“Fade-out?” He tried to focus on her.
“That little number you do, now you see me now you don’t — though I’ll give you this much, sweet Poppy”—and she gave him an absentminded hug, still frowning—“you always turned up when I needed you.”
“Not this time.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I’ll be damned, he thought. Nothing changes. Am I doing to her exactly what he did to me, leaving her? But there’s a difference. She doesn’t need me.
And for a fact she had already turned away, her frowning crossed-up face thrust toward Jack Curl and the Cupps.
“Wait,” he said.
“What?” she said, stopping but not turning toward him.
“Ah — well.”
Ah well. Yes. That’s it. Maybe there had been a time when there was something to say and maybe the time would come again, but it was not now.
“What?” said Leslie.
“Goodbye,” he said.
“What?” she asked vacantly and nodded. “Okay.” She nodded again, eyes fixed in a stare. “Okay.”
“Give me—” He held out his hand.
“Oh, Poppy,” said Leslie, turning back and giving him a cheek hug but still frowning past him. She hadn’t heard him.
Just before he turned away, he took a last look at her. Is it possible to see someone here and now? Her hair was perfectly straight, a long shining fan spread across her shoulders, as bright and clean as a happy child’s. She was a child, hardly more. But when she turned, her face was cross and thrusting, moving in a kind of tic against her hair. When he looked at her, the flashing granny glasses, the inverted U on her forehead, the chewed lip, she slid away from him back in time and he seemed to see her as a child when he passed her in the foyer on 76th Street on her way to Central Park with the nurse, she giving him the same quick fretful cheek hug, and then slid away again but forward in her own time, casting ahead of herself to the park, worrying about. . Are women beside themselves from the beginning?
3
In the upstairs study, built with a widow’s walk above it like a Nantucket house, he found the Greener in a broom closet behind the Electrolux and the waxer. The straps and buckles of the old stiff scuffed case were hard to undo. He gazed at the gun. It was one of four things he had saved from Mississippi. The other three were the Luger, his grandfather’s Ivanhoe, and his father’s Lord Jim. It figured. Both his grandfather and his father had enemies. One, like Ivanhoe, had enemies he hated. The other had the guilts like Jim and an enemy he hated, himself. And one had the shotgun, the other the Luger. What do you do when you are born with a love of death and death-dealing and have no enemies?
He had not looked at the shotgun or Lord Jim or Ivanhoe for twenty years.
Fitting barrel into stock, he clicked it out straight and snapped on the forestock. The gun was shorter and heavier than he remembered, short as a carbine, both barrels cylinder-bore. God, no wonder they were good shots. How could you miss anything with a cannon full of birdshot? The metal was not rusty but the bluing had long since worn away to greasy steel. Only a faint design, fine as scrollwork on money, remained. He broke the breech and sighted at the windows through the barrels. White light from the cloud came spinning down the mirrored bore. There was a faint reek of gun oil and powder from the last shot. Who had cleaned the gun? the sheriff? I? I. On the rib between the barrels he read: W. W. Greener, 68 Haymarket, London. Best in all trials 1875–1888. The grip was worn smooth as a police pistol. The wood of the forestock had shrunk around the bone ornament like an old man’s muscle.
He closed the breech, hefted the gun, sighted it again, pulled the two triggers, first one then the other, then both together. Again, he broke and closed the breech to cock the firing pins. Again he pulled both triggers.
I’ll be damned. You can fire both barrels at once.
Wait a minute. You shot the single. There were two singles. That left one shell for the other single.
But you reloaded.
Why? Why didn’t you wait for the second single and the second shot before reloading?
But you reloaded, then swung around to track the second single, swung so far around and so intent on the tracking that you forgot I was there, didn’t see me through the post oak, and got me too.
Then you reloaded again with one shell. Because one shell was all you needed.
Wait a minute.
There were four empty shells, three the guide had picked up and put on the quilt beside me in the Negro cabin, and one in the breech of the Greener. “Here yo bullets,” the guide said, not even knowing that spent shells are worthless.
Wait a minute.
Then you had to have fired both barrels at the second single.
Why?
You don’t unload two Super-X’s on one small quail.
Wait a minute.
There was no second single. If there had been, I’d remember, because I remember everything now. I’d have heard him get up before you shot, heard the sudden tiny thunder. I knew that all along. Why didn’t I know that I knew it?
Then both barrels were for me, weren’t they?
Well, I’ll be damned. No wonder the Greener spit fire and smoke like a cannon.
So that was it.
Will could not take his eyes from the shotgun. An electric shock seemed to pass into his body from the greasy metal clamped in both hands like an electrode. A violent prickling went up his back and into his hairline.
His diaphragm contracted. He found that he had laughed.
Well, I’ll be damned. Is it possible that I knew it all along and until this moment did not know that I knew it? Or did you miss me? Or am I killed and until this moment did not know it? Can you be only technically alive?
Well, as you used to say, it’s a different ball game now, isn’t it?
Hm. Why do I feel relieved, even dispensed, as if somehow I were now free to do what I am going to do?
Smiling, he turned the carbine-length shotgun, swinging the muzzle toward him. Easily done: you can even put both thumbs on both triggers.
Let me get it straight now.
You shot the first single.
Then you broke the breech, removed the one spent shell, and reloaded.
Then you fired both barrels.
Then you broke the breech, ejected the two, and reloaded, but with one shell.
One shell for the single, two for me, one for you.
Then how did you nearly miss me?
You couldn’t miss a quail on the wing with one barrel at fifty feet. Yet you nearly missed me with both barrels at fifteen feet.
What happened at the very last split second that you pulled up?
Was it love or failure of love?
And how did you miss yourself?
Well, whatever the reason, you corrected it the next time, didn’t you? In the attic, in Mississippi. But why didn’t you take me with you then, if you knew something and were that sure you knew it?
The sorrow in your eyes when I came over and sat beside you in Georgia — were you sorry you did it or sorry you didn’t?
He was smiling down at the shotgun and shaking his head.
Sorry you didn’t do it. Because the next time you took no chances and did it right, used both barrels, both thumbs and your mouth.
I remember now. I cleaned the gun when I got it back from the sheriff in Mississippi. Both barrels. Wouldn’t one have been enough? Yes, given an ordinary need for death. But not if it’s a love of death. In the case of love, more is better than less, two twice as good as one, and most is best of all. And if the aim is the ecstasy of love, two is closer to infinity than one, especially when the two are twelve-gauge Super-X number-eight shot. And what samurai self-love of death, let alone the little death of everyday fuck-you love, can match the double Winchester come of taking oneself into oneself, the cold-steel extension of oneself into mouth, yes, for you, for me, for us, the logical and ultimate act of fuck-you love fuck-off world, the penetration and union of perfect cold gunmetal into warm quailing mortal flesh, the coming to end all coming, brain cells which together faltered and fell short, now flowered and flew apart, flung like stars around the whole dark world.