The Best American Noir of the Century

Benbow suspected she left the best parts out and did his best to listen to the soft southern cadences without watching her face. He knew what happened when he watched her talk, watched the soft moving curve of her dark lips, the wise slant of her gray eyes. So he picked at his breakfast and tried to focus his stare downslope at the steam drifting off the large hot-water pool behind the old shagbark lodge.

But then she switched to her daydreams about their dubious future, which were as deadly specific as a .45 slug in the brainpan: after the baby, they could flee to Canada; nobody would follow them up there. He listened and watched with the false patience of a teenage boy involved in his first confrontation with pure lust and hopeless desire.

Mona Sue ate with the precise and delicate greed of a heart surgeon, the pad of her spatulate thumb white on the handle of her spoon as she carved a perfect curled ball from the soft orange meat of her melon. Each bite of meat had to be balanced with an equal weight of toast before being crushed between her tiny white teeth. Then she examined each strawberry poised before her darkly red lips as if it might be a jewel of great omen and she some ancient oracle, then sank her shining teeth into the fleshy fruit as if it were the mortal truth. Benbow’s heart rolled in his chest as he tried to fill his lungs with the cold air to fight off the heat of her body.

Fall had come to the mountains, now. The cottonwoods and alders welcomed the change with garish mourning dress, and in the mornings a rime of ice covered the windshield of the gray Taurus he had stolen at the Denver airport. New snow fell each night, moving slowly down the ridges from the high distant peaks of the Hard Rock Range, and slipped closer each morning down the steep ridge behind them. Below the bench the old lodge seemed to settle more deeply into the narrow canyon, as if hunkering down for eons of snow, and the steam from the hot springs mixed with wood smoke and lay flat and sinuous among the yellow creek willows.

Benbow suspected, too, that the scenery was wasted on Mona Sue. Her dark eyes seemed turned inward to a dreamscape of her life, her husband, R. L. Dark, the pig farmer, his bull-necked son, Little R. L., and the lumpy Ozark offal of her large worthless family.

“Coach,” she’d say — she thought it funny to call him Coach — interrupting the shattered and drifting narrative of her dreams. Then she would sweep back the thick black Indian hair from her face, tilt her narrow head on the slender column of her neck, and laugh. “Coach, that of R. L., he’s a-comin’. You stole somethin’ belonged to him, and you can bet he’s on his way. Lit’l R. L., too, prob’ly, ‘cause he tol’ me once he’d like to string your guts on a bob-wire fence,” she recited like a sprightly but not very bright child.

“Sweetheart, R. L. Dark can just barely cipher the numbers on a dollar bill or the spots on a card,” Benbow answered, as he had each morning for the six months they’d been on the run. “He can’t read a map that he hasn’t drawn himself, and by noon he’s too drunk to fit his ass in a tractor seat and find his hog pens…”

“You know, Puddin’, an ol’ boy’s got enough a them dollar bills, or stacks a them Franklins like we do,” she added, laughing, “he can hire-out that readin’ part, and the map part too. So he’s a-comin’. You can put that in your mama’s piggy bank.”

This was a new wrinkle in their morning ritual, and Benbow caught himself glancing down at the parking lot behind the lodge and at the single narrow road up Hidden Springs Canyon, but he shook it off quickly. When he made the fateful decision to take Mona Sue and the money, he vowed to go for it, never glancing over his shoulder, living in the moment.

And this was it. Once more. Leaving his breakfast untouched, again, he slipped his hand through the bulky folds of Mona Sue’s terry cloth robe to cradle the warm ripening fullness of her breasts and the long, thick nipples, already rock-hard before his touch, and he kissed her mouth, sweet with strawberry and melon. Once again, he marveled at the deep passionate growl from the base of her throat as he pressed his lips into the hollow, then Benbow lifted her small frame — she nestled the baby high under the smooth vault of her rib cage and even at seven months the baby barely showed — and carried her to the bedroom.