Gun Love

by Jennifer Clement

  I looked over at the pew where Noelle and her mother were sitting. Noelle looked as if she hadn’t brushed her hair all week. She was wearing a deep-red lipstick.

  Look at Noelle, April May said. Look at her.

  She must have put her finger in the electrical socket, I said.

  April May nodded.

  Pastor Rex finished his sermon and said, So, this is my question for all of us today. Do we believe in miracles? Everyone here needs to ask themselves this question. Do you believe in miracles? Then ask yourself, if you don’t believe in miracles, how can you ask for one?

  At these words, I watched Noelle slip down from the pew and onto the floor. She’d fainted.

  There was a scramble as a few people ran to help Mrs. Roberta Young lift Noelle and lay her down on the bench. Rose left our side and quickly went over to take Noelle’s pulse. Pastor Rex raced down from the altar to see if he could help.

  As Rose felt Noelle’s forehead for fever, Pastor Rex used his prayer book to fan Noelle’s face.

  At this point, everyone realized that the service was over and began to leave the building. It was a quiet departure, as if a baby were asleep or there’d been a death.

  Sergeant Bob, April May, and I sat in the pew and waited for Rose to finish nursing Noelle.

  The diagnosis was easy.

  Noelle had also fallen in love with Eli Redmond. The moment he’d walked down the aisle she knew it and she’d been fainting ever since.

  We learned that, after the previous church service when Eli had been introduced to the congregation, Noelle had gone home to do some gardening. It took her several hours to dig holes all around her trailer. She used two large spoons and a fork from the kitchen as gardening tools.

  When Noelle had finished digging sixty-three holes, she carried her large collection of Barbie dolls outside and one by one stuck each doll in one hole. She planted the dolls in feet first and only up to the dolls’ knees.

  The rows of Barbies surrounding her trailer looked like a field of dolls. From a distance, for a second, the yellow, red, black, and brown doll hair looked like bruised petals.

  When I walked over to Noelle’s trailer for a math class only two days after the arrival of Eli and saw the field of dolls, I knew something was kicking dust. I also knew the moment April May saw this doll landscape she’d be talking about it for the next two weeks.

  I walked up the two steps of the trailer and peered in to see if anyone was home. Through the screen door I could see Noelle lying down on the sofa reading a book. I had never seen her read. Mrs. Roberta Young read all the time and always had books lying around, but I didn’t think Noelle was capable of doing this.

  Noelle was dressed in a long, flowing pink nightgown. It was exactly the same as my mother’s lavender nightgown. Noelle and my mother had bought the same princess nightie at Walmart, where it came in lavender, pink, and orange for nine dollars and ninety-five cents and was fireproof.

  I knew there was not going to be a math class.

  Next to Noelle was a Wizard of Oz–green pack of Salem cigarettes. I decided to go in and talk to her and see if I could steal a cigarette or two. The taste of mint smoke was already in my mouth. But before doing this, I walked back to the field of dolls and, grabbing them by their heads, I pulled five of them out of the ground like weeds. I left them lying on the damp earth.

  I walked back to the trailer and knocked on the frame of the screen door. Noelle looked up, sat up, and then walked to the door. She almost seemed to float in the silky nightgown.

  Through the door’s screen netting she could see me.

  Oh, it’s you, Pearl, she said. What do you want?

  May I come in? I said.

  Noelle opened the door.

  Over my shoulder she could see the dolls I’d pulled out of the ground.

  Oh no! she said, and pushed past me to the doll garden.

  I entered the trailer and slipped two Salems out of the pack and up my sleeve.

  I knew what had happened to Noelle. When she saw Eli for the first time at church, he’d turned her into a woman. Noelle had not closed her mouth. Noelle had swallowed him.

  Mrs. Roberta Young hated Eli Redmond from the moment she saw him walk down the aisle.

  In fact, Mrs. Roberta Young wanted to borrow Sergeant Bob’s lie detector machine. She called it a polygraph. Sergeant Bob used it for fishing tournaments as people were always cheating and lying about their catch.

  Nobody can beat the box, Sergeant Bob said.

  He made money on the side traveling around Florida and conducting lie detector tests at the state tournaments. He called this purity fishing. He said the contestants had to sign an agreement to take the test before they could participate in the fishing tournament.

  Sergeant Bob was always working on new questions. The standard questions he asked were, Did you take any fish from anyone outside your boat? Did you hide any fish in your boat or truck? Did you take any fish out of a caged area? Did you ever lie about your fish to get out of trouble?

  Rose dreaded that machine. She knew that her husband would hook her up to it in a second if he thought she might be cheating on him. So, she knew she never could, not even in her imagination.

  Sergeant Bob used to tell his fishermen friends that he’d do the lie detector on their wives for free. He laughed and said, Just replace the word “fish” with the word “lover” and it works!

  That machine is like a Supreme Court judge sitting in the corner of my bedroom, Rose said to my mother one day at the hospital.

  Sergeant Bob explained how some people would put a sharp tack in their shoe and press their foot down on it when they were telling the truth. The truth-trickers thought that feeling pain while telling the truth would look just like the anxiety of telling a lie.

