“See if something else is on,” she said to Jimmy, who had gained possession of the remote.
“Ain’t nothing else but preachers and infomercials,” he said grumpily.
“Try the preachers. They’re funny sometimes.”
“How come you never complain when it’s some dumbass movie about white people?”
“This is about white people, Jimmy.”
“It’s got Graham Green in it. You like Graham Green.”
“Gimme the damn remote!” She reached beneath the covers, hand-fought him for control. Her fingers brushed his dick, felt it twitch. She fisted it, squeezed. “Give it to me.”
He grinned. “Keep that up, I’ll give you something.”
She loosened her grasp, stroked him gently. When he was ready, she came astride his hips and fitted him to her. With her knees high, she sank down, slid forward, rocked up, then sank down again . . . a luxuriant rhythm that triggered a jab of pleasure with each repetition. Her thoughts circled with the languid regularity of her movements, passing from momentary observation to momentary oblivion and back. The way he looked. Sleepy but rapt. Like a boy doing his best to stay awake to watch the end of his favorite show. His fingers gouged her ass, pulling her down harder, sending a hot charge into her belly. She grabbed the headboard, kept it from banging the wall, and let him guide her. Behind her shut-tight lids, a thin strip of light traced a curved horizon, the sun in eclipse. Something shifted inside her, a switch clicked, a relay engaged, something . . . and a passway opened, allowing the charge in her belly to spread throughout and build into a wave. Distantly, she heard the chuffing of Jimmy’s breath and herself saying love words. She tossed back her head and caught a glimpse of gray Sunday through the cracked drapes. The wave was still inside her, but it had grown taller than her, wider, as if the real Rita was a tiny creature living deep in her flesh, in the shadow of the wave, and when it broke she seemed to be lifted and tumbled and almost killed. All but a flicker of her flame extinguished. Waking to the world again, she felt ungainly, out of her medium, a beached mermaid straddling a man who pumped furiously into her, his head raised, face flushed, going at it like a cocaine monkey. She rolled her hips to bring him off. His fingers hooked her waist, grinding her against him until he went rigid and said, “Oh, shit . . . Jesus!” She unstuck strands of hair from her sweaty face, worked her hips some more as he softened, then collapsed half-atop him. He made a contented noise in his throat, ran a hand along her flank.
“Can I have the remote now?” she asked.
“I love you,” he said groggily.
The words made her heart fail, so it had to jump back into rhythm. Whenever that happened, she always wondered if it was love or some associated terror that caused it.
“I love you,” she said, kissed him, and searched around under the covers for the remote, found it down beside his knee.
He closed his eyes, breathed deeply. “Don’t put on no preacher, okay?”
She sat up in bed, channel-surfed until she hit a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Bugs was on the battlement of a frontier fort, firing a cannon at Yosemite Sam. She watched a few minutes, then took to surfing again. Channel 13 was showing an X-Files episode, but it was almost over. Jimmy murmured something, then he said, “Aaron . . .”
She cut the sound on the TV so she could hear. “What’s that?”
“I have to write Susan,” he said
“Jimmy, you awake?”
He didn’t answer at first. Finally he said, “Naw . . . not really.”
“Who’s Aaron?”
He blinked at her. “The hero.”
“In your story? You didn’t tell me about him.”
“Later,” he said. “Okay?”
She gave his shoulder a shake. “C’mon, Jimmy! Don’t hold out on me!”
He licked his lips, blinked, and wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. Sleepily, speaking in phrases at first, but then with greater energy, curving the sentences into fancy shapes, he told her a little about Aaron, then returned to an earlier portion of the narrative that concerned Susan’s intensifiying involvement with Luis and her increasing frustration with the colonel. Rita thought how strange it was that Jimmy’s daddy had been able to pound dents into his brain in just such a way so as to cause him to go groping around in life most of the time—business-sharp, but otherwise dim as a firefly, except when it came to making his stories. They arose from a place inside him she couldn’t see or touch, and it was this mystery, she believed, its resonance with her and not the stories themselves, that inspired the parts she sometimes played and let her become her own incarnation, a story unto herself. She pictured a waterfall in his head, splashing down onto rocks amid a pine forest, amazing creatures materializing from the roiled-up water and vanishing, silver wolves and cave men and private eyes and flashily dressed women. . . . and she felt the story of Colonel Rutherford’s Colt charging a battery inside her, sending forth a voltage that was disintegrating the drab curtain of ordinary concerns that muffled her spirit, liberating it to act. She had a premonition that this story might take them both right to the edge.
