“But now we’ve got two cars on campus. I’ll still have to drive home alone.”
“No, no,” he said. “Bruno stopped by for a beer, and I asked him if he’d drop me off.”
“All right,” she said. “You want me to drive?”
“Better let me,” Evan said. “I know where we’re going.”
She got in on the passenger side. On the backseat was a brown paper bag she didn’t recognize.
“How’d you get into the car?” she said.
“I took your spare key. I got here about twenty minutes ago.”
“What’s in the bag?”
“You’ll see.”
He drove north on Semoran to Winter Park, then turned east on Aloma. After a mile or so he pulled into a parking lot between a travel agency and a sports store.
“What in the world?” Marianne said.
“You can open the bag now,” Evan told her.
She reached into the backseat and brought the bag to the front. Evan was fumbling over her head at the dome light, and as the bag rattled open, the light came on. Out of the bag she slid a concealed thing, heavy for its size. Whatever it was, it was covered in bubble wrap—a pink plastic sheeting wound around and around it, the plastic secured by cellophane tape.
“Open it,” Evan said.
She peeled off the tape and pulled open the bubble wrap. The thing slid into her hand: a revolver, pearl-handled, its chrome barrel rainbowed under a thin patina of oil.
“Oh, my,” she said.
“What do you think?” he said. “It’s a .32. I got a deal on it.”
“Why now?” she asked. “Why tonight?”
“D’you like it?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t expect it.” She pushed the pink wrapping onto the floor of the car.
He put his hand under her chin and drew her face to his for a kiss. “I wanted you to have it. Me not being in your class to walk with you.”
She held the gun in both her hands. “It weighs a ton,” she said. “Will you teach me?”
“You bet.” He kissed her again. “We’ll go to the range together. It’ll be like a date—like the movies, only sexier.”
“Shooting is sexy?”
He switched off the dome light. “Wait and see,” he said. And then, because the place where they’d parked was isolated and the stores were closed, he made love to her—as if the confined discomfort of the Mustang were the most natural setting in the world for it.
Afterward, when she had put herself together and brushed her hair, she took up the gift revolver and cradled it in both hands.
“You don’t honestly believe I could shoot somebody, do you?” she said.
“Sometimes it’s enough that they know you’re packing.”
“Packing?”
“That you’re armed,” he said.
“Armed and dangerous,” she said. “It has a ring to it.”
* * *
IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT when she arrived at her apartment after leaving Evan at his trailer. The courtyard grass was damp with dew that shone silver under a nearly full moon. As she climbed the narrow steps to her door she could hear the telephone ringing inside, but by the time she’d turned the key in the two locks and gotten the door open, the ringing had stopped. Probably it was Evan, making sure she was safely home.
She put the bubble-wrapped handgun on the kitchen counter and set her purse beside it. In the living room, the light was flashing on the answering machine.
But it wasn’t Evan she heard when she pushed the red button. It was her married man from Boston. “I’ve found you,” he said. Just that. I’ve found you, three little words, and the sound of his voice brought everything back to her: the guilty sex, the gleaming black Jag idling in the dark outside her apartment, the man’s unfair power.
The last time he hit her, he’d been on a business trip; he said his flight was late, that it didn’t arrive at Logan until after midnight, but Marianne knew better. Even so, she’d been worried for him, and she said as much.
“You’re not my keeper,” he told her.
He had spoken mildly, but he closed his right hand into a fist and Marianne knew by then what was going to happen. She’d braced herself for the hurt—the flat of the hand, the back of it where his ring might leave a gemstone cut, the corrugation of knuckles. What she hadn’t anticipated was where he struck her—not in the face or on the arms she raised to protect herself, but squarely and with enormous force in her stomach. It doubled her over with pain.
My God, he’s killed me, was what she’d thought. Her breath was gone; probably her heart stopped—just for that instant of impact— then started beating again. She dropped to her knees, suffocating, her lungs clutching at any air, her vision misted by tears: his shoes, the Florsheims she had bought him for his birthday. His far-off words: “I’m going to bed. You work it out.”
How had he found her? Her mother, she imagined. Mothers liked men who had money, who drove expensive cars, who were in charge of their lives.
