Dog Eats Dog

by Iain Levison

  “Yeah. She looked upset,” said Melissa. She sat on the steps. Sitting down wasn’t good, because it meant she wasn’t leaving soon. Dixon couldn’t help but admire her long, muscular legs, suddenly aware that he hadn’t seen a woman up close in days, if not weeks. He petted the kitten, which kept moving around in his hand, and he held it to his chest.

  “How old is this little guy?” Dixon asked, hoping to deflect the conversation to a more neutral topic.

  “Six weeks,” she said. “His mom had a litter of four.” She looked at him, her eyes bright, her voice full of youthful enthusiasm. “You want him?”

  Dixon laughed at the idea. “Nahh.”

  “Why not? He likes you.”

  Dixon paused. Why not? Maybe he’d need a little bit of companionship, and the kitten would be just the thing. But he couldn’t bother with anything like that until he got across the Canadian border. He was sure they had kittens in Canada. It would have to wait.

  “I’m gonna be on the road some, over the next month or so. This little dude here wouldn’t like it.” He handed her the kitten back, and it tried to dig its claws into his hand to prevent the transfer. It really did seem to like him, and he felt a sudden rush of sadness that he had to let it go, that he was always having to let everything go, so he could run to somewhere else. This sadness was accompanied by a feeling of anticipation, of the relief he would feel when he finally bought his farm. A home, a real home for the first time. He could have a kitten if he felt like it, or a puppy, or chickens and cows, or alpacas that would spit on him and bite him. And as Melissa took the kitten back, he felt better, because he had been worrying about details when she came across the fence, and now he realized it was going to be all right. Everything was going to be all right, and soon this pile of shit that had been his life in the United States was going to be over.

  Melissa laughed as she held the kitten up playfully. “On the road some,” she mimicked him. “Where are you from?”

  “Kentucky,” he said, standing up, an invitation to end the conversation politely, and Melissa stood up too, sensing the dismissal. He liked that about her, that she understood. She seemed like a nice girl. Very pretty, a little ditzy, young, but OK. “I’ll tell Elias you stopped by.”

  “OK,” she said, hopping off the steps. She went back as if to climb over the fence again, and Dixon suggested she just go through the gate and around the house.

  “I don’t mind,” she said brightly, and exited the way she had come.

  Dixon felt so much better from chatting with a stranger that it didn’t bother him for a few moments that someone other than Elias had seen him in Tiburn. It didn’t matter anymore. All this would be over soon.

  Elias pulled up outside Wicker Guns ’n Ammo, and with the car still idling in the empty parking lot, stared into the dusty darkness of the store. He knew it was open on Sunday because he had called from a payphone. He hadn’t wanted his cell number on the store’s caller ID, in case something went wrong and he had to run out. He didn’t know what could possibly go wrong, but he just had a vague feeling something might.

  Elias popped the trunk of his car and pulled Dixon’s shiny pistol from underneath the oily clutter of metal objects fastened below his spare tire. He looked at it for the first time, felt its considerable weight. There was power in the weight, and he found that he liked holding it.

  He walked into the gun shop, and a bell over the door jangled. This was one of those country businesses Elias had grown to despise, because the proprietors always had a sense of localism, self-righteousness born of a tangible feeling of superiority to outsiders. Outsiders included any member of the general public who had never visited the establishment before, and Elias always marveled that they could stay in business.

  As he entered, he held the pistol tightly in his hand, and wondered if this made for a more impressive entrance. He wanted to appear confident and familiar with the firearm. Just a guy buying bullets for some range shooting. He saw the shopkeeper behind the counter, and he wondered if walking into the store with the pistol in his hand looked like a stick-up. He loosened his grip on the gun and made sure he smiled and nodded when he met the man’s eye.