  Mrs. Roberta Young wished she could try the machine out on Eli, but she couldn’t think of a scheme to get it done.

  She said, Eli Redmond is the breeze that makes a hurricane form in the Atlantic. He’s a purebred liar. He’s that kind of man who breaks all the windows in your house.

  11

  Eli took over my place.

  He kicked me right out of the car.

  Eli kept his Texas cowboy boots outside near the front left tire. He threw his jean jacket across the hood and propped his sunglasses on one of the windshield wipers.

  He never knocked.

  My mother felt his footsteps from far away. We could be singing, or eating something, or she’d be helping me with my homework and then she’d suddenly look up and stop whatever we were doing. She’d smooth down her frizzy yellow hair and pop a sugar cube in her mouth.

  And sure enough, in a few minutes, I’d look out the window and Eli would be walking toward us. He’d be looking at the sky. I don’t know why he never tripped on anything or took a stepped-on-a-crack kind of step. He looked up at the sky and the ground didn’t care.

  Run off and play. Off you go. Go find yourself something to do. Off with you, my mother said.

  As I got out on one side of the car, Eli would slide in on the other. He always went straight for the backseat, as if it were a bed.

  Run off and play, my mother said.

  I would leave and go into the park, but I really had nowhere to go.

  Sometimes I was lucky and could hang out with April May, but most of the time I just wandered over to the recreation area and sat on the swing for an hour or two until I spied Eli leaving the Mercury and heading back to Pastor Rex’s trailer.

  Once in a while I went down to the river, but I was afraid to be down there by myself because of the alligators.

  I never went to the dump either. It was one thing to find a rotten carcass of a dog with April May and another to find one all alone.

  The last time we’d had been to the dump April May found a plastic bag full
of dry shedded snakeskins. I found a bullet complete with a brass jacket inside a bottle of wine. The bullet shone inside the glass and I had to break the bottle to get it out. Scratched crudely into one side the bullet were the letters V and P.

  My, my, April May said, that bullet had someone’s name on it.

  I don’t think it was ever used.

  Take it with you. There’s still time to use it.

  Of course. I’m not leaving it here, I said, and placed the genie-bullet-in-the-bottle in the pocket of my jeans.

  After a few days of wandering around the park with no place to go, I realized that Eli was going to spend every moment my mother was home from work in our car.

  Now the Mercury even smelled like him when he wasn’t there. It was Brut cologne, my mother said. I told April May about the Brut and she told Rose, who said that was the cologne Elvis Presley always used.

  There was one abandoned trailer at the back of the park. The last tenants were a young wife and her two-year-old child. The woman’s husband had been badly wounded in Iraq and had been treated at the VA hospital. I knew the soldier had died from his injuries and that the wife had left and gone back to live with her parents in Tampa.

  Now that Eli was always in my car, I checked out the empty trailer. I was weary of wandering the park with nowhere to go, and I needed a place to do my homework and get away from the mosquitoes.

  The trailer was clean. There were some trailer homes that were elaborate and even had rooms, but this one was very simple. It was just one very long and narrow room. On one side there was a kitchen, small bathroom with a shower, and a counter table with two stools that were left behind.

  On the other side of the trailer there was a narrow bunk bed. The top bunk was just an empty frame, but the bottom bed still had an old mattress on it. There was graffiti on the wood headboard. Carved with a thin pen knife or paring knife were the words: I am waiting for Halley’s Comet 2061.

  Left behind on the floor was a children’s book and a toy truck. The book was a coloring book, which contained drawings of pistols, shotguns, rifles, and machine guns. The cover read Gun Coloring Book.

  In the kitchen drawers I found a pack of gauze bandages and a hunting knife with a long whitish-yellow bone handle and a coffee cup full of fishing flies. The coffee cup had a photograph of a whale on one side and the words “SeaWorld Orlando” on the other.

  Under the sink there were two unopened boxes of large black garbage bags and a toilet plunger.

  In the bathroom there was a bar of green Zest soap that was still in its wrapping and a stained towel hanging on the back of the door.

  As days turned to weeks my time in the empty trailer became routine as Eli went to the Mercury almost every afternoon and left late, only when it was my bedtime.

  My mother never asked where I went or what I was doing. I watched as her love for Eli made her sleepy. It was hard for her to get up in the morning and get ready for work.

  She had a few explanations for her sleepiness.

  I have too many questions running around inside, she said. This does not let me sleep.

  What kind of questions? I asked.

  Every kind, she said. Do animals speak to each other? Do we have to keep a promise after someone dies? You know, those kinds of questions. Will my life matter? And I even ask myself if Mr. Don’t Come Back will come back. I’m missing him.

  One evening when I left the empty trailer to go home for bedtime, I came across Pastor Rex. He was standing very still behind the entrance gate to the park, where he was hidden from view behind a tree. He gazed over toward the visitor’s parking area and our car. From this spot he could see that my mother was sitting in the backseat on Eli’s lap.

  I knew Eli was sitting in the exact spot Pastor Rex expected would be his place. Before the day Eli came to live with him, Pastor Rex had imagined he would be decorating the backseat of the Mercury with his own stuff.

