“It’s just in case something ever goes wrong.”
She shook her head, pushed the gun across to his side of the table. “That’s your job, making sure that never happens.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Look, if you ain’t got the balls for it anymore, just say so. Jesus Christ, at least let me know before you get us both killed,” Sandy said.
“I told you before, I don’t like that kind of mouth,” he said. He looked at the stack of pancakes getting cold. She hadn’t touched them. “And you’re going to eat those goddamn griddle cakes, too, you hear me?”
“Fuck you,” she said. “I’ll eat what I want.” She stood up and he watched her take her coffee into the living room, heard the TV come on. He picked up the.22 and aimed it at the wall that divided the kitchen from the couch that she had no doubt plopped her skinny ass down on. He stood there for a couple of minutes, wondering if he could make the shot, then put the gun in a drawer. They spent the rest of the cold morning silently watching a Tarzan movie marathon on Channel 10, and then Carl went to the Big Bear and bought a gallon of vanilla ice cream and an apple pie. She’d always liked the sweets. If he had to, he’d force it down her, he thought as he paid the clerk.
Many years ago, he’d heard one of his mother’s boyfriends say that, back in the old days, a man could sell his wife if he got hard up or sick of her, drag her ass to the town market with a horse collar clamped tight around her lousy neck. Making Sandy choke on a little ice cream wouldn’t be that big a deal. Sometimes they didn’t know what was best for them. His mother sure didn’t. A man named Lyndon Langford, the smartest of the long line of bastards she had gotten messed up with during her time on earth, a factory worker in the GM plant in Columbus who sometimes read real books when he was trying to stay off the sauce, had given little Carl his first lessons in photography. Just remember, Lyndon had once told him, most people love to have their picture taken. They’ll do damn near anything you want if you point a camera at them. He would never forget the first time he saw his mother’s naked body, in one of Lyndon’s pictures, tied to her bed with extension cords, a cardboard box over her head with two holes cut in it for her eyes. Still, he was a halfway decent man when he wasn’t drinking. Then Carl fucked everything up by eating a slice of the deli ham that Lyndon kept in their icebox for the nights when he stayed over. His mother never forgave him for it, either.
30
WHEN OHIO STARTED TO TURN WARM and green again, Carl began seriously planning the next trip. He was considering the South this time, give the Midwest a break. He spent evenings studying his road atlas: Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, the Carolinas. Fifteen hundred miles a week, that’s what he always planned for. Though they usually traded cars around the time the peonies bloomed, he had decided that the station wagon was in good enough shape for one more outing. And Sandy wasn’t bringing home the money she used to when she was whoring regular. Lee had taken care of that.
Lying in bed late one Thursday night, Sandy said, “I been thinking about that gun, Carl. Maybe you’re right.” Though she hadn’t mentioned it, she’d also been doing a lot of thinking about the waitress at the White Cow. She’d even stopped in there once, ordered a milk shake, checked the girl out. She wished Lee had never told her. What bothered her most was the way the girl reminded Sandy of herself right before Carl walked into her life: nervous and shy and eager to please. Then, a few nights ago, pouring a drink for a man she had recently fucked for free, she couldn’t help but notice that he wouldn’t even give her a second glance now. As she watched the man leave a few minutes later with some toothy bimbo in a fake fur jacket, it occurred to her that maybe Carl was looking for her replacement. It hurt to think he’d turn on her like that, but then why should he be any different from any of the other bastards she had known? She hoped she was wrong, but having her own gun might not be such a bad idea.
Carl didn’t say anything. He had been staring miserably at the ceiling, wishing the landlady was dead. It surprised him, Sandy mentioning the gun after all this time, but maybe she had just come to her senses. Who in the hell wouldn’t want to carry a gun doing the shit they did? He rolled over, tossed his share of the bedsheet off his fat legs. It was sixty fucking degrees outside at three in the morning, and the old bitch still had the thermostat cranked up. He was certain that she did it on purpose. They’d had words again the other day about his singing at night. He got up and opened the window, stood there letting the slight breeze cool him off. “What made you change your mind?” he finally asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Like you said, you never know what might happen, right?”
He stared out into the darkness, rubbed the stubble on his face. He dreaded getting back in the bed. His side was soaked with sweat. Maybe he’d sleep on the floor tonight by the window, he thought. He leaned down near the ripped screen and took several deep breaths. Damn, he felt like he was suffocating. “She’s just doing it for spite, goddamn it.”
“What?”
“Leaving the fuckin’ heat on,” he said.
Sandy rose up on her elbows and looked at his dark form crouched by the window, like some brooding, mythical beast about to spread its wings and take off in flight. “But you’ll show me how to shoot it, won’t you?”
“Sure,” Carl said. “That’s no big deal.” He heard her strike a match behind him, take a drag off a cigarette. He turned back toward the bed. “We’ll take it out somewhere on your day off, let you fire a few rounds.”
On Sunday they left the apartment around noon and drove to the top of Reub Hill and down the other side. He made a left into a muddy lane and stopped when they got to the trash dump at the end. “How do you know about this place?” Sandy asked. Before Carl came along, she had spent more than a few nights getting screwed back here by boys she didn’t care to remember now. Always, she had hoped that if she put out for this next one, he’d treat her like his girlfriend, maybe take her to one of the dances at the Winter Garden or the Armory, but that had never happened. As soon as they got a nut, they were done with her. A couple of them even took her tip money and made her walk home. She looked out her window and saw, lying in the ditch, a used rubber stretched down over the top of a Boone’s Farm bottle. Boys used to call the place Train Lane; from the looks of things, she figured they still did. Now that she thought about it, she had never been to a dance in her life.
“Just saw it when I was out driving around one day,” he said. “Reminded me of that place in Iowa.”
“You mean with the Scarecrow?”
“Yeah,” Carl said. “Ol’ California, here I come, that cocksucker.” He reached across her and opened the glove compartment, grabbed the.22 and a box of shells. “Come on, let’s see what you got.”
He loaded the gun and set up a few rusty tin cans on top of a soggy, stained mattress. Then he walked back to the front of the car and fired off six shots at thirty feet or so. He knocked four cans over. After he showed her again how to load it, he handed the gun to her. “The fucker goes a little to the left,” he said, “but that’s okay. Don’t try to aim so much as point, like you’d do with your finger. And just take a breath and squeeze the trigger as you let it out.”
Sandy held the pistol in both hands and sighted down the barrel. She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. “Don’t shut your eyes,” Carl said. She fired off the next five rounds as fast as she could. She put several holes in the mattress. “Well, you’re gettin’ closer,” he said. He handed her the box of shells. “You load this time.” He pulled out a cigar and lit it. When she hit the first can, she squealed like a little girl who’d found the prize Easter egg. She missed the next one, then plugged another. “Not bad,” he said. “Here, let me see it.”