  The gun-shop owner was in his fifties, a kindly-looking, bespectacled man, and Elias imagined he had a son or daughter who attended Tiburn, probably on some kind of scholarship. He doubted this gun store covered the expense of on-campus living, so he figured the child drove the half hour every day, maybe even worked in the store part-time. He noticed a wedding ring and tried to picture the man’s wife, figured she was friendly and open but very unsure of people not from around here.

  “Hi,” said Elias. “I got a problem with this here.” This here. Try to talk like a local. Relax, you are a local. He laid the gun down on the counter and the man, who had given a perfunctory nod, less friendly than Elias had hoped for, looked at the gun quickly.

  “Nice piece,” he said. “You don’t see too many of these around anymore.” The man picked it up and turned it over. “What’s the problem? You want a magazine?”

  “A magazine? Oh, no, I need bullets.” Suddenly nervous about having his pretence of knowledge and experience with the pistol exposed, he picked up a box of bullets sitting in a nearby display and examined it. “I think these were the ones I had last time.”

  The man wordlessly took the box of bullets from his hand and placed them back in the display pile, then tilted his glasses off his nose and turned the pistol over in his hand.

  “The serial number’s filed off,” he said.

  Elias said nothing, feeling panic rising. His impulse was to grab the gun back and run out the door, but he just stood there, frozen, waiting. In that panicked second, he imagined the store owner reading his license plate as he peeled off into the parking lot, or the man ripping a shotgun off the wall and blasting him in the back as he bolted for the door. So he waited, frozen, for the man to reach for the phone to call the cops, or pull a pistol of his own, this one loaded, from behind the counter.

  “You don’t want those bullets, not with an M1911,” the man said finally. “Those’re hollow points. They’ll jam it.” He put the pistol back down on the counter and turned around, muttering to himself, looking at rows and rows of bullet boxes. “Oh, no. You want a full metal jacket.” Elias felt a wave of relief wash over him as he realized the man was not going to pursue the question of why the serial number was filed off. The shopkeeper selected one box, extracted it, examined the print on the side, then plopped them on the counter.

  “These’re what you’re looking for,” he said. “It’s a 230-grain. Forty-five cal. Remember that for next time.” He walked to the ancient cash register, paused, then rang the order up. “Eighteen dollars,” he said.

  Elias quickly extracted a twenty from his wallet, noticing that it was one of the four twenties he was supposed to have given Dixon. The man gave him two dollars change while Elias examined his purchase and noticed that the price wasn’t on the bullets. Was he being overcharged, because his ignorance was obvious? Because the man knew he was buying bullets for a pistol with the serial number filed off?

  “Pricey,” Elias observed, hoping the man would infer from this that he bought bullets all the time. He instantly regretted the comment, even though it drew no response. To repair the relationship he felt he had just damaged, he said, “I was shooting just last week, and I was thinking of selling it. What kind of money could I get for it?”

  The man tilted his glasses, looked at it again. “This gun hasn’t been fired in months,” he said. “And no one’s going to buy it with the number filed down. If I were you, I’d get rid of it.”

  The man didn’t turn or leave after he was done talking, but he was clearly expecting Elias to do so. He was looking at the ground.

  “What . . . what . . .” Elias felt curiously compelled to ask questions about the gun, to somehow engage this man in a conversation, to make him understand that he was an intelligent and worthwhile human being who just wanted
to buy bullets. “What . . . er, is this model called? An M1119, did you call it?”

  The man turned to him quizzically and shook his head, and Elias felt he was at last being acknowledged. “It’s an M1911-A1,” he said, and Elias noticed the kindly father with a child who went to Tiburn again, for an instant. “It was designed in 1911, and . . .”

  “It’s that old?” Elias realized he sounded like one of his students, who didn’t really care about the subject but was trying to get his professor to notice him.

  “It was designed in 1911,” the man went on with the exaggerated patience of someone becoming gradually more irritated. “This is a later model. And if I were you, I’d get rid of it.”

  “Yes, you’re probably right,” said Elias. “I just wanted to fire it first.” Aware that he was now admitting that he hadn’t just fired it last week, he was overwhelmed again by the desire to run from the gun shop. But the admission seemed to make the shopkeeper warm to him, if only slightly.

