Barnes did reach down, turning the doctor’s cheeks up, and slap him powerfully, then shut his eyes in pity.
It worked.
Soon enough, Latouche was biped, straightening his tweedy suit back to its original loose rumple, pulling down his vest and replacing his watch chain across the front in the old style. His medical fraternity pin hung there, a small vanity. He was national president in the fifties, the decade of Coots’s first grand fame and obscenity trial. The French, who like their authors sick, fell on his book in droves. Coots stayed shyly and happily away, grogged in morpheus. It had taken him years and the help of friends, but the thing was out and he was going to make some money. Manslaughterer, junkie, thief, queer, layabout — the outer and under had won through. He was regent guru of the beatniks, like it or not.
“Little phase there. I seem to have left you. My cheek smarts. Did I fall?” Latouche wanted to know.
“A little,” said Riley Barnes quickly.
“Old men get tired. Don’t they, Coots? Are you sometimes just tired?”
“Yes indeed.”
“I think it’s martini time. Can almost taste it already, terribly cold, with big white onions. Would you, Riley? What’s your pleasure, Coots?”
“The same. Sounds perfect.”
“All right, then. Don’t want to try the stick?”
“No. Let’s sit in the booth and talk, guns maybe. Hard decisions about the forty-four/forty-five.”
Coots noticed Latouche did not have that detestable turkeyness under the throat that the old often do. Even in his thinness Coots had one gaining on him. A thing that the aging imp Capote attempted to cure by fellatio, he’d heard. They sat.
“Good. I have one. An eighteenth-century heavy handgun. Short piece, cap and ball, of course. Never shot.”
“Bring it on down to the range next Tuesday. We’ll rig it.”
The martinis came, with Barnes, who had a light beer, imported. A health man. How long was his dick? The drinks were sublime, just the ticket. Coots opened up even more. He was narrowing on the question of his own spite.
“I have the Billy the Kid gun,” he said.
“You don’t. There is no Billy the Kid gun.”
“But there is. I’ll show it to you. You must come down to my fort. Say Tuesday instead of the range.”
Barnes spoke up, delighted. “He’s known for not inviting many, Dr. Latouche. You should feel honored. This could be a legendary evening for us.”
Coots looked at the boy, who had become too chummy.
“How about just an old-timers’ chat, the two of us?” said Coots. “This is no rebuke, Barnes.”
“Sorry. Not at all. I go to the gym, anyway, when he goes shooting. I could be nearby, however.”
“Then it’s fixed. I’m feeling better all the time,” said Latouche. “Let me ask you something. Why did Billy the Kid kill so many?”
“¿Quien es?” chuckled Coots. These were the Kid’s last words before being gunned down by Pat Garrett. “I’m not sure. It was a sort of war, the Lincoln County thing. It wasn’t twenty-one, not nearly that. But I’d imagine it got in his blood, very early, when he was attacked by a bully with a knife. Rather like a drug addiction. I’ve studied killers. Now let me ask you: When you shoot, who are you shooting, mentally? What kind of enemies does a man like you have?”
The old doctor was surprised. “Well. . quite zero. It’s all mental, a sport.”
“Come now. You’re too good at it. Some emotion belongs, surely.”
“I’ve no enemies I know of.”
“Life has treated you nicely. No malpractice suit, say, totally unjust. The lawyers. You’ve known women. Some yapping gash that bilked you. Tell me too, that somewhere in the world of money there wasn’t. . And you were in the war, no?”
Coots hardly ever beseeched this much. Even when directly interviewed, for money, he’d not shown this zeal.
“Downrange there you must see some Nazi, some Commie, hippie, queer, black mugger, proponent of socialized medicine, or, really, man a—” Coots almost said cat, as a joke. He looked at Riley Barnes, intense and worshipful, vastly enjoying, and lucky. “Mengele, a Stalin, a Klansman.”
“Not at all. I’m afraid you’re making me sound like a man of no passion. What do you shoot, Coots?”
“Everything. Old age.”
This created high giggles in the other two. Poor men, was he that interesting to them? A scholar, a dreamer, and rather a drudge is what Coots thought he was. He yearned for the character of William Bonney.
“I suppose people who don’t hate don’t write,” said the doctor. “With surgery, I was rarely conscious of a person. Another thing entirely. Never have I felt the necessity, either, to interpret the universe. It was mainly just one piece of work, then another.”
“Then who would you rather have been, Latouche? Please think.”
“Umm. Well, actually. . Methuselah. I’m not ready to go. I’ve known hardly a day I’ve not truly enjoyed. Even the war, I was always up bright and early. Even, do not mistake me, the morning of my wives’ funerals. You’ve made me honest. Is that your function?”
“But, my man, you have. .” Coots reflected and checked on Riley Barnes, who was writing something down on a billfold tablet. “You have grofft. The only man in North America.”
Barnes flashed up, eyes sorrowful. He might want to strike Coots. When he masturbated, looking in the mirror, did he insert his finger in his anus to intensify it? Could he entice women into rim jobs? Many muscle men—vide your obsessive weightlifters in the big house — were “anally retentive,” thanks, Sigmund. And sex was a way of keeping, owning lovers, having them to play with in the bank vault later. As opposed to the looser lostness of the mere pussy, which invited death and servility. Barnes’s big stevedore’s hand was on Latouche’s wrist.
“Yes, I have it. But luckily, it seems, just a mild touch. I’ve not been on all fours yet. No barking. Riley watches me honestly.”
As with a thirty-year quart-a-day man he’d once met at the Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans: “I have no drinking problem, Coots.” Skin flaking off from the burst veiny patches of his face, yellow as a crayon, and his tongue black.
“Then Tuesday night at seven, Latouche.”
“Delighted. I’ll have Riley bring me around in my vintage Hudson. Now there’s an item you might like. Spotless. Forest green. Purrs like a”—Barnes harder on his wrist—“sewing machine.”
“The Hudson and Billy the Kid’s gun,” said Barnes in wonder. “A great American evening.”
A couple days later Coots flew to Kansas with his amanuensis, Horton. They planned to live there soon, and had already bought a small clapboard house with a picket fence and a porch in the university town. Coots hoped he might teach a class there, though there was some lack of enthusiasm from the older faculty, to whom he was a profane dope fiend and pederast who wrote gibberish. His secretary friend was attempting to broker him into a place. Coots could use the money. It was a sorry scandal that they would exclude him. In several apparent ways he was a conservative. He loved the plains of the Midwest and was fascinated by the Old West and its worthy guns. He knew Native American culture (Custer’s stuffed horse, Comanche, was in the university museum); had the notes for two large books wherein he would explore the West in space-time narratives and by way of his “cut-up” method — not montage, he insisted, but more: common threads of magic in random clippings from various sources, sometimes announced into his tape recorder and retranscribed. He’d not yet got all from cannabis that he intended, either. Coots was a hard worker, putting to shame the energies of the senior faculty, with their emeritus rose beds and sailing vacations.