Colonel Rutherford's Colt

by Lucius Shepard

  “You have no friends,” Aaron told him. “Only sycophants and servants and seekers after influence. I doubt they will expend any significant effort in your salvation.”

  Bewilderment once again surfaced in the colonel’s face, only to be replaced by a veneer of confidence. “Randy’s probably lining you up right this second,” he said. “He may not look like much, but he’s a hell of a marksman.”

  “Is he?” Aaron stood and slipped the Colt into his pocket. He stepped behind Colonel Rutherford’s chair and wrestled it around so the colonel could see the couch upon which his servant rested. “It seems his shooting eye is not what it once was.”

  The colonel took a moment to absorb the sight, then twisted his neck about so he could see Aaron’s face. “What do you want?” he asked in a tone markedly less demanding than that he had used to phrase the question originally.

  Aaron turned the colonel’s chair back toward the hearth. “As I said. I want you to explain your treatment of my cousin.”

  “If you’re talking about what she calls rape. . . .” The colonel bit the end off of his sentence; then, as Aaron went to stand beside the hearth, he went on. “I . . . I don’t think your cousin’s recollection of the incident is unclouded. She’s a very devout woman, and I believe she’s devised a false memory to shield her from the guilt she feels—quite unnecessarily, to my mind—at having had relations outside the matrimonial bed.”

  “I fail to see how an affair could inhibit memory.”

  “We were being passionate,” said the colonel. “Extremely passionate. She made a protest at one point, but then she consented. She gave me no reason to think she hadn’t been party to the act.”

  Aaron moved the ironwork screen aside and stirred the fire with a poker that been resting in a stand beside the hearth; he set a fresh log atop the newly blazing remains.

  “It’s the truth . . . I swear!” said the colonel.

  “And the threats?” asked Aaron, setting a second log in place. “Your restriction of her movements? These, too, are the result of a faulty memory?”

  “I was angry. Disappointed. My God, I was in love with her! I still am! I didn’t always act properly. I admit it. People are never at their best when they’re in love . . . especially when the relationship is in trouble.”

  “In her letters to me, my cousin describes a life of unrelenting oppression, a husband whose insensitivity is tempered only by cruelty. Now you wish me to believe that this was all an act of the imagination? Give me some credit, sir. I’m not one of the hounds milling about your supper table, ready to pounce should a crumb fall their way. My cousin would not lie.”

  “Hold on!” said the colonel. “What do you mean, ‘husband’?”

  Aaron ignored him. The last words he had spoken had seeded him with doubt. He wondered now if everything Susan had related, and not merely the tale of her affections, could be a lie. No, it was impossible! She had been provoked to lie, steeped in the duplicitous substance of the marriage, her virtues eroded by the acids of the colonel’s malignancy.

  “Tell me about Carrasquel,” Aaron said. “I would like to hear your justification of the act.”

  Dazedly, the colonel said, “What are you talking about?”

  “Am I to understand you are denying knowledge of my cousin’s lover? His murder?”

  The colonel’s manner became infected with hysteria. “What are you talking about? What in the hell is wrong with you?”

  A ringing issued from another quarter of the house; the colonel glanced sharply in the direction of the sound.

  “That’ll be my friends,” he said. “Probably calling to say they’re on their way.”

  “In that case,” Aaron said, aiming the Colt, “it might be best to conclude our interview.”

  “Wait,” said the colonel. “No one’s coming.”

  The ringing stopped.

  “Yes,” said Aaron. “But whoever called might worry that you have been injured. They might investigate.” He picked up strips of lamp cord from the floor beside his chair. “I really should go.”

  “Listen!” said the colonel in a tone that must have quailed the women of his house. “This stuff about a lover . . . a murder. If she told you I was involved with that, with anything of the sort, it’s just not true!”

  “I’m going to tie your feet now,” said Aaron. “If you thrash about or try to kick me, I will shoot you. Do you understand?”

  The colonel’s stare was an article of mystification. “What’s going on? What’s wrong with you? This is not . . .”

  “I can shoot you now,” said Aaron. “If you don’t understand.”

