“Susan’s real,” he said, defensive.
“Saying she’s kept down ain’t enough. You gotta show what’s doing it to her. You gotta make it so he’s the strongest thing in the story.”
“Maybe . . . I don’t know.”
“I’m telling ya. He should be your story . . . ’least there should be more of him in the first part. You need to do something with Susan, too.”
Depressed now, Jimmy said, “Don’t sound like you enjoyed it so much.”
“Well, there ain’t a whole lot to enjoy right now. Just a couple of characters. But it’s got potential . . . and you tell it real nice.”
The word “nice” sounded to Jimmy like the click of a washer in a blind man’s begging cup.
Rita went to the dresser, where she’d set the pint, and poured herself another three fingers. She leaned against the dresser and crossed her legs. Folded her arms. She gazed at Jimmy fondly, and he dropped his eyes to her legs.
“It reminds me of them romances my aunt’s all the time reading,” she said. “You should make it meaner’n that. It’s a mean story.”
“I was thinking it’s a love story.”
“Most love stories got some meanness in ’em.”
“I suppose,” he said sullenly.
“Look at the colonel—he’s mean.” Rita had a swallow of whiskey, let it settle. “Meanness begets meanness. Maybe Susan’s got to get a little mean herself. ’Less you gonna let her just lay there and take it, and that ain’t right. Even a weak woman’s got teeth.”
He tried to come up with a way to satisfy her and still do what he wanted, but couldn’t fit everything together.
“I’m the one you’re telling the story to,” Rita said, “and all I’m saying is, I ain’t interested in a woman ain’t got a backbone. A man does her wrong, she oughta do him the same. I can’t respect nobody just rolls over and says, ‘Do it again.’ ”
When you changed one thing, you changed everything. The elements of Jimmy’s story drifted apart, becoming vague and unrelated to any other, like the tag-ends of a dream whose meaning he couldn’t recapture. Rita was staring at him expectantly, but he felt stupefied, unable to turn what he was thinking into words.
“Well, do what you want,” she said diffidently, and started for the bathroom. “I’m gonna wash up.”
Jimmy lay for a time with his eyes half-closed, fingering the Colt, rubbing a raised patch on the housing. It was cold now, just a gun, not the warm touchstone it became when he was reeling off the story. Took the story to tickle it to life.
“Wake up!” said Rita.
She was standing naked at the foot of the bed like a savage female spirit who’d walked into a dream he was having. Her small high-riding breasts and long-muscled thighs were baked to a hard pottery gloss. Covering her right breast and part of her ribcage was a tattoo depicting a red-and-purple serpent with hands who looked to be standing on its tail and holding out an apple. It was real good work. The style was old-fashioned, kind of like a Nineteenth Century engraving, but the colors were bright. Down below, she was shaved hairless.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “How much trouble am I in?”
She cocked her left hip, rested a hand on it. “Trouble don’t even say it.”
* * *
Friday night had been unkind to Loretta Snow. As she approached the Guy Guns table at ten o’clock the next morning, no more than a minute or two after the doors had opened, she fiddled with her purse strap, cast nervous glances to the side, and appeared generally unsteady. The bruised-looking skin beneath her eyes was darker and puffier; her buttermilk complexion had acquired a gray undertone. Jimmy thought she looked pretty nonetheless, wearing an ankle-length cotton print with an Empire waist. Rita, who was badly hungover, moaned when she saw the woman coming and laid her head down on a display case. Jimmy got to his feet and smiled and said, “Morning.”
Without pleasantry or preamble, Ms. Snow said, “I need to have my gun back.” She held out a hand like a child demanding a quarter.
“I ain’t even put it on display,” said Jimmy, disconcerted.
“I’m sorry.” Ms. Snow’s chin trembled. “I need it back.”
“Well, it’s your gun, but I think you rushing things.” Jimmy came out from behind the table, hitched his thumbs in his back pockets. “Man’s traveling down from Pullman to look at it next week. You might get your four outa him. Maybe a little more.”
She perked up for a second, hearing that, but then seemed to shrink down inside herself. “I can’t wait that long.”
“I’ll give it to you,” he said. “That’s not a problem. But you oughta hear about this fella before you jump. Whyn’t we grab us a cup of coffee, and I’ll fill you in? You want the Colt back after, I’ll hand her over.”
She hesitated. “All right. But I don’t know if anything can change my mind.”
Rita’s head was still down. Jimmy bent close to her and said, “Need you to watch the table for a half-hour. Okay?”
“Just give her the damn gun,” she said wearily, voice muffled by her arm.
