“Be too drugged up then to remember.”
The .357 that drilled Betty’s chest belonged to Lafayette. He wore the piece everywhere as if it were a nickel-plated watch: Sitting in the concrete stands during high school football games, depositing his pharmacy’s weekly cash flow at the Peoples Bank. Fighting off sleep in the back pew at Bodock Baptist where Betty dragged him. He even pulled the hand cannon on a customer once for being generally disruptive because the man didn’t want to wait five minutes over the estimated hour for his prescription to be filled on account he was a distant cousin of Mayor Duff’s.
But Lafayette would leave the gun at the house that morning, probably for the first time in years. That evening two unarmed men, high on crank and thinking the house vacant, would break in. A kitchen light sparking to life, perhaps, Betty’s voice addressing whom she assumed was Lafayette home from work. And instead of abandoning their mission, one of the men would see an opportunity in Lafayette’s pistol on the side table next to the recliner.
It was nearing ten o’clock when we passed Hickory Flat, about halfway to Olive Branch.
“How bad did that hurt?” I asked, pointing at his bandage in the side mirror.
“Ashamed to admit I cried some,” Lafayette said. “Was a lot like getting your ear flicked in cold weather, except instead of thumping you with their finger, someone shot you. Still hurts like hell. I ain’t never fallen asleep with my head in a fire ant bed before, but I’d venture a guess that the two was comparable.”
“You mean to do it?”
“Why the shit would I mean to shoot myself in the ear?”
“Meant why’d you have a loaded revolver pointed at your head in the first place?”
Lafayette reached down to get his second beer, popped the cap, and offered it to me. I declined. He shrugged and hooked his fingers on the oh-shit handle above him. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I’d do anything for Erin. She’s my daughter. If she’d requested back then to fillet your pecker with a rusty boning knife or to simply shoot you in the face, I’d’ve obliged her. No questions asked. No offense.” He pulled on the bottle. “So if she wants me to get my sternum cracked open or my side split like the underbelly of a bream or however the hell them doctors plan on fitting that crazy Pentecostal son of a bitch’s lung inside me just so all his hair-legged-and-armpitted, ankle-length-denim-skirt-wearing female disciples can speak in tongues like retards, so be it. But it’s not what I want for myself, and I ain’t about to feign enthusiasm for it.”
“So how was jumping off your roof this morning with a noose around your neck doing what’s best for Erin?” I asked.
“Ain’t what I said.”
“Huh?”
“Ain’t said I’d do what’s best for Erin. Said I’d do what she wanted.” Lafayette stared out the window and took two quick pulls on his beer. Said, “I admit I wasn’t in the most logical of frames of mind this morning.” He held his bottle up to me. “Stayed up last night drinking the other eight of these.”
“Shit,” I said.
“What? Power was off. Didn’t have Sanford and Son reruns to distract me, I guess. Guess at some point I thought it was a good idea. Thought better of it once I got up there on the roof.”
“You would’ve taken that branch down with you anyway,” I said. “I suppose it’s good you ain’t gotten any better at committing suicide.”
“Keeps me entertained at least,” he said.
“How long was you up there this morning?”
“Couple hours. Maybe four. It hit me what extent of a bad idea it was soon as I tossed that key out in the yard.”
I felt pretty shitty for pressing the issue and waited for Lafayette to say something else, but he seemed done with that talk. My beer had gone lukewarm. I finished it and held it between my legs and waited until we’d passed another cleanup crew before rolling down the window. For all the debris we’d passed, it seemed the crews’ efforts at present were futile and they’d caught on to that fact as well. The crews this far north simply removed the fallen timber from the highway into brush piles ten or so feet high instead of fighting to stack each piece in a dump truck. The rush of air through the window was a welcome relief to the silence that’d swelled the cab.
It was twenty minutes after ten when we passed the Holly Springs exit. Thirty, thirty-five minutes from the transplant center. I asked Lafayette to hand me the last beer.
“What?” he said.
I pointed down at the box.
“Roll that window up,” he said. I obliged. He popped the cap and handed the beer to me. On the radio, reports on the storm’s aftermath continued. Some of the more rural areas of the state would be without power for upward of a month. Lafayette turned the volume down.
“Tired of hearing about that damn storm.”
“All right,” I said. Beads of sweat big as ball bearings had formed on his brow. “You all right?”
He fiddled with the heater some, trying to turn it down. I intervened.
“That better?” I asked. “You want, I can roll the window back down.”
Lafayette said, “I ever tell you the story about the time I lost that old bird dog of mine?”
He had on several occasions. About how he and his black lab, J.R., were headed in from the field when a pack of feral pit bulls intercepted them, appearing from the tree line like gray ghosts. How Lafayette couldn’t have taken them all on at the same time by himself, how the lab’s efforts distracted the other bulls long enough for Lafayette to defend himself, first with the over-under, then with the .357 which was easier to load, more efficient. He had to put the lab down right there in the hay patch, not fifty yards from the safety his truck offered. Would end the story each time by showing where a large chunk of his calf was missing from where one of the pits stayed latched onto him even after he mowed the top of its head off point-blank with the over-under.
“I’m a little blurry on the particulars, tell you the truth, Lafayette.”
“Was going to make you listen anyway,” he said. He hung his arm on the oh-shit handle above him and commenced his detailed account. “Not thirty yards from us I remember J.R. and see him fighting the good fight but just getting tore at by about half the pack. Four of ’em had abandoned the crowd around J.R. and was headed my way. I popped off one of them with the over-under and abandoned it for the .357 because the over-under’s too slow, too bulky. Get three of the cocksuckers before the other one runs off. Then I hobble toward J.R. but only make it a few yards because of the pit that’s jaws’re still attached on my leg like some badass tick. I shoot the two pits around J.R. but can barely see him for the pit on top of him. Looks like it’s already dug into J.R.’s throat, only a matter of time. So I put a bead on the pit.
“But let’s just say,” Lafayette went on, tapping his middle finger on the dash twice for dramatic effect, “let’s just imagine for a moment it only looked like that pit got ahold of J.R.’s throat, and just as I feel the trigger in the bend of my finger, that J.R., in some impressive maneuver and demonstration of resiliency, somehow manages his mouth around that pit’s fat face and the pit rolls over to break free and it’s my round that goes right into J.R. So that it’s me who kills my dog out of no necessity whatsoever.” He paused and looked for me to answer.
I said, “It’d change the whole dynamic of the story, I guess, Lafayette.”
“About would, yes,” Lafayette said.