John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  Inconsolable Floyd had also been had, he knew that, no matter what his hopes. The former hardware store manager, recently promoted, though no golfer, had spent most of his life in the rough and, after being granted a glimpse of the green, was getting kicked back into it as sure as candy turned to shit. Far from mooning the world (Floyd was a private man whom even Edna rarely saw in a state of nature), he was still wearing his fancy new beige business suit, checked shirt, and two-toned shoes, though the knees and elbows of the suit were stained, the shirt unbuttoned, bootlace tie hanging loose, shoes caked with beery mud. He knew he’d overprided himself and, first thing he’d got home, in penance for his sins of vanity and presumption, he’d shaved the fuzz off his upper lip, and then he’d knelt to pray; but no prayer came out, a curse more like. It was all gone. He was still clutching at the impossible dream John had put in his battered old head, thinking it might somehow still come out all right, but he knew in his gut it wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Which just wasn’t rightful. He’d sincerely tried, Floyd had. He’d spent a dozen years as a rich man’s ass-kissing flunky, treated no better than a blesséd pinboy, teaching God’s word to the spoiled brats of the town, playing all the stupid games they played, and now, with the sudden resurfacing of a past he no longer recognized as his own (his eye was on eternal salvation, the Risen Son, God’s grace and bounty, not some hairless tattooed pussy in Santa Fe, for Christ’s sake), it was as though these dozen years had never happened, or had happened in a dream. Predestination: you had to take it seriously. He packed a couple of bags and told Edna, who sat slumped on the old sofa looking like something found at the back of the fridge, an unwrapped porcelain lamp in a box at her feet, not to worry none but he might have to go off on a business trip soon, though he didn’t know how soon or for how long. Meanwhile, though, he did require a new car, and maybe right away, so he rang up old Stu, hoping it wasn’t too late; but it was his fat profligate wife who answered, mumbling boozily over and over that Stu had something he had to do out at the garage, one of his trucks had been stole or something, he’d be here soon. Finally nothing for it but to shoot out there, just in case, though Floyd figured Stu was probably shacked up somewheres, for which, though on principle he disapproved, Floyd couldn’t blame him. No big surprise, then, to find the place dark. Completely. Even the all-night floods over the car lot were out, the only light coming from the distant flickering of heat lightning on the western horizon. Under the circumstances, Floyd reckoned, borrowing a car might be better than buying one, Stu would understand, and if everything worked out okay he’d bring it back later in the week. So he tried the office door, found it open, pushed on in, and stove his toe on something that turned out to be old Stu hisself. Uh-oh. Just rolled a gutter ball. No time to look for keys to a new model—he could hear the distant wail of approaching sirens—but Stu did have a handgun in his fist that he no longer needed, so Floyd took that and tore ass out of there.

  All this business with guns. Columbia disapproved. Guns were important to the nation, you never saw a pioneer without one, but, though it was almost unpatriotic to say so, those wild romantic days were over. You didn’t have to shoot Indians anymore, if they did bad things you could just electrocute them. It was one thing she’d learned from her father: people kill, not guns, granted, but guns make it too easy, maybe even too much fun. If it weren’t for guns, poor Yale would be with them still, though that was war and maybe it wasn’t a fair argument. She used it, though, just the same, in her desperate effort to dissuade her overheated sister-in-law from arming herself and taking the law into her own hands. Lumby was exhausted and just couldn’t take much more. It had been a very long day, or week, or whatever it was, she’d lost all track. Her white uniform was filthy and patchy with sweat, her hair damp and stringy, her feet were sore, and she couldn’t remember when she’d bathed last, or even washed properly. And all because of her cretinous little brother, who definitely wasn’t worth it, but you couldn’t tell Gretchen that. How could she love such a dumb jerk so? Well, maybe she didn’t, but she loved something, and Corny stood for it, so it was the same as loving him. For Lumby it was much easier, she loved Gretchen plain and simple, and so stuck by her no matter what craziness her jealousy got her into, though there had been times in this punishing odyssey when her mind, dragged down by a protesting body, had loved less than her heart did. The pattern had been the same, over and over: her strenuous attempts to restrain her sister-in-law thwarted sooner or later by Gretchen throwing herself, blind and lame, into the fray, leaving Lumby to extricate her and defend her from counterattacks, often at great hazard to her own vulnerable person. None of which Gretchen, in her madness, seemed to appreciate. She probably couldn’t even see the blows that Lumby took on her behalf, but even if she did or could infer them, it didn’t seem to matter to her: all she cared about was getting Corny back. And, clearly, she would kill to do that. So, when Gretchen had been rejected as a volunteer for the police posse (what a relief!) and had decided therefore to arm herself (oh no!) with Harvie’s old hunting rifle and/or Yale’s army revolver, both kept in the pharmacy storeroom because her father refused to have them in the house where the children were, Lumby had feared the worst: Gretchen, myopic and rabid as she was, might shoot at anything that moved, including the mayor and the police chief, and Corny was too stupid to stay out of the crossfire, all those children would be left fatherless, whether or not they noticed the change, and once the bullets started to fly they might all get killed. Guns were like that. It was almost too terrible to contemplate. Since Gretchen wouldn’t listen to her and she had run out of arguments, Lumby’s