“Guess what that makes me in the real world,” I said.
Rain and guns. I think it must’ve been raining when the first gun was drawn hot from its tempering fire, because when it comes rain, I get an itch to handle a gun if I’ve got one. Which is a roundabout way of saying it rained and Rickey went for food, Leeli hunkered beside me on the bed fixing her nails, while I sat turning Ava’s Colt in my hands, picking at the plaque on the grip, rubbing a little raised, rough patch alongside the chamber, thinking gun thoughts, testing its heft and balance, knowing that if I was really pretty smart I would walk down to the water’s edge and toss it on in. Having a gun was not in my best interests. Without one, if I was at a beach party, let’s say, and some worthless drunken individual tipped over my beer and said diddley dog about it, the worst could happen was busted knuckles and a hospital trip—but I had a gun, God knows, that beer might seem like the very selfsame beer for which the Founding Fathers sacrificed their lives, and I’d be called upon to uphold its sacred honor.
It was an uncommon hard and lasting rain. A drizzle started about ten o’clock and five minutes later it was like a billion hailstones were bouncing off the roof, filling the house with a roar. A weird slivery darkness ensued. The cloud bellies passing over us were black as Satan’s boot soles and the wind flattened the marsh grasses with a constant rush. The rain slacked off many times during the day, a couple of times it stopped altogether and the land yielded up a sodden, animal smell; but it kept returning in strength. Rickey drove off to buy food. Carl and Squire sat on the porch playing a hand-held game of some kind. Leeli got a little closer to her new best friend, Mr. Dilaudid, and fell asleep. I wedged the Colt in my waist and paid a visit to Ava.
Her door was open a foot and I stuck my head in without knocking. She was standing at the window, stark naked, arms folded beneath her breasts and hair loose about her shoulders, gazing out at the rain. She must have felt me there, because she turned her head and delivered me a flat, unsurprised stare. What do you want? she asked.
“A few words would be good.”
“I guess it’s inevitable.”
“I’ll wait out here while you throw something on.”
“No need. We’re like family now.”
Ava went back to watching the weather and I let my eyes out for a run. Though her face was hagging out, her body belonged to a woman in her prime. She wanted to give me a show, it didn’t bother me none. The door proved to be stuck open. I eased in and perched on a straight chair set next to a dresser with its drawers stove-in. Her room was shabbier than ours. Rat turds speckled the boards along the molding and spiderwebs spanned the corners. The bed was so swaybacked, some of the springs were flush to the floor.
“I sneaked a look at your photograph album last night,” I said.
“Oh? What did you think?”
“I think you’re damn sexy for a woman’s gotta be in her fifties.”
“Sixty-one,” she said. “I’m sixty-one.”
“Okay. A woman in her sixties. And Carl, how old is he?”
“Carl.” Her smile had a fond quality. “Carl’s ageless.”
“Squire, too. He ageless?”
“In a way.”
She crossed to the bed with a three-step stroll and laid herself out, back against the headboard, arms spread on the pillows. Her pubic hair was trimmed to a neat strip and she had a long waist to go with her trophy chest. She reminded me of this naked woman in a painting one of my high school teachers had prattled on about, some rich horny bitch from another century lying on a couch and looking at you with a similar scornful, seductive attitude.
“If you want to come over here with me, it’s all right,” she said.
“I’m fine where I am.”
“Leeli won’t mind, that’s what’s worrying you.”
“You don’t know nothing about that, believe me.”
She shrugged, smiled.
“Why would you even want me to come over there?” I asked. “We ain’t got nothing going on.”
“I like sex.”
“So do I, but…”
“Oh I see! You have to like the girl first. You require an emotional attachment.”
I didn’t care for her mocking me and I was tempted to fuck her knock-kneed, but that would have been playing with her deck. “I don’t have to like her all that much,” I said. “Helps if I like her some, though.”
Her smile cut itself a wider curve. “You don’t like me a tiny bit?”
“I ain’t even sure what the fuck you are. Whyn’t you clear that up for me?”
The rain came harder, spitting through the window screen, drops darkening a wedge of floor beneath it. Some giant’s stomach grumbled and the light dimmed.
“You gonna shoot me if I don’t tell you?”
“That wasn’t my intention.”
“No? Yet you come in here with my gun on display.”
“Just making a point.”
“The point being, you might be prepared to shoot me.”
“You want me to shoot you? You keep pissing me off, maybe I will. Don’t seem like it would affect you that much, anyway. Or is it just the boys who’s good at taking bullets?”
This was the first real conversation I’d had with Ava. I’d seen that on the outside she was a cool, collected sort. Now I was coming to think coolness ran deep in her, that instead of a heart, a little refrigeration unit was humming in her chest, pumping out frosty air. She seemed like a lotta women I’d known who’d survived bar fights that passed for marriages. Women who felt you couldn’t do nothing more to them than had been done already. Yet I didn’t accept that picture of her. She was too steady, too unconcerned. I had a notion that her steadiness came from a perception of my weaknesses. Like she was X-raying me, reading all my flaws.
“You’d like me to tell you a story,” she said. “Is that it?”
“A true story. I don’t want no fairy tales.”
“All right.”
She proceeded to whip one off about how she and Carl had been dating back in the 60s while she was in high school and he was in college, and they had gone down to State Road 44 to look at the flying saucers and have sex, and a saucer had abducted them, worked some weird change on them both, and set them back on earth for God knows what purpose, maybe just as test subjects, and they were prodded this way and that by alien agencies—powerful ones that penetrated every layer of society, even the FBI—and they were always being put in strange situations, and this was why they had been at the house in the dunes when Leeli and I showed up.
I was about to ask if Squire was an alien agent, one who was doing the prodding, when she launched into a second story, saying Carl and Squire had been hybrid clone babies, grown from human eggs and alien juice extracted from a dead UFO pilot, and she’d been in charge of them when the government decided the experiment wasn’t producing any valuable result and decided to kill the two boys, so Ava, with the help of highly placed friends, had run off with them, and they’d been pursued for a time, but then the government changed their minds and thought the thing to do was let the boys run, acquire life experiences, and see if they developed into a crop worth harvesting. They lived in constant fear of judgment, she said. Never knowing if the government would change their minds again. She was worried that Carl shooting the HoJo’s manager might be the last straw and the government would send their killers.
I wondered if she could’ve tapped into my thoughts of the night before and devised these stories to suit my tabloid fantasies. “Why’d you tell two stories?” I asked. “You told me just the one, I might’ve believed it.”
“You’re not a believer,” Ava said. “You’re a doubter. Don’t matter what I say, you’re gonna pick at it.”