For a few seconds the world sways. He grabs hold of the showerhead and then the wall until things settle. He looks down and can’t see how dark blood can be good. The water makes it disappear. It makes him think that something inside his stomach has been damaged. Isn’t there a kidney there somewhere? Or a liver? What about his actual stomach? He realizes he’s eaten very little over the last few days, and when he does his stomach burns. Why is that? He studies the skin with his fingers, pulling and poking. It is black in areas, white in others, hard all over, and he isn’t sure which color represents the infection. He lets the hot water wash over it.
He gets out of the shower and sits on the bathroom floor with his back against the bathtub and his towel beneath him. He swabs the wound with disinfectant and it stings like a bitch. He places some medical gauze over the wound, some padding over the gauze, and wraps bandaging around his torso to hold everything in place. He’s going to be moving around some more later, so he wraps some duct tape around it all too, just to be sure. When he gets up he doesn’t feel like the new man he was hoping for, but it’s sure as shit better than seeing dark blood fall out of him.
He wraps the towel around him and goes and checks on his wife. She’s awake. She’s staring at the TV, but not really looking at it. He’s seen her do this before.
“Hey, babe,” he says, and the words feel numb, they sound like they’re not coming from him.
“Where’s Ba-e?” she asks.
She’s referring to Billy. Billy was her cat when she was a child. She told him about Billy years ago. Billy has been dead for thirty years. “He’s sitting out in the sun,” he says.
“Ba-e,” she says, and she smiles.
“Are you. .” he says, then another trip on the morphine wave, and he has to grab hold of the wall to stay balanced. Shit.
“Side-Russ and Ba-e sitting in a tree,” she says. “K-I. . I. . I forget.”
“It’s okay,” he tells her.
“I’m sorry,” she tells him. “I dot mean to forget.”
“It’s okay,” he tells her, and he sits down on the side of the bed and strokes her hair. Something on the TV makes her smile. She forgets all about being sad that she forgets things.
He moves to his bedroom. He runs his hands over the dressing on his stomach. The wound is clean and patched and the pain seems to be just a shadow of what it was earlier. A packet of aspirin sits on the nightstand along with a packet of sleeping pills. Both are nearly empty. He doesn’t think he’ll need them. He sets the alarm clock. He has a meeting tonight, but right now he can’t think exactly what for. He climbs onto the bed. The sheets are damp and he thinks about making a note to wash them, but before he can make one and after he forgets what the note would be for anyway, he falls asleep.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The temperature is rising and I have the air-conditioning turned to high. In this heat it’s easy to forget I nearly froze to death two nights ago, but easy to remember that Hell is waiting around the corner.
I stop at a coffee shop and insert myself inside another slice of normal life, the type of slice where normal people are doing normal things on a day-to-day basis that doesn’t include blood. It’s a more upscale café than the one I sat at two mornings ago. All the furniture is made from shiny metal and shiny wood, and several mirrors and paintings have been jammed up on the wall, each an identical distance from the last. I sit at a window where I can keep an eye on the car because the gun is beneath the front seat. I order some lunch from a waitress who’s obviously psychic because she says things like See you’re reading the paper and Nice day outside. I especially like it when she tells me I look as though I’ve been through the wars. I want to ask what her thoughts are on tonight, but decide I might not like her predictions.
I drink coffee and, in a rare moment of healthy consumption, I have a glass of orange juice. I read my ten-thousand-dollar newspaper. It offers up stories about politics and about companies going broke, and it makes me think of Arthur and the economic downturn that is forcing him to sell guns to guys like me, and I wonder how much of what he said is true. I stare at the crossword I would probably half complete if I had a pen. When my bacon and eggs arrive I nearly inhale them off the plate before the waitress can put them down. When I finish I trap a twenty-dollar note beneath the plate as a tip because I’m awestruck by her psychic abilities, and I think how cool it would be to improve at least one person’s day, the same way the traffic cop improved mine yesterday. It’s a small step, but perhaps I can change the world.
I drive home at a casual speed. I’m in no hurry to be anywhere yet I feel as though I’m running at a hectic pace. When I get home, my next-door neighbor, a man in his late seventies who I see putting golf clubs into his car at least three times every week, catches me in the driveway and starts making conversation. We talk about the weather. He asks how I’m enjoying living in the neighborhood. He tells me if there’s anything he or his wife can do for me, just to let him know. I wonder how far his offer would stretch if I told him what I had planned.
When I get inside I start playing with the Glock. It feels more comfortable than it did in the store because I don’t have to pretend I know what I’m looking at. Holding it in my hands I feel liberated. I feel like I’ve beaten the system designed to keep people like myself from owning such a weapon. I also feel like I’m on the right track, that the Glock has evened the playing field. I turn it over in my hand, studying the lines and textures. The cold metal isn’t quite metal, according to Arthur, but a high-impact synthetic material that he didn’t name. He nicknamed the Glock the plastic pistol, but it doesn’t feel like plastic. In fact the feeling it gives me is that things might turn out okay.
I pick up the magazine and check to make sure it’s empty. I slip it into the gun and slap the butt of it, clicking it into place. Then I play. I point it around the kitchen, the dining room, the lounge. Action Man is having fun. Though fun probably isn’t quite the right word. I point it at things. I pull the trigger. The slide pulls back. It clicks into place. On each pull my face tightens and my eyes half close as I expect to hear thunder. I feel like a kid playing war. I move around corners, keeping the gun low like they do in movies.
I wonder if I should test it. I could go over to the pasture where I buried the cardboard box and fire off a few shots if nobody is around, but I decide against it. I can’t squeeze the drama of being caught into my schedule. I would be charged, fingerprinted, and my fingerprints would quickly match those found at the two dead girls’ homes.
I drop the gun into my pocket when there’s knocking at the door. It’s the carpenter. He’s right on time. He’s a young guy, maybe only twenty, who talks like a teenager and thinks I must be one too. He calls me man every few minutes or so and talks about surfboards as he fixes my back door. I guess I ought to be flattered he thinks I’m young enough to understand. While he works, I put the gun up into the ceiling with the cash hidden up there. Then I change into shorts and a T-shirt. I wait around for the guy to finish. It takes him two hours to strip out the broken door frame and cut and fit the replacement pieces. The door itself is okay. So are the handle and lock.