only recourse was somehow—though she hadn’t the least idea how the wicked gizmos worked—to sabotage them, even if that made Gretchen mad at her for a time. So, though ready to drop, Columbia dogged Gretchen’s heels, prepared to do whatever she had to do to save all their lives, or at least the life of the one she loved. But as they approached the drugstore, Columbia saw that there were lights on and told Gretchen so: a break-in! She tried to hold Gretchen back but that woman, once set on a course, could not be stayed: she clumped heavily right on down the street, through the door, and up to the video game machine where Cornell was hunched forward, nose to the screen, his head looking a bit squashed in but otherwise her useless dimwit brother, same as ever (to collapsing Columbia he was a beautiful sight), slapped him fiercely about the ears and shoulders, and hauled him away, asking Lumby to close up the store for her, she was taking her wayward husband home and locking him in his room for a week as punishment for all the grief he’d caused them, chasing after a shameless jezebel like that. He didn’t resist, though he seemed to have no idea what she was talking about, which was to say, numskull Corny as usual. Columbia pushed the door shut behind them, double-locked, turned off the lights, and, finger still on the switch, fell asleep in her tracks there where she stood.

  Columbia’s view of guns as wicked gizmos was not shared by the town police chief, but he did not romanticize them either, nor did he even use them for sport, and he wished, as Oxford and his daughter did, that there were fewer of them around. For Otis, guns were merely tools of his trade, deterrents against disorder, protectors of life, liberty, and property, and necessary weapons in the eternal struggle between Good and Evil. When he thought of the Good, he thought of the Virgin and her terrible vulnerability, the image that had made a soldier and lawman of him, and on his way out to the airport to meet with Mayor Snuffy and the boys, Otis had the officer behind the wheel stop by the church so he could drop in to ask the Virgin for strength and guidance. She told him he had a long hard night ahead of him (he already knew that) and asked him if his heart was pure. He said he thought it was but those photographs bothered him somewhat. She reminded him that he had taken them as material evidence and that examining them was therefore part of his sworn duty, but that if he was improperly aroused by them he should think of her and her great suffering and of her loneliness. Otis was kneeling before her and she seemed to place her soft hand on th
e back of his neck for a healing moment, which he understood without understanding, likewise this whole tender conversation with something made of—what? plaster of Paris probably, or the stuff they made dolls out of. The cold shiny feet of which he reverentially kissed, and then, Pauline’s monumental thighs crowding into his thoughts like a kind of mental avalanche, he hastily crossed himself and withdrew. Back in the squad car, Pauline’s Daddy Duwayne, manacled in the backseat beside him, cackled wheezily and asked what it felt like to give communion to all seven scarlet-tongued heads of the Great Whore of Babylon at once, and Otis whacked him up the head with the flat side of his revolver, knocking his baseball hat off as his ugly nut bounced against the window, which was another use of his occupational tool. It was the providing of such tools to those members of the newly deputized posse who had no weapons of their own that was the purpose of meeting at the airport before the general rendezvous at the Country Tavern: the mayor, who until recently had worked there, had the keys to John’s gun cabinet and permission to use the arms at any time for the defense of the municipal air facility, of which the hunting down of the two bandits, who for a time had trespassed illegally on airport property, was considered an extension. When they pulled in, they found the young mechanic from the Ford-Mercury garage already there, though in the dark, fumbling with the locked door and startled by their arrival, as though he thought they might be the bandits catching him from behind. A case of mistaken identity, everybody was a bit jumpy, they laughed it off. “Ah, there it is, I been looking for it,” Snuffy said, taking the mechanic’s rifle, then handing it back. “You might as well keep it, son. You’re gonna need it. Now, let’s get this goddamned ballgame underway.” The mayor led the way in with his key ring; passed out the weapons; then, cranking up into his old half-time mode, said that nobody’d ever handed nothing on a platter to this town, they didn’t have no mountains or oceans, lakes or gold mines or rivers, everything that was here had got made by oldtime hustle and grit and teamwork, and the job this team had to do tonight was take out a couple of dangerous elements that threatened a quality of life here which had required more than a century to knock into shape. So everybody should stay on their toes and knuckle down and brace up for a long, hard, and bruising night. We gotta dig in and pop them suckers, boys, he said, before they pop us! There ain’t no runners-up when it’s do or die! Otis informed them that the two killers were holed out in Settler’s Woods back of the motel and they were all going to join up now with the others at the Country Tavern, where he’d lay out the strategy for the rest of the search. Some of them wanted to know just how big Pauline really was, so Otis asked the young golf pro, who’d had a good look, to give them all a description of what he’d seen, but since it had to do with Pauline taking a stupendous crap and that fellow was something of a joker who liked to act out his stories, Otis had to turn him off (he was just lowering his pansy-yellow pants) before his hunting party turned into some other kind. His recruits were a bunch of cockeyed goofballs for the most part, Otis knew that, he shouldn’t be putting guns in the hands of any of them, except for his own boys, his old coach, the garage mechanic maybe (he sure as hell wished John was here), but what could he do? Like his old commanding officer used to say: A man can’t choose his own emergencies.