  He had not seen me or heard me approach, so I stepped back a few paces into the shadow of a tree. I was so small it was always easy for me to disappear.

  I watched Pastor Rex reach into his jacket pocket and take out a pack of Marlboros and a lighter. He lit up a cigarette and smoked it slowly as he watched my mother and Eli. He smoked as if he were smoking out all the hope. He took in a deep drag, in and in and in, but didn’t exhale any smoke. He smoked the whole cigarette in this way. Pastor Rex watched, and I watched, as Eli took off my mother’s blouse. He watched, and I watched, as Eli bent down and kissed my mother’s small breasts. He watched, and I watched, my mother kiss Eli’s face.

  When Pastor Rex finished smoking up all his hope, he threw the butt down on the ground, crushed it into the gravel with the heel of his shoe, and turned around and walked back to his trailer in a hurry.

  I also turned and went back to my empty trailer for another hour. There was nothing else for me to do.

  Now that my mother was loving Eli, she was tasting him deep and only getting a wishing-well kind of hunger. She’d never be full again.

  When Eli left and I was back in the car, I watched as she licked the inside of her palms for his taste like a kitten.

  At night she slept wearing one of Eli’s shirts and moved around fretfully in her sleep.

  If my mother had watched another woman in this condition, she would have had the diagnosis in a second. My mother would have said, Pearl, it’s like that song—she’s askin’ for water, but he’s givin’ her gasoline.

  12

  When April May and I walked home from school along the highway, we always had our eyes fixed to the side of the road in case there was something interesting on the ground. Once we found a five-dollar bill.

  It was on the day that April May and I didn’t find any money, but found a small baby raccoon under a bush, that the police stopped at the trailer park to investigate our car.

  April May leaned over and looked at the creature closely. It’s a baby, she said. Do you think it’s wounded? Maybe it’s sick.

  Just leave it alone, I said. They can have rabies.

  Oh, yes, of course, she said, and moved away quickly.

  We both picked up our stride as if just being close to the raccoon could make us sick. As we turned toward the trailer park we could see a police car stopped next to the Mercury. The siren was off, but the vehicle’s red warning lights blinked and flashed.

  My mother stood outside. She was dressed in her lavender nightgown and was barefoot. I knew she must have been asleep when the policemen drove in, parked, and knocked on our car door. The towels we used over the Mercury’s windows were still in place. She should have been at work and not in our car. School was out. It was at least three o’clock. She shouldn’t have been asleep.

  My mother hugged her stomach and rocked back and forth.

  There were two policemen with her and both were tall men, which made my mother look even smaller than usual. One had red hair and was covered with freckles. He could have been April May’s relative. The other policeman had black hair and dark skin and stood back from the Mercury with his hand on his gun.

  The policeman with red hair was walking around the car. He was attempting to peer into the windows through the towels. I heard him say, So there’s no one else in the vehicle, is this correct, lady?

  As I walked toward my mother, both men stared at me.

  The policeman with black hair let out a sigh. I was used to those looks of astonishment at my eggshell skin and light pastel-blue eyes.

  I walked over to my mother and placed my hand in her hand.

  The policeman with red hair stepped close to me and said, Hey, are you a real albino?

  April May just kept on walking. She looked straight ahead as if she didn’t know us.

  Is this your daughter? the policeman with red hair asked my mother. He was the only one of the two men who spoke, and
he had a cold, clear voice.

  I answered for her. Yes, I said, she’s my mother.

  Do you live in the car? Really?

  Yes.

  Where’s your birth certificate?

  The policeman with black hair watched everything as he chewed a piece of gum wedged tightly between his two front teeth. He kept his right hand on the pistol holder at his waist.

  Come on, lady. Is this child yours? the policeman asked. Don’t tell me you just screwed around like an animal and had a child without even a birth certificate! Jesus! Is she an albino? Does she have a name?

  Pearl. Her name is Pearl, my mother said.

  And what about a last name?

  France.

  And your name?

  Margot France.

  Do you have the registration for this car? Insurance? Where did you get this? Is it stolen property? Where did you get this car, lady? How long have you been hanging out here?

  It’s just a junk really, my mother answered.

  Look at all the bags, the other policeman said. He spoke up for the first time as he peered into the window of the Mercury. His voice was a high-pitched, womanly voice. She’s like a goddamn bag lady, he said.

  Hey, Torres, the red-haired policeman said, check out the trunk.

  Torres opened the door on the driver’s side and flipped the lever for the trunk. Then he walked to the back of the car and looked in.

  The beautiful boxes made of cardboard lined with white paper, wood boxes, and leather boxes with fine gold latches were all in place.

  He lifted the green felt bag, pulled open the tie, and took out the elephant-tusk boat.

  Where did you get this? he asked as he held it in his hands with care.

  He placed the ivory boat back in the long bag and lay it back down in the trunk. Then he touched the black leather violin case. He didn’t open it.

  My God, he said. What is all of this? Did you rob an antique store, lady?

  He even lifted and shook the long, flat box, which was lined on the outside in raw silk and wrapped with a yellow silk ribbon.