  The colonel said, “I understand.”

  As Aaron bound the colonel’s feet, he experienced a thrill of fear connected neither to the violence he was about to perpetrate, nor to any comprehensible antecedent. It seemed rather that fear itself had decided to lend a hand and was leaning in over his shoulder, a phantom mimicking his form, his movements, reminding him that he was soon to enter a sphere where many before him had traveled and few had thrived. He tucked the loose ends of the cords beneath the loops lashing the colonel’s ankles and went back toward the hearth where flames were now snapping and leaping high. Seams of sap glowed molten on the fresh logs.

  “Will you listen?” The colonel leaned toward Aaron, a picture of foolish entreaty, eyes wide, lips puffing. “You need to listen to me. You’re making a mistake!”

  “It was Susan who made the mistake.” Aaron gave the fire another poke. “I am merely correcting it.”

  “Susan? Who’s Susan?” Then the colonel shouted it: “Who in God’s name is Susan?”

  “Spare yourself, Colonel,” Aaron said. “This is not a workable stratagem.”

  After a pause the colonel said, “Who do you think I am?”

  Aaron continued to poke at the fire. The heat from the hearth stung his face, yet his bones were cored with ice. The bed of embers brightened and faded, drawing his eye with a hypnotic rhythm.

  “It’s major,” said the colonel. “Major. Raymond. Borchard. That’s who I am. My name. Who do you think I am?”

  “How modest of you to give yourself a demotion! I wouldn’t have expected such self-effacement.” He turned to the colonel. “Who do I think you are? I think you’re a monster of the most ordinary, yet the most dangerous variety. One incapable of perceiving his own monstrous nature.”

  “Try to listen to me. All right? Try to understand me.” The colonel edged forward in his chair and spoke with extreme deliberation. “Something’s wrong with you. The way you’re talking, these names . . . You’re not responding to what I’m saying! You may be having some kind of episode!”

  Aaron laughed. “My cousin is a liar, and I’m . . . What? Deluded? Demented? These are tactics unworthy of an Academy graduate.”

  “I didn’t attend the academy!” said the colonel excitedly. “I was at the Citadel! Don’t you see? I’m not who you think!”

  “You know nothing of Susan? Nothing of her family, the Lisles of Buckingham? Of Aaron, her cousin?”

  “No,” said the colonel dully; then, louder: “No!”

  “Yet earlier tonight, you recognized me, did you not?”

  If the colonel’s hands had been free, Aaron thought, he would have clapped them to his head in frustration, unable to counter this argument. He threw himself about in the chair, grunting and fuming. “You’re fucking out of your mind!” he said.

  A voice, not the colonel’s, though it was saying much the same thing, commanded Aaron’s attention. It seemed to be issuing from within him, perhaps the voice of conscience or that of a wise shadow prompting him from the wings of consciousness, urging him to break from the character of this little drama and recognize the wrongness of his part. The voice, or rather its owner, pressed forward, and Aaron felt a winnowing, an imminent dissolution that threatened to wash him away. He heard himself say, “I just want you to leave her alone,” speaking in a yokel accent that was altogether different from
his usual cultivated tone.

  “I will!” the colonel said eagerly. “I swear before God, I will leave her alone!”

  “How the hell I’m gonna trust you?” asked the voice. “You can’t give me no guarantees I can trust.”

  “I can sign something. Write whatever guarantee will satisfy you. I’ll sign it!”

  “That ain’t gonna do it. You’ll just tell your cop friends you signed under duress.” After an interval, the voice said, “You got a camera?”

  The colonel, somewhat less eagerly, said, “Yes, I have a digital camera. In my study. Next to the computer.” A pause. “Why . . . what do you want it for?”

  “I think I might got a way to keep you under control.”

  The world had become confused, a shadowy film blending lights and darks into a muddy constituency of unfamiliar objects. It seemed Aaron was dwindling, falling away inside the vastness of his own soul. With a mighty effort, he pushed against the presence that against all logic had invaded him. Less a push than an effort of will, of denial. After a brief struggle, the voice receded, reduced to a whisper, and the world was sharp again. He felt weak, tremulous, as though he had only just shaken off a delirium, but the sight of the fire lashing upward from the ember-coated logs served to steady him.