  “Do you need a magazine?” the shopkeeper asked.

  Why did this man keep wanting to sell him magazines? “What kind of magazine? Like, you mean, a gun magazine?”

  “Yes, a gun magazine. To load the bullets into.”

  Elias had read hundreds of history books, or at least flipped through them, and knew that a magazine was an important part of a firearm. But until that second, that piece of information hadn’t processed in his mind, and he had assumed he was about to be handed reading material. He tried to make his sudden understanding of the conversation unnoticeable by nodding thoughtfully.

  “Yes. Yes,” he said, nodding. “I’ll take one of those, uh magazines. I do need that, too. I forgot.”

  “Without it you’d just be shoving the bullets into the grip,” said the man, smiling for the first time.

  Elias was so relieved to see a smile that he felt compelled to offer more information as fast as he could make it up, as if to cement a friendship that was forming between them. Between the guy who said bizarre untrue things about his pistol, and this intractable old bastard of a gun-shop owner.

  “It was my father’s gun,” he said. “He just passed away. I just found it in the house. My father was a soldier in World War Two.”

  “This gun isn’t military issue,” said the shopkeeper, shaking his head, as if bored with Elias’s lies. “This is chrome-plated. And it was manufactured well after that. If the serial number hadn’t been filed off, I could tell you exactly when, but I figure, oh, about 1950s.” He was looking at Elias now, as if he expected either honesty or silence. He slid a piece of black metal across the counter, then opened the box of bullets. “The war was over by then. You should learn about history,” he said.

  Elias was so taken aback by this country bumpkin telling him to learn about history that he almost blurted out that he was a history professor who was about to get tenure and was going to be published in the National Historical Review. Then he remembered, from deceiving Denise, the joy and energy that came from playing dumb. “My dad must have bought it recently, I guess,” he said humbly.

  The shopkeeper loaded bullets into the magazine. “This is how you load it,” he said, pressing each bullet down into the clip with a slow, deliberate gesture, looking up at Elias to make sure he was being heeded. “It takes seven slugs.” He slid the magazine into the grip. “This lever here drops the magazine back out of the grip when it’s empty.”

  Elias nodded.

  “Can you shoot, or do you need lessons?”

  Elias clenched his lips, considering this. He couldn’t shoot, but how hard was it? You pulled a trigger. But he might need a practice shot or two, to make sure the gun worked, to learn what it felt like. All kinds of disasters could happen without some experience with actually firing it, and this was clearly the man to ask for information.

  “I charge twenty dollars for a fifteen-minute lesson,” the shopkeeper said.

  Now Elias felt he was being screwed again. This man was looking to take advantage of the poor sap who walked into his store just wanting to buy bullets. That was how these country types operated, Elias figured.

  “I should be fine,” he said. “Thanks, though.”

  “Fifteen even for the clip,” said the shopkeeper, and Elias reached into his wallet again, making a mental note to research how much these things actually cost. He’d look it up online, see what they were selling for on eBay. As the man took his money and brought him change, Elias had the feeling that the shopkeeper knew exactly what he was going to do with the gun, and didn’t really care. He must see people like me every day, Elias thought, people with sawn-off shotguns and filed-off serial numbers, people who lie about where they found the gun and what they were going to do with it.

  “And five dollars change,” the man said as he handed Elias a bill, slamming shut the register drawer.

  “Thanks very much,” Elias said, searching for eye contact, but the man had turned away again, walking to the back of the store, as if to escape Elias’s company. “If I were you, I’d get rid of that thing,” he said.

  “Yes, of course. Thank you.”

  12

  Elias was in a clearing, about three miles from Tiburn, looking at an overturned picnic table in what had been a small campground, known only to the locals. Now it was a field of ash and blackness, which – as he knew from an article last fall in the Tiburn Register – was because some high school kids had started a small forest fire. The fire had apparently been an accident, and they all had received community service, but Elias was surprised to see so much damage this long after the incident.