He put his mouth to her ear and whispered, “I ain’t finished my story! You can handle the table. Hardly anybody’s here.”
She flapped a hand at him. “Go on.”
“Want me bring you back something?”
“Bring me a fucking cure for pain,” she said.
Jimmy steered Ms. Snow by the elbow along the empty aisles, past dealers slumped in folding chairs behind mounds of T-shirts, some gazing bleakly at the walls, others lethargically sorting their change, or talking on cell phones, or rummaging through boxes of stock. Everyone in the show looked to be in about the same shape as Rita, except for Hardy and Rosalie Castin, a Christian couple who stood jauntily at the ready behind display cases arrayed with shiny new handguns and semi-autos and speed loaders, the good soldiers in an otherwise dissolute army. Once Jimmy had paid for the coffee, he and Ms. Snow found an unoccupied bench at the edge of the parking lot that faced toward a Key Bank and made themselves comfortable. The green humps of the Cascades lifted beyond the bank, their summits aglow in a sunstruck mist.
“This fella I told you about,” Jimmy said, “teaches up at State and writes books about the white power movement and the militias. Few years ago he talked the university into funding a collection of memorabilia. I had this rifle I couldn’t move. It was used by the Branch Davidians down there in Waco. Reason I couldn’t move it, I didn’t have much in the way of authentication. I had a letter from one of the cult members saying David Koresh had carried the rifle at one time, but collectors . . . they looking for a gun he used during the siege, and I wasn’t able to get testimony to that effect.”
“It sounds sick,” Ms. Snow said in her milk-and-cookies voice.
“I can’t deny there’s that element. When I started the business, I didn’t carry crime guns. But I learned I needed that market if I was gonna survive.” He sipped his coffee, found it too sweet, and set the cup on the bench beside him. “This professor, Doctor Wylie, he ain’t no sicko. Just a man with an obsession. And that’s why he might be the fella’ll give you four. He paid me a whole lot more’n that Davidian rifle was worth. Way he reacted to my email, I figure he’s hot for your Colt. I got no idea what he might pay, but since there ain’t no question about its authenticity, I’m guessing four might be low.” He smacked his forehead, as if to punish himself. “I shoulda thought of him yesterday, but it didn’t occur to me till after you left.”
Ms. Snow gazed off along the street. The traffic had picked up, and the parking lot was beginning to fill.
“See,” Jimmy went on, “I can tell him Borchard’s offered me six and that’ll juice the price.”
The major’s name galvanized Ms. Snow. “I want the gun back,” she said fretfully. “I’m sorry. I . . .”
She made to stand, but Jimmy caught her hand. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
Ms. Snow’s shoulders heaved and she leaked a sob. Her trouble pulled at Jimmy, ti
ghtened his chest—the same as he got whenever he watched TV by himself and they ran a commercial for starving kids you could feed on twenty dollars a month and he took to feeling sad not for just them, but for himself at being part of that world.
“Hey,” he said. “It ain’t nothing can’t be fixed. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“You can’t help me,” she said, but there was an inch of hope in her voice.
“You need to tell somebody. That much is plain.”
She cut her eyes toward him. They were a cold dark blue, like the water in the San Juan Straits on a sunny day. She made no effort to free her hand from his grasp.
“He came to see me last night,” she said.
“Borchard?”
A nod. “He was furious. He told me to get the gun for him. He said you wouldn’t sell it, and he wasn’t going to allow Bob Champion’s gun to pass into the hands of somebody didn’t know its true value.”
“Hell with him,” Jimmy said.
“You don’t understand! He’s threatening me!”
“Call the police. They’ll take care of him.”
“The police won’t do anything. He knows most of them. They all think he’s Christ come down.”
Jimmy started to say something, but Ms. Snow cut in and said tearfully, “You don’t understand!”
The sliding door of an old green Dodge van in the lot opened and half a dozen teenage boys climbed out. They shuffled about moodily, not talking much, waiting on the driver to lock up. Sallow and unkempt, untrendily dressed in jeans and sweaters, none of which bagged. They mosied off, two abreast, toward the entrance to the armory, a platoon of stragglers cut loose from some disenchanted force, maybe looking to arm themselves for an assault on homeroom tyrants, Nazi jocks. Ms. Snow eyed them warily.
“I ain’t never gonna understand unless you explain it to me,” Jimmy said.