Jimmy’s voice trailed off and he turned his head away. His breathing grew slow and regular. Rita watched a commercial for an Internet service that featured groups of shiny young folk, one of every race except her own, all made ecstatic by their access to endless quantities of porn and merchandise. Then she settled on her side next to Jimmy. His eyelids were fluttery with dreams. She touched her lips to his cheek, and he whispered too low to hear. Probably dreaming about the story. Often when he fucked her she wasn’t sure whether he’d gotten lost in a story and was doing someone named Charlotte or Marie . . . or Susan. She wondered what it was like, having stories in your head. It was hard enough pretending to be yourself, sifting through all the garbage floating in your mind and finding the thoughts that mattered, that streamed up pure from the place you streamed up from. She leaned over him, kissed his mouth. Inhaled his sweet warm smell. An easy stirring in her gut caused her to think about waking him. She recalled a time in Oregon City when she climbed on board the Jimmy train an hour before opening and hadn’t jumped off until half past six. She just couldn’t get enough of the crazy bastard. And when he was working on a story, he couldn’t get enough of her. Like his dick was connected to the part of his brain did the telling. It would be fun, she thought. If the Colt was going to sell, they didn’t need a good day. But she let the notion slide. She dug the remote from a fold in the blanket, aimed it at the TV, and changed channels.
* * *
Sunday afternoon was slow for everyone. The big spenders generally waited until the last day to buy, and most of the sensible shoppers had come and gone, leaving gawkers and curiosity seekers and shoplifters to turtle along the aisles, causing the dealers to view with suspicion every roomy jacket and purse. No one ever tried to steal from the Guy Guns tables, because the weapons were under lock and key; but Rita liked spying out shoplifters at the adjacent tables, so Jimmy let her handle the business and sat off to the side of things. Most times he enjoyed doing the shows, but today it unnerved him. Lights were too harsh, chatter troubled his ears. And the smell . . . It was as if cleaning agents and neat’s-foot oil and people and freshly dried T-shirts and corn dogs and everything else had canceled each other out, and what remained was a faint oily residue of deadness left by the passage of thousands of rounds through the barrel of an enormous gun.
He tried to climb back into his story, but couldn’t find an opening. A sun-drenched linoleum floor sprang to mind. Dirty; with pieces of lettuce mired in a gravy film; the whole thing iridescent with grease. Under the scum lay a pattern of weird abstract shapes. Once when he was fifteen he’d dropped some acid and spent all day tracing the shapes on flimsy, opaque paper. Cowboys, Indians, devils hiding in clouds, winged monsters—dozens of images surfacing from the family filth as if he had unearthed their true genealogy, their spiritual history. The sheets of paper adhered to the floor, ripping when he tried to peel them
off. A total mess. He didn’t feel like cleaning it, so he went out to the barn and sat watching swallows fall like tiny desperate angels born from the holy radiance pouring through a loft window, their flurried wingbeats chasing the stillness. Whitish gold bars of light crumbled between long gaps in the boards. You could see anything within them. You could almost go inside them, visit the incandescent country they bordered. Moldy hay and ripe horseshit thick in his nostrils. The little stallion whuffling in his stall below. Hours like that. The light gapping the boards burned orange. The swallows nested. Then he heard his father scream his name. Nobody screamed like his old man. “Jimmaaaaay!” Spoken that way, it had the weight of a deadly Arabic curse, a word that meant “kill” or “die.” It hadn’t scared him that day. It seemed part of nature. An eagle sighting its violated nest would sound so. Such strength and fury, its red-hot edge had sliced a smile onto his face . . .