  His mother had taken him here twice a month or so, and sometimes they would see deer. He was small enough then that deer were a cause for excitement. As an adult, he would come to dread them as nothing more than the leading local cause of car accidents, but back then, every deer was Bambi. The deer would never eat out of his hand, but he and his mother would wait, hopeful that one day it would happen, if only they could find the right food. They would sit and wait after having placed the food in a crude trail to the picnic table, listening for the sounds that indicated the deer’s approach. Sometimes, they would wait for an hour or more, chatting about their days. Sometimes she would tell him stories.

  It occurred to Elias, as he looked at the charred, overturned picnic table, that his mother had never expected the deer to approach them. As an adult, she must have known how timid they were, how impossible it was to win them over. The point of the exercise, for her, must have been the wait itself, and the conversations they would have. She had enjoyed his company then, when he was a little boy.

  He had been standing here for at least five minutes, and there was no indication of human presence, which was just what he had been looking for. It was as quiet now as it had been when he had come here as a child. Still, you couldn’t be too careful. He looked around, then around again, then acted as if he were going for a walk up a small path to the creek. A few steps up the path he finally became convinced the place was deserted, and he went back to his car.

  He was surprised at how calm he felt. This wasn’t as hard as he had always imagined it would be. He loosened the spare tire and pulled out Dixon’s big, silver gun.

  He walked out into the clearing again, looked around one final time. The pistol was heavy, but its weight was comforting, powerful. Quickly, Elias raised his arm, pointed the pistol at the picnic table and fired.

  He felt the gun jump, as if it were a live cat trying to escape his hand. The noise was deafening, yet somehow not unpleasant. He aimed at the table again, this time holding the pistol with both hands, one cupped underneath the grip. He fired again, and this time he had more control. Used to the noise now, but realizing it could be attracting attention from miles away, he fired a third time, then walked up to the picnic table. He saw three holes in the thick wood, not more than a foot apart.

  He was a natural.

  He got back in the car and drove back to Tiburn.

  At the end of his str
eet, Elias parked, the car idling, and took a deep breath. His hands were shaking, like they had been before he had taught his first class. He likened that experience to this one, remembering how the nervousness had made him perform better. Any undertaking which initiated change would inspire nervousness.

  He reached down under the passenger seat and pulled the gun out from where he had stashed it. If he had been pulled over for some traffic offence, it wouldn’t have been good to have the pistol sitting in plain view, with its serial number filed off. He looked at it, and felt a bolt of adrenaline go through him, tried to exhale the nervousness as if it were poisoned gas. Then he heard a low rumble coming up the street behind him, and in his wing mirror, he saw a kid on a skateboard, coming towards him.

  Can’t sit here all day, he thought to himself. He put the car in drive. Let’s get this done. He saw the dashboard clock. 6:17.

  He drove onto his street and into the driveway so fast that he had to slam on his brakes, and the gun slid off the passenger seat and onto the floor. He clenched his eyes shut in horror at what he had just done. What if the gun had gone off, shot him? Focused on the gun lying on the passenger-side floor, he leaned over to pick it up, and forgot the car was still in drive, and felt it creeping forward into his own hedges.

  He gasped in exasperation, slammed the car into park. He was thinking too much. This was simple. He angrily picked the gun up off the floor of the car, checked to make sure the safety was off, and tucked it under his left arm as he got out and slammed the car door shut. Looking around, he noticed that the Covington house was quiet, and no cars were in the driveway. Good. They usually went out to dinner on Sunday afternoons. Keeping the pistol tucked in his armpit, he marched up onto his porch, flung his front door open, and looked around.

  No one here.

  There was a rustling from down in the basement as he heard Dixon get off his cot. He took the gun out from under his armpit. He opened the basement door and looked down, standing slightly to one side, the pistol concealed from the doorway.