“You bet your life I have a magnificent son. This is Owney. Eugene Onegin Davis.”
“A pleasure.”
“You’re doing the math, but I’ll save you the trouble. Especially you. She drifted away from both of us that fateful night. But we crossed paths in Marfa years later.”
“She?”
“She,” said a voice. A dark, glitter-dusted hand brushed my shoulder: Brianna.
“So, you two are…”
“God, no,” said Brianna. She still had the heart-threshing looks, the wicked corneal glint of a serious reader. “We still care for each other, and we both love Eugene, but our affections have relocated.”
“Well phrased,” said Davis.
“So,” I said. “How are you dealing with the illness?”
Brianna looked baffled.
“Great news,” said Davis. “I’m not terminal. That’s you, I’m afraid. I’m going live forever. I’ve gotten my hands on some black market Super Resveratrol. I’ll tell you, some of these scientists become dope slingers just to keep their three houses going. But no, I’m fine. How was I going to get you out here? For my shot?”
“Your what?”
“Please, you’ve already figured it out, I’m sure. Down deep”—he poked my chest bone—“you must have understood exactly what was going on.”
“I don’t have much of a deep down.”
“But remember, this can’t work unless you know what you will be missing.”
“The future?” I said, and broke from his grip.
“What can’t work?” said Brianna.
“Nothing, sweetie.”
“Brilliant Brianna,” I said. “Did you know I was married? The union didn’t last. I couldn’t forget you. I sexed it with the mother, though. That was tender.”
“See, that song won’t pass the audition,” said Davis. “I have to know I’m ventilating a contented man. Otherwise it’s a mercy job. So you’ve drifted a bit. Lived with uncertainty. You’re a student of life. You’re the eternal student. You should have lived centuries ago in Germany. Besides, you’re a stud, my man. Women want to make love to your sunglasses. It’s always been that way. You’ve pursued and overtaken happiness. Maybe you’ll suddenly decide to make a ton of money, find a beauty to bear your children. This life, it’s all so exalted, so tremendous and full of wonder, and also relaxing. Are you with me?”
“I’ve just been running from anything that resembled revelation. For twenty years I’ve been running.”
“Nonsense,” said Davis. “You have friends. You have health.”
“I did quit the cowboy killers,” I said. “And you and me, we had a ball, just hanging out, talking.”
“I didn’t like you,” said Davis. “Go another way.”
I stepped forward and stroked his lapels. He shucked me off.
“You condescended,” said Davis. “Acted like you were killing time until a better life came along.”
“You never cared for my ideas,” I said, and snatched his hand, kissed his knuckles.
“What ideas?”
“Not ideas. Something. I’ve blocked most of it. Our whole friendship is a blur.”
“I remember every microsecond,” said Davis.
“It’s really good to see you,” I said.
“Fetch the party favor, Owney.”
The boy reached under the bar for the mahogany box. Davis lifted out the Beretta.
“We’ll just need one of these.”
The new guests, who had gathered in for our sloppy matinee, gasped. The old hands, the repeat attendees, stood back.
“Not this homoerotic gunplay again,” said the goblin.
“Homosocial,” said Brianna. “Or, no, you’re right.”
“Shitesnickers,” said the Texan, whom I’d overheard talking about his Irish roots.
“Just blanks,” said the goblin. “They’re old farts now. Wouldn’t dare.”
“It’s a prank,” a man with a gray-blond beard said to his date. “They all went to college together and it’s like a sketch they do.”
“Juvenile, entitled,” said the date.
“It’s like that Chekhov play,” said another woman. “The one with the gun that must go off if you dare introduce it.”
“No,” the woman by the grill cried, wrapped herself around my waist. “Didn’t you know it was me! Me all along!”
“Me who?” I said.
“Debbie!”
Brianna giggled, blew me a French kiss. It mattered that she’d never loved me, or ever saw me as anything but a pleasant face to mount. I’d always known this, but never understood how germane it was to what I’d begun calling, suddenly, inanely, my life narrative, which I assumed would culminate in our bright joining.
But here was Debbie instead.
“Debbie!” said Davis to me. “Yes! Of course. Your reason to live, pal! Debbie! The tragic element of your demise.”
Davis pointed his oiled Lombardic hole puncher and took aim, as he had years before, when I had the soul of a laboratory coke mouse, craved only life’s jolt, couldn’t know wise joy.
“Debbie, honey,” I whispered. “Move away. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
I raised my arms and tilted my head in the manner of the carpentered carpenter.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, to complete a procedure begun many, many years ago, when I, Standish James Davis, having been fired upon by this knave during the latter days of Bush the Elder, take, as my duelist’s right, the second and, fate willing, final shot of this contest. Furthermore—”
“Cap his monkey ass!” shouted Brianna.
Davis obliged.
* * *
Summertime, the neighbors come around to the backyard of the sweet rickety house Ondine sold us, watch me wheel up to the grills and baste the meats and flip them into Styrofoam boxes and thermal bags. We do only takeout, pork or beef, with biscuits and pop, and only on the weekend. We don’t even have an official name, but I hear some people call our operation the Capo’s, because a rumor floated that I was once some edge player in the North Jersey mob, got marked for a whack. Hence the wound, the wheelchair.
These are good people, but they watch too much television. Debbie, who works the register and is my wife, insists we do without one. We pass long evenings in our house drinking tea and talking about books and art and politics, or watching old movies on the computer, or having gentle, atrocious sex.
Sometimes Ondine comes over for poker or we all go out for chimichangas. Last time, after a few drinks, I asked Ondine about her daughter.
“Martha? She’ll never be happy with anybody but herself.”
“Lucky girl.”
“You lucked out, too,” said Ondine.
“I know,” I said. “But life gets really murky sometimes.”
“It’s true, honey. Like a fish tank nobody cleans. Just fish shit and dead fish. But that’s how you know it’s life.”
Debbie is a big deal over at the university, where she got a professorship as soon as I was healed enough to marry. We didn’t plan on Ypsilanti, but Michigan happened to want her. Sometimes I read her presentations for typos, but I don’t understand them. Turned out she was the brilliant one of our bunch.
I never charged Davis, and they ruled the shooting an accident. If I’d charged him, I could have taken him to civil court and gutted him, but he wasn’t lying about the disappearance of his family fortune. Last I heard, he ran some kind of permanent luau up on that Red Hook roof, and also a break-dancing camp for private school kids. Brianna, somebody told me, makes films of women giving birth alone in public spaces. I never even knew she liked that sort of thing.
I’m not sure why Debbie stays with me. Her devotion must have fixed itself to the memory of my brief, illusory splendor, or else she has some plan of revenge for the years I missed her charms. I would deserve that, if only because I know in my heart that if she were the ruined one, I would not stay.