Rita was talking to a customer, a shrunken old man sporting a VFW pin on his baggy sports jacket. She stood one-footed, her left knee on a folding chair. Her ass shifted when she gestured, jeans clinging to every curve, and that got him remembering the morning. Who’d think you could fit so much meanness and so much sweetness into the same woman? She’d snap your dick off with a stare, then go soft and take your breath away. Between those contrary states, her arrow usually swung into the mean, but that was just her survival posture. Didn’t bother him any. The old man wobbled off and she caught Jimmy staring. She tried to hide a smile, lost the battle, and sat down. She glanced over her shoulder at him, still smiling, her hair flipping away from her face—he saw her younger, how she must have looked before bad love walked in and money luck ran out. She didn’t let that pretty girl loose too often. Jimmy remembered the days when she hadn’t ever let her loose. She’d glared at everyone with hateful intensity. Their first conversation, she was working this armpit club in Billings on a slow Wednesday night, sitting on a barstool in a tight one-piece black dress that showed off her legs, tits, and shoulders. She’d priced herself at two hundred dollars. He said he didn’t have that much, but he would tell her a story. A real story, not some bullshit. A genuine just-for-her work of the imagination. Whatever kind she wanted. A unique creation with hearts and lives on the line.
“What do I have to do?” she asked.
“Stick around for the telling is all,” he replied. “Sometimes it takes a while.”
He kicked out his legs, crossed them at the ankles. Still thinking about Rita, he relaxed, checked out the passing parade. He idly followed the progress of a skinny black guy who must have gone six-ten easy, heavy on the jewelry, expensively dressed. Jimmy was wondering if the guy might be one of the Sonics, when the image of the sabal palm flew into his mind, and along with it, like a shadow on the sun, Colonel Rutherford’s bland, meticulous personality. He had arrived home after midnight, without announcing his presence to Susan, and now at nearly five in the morning—dressed in trousers, undershirt, and braces—was sitting in a wooden chair that he had set beneath the stairway in the corridor leading to Mariana’s quarters (he had sent the housekeeper off to pass the evening with her sister in Varadero Beach). Now and then he leaned forward and looked off along the corridor and out the open door toward the little palm tree, isolate against the dark-green backdrop of the grounds. He was nervous, his palms clammy, his respiration shallow and uneven. He anticipated no logistical difficulties, but he had never before killed a man, and the concept of such an act excited and alarmed him. The colonel’s aversion to violence, even violence of the staged variety such as fencing and boxing contests, had become something of a joke amongst his fellow cadets at the Academy, and had ensured him a career spent behind a desk. Yet in this instance, violence was the sole remedy that would secure a proper resolution and the respect of his brother officers. Though he remained confident that he would carry through with his intention, and that he would suffer no reprisals, official or otherwise, for having shot an intruder, he was concerned about the possible psychological consequences—he had known soldiers who, albeit justified in their actions, had been afflicted by severe mental trauma. The idea that Carrasquel might haunt him in death was intolerable. The man had violated his marriage and thus forfeited humane consideration. He deserved not merely to die, but to be erased from memory, consigned to oblivion. These stern thoughts heartened the colonel and convinced him both of his moral right and of the shield that righteousness would contrive against self-recrimination. When he confronted Carrasquel, he would not see a man, but a vile error, and he would expunge it.
Five-thirty arrived and Carrasquel did not appear. Birds twittered in the crown of the ceiba tree, and a cart passed on the street beyond the wall, its wheels racketing. The colonel stationed himself just inside the door, afire with frustration. At first he blamed the quality of his information. Perhaps Doctor Lens had misled him as to the regularity of Carrasquel’s entrances and exits. He admonished himself for not having brought his own investigation to bear. Then he realized that Susan and her lover might be so wholeheartedly engaged, they had lost track of time. He was tempted to creep up the stairs to Susan’s chambers and burst in upon them, but decided he did not want to catch them at their passion. His imagination required no support in picturing their involvement. The original plan was best. He would wait.
