Tiny Crimes Read online

  The tech companies took sides and wireless signals

  Danielle Evans

  190

  were spotty for months. When she finally got through they were off the keys somewhere and Adam was all bad news. The city was out of clean water again and bottled was limited. There was some kind of new drug and it was bad. The teachers had been fired from Lyla’s school, which would reopen next week with new, properly vetted teachers.

  “We’re going home,” he said.

  That he was cryptic meant he must have thought someone else was listening, but he also knew what she would hear. Adam’s mother is dead, his father remarried and living in a safe zone, a zone that voted for all of this, a zone that even on a pass Veronica can’t enter now.

  “You can’t take Lyla there,” she said. It was a statement of fact or it was a plea.

  “I can,” he said.

  He could. She knew that. She knows that. Her daughter is white until more months of summer sun than she will see on land, until someone sees her with her mother, until someone asks the right question and she forgets to lie. Even in what used to be her normal life, something in Veronica had suspected it would come to this, that even in the country she grew up in, no one who didn’t have to would in their right mind choose to claim her forever. Every time Grace comes back from the inside it is a small miracle. Veronica is on a boat. Somewhere in what used to be her country, her daughter is a white girl. Somewhere in who used to be her daughter, she is a ticking bomb.

  Nobody’s Gonna Sleep Here, Honey

  191

  The Wrong One

  Erica Wright

  Leeches should have been the least of my concerns, but I put on my waders anyway. Ophelia, I thought, looking at the girl’s hair rippling away from the back of her head. But the water was too shallow, and I knew that her face would be scraped and bruised from the rocks.

  “Ain’t rattlers, Dee, just horned-up crickets.”

  The newest member of the volunteer fire department had a too-big wad of chaw in his cheek and was spitting often enough to make a circle in the weeds at his feet. He didn’t seem to care that he was the bull’s-eye. Ardy’s bravado didn’t surprise me, but hanging around in the sticks past eighteen? There must have been some girlfriend, but I couldn’t think who was near enough his age to matter.

  193

  The water bubbled past the rubber of my boots and kept going toward Nashville, sixty miles or forever, depending on who you asked. She was heavier than I would have guessed, and my hands slipped on the first try. The water splashed onto my pants, and I tried not to think death water. I bent from my knees and locked my arms around her torso, hauling us both upright with a grunt. Dee started vomiting behind me, but I didn’t turn around, walking backward one step at a time. The corpse’s hair was in my mouth, and I made myself think girl’s hair instead. Neither Dee nor Ardy helped me when I got to the bank, and I had to drag her by the arms onto the mud and shells. Crawfish darted back into the water.

  “Well,” Ardy asked.

  “It’s not her,” I said.

  He spat toward the ground, but a black glob got stuck to his cheek, and he wiped it off. Dee came crashing into view, shrieking about snakes again. Sure enough, when I turned to where she was pointing, a cottonmouth was burning through the water.

  “She got ID or something,” Ardy said.

  “Dog tags around her neck,” I said.

  “No shit!”

  I shook my head, more irritated with myself for making a joke than with Ardy. “She’s got nothing on her.”

  Nobody said anything for a while, then Dee suggested we pray or something. She just wanted to go

  Erica Wright

  194

  home, though. I stripped off my dishwashing gloves and shoved them into my pocket, nodding. Something would eat her if we didn’t tell anyone she was here.

  I kept my boots on as we headed back the way we came, through an overgrown field belonging to a neighbor long past retirement age. Dee walked close enough behind me to catch my heels from time to time. She smelled sick, and I figured she’d tell her husband she’d been drinking. Ardy’s parents wouldn’t care that he’d been gone all afternoon, and there was nobody waiting for me. Maybe next time, it would be the right girl.

  The Wrong One

  195

  The Trashman Cometh

  J. W. McCormack

  The Trashman travels in the back of his truck, rather than the front like other gatherers of refuge, and seldom does anyone see the shrouded figure behind the wheel when he pulls up the curb and opens the compactor. The Trashman slips out with his bag. His face is a frozen mask that neither smiles nor frowns. But his bag smiles, crinkly plastic hungry for its diet of secret things. Life must have room for improvement. The present must have space. The Trashman starts with the mailbox, padding the bottom of his bag with court summonses and magazine subscriptions. Things no one cares about, as opposed to the things everyone has forgotten. For those, he must crawl in under the windowsill and sneak into the bedroom, where he wriggles

  197

  under a spare mattress, where he tiptoes around the conjugal bed and fishes between the cushions. His bag waits outside, yawning for the waste and trinkets the Trashman tosses out the window. He pilfers painful memories and good ones that have no open circuit in the present. His service is useful, but his aspect is terrible; if you were to wake while he slid pictures from their frames you would imagine yourself inside the grip of a weird nightmare. Children sleep as the Trashman crouches on their bed frame and siphons the physical residue of their youth. Without the Trashman, no one can grow any older. He snatches up macramé made at summer camps and photographs of beachside vacations, ferrets out hidden postcards, and as he fills his bag, the memories associated with each object erode. The sleeper awakens into a life made a little smaller, a little more manageable, sheared of a little unnecessary pain and needless sentiment. The Trashman’s bag bulges with secrets.

