded off. He’d dissolved six Ambien in their tea. Worked like a dream. He told them about how if you wanted to get away with killing someone, you should kill them in a pool. Not that he was trying to get away with anything, you understand. Too late for that. Drowning is a diagnosis of exclusion, he said. It cannot be proven in an autopsy, cannot be disproved. He told them about the actor who drives a spaceship through the universe, how he drowned his wife in Beverley Hills, and everyone knows he did, but they can’t prove it. You could see this guy any week on his new TV show, and he behaves like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. That’s acting.

Jordan slapped his mother awake. He told her what he’d done this morning. Vernal blinked, looked at Calbert with his face in the bowl, and laughed. This is the strangest dream, she said. He told her how he’d carved Caroldean’s throat with a serrated kitchen knife, how it felt like slicing through a mango when he hit the larynx. Oh dear, Vernal said. Whee! Jordan reached out his foot and rested it on the seat of Calbert’s chair. He kicked the chair over. Calbert hit his head on the concrete skirt of the pool. A floret of blood bloomed on his teal Marlins cap. Jordan stripped his parents to their undies and slid them into the pool. He sat under the umbrella and watched, saw those brief spasms when the water first hit the lungs, and then the flutter as the body fought for air. He watched them float, knock against each other, sink to the bottom of the pool. He knew it would take a couple of days for the bodies to bloat with gas and rise again. He knew they’d be discovered long before that. He fetched his dad’s Sony Handycam, sat at the edge of the pool, and taped the bodies, looking like the last two pickled eggs in a jar. Then he turned the camcorder on himself and told his story.

Jordan explained how he had a crew in his office tearing up the place. So could we meet at your place? he said. That way he could take some measurements, note the color scheme, kill two birds with one stone. I gave him my address. That’s over by the Fetish Box, isn’t it? Yes, it is. Twenty minutes.

He said, “Determination is often the first chapter in the book of excellence.”

“Excuse me?”

“Maybe the photo’s of a long-distance runner on her last leg, gritting it out to the finish line.”

“Do you have one for honesty?”

“I can give you serenity.”

“I wish you could.”

“Will truth do?”

“Close enough.”

“Okay. An old man, red jacket, floppy cap, walks through the autumn woods in New England. Glorious colors. Clear, crisp. We can see the steam of his breath. His head’s down. Below that the word truth — all caps — and below that, Purity is born of virtue.”

Jordan Delreese knocked shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits on my office door, pushed the door open with his shoulder, and poked his grinning face into the room. He held his BlackBerry to his ear, rolled his eyes, smiled at me, and told whomever he was speaking with or pretending to speak with that he’d get back to them with the figures ASAP. He scratched his nose. Okey-dokey. He nodded. Ciao!

He holstered the BlackBerry, clapped his hands, and stepped toward the desk where I sat. He said, “I pictured you bald, slight, with maybe a pitiful little mustache. Funny how a voice can fool you.” He admired my autographed Marlins baseball, gripped it like he was pitching a curve. “Well, here we are, Mr. Melville.”

“Call me Wylie. All my friends do.”

“I pegged you for a sociable guy.”

“Except Carlos. He calls me Coyote.”

“And you call him The Jackal, I suppose.”

“Have a seat, Mr. Delreese.”

He pointed to the wall above the sofa. “We’ll hang it there.” He put his fists on his hips, swivelled and looked left, then right, looked at me, and shrugged. “No photos of the wife and kiddies.”

“No wife and kiddies, I’m afraid.”

“Fag?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are you a fag?”

“That’s an inappropriate question, Mr. Delreese.”

“If you say so.”

“But a revealing one.”

He sat, crossed his legs, folded his hands behind his head, smiled, and I knew that he knew that I knew. “No kids.” He clicked his tongue and shook his head. “Fruitless.” He raised an eyebrow, stuck out his lower lip, and cocked his head. “No regrets, Coyote?”

“Plenty.”

He picked up the photo of Dad and me squinting into the sun at the News Café. “They fuck you up, don’t they?”

“Who?”

“Your mom and dad.”

“They did their best.”

He smiled and aligned my Post-it note dispenser with my saucer of paper clips. Ordering his thoughts. He turned my little ceramic flamingo so she was facing me. He leaned back in his chair. I leaned back in mine.

He said, “I see what you’re doing.”

“You’re a perceptive man.”

“Why didn’t you call the cops?”

“Who says I didn’t?”

“Your need makes you transparent.” He steepled his fingers, brought them to his lips. “So what do we do now?”

“You tell me your story.”

“And you process my behavior and feed it back to me.”

“I listen.”

“Why should I tell you my story?” “Why did you kill your family?”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s barbaric, illegal, immoral—”

“Insane?”

“Did you think you’d get away with it?”

“I already did, dipshit.” He laughed. “They’re dead.” He put his face in his hands. “My parents had outlived their usefulness. They disgusted me. They smelled like rancid milk.”

“How do you feel right now?”