She sighed, stared toward the bank. “We have a history, the major and I. I met him at church, and he seemed nice. I hadn’t been out with anyone since Bob died. I guess I was lonely and not looking closely enough. We went out four times. It wasn’t going anywhere. It just felt good getting away from the kids. Anyway, one day I found out he was in the movement. I’ve had all I can take of those people. When he came over that night I told him I wouldn’t see him anymore. He started yelling and kicking the furniture. Some of the things he said made me realize the only reason he attached himself to me was that I used to belong to Bob Champion. That’s how he put it. I ‘belonged’ to Bob. I think he may have been attracted to me the same way he’s attracted to the gun.” She toyed with the catch of her purse. “He kept getting madder and madder. The upshot of it all is, he forced me.” She held Jimmy’s eyes an instant, as though to establish that she had dealt with this and was unashamed.
“You report it?”
“Oh, yes. That’s how I know the cops won’t do anything. He told them I was hysterical because he’d broken it off with me. They weren’t interested in a rape, they won’t get out of their chairs if I report him for a threat.”
Jimmy gave the situation a turn or two, and was distracted by an old Chrysler, an early fifties model, black and grumbling, that nosed into the slot directly behind the bench; the engine dieseled for a few seconds after the ignition had been switched off. A fat woman, as massive and all-over bulging as a sumo wrestler, with a head of dyed-black curls, squeezed from behind the wheel. She was cinched into stretch pants and a flowered smock. She gasped for breath and hauled a canvas-sheathed shotgun out from the trunk.
“What y’know, Shelly?” he called.
The woman saw him and a smile pumpkin-carved her flushed round face. “Hi there, Jimmy!” She waddled a couple of steps toward the bench, shouldering the shotgun. “Didn’t think we’d be seeing you till Yakima.”
He held up a hand, rubbed thumb and forefinger together to signify a need for cash.
“I hear that.” She cast a suspicious glance at Ms. Snow. “Well, I’ll talk to ya inside, awright?”
He waved, went back to studying the situation. Finally he said to Ms. Snow, “How much you tell Borchard about our deal?”
“Nothing, really. I said I gave you the gun to sell.”
“Tell him you misspoke. Tell him you sold it to me.”
“That won’t stop him.”
She had collected herself while relating her story, but now she began to unravel again, to mist up and twist the hem of her dress. Jimmy pictured her trying to cover herself with a torn blouse, while the colonel stood above her, arms folded, stern as a Viking statue, but weak . . . weak in his bones.
“We can get this done,” Jimmy said.
“I don’t see how.”
“What he wants most is the Colt, right?”
“I suppose.”
“And if you had the money, how soon could you leave for Seattle?”
“Tomorrow . . . if I had the money. We can stay with my cousin in Ballard till I find a place.”
“Then it’s easy. We’ll write us a bill of sale. We’ll go to a notary and get him to witness it’s not a real sale. That’s to protect you. I’ll show the bill to the colonel if needs be, and I’ll tell him I’ll break my bond about not selling him the Colt so long as he leaves you alone. But I got another buyer. If he wants it, he has to bid.”
“What if he says no?”
“What’s he gonna do? Kill me? That wouldn’t bring him the gun. Truth is, I doubt he’s up to killing. He’s a bully. A bully ain’t gonna pick on a cat with claws.”
“The major,” said Ms. Snow.
He waited for her to finish.
“Before . . . you said ‘the colonel.’ It’s major.”
“Same difference,” he said.
There was a shine on the Key Bank clock—he had to squint to see where the hands were pointing. Getting on eleven. Rita would be starting to squirm. By the time they returned from the notary, she would be ready to eat his liver. But he couldn’t help that.
“I’m gonna call my professor,” Jimmy said. “He finds out I got a buyer down here, he’ll bid it up over the phone. I was you, I’d go home and pack. We might get this thing done by Labor Day.”
A drop of suspicion added itself to her mix. “Why’re you doing all this?”
“It ain’t ‘all this,’ ” he said. “I’m gonna make serious money. I let them bid it up, hell, the Colt might move for five figures. When two men think a gun means something, they can be extremely impractical.”
He couldn’t read her expression.
“Thank you,” she said, and put her arms about his neck.
Her body eased up against him, and the hug lasted so long, Jimmy did not think it could be legally construed a hug. More of an embrace. It brought a character out from the shadows of his story, one with a new slant on the situation. A man. The character was gone too quickly for him to identify, but its brief appearance caused Jimmy to ignore the tension the hug had bred in him, and to become an active participant in the embrace, smelling Ms. Snow’s hair, his right hand going to her waist. Her mouth grazed his cheek, skittered up to his ear.
“I don’t believe you,” she whispered.