She went back to the kitchen and stuffed the bubble wrap into the wastebasket under the sink. When she picked up the uncovered .32 it was even heavier than she remembered, and it lay cold in her hand. She held the gun by its handle, put a finger lightly on the trigger and pointed it at the coffee carafe at the end of the counter. What next? she asked herself.
It was as if by making her a gift of this shiny gun, Evan had conjured her old, abusive lover out of the thin air that lay between Orlando and Boston. She had not thought about him since Evan came into her life, had half forgotten standing before the mirror in his bathroom. But there had been nothing to see—no cut, no bruise, no evidence she’d been struck. How smart he was. His poor wife had taught him something.
* * *
THE PISTOL RANGE WAS IN THE BASEMENT of a gun shop, down a short flight of wooden stairs. It was brightly lighted and smelled of damp earth and what she supposed was burnt gunpowder. Two men were in the room ahead of her, standing at a narrow wooden barrier whose top formed a kind of counter where she could see the man nearest her had laid his cigarettes and a silver lighter alongside a yellow ammunition box. Both men were firing; when each gun went off, it gave a little hop at the end of the arm holding it.
It was the noise of the firing that surprised her: not the bang, bang of the comics, or the pow! of boys’ games, but a sort of over-loud pop that left almost no echo in the cave of the range.
Evan came down the stairs behind her. “Not what you expected?” he said.
“I didn’t know what to expect.” She looked at him over her shoulder. “It smells,” she said.
He took her elbow and steered her along the barrier. “This is us,” he said. “Four and five. You’re five.”
“All right,” she said.
“And that’s the target you’re aiming at.” He pointed down range. The target was about fifty feet away, concentric circles imposed over the frontal silhouette of a man. “Number five,” Evan said. “You hit a different target, you’re boosting somebody else’s score.”
He balanced his gym bag on the edge of the counter and arranged weapons and ammunition; he handed Marianne a headset.
“Everybody wears this,” he said. “So the noise doesn’t bust your eardrums, O.K.?”
“O.K.”
“Now you load your weapon.” He took the revolver from her and slapped it against his hand. The cylinder flopped open. “Here,” he said.
She opened the box of bullets, their tips jewelry-gold. She pushed them clumsily into the cylinder.
“If you were in the military,” Evan said, “there’d be a whole ritual to this. The range officer would say, ‘Ball ammunition, lock and load’ and you’d do what you’re doing now, and then he’d say, ‘Ready on the right’ and ‘Ready on the left’ and then ‘Ready on the firing line.’ Finally he’d say, ‘Commence firing,’ and you’d start shooting at your target.”
“How do you know all that?”
“I was in the army. W
hat did you think?”
“When?”
“About twenty years ago. When I was a kid.”
“That’s why you like guns,” Marianne said. “Not because you worked at the dog track.”
“Just put on your headset,” he told her. “Leave one ear uncovered so we can talk.”
She pressed the cylinder into place and held the revolver in front of her with both hands.
“If you need to,” Evan said, “you can support your gun-hand wrist with your free hand.”
“I squint through one eye,” she said. “Isn’t that how people aim?”
“You sight down the length of the barrel. You line up this little tab against what you’re aiming at.”
“Which eye do I use?”
“I don’t know. Are you right-eyed or left-eyed?”
“Don’t be funny,” she said. “Just tell me which one.”
He backed away from her. “Here,” he said. “Put your hands together and make a triangle out of your thumbs and first fingers.” He demonstrated. “Make the triangle real small.”
Marianne laid the revolver down and frowned at her hands; she made a triangle about two inches on a side.
“Now pretend you’re looking through a keyhole,” Evan said. “Look through it at my face.”
She framed his face. “Bang, bang,” she said.
“You’ve got your left eye over the keyhole,” Evan said. “So you’re left-eyed. That’s the eye you aim with.”
Marianne dropped her hands to her side. “If I’m left-eyed, do I hold the gun in my left hand?”
“Not if you’re right-handed.”
She pursed her lips. “It lacks symmetry,” she said.