  Like all angels of mercy, the Trashman’s duties are prescribed by a higher power. But the manner in which he carries them out are open to his discretion. He sometimes pauses to admire a compromising photograph or a pressed flower. Should he rid this woman of the stuffed rhinoceros she bought for a child that went unborn? Or unspool the tape from this mixtape, traded for a sagging ex-rebel’s ancient virginity? He parts his pale lips and out comes his long tongue, tasting each

  J. W. McCormack

  198

  object in turn and weighing its value. If it is sour, it is truly forgotten. It is less than trash and of no interest to this Trashman. But if it is sweet, then it still has the power to stir. The power to disturb the present with the reverberations of the past. Then it goes into the bag.

  And then there are the houses of the dead, or houses that are themselves dead and gone. He squelches all needless things that stain the earth and, without the Trashman, would overcrowd it. These dead souls he takes wholesale, unbuilding what the living have accrued. Every piece of furniture, every unrealized dream. The bag has room enough for everyone.

  And so the Trashman journeys from house to house, lugging his huge bag behind him. The truck follows at a distance. Time moves differently for the Trashman and the days are like cracked plates that he splits straight through. He’ll cover the whole Earth in a week, following the night. The night is his harvest season. Sometimes he carries a scythe, for when he must cut a precious piece of detritus from hands that clutch at it, instinctively protecting the objects that make their lives impossible. But the bag will be fed and so the Trashman gorges it on abacuses, rocking horses, mailboxes, lipstick, lip gloss, pinups, teacups, footstools, bridges, ladders, letter openers, spoons, globes, bicycles, unicycles, ice-cube trays, bales of hay, stereos, sextants, plungers, dials, eyeglasses, astrolabes, LPs, toothpaste, mill wheels, marbles, milk

  The Trashman Cometh

  199

  cartons, fire alarms, andirons, sofas, por
traits, cradles, coffins, keyboards, surfboards, handlebars, bells, desk chairs, chaise lounges, bookcases, diamonds, pearls, inhalers, pillboxes, top hats, tiles, chimneys, washing machines, telegraphs, candlesticks, bowling balls, walking sticks, sunglasses, shot glasses, rifles, printers, neckties, Coke bottles, beer cans, air conditioners, jukeboxes, music boxes, cereal boxes, heart-shaped boxes, balloons, chains, cages, collars, wigs, hand mirrors, light switches, Christmas trees, go-carts, engine parts, stethoscopes, wooden crates, trash cans, necklaces, funnels, cranes, model planes, shovels, pencils, rubber stamps, books on tape, quills, shower stalls, Matryoshka dolls. In a list that goes on forever, he drains the world of its sinks, shells, feathers, faucets, baskets, bones, bathtubs, TV sets, marionettes, petals, paper dolls, china dolls, honeycombs, wheels, windups, matchbooks, storybooks, lampshades, stuffed birds, keys, wrappers, blankets, crosses, fences, fortunes, doorknobs, doghouses, street signs, cuckoo clocks, board games, bedposts, stepping stones, camera cases, film reels, lawn gnomes . . . and never, in all this flotsam, has he found what he is looking for.

  J. W. McCormack

  200

  Actual Urchin

  Henry Hoke

  The way the urchin died was he walked up to a guy and said you owe me fifty bucks and the guy stabbed him in the heart.

  The way the urchin died was he went into a bar fuming and grabbed a guy that owed him money and said where’s my money and the guy killed him right then and there.

  The way the urchin died was he lent the wrong guy money, and that guy turned out to be a killer. His killer.

  201

  This was way after the old days, way after he was famous. Way after.

  The studio needed an actual urchin. They were tired to death of show kids. This new production was scrappy. It needed that shit-on mood, spines at its center.

  Men from the gate went out to drag the streets like dogcatchers and come back with candidates. Not too sick, said the studio. We can’t work with sick.

  There was only one true choice. They found the actual urchin standing on a dead-end street, looking up at a lamppost like it was the sun.

  Action, the director would shout from his chair, and the urchin would take charge, bringing the show kids down to his level for mischief and puppy love. The studio had a hit show on their hands. They kept the urchin in-house.

  At the end of the shoot day, which was every day except Sunday, drunk parents would come and scoop up their show kids and the urchin would head back to his room in the basement. There’d be soup waiting and no windows and he’d dream of a dugout. Of a cool lagoon.

  Henry Hoke

  202

  The urchin never knew what to say, unless someone told him.

  Not for a billion bucks, he would say.

  You’re trouble, he would say.

