Must be unloaded, then.
I'll make him get rid of it just the same, she thought, backing
down the stepladder. Tonight. When he gets back from the post
office. I'll stand right up to him. "Joe" I'll say, "it's no good having a
gun sitting around the house even if there's no kids around and it's
unloaded. You don't even use it to shoot bottles anymore." That's
what I'll say.
This was a satisfying thing to think, but her undermind knew
that she would of course say no such thing. In the Paulson house, it
was Joe who mostly picked the roads and drove the horses. She
supposed that it would be best to just dispose of it herself put it in a
plastic garbage bag under the other rickrack from the closet shelf.
The gun would go to the dump with everything else the next time
Vinnie Margolies stopped by to pick up their throw-out. Joe would
not miss what he had already forgotten the lid of the box had been
thick with undisturbed dust. Would not miss it, that was, unless she
was stupid enough to bring it to his attention.
'Becka reached the bottom of the ladder. Then she stepped
backward onto the Reader's Digest Condensed Book with her left
foot. The front board of the book slid backward as the rotted binding
gave way. She tottered, holding the gun with one hand and flailing
with the other. Her right foot came down on the pile of knitted caps,
which also slid backward. As she fell she realised that she looked
more like a woman bent on suicide than on cleaning.
Well, it ain't loaded, she had time to think, but the gun was
loaded, and it had been cocked; cocked for years, as if waiting for her
to come along. She sat down hard in the hallway and when she did
the hammer of the pistol snapped forward. There was a flat,
unimportant bang not much louder than a baby firecracker in a tin
cup, and a .22 Winchester short entered 'Becka Paulson's brain just
above the left eye. It made a small black hole what was the faint blue
of just-bloomed irises around the edges.
Her head thumped back against the wall, and a trickle of blood
ran from the hole into her left eyebrow. The gun, with a tiny thread of
white smoke rising from its muzzle, fell into her lap. Her hands
drummed lightly up and down on the floor for a period of about five
seconds, her right leg flexed, then shot straight out. Her loafer flew
across the hall and hit the far wall. Her eyes remained open for the
next thirty minutes, the pupils dilating and constricting, dilating and
constricting.
Ozzie Nelson came to the living-room door, miaowed at her,
and then began washing himself.
She was putting supper on the table that night before Joe
noticed the Band-Aid over her eye. He had been home for an hour
and a half, but just lately he didn't notice much at all around the
house he seemed preoccupied with something, far away from her a
lot of the time. This didn't bother her as much as it might have once
at least he wasn't always after her to let him put his manthing into her
ladyplace.
"What'd you do to your head?" he asked as she put a bowl of
beans and a plate of red hot dogs on the table.
She touched the Band-Aid vaguely. Yes what exactly had she
done to her head? She couldn't really remember. The whole middle of
the day had a funny dark place in it, like an inkstain. She
remembered feeding Joe his breakfast and standing on the porch as he
headed off to the post office in his Wagoneer that much was crystal
clear. She remembered doing the white load in the new Sears washer
while Wheel of Fortune blared from the TV. That was also clear.
Then the inkstain began. She remembered putting in the colors and
starting the cold cycle. She had the faintest, vaguest recollection of
putting a couple of Swanson's Hungary man frozen dinners in the
oven for herself 'Becka Paulson was a hefty eater but after that
there was nothing. Not until she had awakened sitting on the living-
room couch. She had changed from slacks and her flowed smock into
a dress and high heel; she had put her hair in braids. There was
something heavy in her lap and on her shoulders and her forehead
tickled. It was Ozzie Nelson. Ozzie was standing with his hind legs in
her crotch and his forepaws on her shoulders. He was busily licking
blood off her forehead and out of her eyebrow. She swotted Ozzie
away from her lap and then looked at the clock. Joe would be home
in an hour and she hadn't even started dinner. Then she had touched
her head, which throbbed vaguely.
"'Becka?"
"What?" She sat down at her place and began to spoon beans
onto her plate.
"I asked you what you did to your head?"
"Bumped it," she said ... although, when she went down to the
bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror, it hadn't looked like a
bump; it had looked like a hole. "I just bumped it."
"Oh," he said, losing interest. He opened the new issue of
Sports Illustrated which had come that day and immediately fell into
a daydream. In it he was running his hands slowly over the body of
Nancy Voss an activity he had been indulging in the last six weeks
or so. God bless the United States Postal Authority for sending Nancy
Voss from Falmouth to Haven, that was all he could say. Falmouth's
loss was Joe Paulson's gain. He had whole days when he was quite
sure he had died and gone to heaven, and his pecker hadn't been so
frisky since he was nineteen and touring West Germany with the U.S.
Army. It would have taken more than a Band-Aid on his wife's
forehead to engage his full attention.
'Becka helped herself to three hot dogs, paused to debate a
moment, and then added a fourth. She doused the dogs and the beans
with ketchup and then stirred everything together. The result looked a
bit like the aftermath of a bad motorcycle accident. She poured
herself a glass of grape Kool-Aid from the pitcher on the table (Joe
had a beer) and then touched the Band-Aid with the tips of her fingers
she had been doing that ever since she put it on. Nothing but a cool
plastic strip. That was okay ... but she could feel the circular
indentation beneath. The hole. That wasn't so okay.
"Just bumped it," she murmured again, as if saying would
make it so. Joe didn't look up and 'Becka began to eat.
Hasn't hurt my appetite any, whatever it was, she thought. Not
that much ever does probably nothing ever will. When they say on
the radio that all those missiles are flying and it's the end of the world.
I'll probably go right on eating until one of those rockets lands on
Haven.
She cut herself a piece of bread from the homemade loaf and
began mopping up bean juice with it.
Seeing that ... that mark on her forehead had unnerved her at
the time, unnerved her plenty. No sense kidding about that, just as
there was no sense kidding that it was just a mark, like a bruise. And
in case anyone ever wanted to know, 'Becka thought, she would tell
them that looking into the mirror and seeing that you had an extra
hole in your head wasn't one of life's cheeriest experiences. Your
head, after all, was where your brains were. And as for what she had
done next
She tried to shy away from that, but it was too late.
Too late, 'Becka, a voice tolled in her mind it sounded like
her dead father's voice.
She had stared at the hole, stared at it and stared at it, and then
she had pulled open the drawer to the left of the sink and had pawed
through her few meager items of makeup with hands that didn't seem
to belong to her. She took out her eyebrow pencil and then looked