  “Why do you want it?” the colonel repeated.

  “I don’t.” Aaron left the thought unfinished, still not quite certain of himself.

  “Look, I don’t know what you’ve got in mind. Whatever it is, I’m willing to listen. I’ll go along . . .”

  For no other reason than he wanted to stop the colonel from questioning him, Aaron hooked a log with the poker and dragged it out onto the floorboards. Blue flames danced up from the varnish.

  “What are you doing?” The colonel stared at the log with horrified amazement, as though its presence abrogated a sacred principle.

  “Stoking the fire,” said Aaron, comfortable now with what he had done. “I’m quite cold.”

  He hooked a second log out to join the first, then plucked a burning stick of kindling from the hearth and proceeded about the room, torching the curtains one by one, while the colonel pled and cursed and screamed. The patch of floor in front of him was starting to catch, and flames from the curtains were licking at the ceiling. Before long the room was illuminated by a kind of hellish daylight, and the several fires came to have a greedy, lip-smacking sound. With a tremendous effort, the colonel succeeded in wriggling out of the chair and worm-crawled across the slick boards. The cords prevented him from making much progress. Dollops of burning pitch dripped from the edges of the ceiling, and one of the throw rugs caught and went to blazes in a matter of seconds, a little magic circle of heat and light. Smoke accumulated in the corners. The colonel propped his chin up on the boards, peered at Aaron, who stood not far from the entryway, and, each sentence more agonized than the one preceding, said, “What do you want? I’ll do anything . . . anything you say. What do you want?”

  A sprig of mercy brought forth a leaf in the wasteland of Aaron’s emotions, but could not sustain growth amid the airlessness of the place. “Ask your questions of she who sent me. Ask them of Susan.”

  The colonel, with renewed desperation, wormed a few inches forward, then looked again to Aaron, words rushing out of him. “I’ll tell you about Susan . . . everything I did to her. Just get me out!”

  “You admit your guilt?”

  Hesitantly, the colonel said, “Yes . . . yes! I’ll tell you everything.”

  “Tell me quickly,” said Aaron. “The fire is spreading.”

  Hope abandoned the colonel, and the residue of his strength dissolved. “Shoot me!” he implored. With his pleading eyes, his droopy mustaches, his checkered costume, he looked pitiable and clownish, an absurd figure trapped on stage during the first and final performance of an apocalyptic opera whose merry, crackling music was starting to out-voice its tenor’s lament. Fringes of flame ate pitch from the seams of the boards above him; two leather chairs nearby began to smolder. He wriggled forward a few inches more. “For God’s sake, shoot me! Don’t leave me like this!”

  As Aaron opened the door, the colonel spoke the last words he would utter to any worldly authority. “Come back!” he cried. “Christ! Come back!”

  Aaron hurried down the path, not daring to stop and admire his handiwork, not wanting to stop. Every step he took, every impression of the dark watchful forest, every breath of cold, damp air, seemed each a more profound confirmation of the parasite that had attached itself to him, the black crablike creature-form of murder riding between his shoulders, infesting him, seeping into his flesh, until at length its every particle would converge inside his chest, there to counterfeit a heart. But as the fire came to roar at his back, to brighten the path ahead, he could not resist turning to watch the union of flames shape itself into a red-gold glove pointing skyward, exploding up from the enormous skull of pitch and logs it was consuming, as if to direct his attention to or announce his infamy to God. Embers showered upward from the conflagration, scattering onto the ground and among the boughs. The configurations of doors and windows showed demon black within garlands of yellow fire, and other structural features, too, seeming mystical in their design, were darkly visible within the blaze. This was the sight Susan had envisioned at her mad window, the vision she had employed him to create, yet he derived no joy from having pleased her. Sickness assailed him. Heart-sickness. His spirit tottered and lost balance on its platform of bone. He wandered off the path and sat upon one of the boulders that sprang from the moist, wormy earth, and without a thought of self-destruction, acting as if by reflex or upon instruction from some infinitely subtle source, he drew Colonel Rutherford’s Colt and placed the barrel to his temple. One twitch, and the infirm essence that demanded immortality would be whisked away. It was unreal, the whole of it. The entire process a fabrication, every life a flimsy buttress of fear and violence contrived to shore up the rickety conventions of an insane narrative. No story truly ended. They were merely done with, slaughtered, left with broken necks and severed spines, starved, beaten, impaled, strangled, poisoned, eviscerated, axed, made ill, denied by justice, gutshot, blown up, drowned, and burned alive . . . eventualities which no reader mourned. Though it was plausible, he supposed, that such a story might be the product of a cosmic exercise in self-absorption, that it might have an author, a constellate figure whose mythic purpose it was to entertain an audience of one, a woman fashioned of stars and darkness, alone and unhappy in another quadrant of their lover’s sky . . .