The sun climbed higher, and the sapling palm was suffused in warm yellow light, seeming emblematic in its glowing solitude, as if it foreshadowed a holy imminence and were itself a point above which the Virgin might momentarily appear to tender sweet cautions to the world, or even Christ himself manifest in all his bloody glory, his wounds still yielding crimson droplets that fell upon the ground to fertilize with sacred life the tree where he had come to teach some material perfection. This sight and his interpretation of it reinvigorated the colonel’s less-than-holy purpose and restored to him the force of emotion he had experienced upon learning of his wife’s infidelity. His frustration swelled into a petulant fury that in turn elevated him to a reach from which he believed he could distinguish the entire field of possibility, and from that height he could find no impediment to his craving for vengeance. No, not vengeance, he thought. Balance. That was what he most craved. An evening out of things, the employment of counterweights to preserve a workable if not desirable level of engagement. He studied the Colt in his hand, perceiving it to be the instrument of unqualified conviction. Its cold weight satisfied. The slotted shells, silent yet about to speak. He firmed his grip, caressed the trigger with the ball of his forefinger, and grew calm.
At four minutes past six by the colonel’s watch, he heard the voices of a man and a woman issuing from above, pitched low and urgent. Then the closing of a window and muted noises of exertion, a foot scraping against the wall. Steeling himself, the colonel stepped out into the light of day. Carrasquel, wearing a striped dress shirt and coffee-colored slacks, tie and jacket draped over one arm, was suspended six feet above and to the left, clutching the vines that straggled across the yellow stucco wall. When he saw the colonel he froze like a lizard on a twig, his features aghast.
“Come down,” said the colonel, backing away so as to prevent Carrasquel from leaping on him. He had, during the days preceding, prepared several versions of a speech, a recitation testifying to his disgust with the lovers and presenting his views on the finality of death. But seeing Carrasquel knocked all that from his mind. His brain seemed to have become a solid block of implacable hatred. “Come down” was all he could muster.
Once on the ground, his tie and jacket abandoned, Carrasquel said, “Colonel, listen to me,” and held his hands palms up as though about to present a defense.
Colonel Rutherford put a finger to his lips and then pointed to Susan’s window. Carrasquel must have perceived this signal to offer some hopeful possibility, for he nodded vigorously in assent and made a placatory gesture—he wanted to cooperate, to get past this moment. The colonel gathered himself, drew in a breath of the fresh morning air, and with all his might he sho
uted: “Susaaaaan!” Birds started up from the ceiba. Scant seconds later the bedroom window was flung open, and Susan leaned forth, her black hair disheveled, holding a filmy robe shut at her breasts. It was apparent that for an instant she did not fully comprehend the situation, but then terror washed the confounded expression from her face and she cried, “Oh, God! Please . . . Hawes!”
Faint hope had been replaced by resignation in Carrasquel’s face. He looked up to the window, to Susan, and Colonel Rutherford thought he could actually make out the transit of emotion between them, a transparent tunnel created by their fused stares, along which a faint rippling, as of heat haze, was passing. They might not have known he was there. This disrespect, this fundamental neglect, so enraged the colonel, he pushed aside the doubts that had been nibbling at his determination. He aimed the Colt, locked his elbow, sighted, all with an easy fluidity and precision, and shot Luis Carrasquel in the head, and—as he pitched sideways, half-turning in his fall—in the side just below the pit of the arm.
Susan screamed her lover’s name, then screamed again, an inarticulate cry to heaven, and began to sob, to speak brokenly—whether outpourings of grief or hatred, the colonel could not tell. He refused to look at her. The shots had caused his heart to race, but it was slowing now. He felt considerably less satisfaction than he might have expected, but that did not dismay him—emotional satisfaction had not been his goal. He considered the body, the sprays and poolings of blood, making certain that the physical details had no substantial power over him. The second bullet had spun Carrasquel so that he had toppled onto his belly, with his face partly buried in the grass. The initial entry wound was obscured, but from his vantage the colonel saw that a sizeable portion of skull had been removed from the back of the man’s head. Gore clotted the hair surrounding the cavity. He had an annoying sense of the pulse in his neck and felt no little revulsion at the profusion of insect life already scurrying to welcome Carrasquel into the lower orders of the food chain. But nothing, in his view, that presaged the abnormal or the untoward.
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