“Just do it.” He stood behind her and encircled her with his arms. He held her right wrist—her gun-hand wrist—and lifted it in line with her target. “You start your aim above the target,” he told her, “and you bring your weapon down to it, smoothly, very smoothly. You’ve got your index finger on the trigger. You’re bringing the weapon down, down, always smoothly, no herky-jerky, and when your sights are on the target you squeeze the trigger. You don’t pull the trigger. When somebody talks about ‘pulling the trigger,’ that’s not what they mean. If you really pulled the trigger you’d probably also pull your sights off target and you’d miss. Got it?”
“Squeeze,” she said.
“Now your aim might wobble. You might be on the target, then off, then on again. So you’re squeezing and you increase the pressure of your finger on the trigger whenever your sights are on target. You don’t know exactly when your weapon is going to fire. What you do know is: when it fires, your sights will be on the target.”
There was Evan’s intensity again, the concentration she had admired from the beginning. Nothing distracted him from a point he wanted to make; it was only reasonable, since he had conjured her married man, that Evan be the one to explain the rules for making him vanish.
While he talked, he guided her hand down and over the target. Now he released her and dropped his hands to her waist. “Got all that?” he said.
“Got it.”
“Then slide the safety off and go to it.”
“You’re supposed to say, ‘Commence firing.’”
“No. In this situation the range officer would say, ‘Fire at will.’”
He slipped the headset in place on her right ear and bent to kiss her gently on the neck.
“Your hair smells good,” he said.
She uncovered the ear. “What?”
“I said your hair smells good.”
She replaced the headset. “Watermelon,” she said.
* * *
THE TARGET WAS SO NEAR—this was a pistol range, Evan had reminded her, not a rifle range—Marianne couldn’t imagine not hitting it. But when she brought the sights of the .32 down over the bull’s-eye and squeezed the trigger, the revolver leaped in her hand with a force both upward and backward that upset her balance.
Evan caught her with one arm across her shoulders. “Whoa, Nellie,” he said. He was laughing.
She slipped the headset off and let it hang around her neck. “I didn’t expect that,” she said.
“You best use both hands,” he told her.
“What did I hit?”
“I don’t see anybody down,” he said. “I guess you hit nothing.”
“I missed the target?”
“By a mile. Try again.”
They stayed at the range another half-hour, Evan with the blue-barreled .38 clustering his shots in the chest of his imaginary enemy, Marianne with her silver .32, gripping her right wrist with all her strength as the revolver pulsed and jumped and flew with her, her bullets making a scatter of holes that covered the target unpredictably, sometimes hitting the man’s outline, but usually not.
Then she began to get the hang of it. Perhaps her wrist and arm and shoulder were numbed, or she’d found a rhythm that gave the gun a will of its own. When she had reloaded for the last time— Evan impatient to catch the FSU game on the tube—she felt relaxed and focused and smooth. The outline on the target had become real. She could read the monogram on the pocket of the married man’s dress shirt with its false French cuffs, she could see him standing beside a car—was it the Jaguar?—at the far end of the Shooters Haven lot.
She fired a round and saw it catch the man in the left shoulder. My God, she thought. She heard him beg, clutching the wound, blood pulsing under his hand, and she squeezed the trigger again. A hole appeared in the center of his forehead, and he fell to his knees and stopped begging. She fired once, twice, three times. A triangle of black dots marked where his heart was. Each time she fired, her eyes teared and her mouth made the words: My God. My God.
“That’s it,” Evan shouted to her. “That’s it.”
My God. She realized she’d been saying the words out loud. Had Evan heard them? She wondered if they were like a prayer, and if they were, what did Evan imagine she was praying for?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A number of the stories in this collection have appeared earlier, sometimes in slightly different form:
“The Word” also appeared in The Mysterious Life of the Heart. “The Decline of the West” was a selection of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project and appeared in several North American newspapers.
I owe debts of gratitude to a number of friends and relations whose comments and advice helped shape this collection: to J. Harley McIlrath, a fellow writer and unsparing critic; to Dr. Nader Moinfar and Dr. Abraham Verghese, for corrections to my considerable medical ignorance; most of all to my wife, Susan, and her daughters, Kate and Clare, readers who have shared with me the geography of many of these stories.
Fiction Titles in the Series
Who Will Hear Your Secrets? Page 19