“He did?”
“He did,” she said. “Baby, she’s not going to die from that.”
“Maybe. She’s old.”
“She’s old, yeah. The fall from the bed was worse.”
“We shot an old lady.”
“We didn’t shoot her.”
“In the ass.”
“We didn’t shoot anyone. He had the gun.”
“That’s how it’ll play, though. You know that. An old lady. Christ.”
Gwen’s eyes the size of that diamond as she looked at you and then she said, “Ooof.”
“Don’t start,” you said.
“I can’t help it. Bobby, Jesus.”
She said your name. That’s your name — Bobby. You loved hearing her say it.
Sirens coming up the road behind you now and you’re looking at her and thinking this isn’t funny, it isn’t, it’s fucking sad, that poor old lady, and thinking, Okay, it’s sad, but God, Gwen, I will never, ever live without you. I just can’t imagine it anymore. I want to… What?
And the wind is pouring into the car, and the sirens are growing louder and there are several of them, an army of them, and Gwen’s face is an inch from yours, her hair falling from behind her ear and whipping across her mouth, and she’s looking at you, she’s seeing you — really seeing you; nobody’d ever done that; nobody — tuned to you like a radio tower out on the edge of the unbroken fields of wheat, blinking red under a dark blue sky, and that night breeze lifting your bangs was her, for Christ’s sake, her, and she’s laughing, her hair in her teeth, laughing because the old lady had fallen out of bed and it isn’t funny, it isn’t and you’d said the first part in your head, the “I want to” part, but you say the second part aloud:
“Dissolve into you.”
And Gentleman Pete, up there at the wheel, on this dark country road, says, “What?”
But Gwen says, “I know, baby. I know.” And her voice breaks around the words, breaks in the middle of her laughter and her fear and her guilt and she takes your face in her hands as Pete drives up on the interstate and you see all those siren lights washing across the back window like Fourth of July ice cream and then the window comes down like yanked netting and chucks glass pebbles into your shirt and you feel something in your head go all shifty and loose and hot as a cigarette coal.
The fairground is empty and you and your father walk around for a bit. The tarps over some of the booths have come undone at the corners, and they rustle and flap, caught between the wind and the wood, and your father watches you, waiting for you to remember, and you say, “It’s coming back to me. A little.”
Your father says, “Yeah?”
You hold up your hand, tip it from side to side.
Out behind the cages where, in summer, they set up the dunking machine and the bearded lady’s chair and the fast-pitch machines, you see a fresh square of dirt, recently tilled, and you stand over it until your old man stops beside you and you say, “Mandy?”
The old man chuckles softly, scuffs at the dirt with his shoe, looks off at the horizon.
“I held it in my hand, you know,” you say.
“I’d figure,” the old man says.
It’s quiet, the land flat and metal-blue and empty for miles in every direction, and you can hear the rustle of the tarps and nothing else, and you know that the old man has brought you here to kill you. Picked you up from prison to kill you. Brought you into the world, probably, so eventually he could kill you.
“Covered the center of my palm.”
“Big, huh?”
“Big enough.”
“Running out of patience, boy,” your father says.
You nod. “I’d guess you would be.”
“Never my strong suit.”
“No.”
“This has been nice,” your father says and sniffs the air. “Like old times, reconnecting and shit.”
“I told her that night to just go, just get, just put as much country as she could between you and her until I got out. I told her to trust no one. I told her you’d stay hot on her trail even when all logic said you’d quit. I told her even if I told you I had it, you’d have to cover your bets — you’d have to come looking for her.”
Your father looks at his watch, looks off at the sky again.
“I told her if you ever caught up to her to take you to the fairgrounds.”
“Who’s this we’re talking about?”
“Gwen.” Saying her name to the air, to the flapping tarps, to the cold.
“You don’t say.” Your father’s gun comes out now. He taps it against his outer knee.
“Told her to tell you that’s all she knew. I’d hid it here. Somewhere here.”
“Lotta ground.”
You nod.
Your father turns so you are facing, his hands crossed over his groin, the gun there, waiting.
“The kinda money that stone’ll bring,” your father says, “a man could retire.”
“To what?” you say.
“Mexico.”
“To what, though?” you say. “Mean old man like you? What else you got, you ain’t stealing something, killing somebody, making sure no one alive has a good fucking day?”
The old man shrugs, and you watch his brain go to work, something bugging him finally, something he hasn’t considered until now.
“It just come to me,” he says, his eyes narrowing as they focus on yours.
“What’s that?”
“You’ve known for, what, three years now that Gwen is no more?”
“Dead.”
“If you like,” your father says. “Dead.”
“Yeah.”
“Three years,” your father says. “Lotta time to think.”
You nod.
“Plan.”
You give him another nod.
Your father looks down at the gun in his hand. “This going to fire?”
You shake your head.
Your father says, “It’s loaded. I can feel the mag weight.”
“Jack the slide,” you say.
He gives it a few seconds, then tries. He yanks back hard, bending over a bit, but nothing. The slide is stone.
“Krazy Glue,” you say. “Filled the barrel too.”
You pull your hand from your pocket, open up the knife. You’re very talented with a knife. Your father knows this. He’s seen you win money this way, throwing knives at targets, dancing blades between your fingers in a blur.
You say, “Wherever you buried her, you’re digging her out.”
The old man nods. “I got a shovel in the trunk.”
You shake your head. “With your hands.”
Dawn is coming up, the sky bronzed with it along the lower reaches, when you let the old man use the shovel. His nails are gone, blood crusted black all over the older cuts, red seeping out of the newer ones. The old man broke down crying once. Another time, he got mean, told you you aren’t his anyway, some whore’s kid he found in a barrel, decided might come in useful on a missing-baby scam they were running back then.
You say, “Was this in Las Vegas? Or Idaho?”
When the shovel hits bone, you say, “Toss it back up here,” and step back as the old man throws the shovel out of the grave.
The sun is up now and you watch the old man claw away the dirt for a while and then there she is, all black and rotted, bones exposed in some places, her rib cage reminding you of the scales of a large fish you saw dead on a beach once in Oregon.
The old man says, “Now, what?” and tears flee his eyes and drip off his chin.
“What’d you do with her clothes?”
“Burned ’em.”
“I mean, why’d you take ’em off in the first place?”
The old man looks back at the bones, says nothing.
“Look closer,” you say. “Where her stomach used to be.”
The old man squats, peering, and you pick up the shovel.
Until Gwen, you had no idea who you were. None. During Gwen, you knew. After Gwen, you’re back to wondering.