“Plus we’ve got cable,” Louisa pointed out, her voice warbling with glee.
BUT THE IDEA that I had, through oversimplification, misunderstood the situation out there on the gulag (like: who was paying the mortgage anyway?) occurred to me one day when I saw my mother stepping out of the house with my father’s Browning. She held the gun with both hands while she carried the box of cartridges by clenching the open box-flap between her teeth. When I asked what she was doing, she grunted, “Mmhm mhmm mmmh,” until I took the bullets from her mouth.
“I want you to show me how to load this,” she said, and then of course I’m dumb enough to ask her why.
“I want you to show me how to load this so I can fire it,” she snapped. “Really. Must we proceed with these inane questions?”
My mother may be short and squat, a victim of too many shortbreads with her tea, but she’s still not a woman you want to go up against when she’s got a bee in her bonnet and a gun in her hands. So I drew back the bolt and showed her how the bullets fed into the barrel. Then I tried to show her how to brace the butt against her shoulder but at this point my mother strong-armed me away.
“I’ve got it. All right. Enough!”
She marched across the field to one of Mister Chester’s jumps, a couple of logs that I had stacked. Along the way, she collected some Snapple jars from the piles of trash, jars that she lined up on the top log of the jump. She was wearing her rubber barn boots and a pleated skirt that stuck out from underneath her raincoat. When she raised the Browning I could see the ripples where her pantyhose sagged on the backs of her knees.
Boom! Her first shot knocked her over, and she went down like a tree, her knees locked so that when she landed, still clutching the rifle, the barrel pointed straight up from a clump of poppies.
“I won’t have you mocking me,” she yelled from that nest of orange flowers, from which she wouldn’t rise until Mister Chester and I had ridden off. “Be gone, the both of you! Both you and that wretched hack.”
Being the kind of animal who thrived on chaos in its sonic form, Mister Chester never flinched no matter how the branches rattled from her shots. And somehow it was thrilling, if you want to know the truth — to be the last remnant of a dying outpost while the enemy encroaches on all sides. In no time I started feeling like a member of the Polish cavalry riding toward the German tanks, the little cones raining down from the hemlocks to be crunched by Mister Chester’s feet. With my recent attentions, his nut-brown coat had once again begun to shine the way it did when we were both kids, and when he galloped across the pasture he lifted his legs like a showgirl, like the sky was a camera and the sun was its bulb, flashing whenever a cloud sailed past.
And by the time we got back, I had to hand it to my mother: more often than not, she was hitting her marks. If the jar didn’t shatter, she’d cry, “Bloody hell!” then fire again. I could hear her muttering like a chipmunk as I put up Mister Chester in the barn. Every time a bottle bit the dust, she went: “Hah!”
Inside the house, lost in MTV-land, Louisa was watching a guy prance around in a black leather contraption that exposed his buttocks whenever he turned his back to us.
“Bad manners,” she said, wagging a finger at the screen.
“I think bad manners is the point.”
Though the guy’s bare ass was working its magic, still Louisa couldn’t keep her attention from eventually turning to the outside world.
“What’s Mummy doing? It’s time for Oprah,” she said as she peered out the living room’s picture window, twisting herself into the drapes. When she turned around again, the video had changed to a troop of large-breasted women, very energetically dancing.
“What happened to the guy with the butt?” she asked suspiciously — like I had somehow deliberately made him vanish.
IT TOOK ME a few days to figure out what she was up to, my mother, when I started coming home from mornings with the narcos and the two of them were gone. Well after sunset they got in, with half-ravaged cartons of take-out food and Louisa giddy, I could tell, from the adrenaline rush of some new unfamiliar form of guilt. My mother wore the collar of her raincoat turned up like a spy, and she even had on — I swear — dark glasses. Except that these glasses had rhinestones at the hinge.
When I asked where the two of them had been, Mum reported from somewhere high up in her sinuses that she was under the impression that one of the benefits of getting old was that you did not have to give a continuous accounting of your whereabouts.
“At least that’s how it was explained to me by your father,” she added, though this cynicism sailed right over Louisa’s head.
“We got Chinese food,” my sister said, holding up the crinkly sacks. “It’s your favorite: pig and duck.”
That night, in the car trunk, swaddled in an old pink blanket, I found the Browning and swapped it for an alder limb of about the same configuration. I could picture my mother cruising by the pulp mill until her path intersects my father’s just as he gets off from work. Then Mum leaps out of the car, muttering something about being stuck out on the gulag with an addled child and a junkie, before she discovers that the Browning is now a stick and damns me to hell forever.
And this is part of what happens, or at least the middle act of it — the drama commences when my mother stops at a traffic light and realizes that she’s pulled up alongside who else but my father: right-hand lane, wearing his tweed porkpie hat, Carmen blasting so loud that she can see his windows flex. There’s too much traffic for her to stop and pop the trunk right then and there, so instead when the light turns green what she does is pull in behind him. And she rams him a couple of times, then tries to cut to his left to force him off the road, the only problem with this plan she’s making up as she goes being that her car’s a Hyundai while my father’s in his Lincoln. With a little evasive maneuvering he could leave her in the dust, but instead what he does is give her what she wants, in this case meaning that he does pull off, he even gets out of the car in his stupid hat like he’s offering himself to whatever punishment she wants to inflict. And my mother apparently takes some hope in that, that his willingness to let her kill him is his way of atoning for his sins, her gunshot his penance, his penance her forgiveness (& suddenly her plan changes — she will only graze him with a flesh wound), when in fact my father has stopped here only because he’s noticed something that my mother in her homicidal trance has not, which is that the parking lot belongs to a substation for the state police.
But in the narrow focus of her rage, the percentage of cars in the parking lot that are cruisers does not click, as Mum grabs what she thinks is the gun from her trunk and shakes the blanket and the limb comes rolling out. In the meantime my father has stepped into the substation and is now striding her way with three troopers in tow, among whom my mother is suddenly whirling like a ninja, swinging at my father’s head like it was a piñata full of shit, jabbing the limb like a bayonet every time she gets an open shot. She’s shrieking all the Anglo-Saxon that she knows, carrying on like a Pentecostal jabbering in tongues, sunglasses slantwise on her face so that one eye shows Picasso-like above and one below, both of them bugged from the pressure of all the steam inside her head, the cause of which is curiously not my father but the woman who sits in his Lincoln with the windows rolled and all the doors locked — the terrified counterpart to terrified Louisa, who similarly cowers in my mother’s car with her eyes shut and both hands over her ears.
Or at least this is my version, cobbled together from everyone else’s, starting with the troopers’ report. From the back seat of the Hyundai (this was after I called a cab out to the gulag so that, after throwing their bail, I could drive the felons home) my mother was not shy about painting me her own picture of events, the focal point of which being how she’d be damned if she was going to stand by and let her home be snatched from underneath her.