A fat piece of rage flew into her chest suddenly. Was he threatening her, was this fucker threatening her in her own house after she had dragged him in, that piece of shit? She let the rage hang there between them for a minute. Finally she said, Well, just so you know, mister, you can’t stay here, okay, you can’t fucking stay here. She was out of breath, winded. She could see the phone and she tried to think who she could call if this joker tried to play the fool. She’d rented the house from an older lesbian couple who were psychiatrists and who lived two houses down with their adopted son Ron, who they said had Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, but that term, she’d come to learn, was just a euphemism for crabby and rude and antisocial behavior. She could call them. Or, if she screamed, there was George the electrician across the street, she’d met him just yesterday, and there was the woman to her right whose dog was always shitting in her yard; there was the old geezer on the other side who leered at all the young women who passed his porch. Chuck. But even if she screamed, who would hear her with all this rain battering down?
Help me, he whimpered like a half-dead dog, help me clean this up, please. He was losing massive amounts of blood, she could see that now, and his face looked scared and at the same time slightly suprised. His full lips were loose and leaking.
She could just let him bleed to death, she was thinking. But she was not that kind of person. She didn’t think she could do that. Here, she said, dropping some pills into his hand that shook mightily and giving him a glass of juice. He swallowed them quickly, his Adam’s apple sliding up and down. Then she set to work, boiling water on the gas stove, helping him out of his shirt that smelled like shit and sulphite, hauling him over to the sink where she proceeded to extract the bullet with her assortment of instruments, and to bathe and dress and bandage the wound. She was good at this; she’d been an emergency room nurse until a few years ago. She was gentle and patient, as she tended to be with all things maimed. The whimpering soon subsided. She could see he was impressed, but more than that, relieved. Perhaps even grateful. He could have bled to death or the wound could’ve turned septic. It took a good thirty minutes, and during that time she felt his eyes moving up and down her chest-she was stacked-and around her neck and arms which were strong and scented with ginger and musk oil.
Have you eaten? she asked him.
He nodded wearily. And she saw that he was not a bad-looking man, his face was bony and square, his eyes big and long-lashed, and he wore his hair cut close and even to his head. The mustache made him look older than he probably was; she put him to be slightly past fifty. He was not a very big man; she could take him down, she decided, if it came to that, she was strong. Still, he was muscle-bound, as if he’d spent a lot of time in jail or at the gym. She did not think it was the latter. He wore a layer of defeat about him that reminded her of Russell.
You have family around here? she asked him. You married? She made her voice hard.
Twice, he said. Two kids. One at community college. The girl. You?
She shook her head and remembered that she was wearing her duster-and underneath that her pink gown-and she pulled the string tighter around her waist and pressed down her hair, which felt big and heavy suddenly. Did she have toothpaste on her face? Sometimes she used toothpaste to stop the swelling boils. Her fingers edged up toward her cheeks to check. She breathed in relief.
Divorced, she said when she saw that his eyes were still moving on her honey skin, and then she could’ve kicked herself. My boyfriend should be coming home about now, she added, and glanced at the clock on the wall, which had stopped at 7:19.
Got in with the wrong crowd, he said, as if he hadn’t heard that her man was coming home. And now they’re on my ass.
Coke. She said this softly. She didn’t even know why she said it. But he seemed like he’d do it big. He looked the kind who would want to impress.
He sighed without answering. Then: They think I have the money.
She nodded.
I ditched the car and then hoofed it. Fuckers shot me.
She didn’t look at him, she didn’t want to encourage him; she didn’t want details. Here was another boy playing at being a man. She knew that crowd. Did he even ask his wife about the cocaine, did he even say to her, Look, love, things piling up, I have this plan? Did he even allow her to talk him out of it? How about this, she might have said, instead? No, he had a scheme, some get-rich-quick scheme, some half-baked idea with a bunch of criminals. But everyone wants to be the hero. Russell too wanted to be a hero. She thought his mustache was ridiculous. He didn’t earn it.
She was exhausted. It was late. She had wiped up the blood from off the floor and the counter and disposed of the rags and the bullet. She was ready for him to go now so she could get back to her life. Except he didn’t look like someone ready to move. She grabbed two glasses from the cabinet and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. She poured him a finger, which he sucked down at once; she poured him another and one for herself, which she sipped slowly there at the kitchen table, the rain coming down outside, the flickering candles between them, the light low and soft on their drugged and morbid faces, their shadows skittering off the walls.
She missed Fred something furious; she had not missed him all this time-but tonight suddenly she wanted his taste on her tongue, his long dark neck, his beautiful mouth with the lips shaped like a heart, his breath jagged and harsh. She imagined him picking up the phone, his surprise at first, which he would immediately cover up by hardening his voice. Then it would be like pulling teeth trying to get anything out of him, anything warm. It was close to 12:30, by this time he’d be asleep or perhaps reading still and sipping the glass of port he took at night before bed, his feet covered in socks no matter how warm the night; it helped him sleep, he said. And what would she tell him? She’d let a white man into her house. A man who could kill her. A man she did not know from Adam.
She found another candle, lit it, and gave it to him.
The bathroom is upstairs to the left, she said, you’ll find towels too, and soap.
She turned away from his eyes like coals in the night, and busied herself in the kitchen as he trailed away with the light and started heavily up the stairs. She heard the door close, heard him tinkling, heard the toilet flush, and now the tub was filling with water.
She had to call somebody, needed to call somebody. But when she picked up the phone and put it to her ear, she saw that it was dead and that the line was cut.
Motherfucker! she thundered up at him, the panic eating at her now. Where was her cell, where the fuck was her cell? She scrambled around in the dark, knocking over bottles, crashing into bins; a glass fell on the floor and shattered. Jesus Christ! The terror was at her throat. She couldn’t find her purse. She couldn’t find her keys. She couldn’t find anything at all. She turned Jack Daniel’s to her head, gulped down a mouthful, and when that didn’t produce the desired result, she swiftly swallowed several more. Fred’s favorite sermon was about evil. You had to defeat it, he said. You can never let the seeds of it flourish. It is like cancer, he liked to tell the crowd, the worst, most virulent form, it spreads like wild fire. And when she’d tried to follow his reasoning about what this evil was, it was always the unknown, it was the surprise, and it was the challenge, the unpredictability. He was a careful man, that Fred. She’d left because of her faith, or maybe her lack of it. She didn’t have conviction. She didn’t have belief. She didn’t have strong boundaries against evil, and how could she when she was always so curious about the unknown?