  For reasons no more material than those that had moved him to suicide, though perhaps his appreciation of a universal indifference had some motive force, Aaron slipped the Colt into his pocket and set out along the path. It was much colder than it had been, a dampness that penetrated to the soul. He hunched his shoulders, wrapped his arms about himself, his thoughts leaping high and crackling with the dumb immediacy of flame, walking briskly as if he had somewhere to go and little time to get there.

  * * *

  Rita found Dee at the end of the bar just as the band was calling it a night. They smooched, shared a dessert drink, smooched. Single men were wandering about, searching for their last chance; couples were leaving. The white stage lights brought up scars and scuffmarks from the empty dance floor. The jukebox was on, but low. It was forty minutes to last call, and people were crowding the bar, trying to get drunk enough to drive. When Rita asked how it had gone with Janine, Dee made a woeful face. “I don’t know. Maggie drove her home. I did the best I could for her.”

  “Well, if I’m a judge,” said Rita with a grin, “that means she’s probably feeling pretty good about now.”

  Dee blushed and spanked her on the arm. “Talking to Janine about anything serious, even when she’s straight, she always makes it into a sarcastic game. She was going like . . .” Dee struck a pose and in an affected voice, said, “ ‘Like I totally understand. You’re attracted to her.’ ” She gave a dismissive gesture. “Aft
er a while I just said, ‘Fuck!’ She’ll probably call me tomorrow.”

  A bouncer pushed up to the bar beside them and spoke urgently to a chunky barmaid with dyed-black hair, grape lipstick, and a pierced nose. The barmaid reacted with a concerned look. Once the bouncer had left, Rita snared the barmaid’s attention and asked what was wrong.

  “Biker cut some guy in the parking lot,” the barmaid said. “Gainer’s useta be a biker hang-out, and they hate the way the place is now. They come around all the time. I suppose they got nothing better to do than hassle people.”

  “It’s a way of life for some,” said Rita.

  The barmaid turned liquor service professional. “Can I get you ladies anything else?”

  “Maybe couple shots.” Rita looked to Dee, and then, together, they said brightly, “Tequila!”

  “Two shots?” the barmaid asked.

  “Better bring six,” said Rita.

  The barmaid pursed her lips. “You ladies driving?”

  “I got a ride supposed to be coming,” Rita told her. “He don’t make it, we’ll call a cab.”

  Dee acted disappointed. “You have a ride?”

  “This friend of mine was gonna party with me tonight, but he had to finish a story. He might come by late to give me a ride home. I’m at a motel in Issaquah.”

  “He’s a screenwriter?”

  “Just stories.”

  Two guys in their thirties, salesmen maybe, with yuppie haircuts and mustaches, tried to move in, hemming them in against the bar, one saying, “I’m afraid of the dark—one of you ladies help me find my Ferrari?”, and the other saying, “I told him to say that,” and laughing, like it was a joke, like they’d been having a lame-line contest. Rita told them a ten-second story about the future and they left. Dee laid her head against Rita’s, drew a kiss from the corner of her lips. “I want you to teach me everything,” she said huskily.