  Boy would I, he would say.

  We’ve all seen him. We all know.

  A ton of time can pass during a commercial break.

  Motherfuck, said the director one day through his old-timey megaphone. They said motherfuck, even back then. You’re too big a boy now, you can go. Plus you’re starting to break out in hives, maybe it’s the oil we use to slick your hair, maybe it’s—

  They sent him out the back gate. He got an apartment one block away and started drinking and borrowing money and doing all the other fun things big kids do. There was a clause in the urchin’s contract that once released he couldn’t lead a happy life.

  How’s he doing? those that thought of the urchin or saw him in reruns would ask. Is he even alive? I think so, whoever would reply. And for a decade and a half, whoever was right. Until one day they weren’t.

  Actual Urchin

  203

  How did the urchin die, they’d ask. He walked into a bar and up to a man and said you owe me fifty bucks and the man stuck a knife in him.

  The studio got to paint it in the papers. Life snuffed out, in a better place now. Other, bigger people died that day and needed column space. The short of what happened.

  The long of what happened was the urchin walked into a bar, looked over to a corner booth, and in that corner booth a man sat wearing a T-shirt with the little urchin’s face on it. His young face on a new T-shirt. The urchin might have been in a haze of barbiturates, but this was still an odd sight in those days. Then the guy who owed him money blocked the view. Then: the demand.

  Then: the stab.

  The urchin crawled the length of the bar to the corner booth and clutched on to the T-shirt, and the man wearing it had no idea who this dying awkward urchin was but the urchin held tight and his own young face filled the screen, accompanied him into death.

  The man the urchin held on to in his final moments had seen some shit, and wasn’t the type who thought much

  Henry Hoke

  204

  of staring down death. This wasn’t a main moment of the man’s week. The man didn’t even think to wash the clothes right away.

  Actual Urchin

  205

  The Law of Expansion

  Brian Evenson

  1.

  Sabra, can you come up here?

  —I’m busy.

  —You’re always busy. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t need your help.

  —Oh, all right . . . How did that happen?

  —It doesn’t matter.

  —Is he dead?

  —What do you think? Of course he’s dead. See, it comes right off.

  —Jimmy! Why would you show me that? What’s wrong with you?

  207

  —Sorry . . . Here, you take the legs and I’ll take the heavier half. We’ll have to tuck his head into his shirt somehow. It’d be a lot easier if he was wearing a T-shirt, but at least this shirt is baggy. Between the two of us—

  —We can’t move him, Jimmy. We’ve got to leave him there.

  —Why?

  —Why? For the police. They have to come and take pictures and all that.

  —The police? Oh, I don’t think there’s any point in bringing the police in on this, do you?

  —Yes, of course I do. That’s what the police are for.

  —I think that would just complicate matters . . . Besides, they’re already so busy . . .

  — . . .

  — . . .

  —Well, we definitely have to tell Mom.

  —We definitely shouldn’t tell Mom.

  —It’s her boyfriend, Jimmy! It’s Dale, for God’s sake. She has a right to know.

  —Was her boyfriend. Really, Sabra. You can’t tell Mom.

  — . . .

  — . . .

  —Goddamnit, this is just like Mr. Emmons all over again.

  —I can’t believe you’d say that! This is nothing

  Brian Evenson

  208

  like what happened with Mr. Emmons! That was a complete accident!

  —So you’re saying this wasn’t?

  —Of course it was, but it was a completely different kind of accident . . .

  —Hmm.

  —We really should get him out of here and clean up.

  —How did it happen, Jimmy?

  —Oh, you know. These things happen.

  —These things happen? Just what is that supposed to mean? I swear to God, Jimmy. I was right. This is just like Mr. Emmons all over again!

  —It’s not at all like Mr. Emmons!

  —All right, then, prove it. How did it happen?

  —I was just sleeping in bed, when suddenly I heard something. I sat bolt upright in bed and there he was, looming over me. I’m pretty sure he was planning to kill me. I hardly had time to think. I just lashed out.

  —Why would he want to kill you?

  —How do I know? I’m not in his head.

  —And you just happened to have a knife on your bedside table . . .

  —I’d . . . No, I think he must have had the knife. Probably he dropped it when I sat bolt upright.

&n
bsp; —Stop saying bolt upright! This is not a novel! The police are going to think you’re making it up!

  —There’s not a better way to say it! And we’re not calling the police!

  The Law of Expansion

  209

  — . . .

  —Anyway, probably he dropped the knife when I sat bol—when I sat suddenly up. My hand just happened to accidentally close over the handle when it fell. And then I lifted my arms to defend myself and accidentally killed him.

  —Naturally.

  —Naturally.

  —By decapitating the poor man.

  —He was a son of a bitch.

  —Yes, he was, but that’s no reason to decapitate him.

  —I . . . don’t know exactly how that happened. But you have to admit, he shouldn’t have been in my room.