“You look through this thing, don’t you?”
“You aim at something in the sights then squeeze the trigger exceedingly gently so as to keep the gun from jumping as it fires.”
She nods then pulls the trigger off in a blind rush, shooting the horse out from under a mounted policeman. “That was easy.”
She brings the gun, which had squirmed like a baby at the release of the shot, back into firing position. I try to get it away from her but she holds tight.
“One more,” she says. “What’s fair for you is fair for me.”
I say no, and ask once again in a reasonable tone for the return of the gun. “Killing is addictive,” I remind her.
My empty hand out is ignored. She fires three leaping shots in ripe succession, pinning the policeman to the flanks of his horse.
I go out and come back, sit around reading old newspapers, waiting for her to give it up. There are none of the anticipated opportunities. The gun visits the bathroom when she does. She wears it in a sling over her shoulder at the dinner table.
My opportunity will come, I think, when she goes to sleep, which is something she’s done every night for as long as I’ve known her.
At two minutes after midnight she is still at the window with my gun.
What I do, which is hard to do when you are genuinely tired, is pretend to go to sleep. She lies down next to me and without warning screams, “The police are coming for you,” in my ear.
I groan in my pretended sleep. “Are you asleep?” she asks again and again. When I say, “Yes,” she rolls over on her side, sighing like a cat.
There’s no need to detail here the process by which I cut away the rifle strap from around her shoulder while she sleeps and slide the gun out from under her nightgown without waking her. It is done. Although I am fond of the gun — it is one of the objects of my affection — I am resolved for my wife’s sake to dispose of it before she wakes. I think of reducing it to its parts and burying it in a cemetery or dropping it with weights around the barrel into a river.
She is awake and calling my name before I am out the door.
Before I can reason with her we are in a tug of war. The gun goes off. She falls in a fragment of blood like the missing section of a jigsaw puzzle.
It is not my idea of married life.
I am walking with the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.
“What are your chances?” I ask him.
We are walking down the steps of the Pentagon. “They could be better and they could be worse: He has, it is characteristic of him, the saddest smile. “If pushed to the wall, I would say two to one.”
The answer makes no sense to me, though I let it pass. I tell him that according to my sense of the national vibration, he’s going to win the election, time on his side. The election, insofar as I can remember, is two or three months away. It was or is. Such facts of time are unreliable.
He talks about loyalty and betrayal, asks if I would support a man who had no chance to win. If he was the best man, I say.
I reach for a handkerchief. A Secret Service man grabs my hand before I can get it inside my pants pocket, removes a gun I didn’t know I had.
“It is easier to trust people,” says the candidate with painful regret, “when you make sure they have nothing about them to distrust.”
How can I explain the secret possession of a weapon? “I use it for hunting,” I say. “That is, I used to hunt. It is now just a token of former days.” I offer half a dozen self-conflicting explanations.
“You don’t want me to win, do you?” he says sternly, his face closed to interpretation. “What you want is to commit yourself to an occasion for defeat.”
I insist that it is not true, offer to do whatever I can to help bring about his election.
“How far would you go?”
“Try me.”
“There is something we desperately need at this time in our history, but to be frank I doubt that you’re the right man for the job.” Our latrines are beyond the pale.
I defend his behavior to myself as an aspect of his distraction.
I volunteer my services. “With all due respect. sir,” I say, “I believe I, can write better speeches than the ones you’ve been using.”
“Maybe so. Maybe so.” He walks very quickly, irritated with me or perhaps with himself, a pigeon flying out of his back pocket. He is not the man I imagined he was, if still the best of two practical alternatives.
Dreaming of time is dreaming of being too late.
The next time we meet he does not remember our earlier interview. I joke with him. “Has anyone cleaned out the latrines for you yet?”
He clamps thumb and forefinger to his nose. “My friend, you wouldn’t believe how high the shit has risen. We’ve had to move our headquarters on three separate occasions just to escape it.”
“The last time we talked I asked you what you thought your chances were and you gave me a concise and somewhat cryptic answer. I’d like to ask you what your view of your chances is today.”
“Same view. Same chances.”
He has the look of a man who has spent all hope, his face even more saintlike than I remember it under the strain of lost cause. I ask for an elucidation of his remarks.
He shakes his head in a convulsive way a number of times.
“You’ll have to excuse me, Jack, I’m late for a hell-raising dinner. I guess we can go along together and talk if that suits your plans.”
I share a taxi with him to the Grand Hotel. As a campaign economy, I let sit on my lap one of his entourage, his interpreter of questions and labor problems, a skinny dark-haired woman named Winnie. The cab has its radio on, making it difficult to hear ourselves talk.
“Sometimes the measure of, a man,” says the candidate, “is how he bears his losses.”
I remind him that it was he who had accused me of defeatism in the early days: The interpreter on my lap says, “Shhh.” There is something on the news she wants to hear. The static as we rush through traffic is almost impenetrable, “We’re winning,” she says, “according to the early returns.”
“Is she kidding?” I ask him. “The voting hasn’t taken place yet, has it?”
“Winnie has a way of cutting through all the gunk,” he says, “to the heart of the message.”
“You’ve taken Idaho and the Philippines,” she reports.
“I suppose,” the candidate says in his weary drawl, “I’ll have to give them back.”
“What will you do, senator, if you win?”
“First of all, I’ll give up prophecy.”
Everyone in the cab laughs.
“Can this man walk on water?” asks the cabdriver. “The traffic don’t budge, it don’t budge. So where are we?”
“Just take your time,” says the candidate. “They can’t do anything until we get there.”
“What’s the latest?” I ask the interpreter.
“They’ve stopped voting,” she says. “Everything’s at a standstill.”
The candidate makes a personal appeal to his followers not to panic. His eyes close out of weariness. A crack appears in his forehead above the right eye. He says in a whisper, “Now you see from the inside, Jack, what this campaign’s been like.”
“There have been,” someone says, “thirty — nine attempts on his probity.”
For no reason, for nothing I’ve done, the interpreter turns around and kisses me. “Have you ever thought of politics?” she asks. The candidate’s crowd of supporters clap politely and call for a speech.
“I’m getting old,” says the candidate. “Someone’s going to have to take my place.”
When no one is looking, unable to fulfill their expectations of me, I sneak out the door of the cab and, unsure of the direction, run for my life.