* * *
Rita wasn’t mad like Jimmy had expected. She had moved a mid-range piece and someone wanted to take a look at the gas-cylinder Thompson they kept locked in the van. It wasn’t often she closed a sale, and it had boosted her spirits. She limited her displeasure with him to a disgruntled shake of the head. But when he told her he needed the van that evening to visit Borchard, she arched her back and spat.
“You messing with that white woman?” she asked. “Is that what this shit’s about?”
“Christ, Rita.” He brushed a scrap of candy bar wrapper off the top of a display case.
She reached across the table and punched his arm with the heel of her hand. “I saw you scoping her out. You wouldn’t look no sharper, you’d been trying to guess her goddamn weight.”
Somebody had left a book on the back corner of the table. The G
olden Age of Shotgunning. He wondered when the Golden Age had been. Probably depended on where you were living.
Rita punched him again, harder, and a bubble of anger boiled up from the surface of his thoughts, as if something big down below was blowing its tanks, preparing to rise. “Fuck’s wrong with you?” he said. “I’m trying to sell a gun and I’m working on a story. You know how I get. So leave me the fuck alone!”
Her eyes spiked him, but his anger was taller than hers for a change, or else she was too sick to fight. She sat looking into her partial reflection in the top of a display case. “I’m a real bitch this morning,” she said. “I’m sorry, baby.”
“You a bitch most of the damn time,” he said. “Most of the time I kinda like it. But I could stand you easing off some today.”
“I’m sorry.” She reached out a hand, as if to touch him, but didn’t complete the gesture. “Y’ain’t messing with her, are ya?”
“Think I’d screw up what we got?”
“No. But you get tempted when you’re telling a story. I know it’s only part of the story, but it worries me.”
“Nothing’s gonna happen.” His anger had subsided, but he couldn’t jump down yet from the peak it had left him standing on.
“Maybe I’ll go back to the motel and sleep for an hour,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Sure you can handle things?”
“Buncha assholes saying”—he did a cartoon voice—“ ‘That really Teddy Roosevelt’s gun?’ I reckon I can handle that. It gets busy, I’ll give you a call.”
“All right.”
She moved out into the aisle, then leaned across the table and kissed him, her tongue flirting briefly with his.
The kiss brought everything inside him back to even. “That a promise?” he asked.
“Not hardly, lover. That’s a gift subscription.”
* * *
By one o’clock the crowds had grown heavy, thick with teenage shoplifters and once-through gawkers. Jimmy propped his SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY sign against a display case, turned his chair sideways to the aisle, and sat holding the Colt in his lap. The buzz and mutter of the show seemed to be etching a pattern of static in his head, but the oil-smooth patina of the gun soothed him, and he fell to thinking about Colonel Hawes Rutherford, a big cold man, wide shoulders racked beneath his dress uniform, dark beard trimmed neat as a pencil sketch, standing beside the breakfast table, staring down at his wife’s breasts, nestled in the lacy shells of a peignoir. The sight caused him frustration—he had not been with Susan for several weeks—and also inspired a feeling of disdain toward this display of female softness, the very same that provoked his arousal. He was happiest when focused upon affairs of duty, whether negotiating with the sublimely corrupt officialdom of the country or directing the movements of materiel. He perceived himself to be a soldier in the service of, first, order and then the United States, and it sometimes galled him that the rigor of his mental life should be diluted by an addiction to the feminine, with all its cryptic delicacy and attendant confusions. This inborn condescension aside, there was no doubt the colonel loved his wife, even respected her in some pale fashion. Women, he felt, were due respect for the exact reasons they deserved protection. That they were weak and sought to prevail in life spoke to an admirable persistence. As for love, the colonel had written a treaty with his brain, ceding a certain portion of his mental life to the nourishing of a smallish flame notable for its steadiness. Each day prior to returning home—or if he was away—before retiring, he would think those thoughts he deemed essential to the maintenance of the flame, including appreciations of Susan’s beauty and sense of style, her effectiveness at state functions, her efficiency in overseeing the servants, her fidelity. For the duration of the exercise he would faithfully put from mind those elements of her personality he found wanting. He excused his proprietary attitude toward Susan and the abuses that arose from it by countenancing them necessary in order to make the flower of her womanhood bloom, and on those rare occasions when he was confronted by the realization that he had misused her, he forgave himself—in his view, when it fell to an older man to instruct a young woman, the acts of instruction themselves were bound to stimulate certain primitive albeit godly desires, and he was nothing if not a natural man. So it was that he managed to sustain the self-image of an honorable, kindly, and loving husband, a far cry from the unfeeling, humorless monster Susan perceived him to be.
Colonel Rutherford's Colt Page 4