  A lesson that Trevor the accountant was learning, for though he had no one to blame but himself for where he was (this irrational pursuit of a phantom called delight, he must be mad!), what he discovered there was not of his doing, nor could he have foreseen it. His emergency was this: finding himself, a respected middle-aged accountant, married, alone in a motel room with a young girl in raggedy shorts whose name he didn’t even know and, lying on the floor in his own blood, a wounded man, more or less naked and possibly dead, a gun on the bed and clothing scattered about, ambulance and police cars pulling up outside, sirens screaming. “Gosh, I’m so scared!” gasped the girl, dropping what she was carrying and throwing herself into Trevor’s arms, the bare arms around his neck frightening him nearly as much as the body on the floor or the red and blue lights flashing against the window blinds. “Thank goodness I’m with someone who knows what to do in situations like this!” Trevor’s knees had turned to butter, his brains too, and he had to bite his cheeks to keep from crying. “You’re so cool, man! Just grinning like that!” The police were hammering on the door. “Hey! Who’s in there? What’s going on? Open up!” “Don’t let them know I’m here!” the girl cried, and grabbing up an armful of clothing again, she ducked into the bathroom, blowing him a last-second kiss, just as the door exploded inward and men in white jackets, others in gray and blue, some with their pistols drawn, came crashing into the room. “There he is!” The butter melted and he sank to the floor, but was soon hauled, roughly, to his feet again. “Shoot him if he moves!” “That your shotgun, killer?” “No!” he whimpered, as something hard and pointy bruised his ribs. “Ow!” His bladder gave way and a wet warmth spread to his knees. “It’s—it’s all a mistake! She—!” “She—? She, who?” “Wait a minute. Ain’t that John’s business manager?” “Trevor—?! What the hell are you doing here?” “I-I’m not, I don’t, it’s not what it—a client!” he gasped, churning up the head butter. “What—?!” “He, you know, a p-policy! Insurance! I, uh, I had to—!” “You’re tellin’ me you’re here to service a fucking insurance policy—?!” “I hope for old Dutch’s sake it’s a good one,” grunted one of the ambulance men lifting the motelkeeper onto a stretcher. “The poor bastard’s had the best part of him blown clean away!” “Yeah, pretty much tore his right hand off, too!” “Is he alive?” “Barely. He’s lost buckets.” “Lucky he had that two-way radio Otis give him, what with all the phonelines around here took out.” “Hey, this broken glass is weird! Look! One side’s like a mirror, but the other—” “Hold on, whose purple pants are these? These fruitbags yours, buddy?” “No!” “Anything in the pockets?” “Some golf tees. Keys. A pack of rubbers. No, wait! A billfold! Well, I’ll be goddamned!” “Who is it?” “These here are old Waldo’s pants!” “Jesus, you think he left without them?” “If he did, he shouldn’t be hard to find.” “Shit, John’s not gonna like this!” “No, but just the same we’ll have to get a warrant out.” “Yeah, well, later. We’re due over at the Tavern. Otis will be pissed if we don’t hustle our butts over there.” “What about all this shit?” “Grab it up and bring it along!” “Trevor, we oughta lock you up but we don’t have time. So, you go home and stay outa trouble now, goddamn it, and we’ll talk to you tomorrow, you hear?” He nodded bleakly, feeling the nausea rise again, and then he was alone in his wet pants on a bloodstained floor littered with broken mirror fragments, staring into the messy darkness of the little room beyond, which seemed to be reflecting his own dark messiness within. Alone, but not for long. Marge’s friend Lorraine poked her head around the door, then jumped inside and slapped the door shut with her hips. “Don’t look!” she shrieked, and only then did it register on him that she was wearing nothing but a shirt, tails tugged down between her thighs with both hands. She glanced around wildly, then loped leggily into the bathroom, high-stepping through the broken glass. “No! Stop!” he cried, but too late. Would this folly never end? He stumbled over, abashed, to explain what was beyond explanation, but when he looked there was no one in there but red-faced Lorraine, tying a towel on and screaming at him that he was a sick voyeuristic pervert, get the hell out! What was worse, she was right. She threw a toilet plunger at him and everything went black. Had he gone blind in the other eye as well? If so, so be it. Trevor had seen about all he ever wanted to see.