“Like I’m wasting my time. If you’re looking for credible motivation, Melville, you won’t find it here.”

“Every lie is a victory for you, isn’t it?”

“You want to make sense of this so badly, you’ll believe anything I tell you so long as there’s an element of horror and remorse. Am I right? You want the world to make sense, but it doesn’t.”

“It does if you bother.”

“Most times nobody knows why they do anything.”

“Most times they don’t want to know.”

“Don’t you go to the movies? This is the twenty-first century, Wylie, the Age of Unreason. Kill someone in the morning; go to the theater at night. No reason, no resistance. Action is its own motivation. It’s kind of funny if you think about it.” Delreese pulled a snub-nosed revolver out of a shoulder holster, said he bet I wasn’t planning on this, and I told him he was right about that, and he told me he had nothing to lose, and I told him that I did. How on earth had I missed the signals? Had his lips narrowed while I blinked? Did the pitch of his voice rise, not in deceit, but in anger?

He said, “You know what’s easy, Wylie? Lying to someone who wants to be lied to.” He aimed the pistol at my heart and asked me if I was a religious man. I told him I was not. He said, “Too bad for you then. You don’t get saved.”

“There’s no salvation for you either, Delreese. Every child knows that this is our only life. Every pig knows it. Every snake. Just people like you who don’t.”

“People like me.”

“People who feel that the world has let them down, who can’t imagine existence without their own presence. Dishonest people.”

“The only honesty is a lie well-acted.”

I told him to put the gun away and let’s talk. I said it like I was soothing a feisty dog.

Delreese picked up the Marlins baseball, lobbed it across the room, fired the pistol at it, and put a bullet through the window. “I suspect we don’t have much time now.” He pointed the gun at my face. I squeezed my eyes shut. I tried to breathe deeply to keep my heart from exploding out of my chest. I trembled and held onto my chair. I thought about my father waiting for me on Sunday, sitting with the cigarette-smoking attendants on the shady bench outside the Clover House lobby, tapping his foot, chewing his lip, trying to remember why the hell he was sitting there, and I understood that without me around to fight for him, the health-care system would swallow him up, strap him to a bed in some shadowy ward, and let him waste away. When they told him I was dead, would he know who they were talking about?

Delreese said, “Cat got your tongue?”

I thought if I could talk, maybe I could save my life, but in order to talk I’d have to think; only I couldn’t think; I could only remember. I saw my brother Cameron and me, and we’re six and on the floor in the den with Oreos and milk watching The Lone Ranger. Dad’s snoring over on the couch, and Mom’s out on the patio smoking up a storm and reading another Harlequin romance. This bad guy from the Cavendish gang has the drop on the Lone Ranger and tells him to nice-and-easy-like take off his mask, which looks like my father’s eyeshade, and which, of course, he will never do, even though I kind of want him to myself, which is sort of a betrayal, I know, and the Lone Ranger pretends that someone’s behind the bad guy by making these not-so-subtle head and eye gestures that arouse the desperado’s suspicion, and then the Lone Ranger says, “Get ’em, Tonto,” and when the bad guy turns and fires, the Lone Ranger jumps him, grabs the six-shooter, and knocks the bad guy out with a single punch.

Delreese said, “I call this game Meet Your Maker.” He laughed. “Ten Mississippi,” he said. “Nine…”

Cameron changed the channel and told me to stop crying. I told him I wasn’t crying, but I could taste the tears on my lips. Bugs Bunny aimed a pistol at Elmer Fudd, pulled the trigger, and a flag popped out of the barrel of the gun, unfurled, and said Bang! Bugs gave Elmer a big wet kiss. I couldn’t remember my mother’s face, just the back of her head. I knew I wouldn’t hear the gunshot, wouldn’t feel a thing. Everything would be over before I knew it. What would be the last thought I thought, the last picture I saw?

“Five Mississippi.”

What I did remember about Mom was her silence, her ratty chenille robe, and her pink Deerfoam slippers. When she thought I was lying, she’d tell me to stick out my tongue, said that if I was lying it would be black. It was always black, even those times I was sure I wasn’t lying. She’d wash my mouth out with Lifebuoy soap or spoon horseradish on my tongue. Cameron called her The Beast. Cameron, my twin, who looked exactly like me, people said, but was somehow more handsome, who always knew what I was thinking and could make me laugh at the drop of a hat, who fell into a life of drug addiction and robbed my parents blind, died in room 201 at the Pirate’s Inn in Dania, beaten to death by his playmates with a studded mace and a stone war club. He was twenty-four.

I realized that Delreese had stopped counting, and I waited and thought maybe I was dead already, that this dark stillness was life after life, that I’d already been shot, that I’d been wrong about death too, and Willis had been right after all; there is no pain, no past, no present, no future, just the everything all at once, just a floating toward a resplendent and cleansing light, so I opened my eyes to see it, to let it wash over me, and I saw Delreese, who must have been waiting for this moment, with the black barrel of the gun in his mouth, saw him smile and wink. I reached for his arm, and he squeezed the trigger.