by Larry Brown
“Let me get my purse.”
He was behind her, guiding her.
“Fuck your purse.”
She went for it, but she didn’t go far enough, only snatched at the strap enough to yank it off the chair when he jerked her back, and when it hit the porch floor it went clunk. He stopped.
His eyes lost the last little bit of that soft light they’d held. And she’d seen that look on his face before, the one he turned now on her.
“Well shit, sweet baby. What you got in your purse there, dumpling? Chunk of lead? Huh? You got to do me like this. Want to go back now and fuck the other guy that fucked you first, is that it? What’s my sweet thing got in her purse that’s so heavy, now?”
“Nothin.”
“Ooo we sound scared.”
He bent over and got it by the strap, and hefted it, throwing it up so that the strap slapped back down hard into his hand.
He chuckled, seemed pretty amused by it all.
“You know what this … know what this feels like? It feels like a fucking gun. That’s exactly what it feels like. So let’s just dump it out and …”
He lowered the purse and turned it over gently. His bedroom piece slid out, and it clattered and lay there among lipstick tubes and pieces of gum and a few nickels. He picked up the gun and stood there with it. Then he leaned in and whispered, amazed, infuriated:
“All you fucking whores are a like.”
THE AIR WAS cooler now close to the coast and he could begin to even smell it. Boats were everywhere in yards and shops and there were places that sold motors and trailers and there were signs painted on sheets of plywood that advertised shrimp or charters for a day of fishing. The pine trees were a different kind here, and they grew low and close together in dark forests of themselves.
There was gas enough left to make it to Pass Christian, he thought. It was only a little below half a tank and the traffic wasn’t bad. He hadn’t been down here in a while. But he had been here plenty of times before. There wasn’t much in Pass Christian, he thought, just a nice little town with some pretty old homes set up on some higher land across from the water. She’d said she was right across from the boats. A big white house her voice had said. He’d played the message three times and then written down everything on a piece of paper that was in his pocket. But he had it all in his head anyway. For the tenth time he glanced down at his Smith & Wesson, lying there quietly in its brown leather holster.
Too much road. Too many miles. When he got back with her there would be time to fix everything. Even if he had to take an early retirement he’d draw something, he didn’t know how much. But there were other jobs. He wasn’t too old to work somewhere else. Keep paying in his Social Security. Hell, he could commercial fish right behind the house. There was plenty he could do. He could get a piece of land at Pat’s Bluff or somewhere and build a nice bait shop and have a grill where he could cook for people, sell beer and sandwiches, have plenty of fishing poles and stuff on hand. Once everything got straightened out they could. Or maybe it might be better for him to just go ahead and retire. Look at all the driving he had to do. He had to direct traffic for all the Ole Miss football games. He was out in bad weather a lot and there were all kinds of shit details they sent you on. And there were always the wrecks. Always some drunk son of a bitch who couldn’t find his ass with both hands driving a car down the road and drinking some more. Some had bars in their cars.
There was plenty he could do. Just about anything was possible. He was getting pretty close now. Probably less than an hour.
After a while the green sign for Gulfport came up. He changed lanes and drove beneath a big metal arch across the highway. It wouldn’t be much longer now.
The traffic moved around him. The radio played some tunes and he wasn’t a bit sleepy, just wished he hadn’t slept quite so long. Then he could have talked to her on the phone. But it wouldn’t be long now. All he had to do was get to Gulfport and turn right.
The road kept moving under him, and the cars and trucks seemed to move aside for him, and he flew low and fast, going through the night with his taillights moving in a red blur.
SHE STARTED FIGHTING him when he pushed her through the door hard enough to send her against the wall and when he caught her with his hands he ripped her blouse and she got her hands up toward his face and raked a red groove down one of his cheeks but he slapped her and spun her into a corner next to a door in the hall. An umbrella stood at her knee. She grabbed it. Poking at him as he advanced, her breath coming fast, her arms shaking. He snatched it from her hand and flung it, waiting for her to come out of the corner. She started out like she was going to run, and when he moved to intercept her she launched her foot out and caught him square in the crotch. The breath oofed out of him and almost immediately he was on his knees. But when she went by him he reached out a hand anyway and caught her and pulled her down. The floor was hard on her back and she kicked at him as he dragged her to him, he himself curled almost into a ball and trying to throw up. She kicked him in the face. He was trying to get up onto his knees. He was trying to slide her up under him. And there the gun lay, where it had fallen from the back of his pants, and he was still hurting, and she turned on her side and sent her hand out for it and once she had it she swung herself back under his belly and holding it in both her little hands and thinking about her gone baby she went boom boom boom in the big hollow house.
AFTER SHE ROLLED him off her and got up, Aaron lay there for a long time, listening to the sounds of her leaving. He was too weak to move much, and after she left there was only the sound of an occasional vehicle out on the road, and the wind singing in the nets. Up above him he could see that flakes of paint had fallen from the ceiling. And his mama still wasn’t home yet.
The blood cooled on his shirt and there was so much of it. It kept coming. He tried pulling himself along on his belly toward the phone in the kitchen, but his strength was going. It came and went in waves. Sometimes he could pull himself a few inches. Sometimes he could not. He was able to get his hands on the gun where she’d dropped it.
He thought he dreamed, but then came to know that he had been only thinking about the daylight creeping up over the water to light the transom of his father’s shrimp boat as it crawled rocking along off the coast and the houses he could see like this one sitting so far away.
After a while he gave up on getting to the telephone and pulled himself up against the wall to lean back with the gun between his bloody legs. The cigarettes in his pocket were soaked with blood and his weak fingers shook three or four of them out until he found one that still had some white on it. Then his lighter wouldn’t work. His eyes were focused on it, his thumb striking on the wheel, the little spark it kept throwing up. It fired finally and he sucked the smoke in and leaned his head back against the wall.
Damn. All that fucking trouble for nothing.
He knew he was in shock. He was glad to be in shock. Shock was cool if shock was what it took not to feel what was wrong with him. He wished he had some of the hash. Or even a drink of the whiskey.
He saw the son of a bitch when he came in. He saw him outside at the screen door first. He eased the gun under his leg, hiding it beneath his knee. Old boyfriend come to retrieve his lost squeeze, eh? They’d see about that.
The door opened, and he came on in. He had a revolver in his hand and he stood there looking down on him for a long time. All of his hair had been cut off and his hands were pink with new skin like he’d been burned. Behind him a car went up the road, and the wind blew through the open door.
“Where’s Fay?” he said, and Aaron pulled the gun from under his knee and raised it and squeezed the trigger. It kicked in his hand, and the shot was loud in the hall, and the guy with the revolver toppled backward into a table and knocked one of the antique lamps to the floor, where it broke into curved shards of painted glass. He must have fallen, because Aaron couldn’t see him anymore. There were some noises, but he couldn’t tell what they
were.
He lay there bleeding and now his guts were on fire. Far off he could hear sirens screaming toward them. They rose slowly, threatening to overpower the wind singing in the riggings.
A gun roared once, twice, almost in his face, almost deafening, that close.
AND WAILING ALONG the coastal road in the back of the ambulance he heard the siren going and the sound of it comforted him because it sounded just like the one in his cruiser. Probably made by the same company.
It was very bright in there and he was on his back on the gurney and the two of them were working over him with their pale rubber gloves so bloody. They were shaking their heads, but there was no need for them to get so upset. She was probably okay now. And he was just too tired.
EPILOGUE
ONE EVENING AT the end of the summer, just before the gas lamps came on, a girl walked on the streets of the Old Square in New Orleans and drew the looks of men as she passed. They would stop and look at her and walk some more and stop and look back again. She moved among the drinkers and bars and the rich fragrances of Cuban food cooking, a zydeco beat on the air, the soothing notes of an accordion. She mingled with the talking people on Royal and looked at old coins and Civil War muskets or mummies in shop windows and she smiled as she walked. She stopped at a wide plate of glass to see people standing at a zinc bar eating oysters off their shells and drinking beer from tall brown bottles.
She came out of one bar with a plastic cup in her hand and went on up the street, smiling and ducking her head or brushing her hair to the side and stepping past the men who tried to stop her and talk to her. She did talk to some of them, but she kept moving, too. The dark came down a little bit but it didn’t lessen the crowds in the streets. Somebody was selling postcards on a corner and she bought one.
On a cobbled avenue she saw the marquee in lights and when she got closer she looked at the women on the posters with brighter bulbs around their frames and they were wrapped in feather boas and sparkling sequins. People waiting outside called to her. In front of the door there was a man in a striped coat and a flat-brimmed straw hat. He had a silver-tipped cane and he was hailing walkers to stop in and see the girls. To this one he tipped his hat, called her by name. She handed him her empty cup, and then she went on in.