by Lewis Nordan
For a long time nobody said anything. They just all looked at him.
Blue John said, “Then you could sign up for the high school spear-chunking team, Rufus. Wouldn’t need to be on no arrow-catching team.”
The Rider said, Heh heh heh.
Rufus McKay said, “You make a joke like that and you jess part of the problem, Blue John. You part of the reason that child done put his life in danger, make a joke like that. You, too, Rider, laughing at it, like you some kind of mystery on the mountain. You ain’t no mystery. All y’all just guilty as sin, guilty as the gravedigger, guilty as me.”
5
THE ARROW Hotel was not a hotel at all, but a great big, wood-frame, two-story boarding house, with feather pillows on the beds that smelled like Vitalis and Wildroot, no meals, room and bath, two dollars a night. There was not even a desk clerk to let you in—old Miss Peabody who owned the place had stopped coming altogether, and so you just went in, left your two dollars under a shot glass near the register-book, and found yourself a place to flop.
Across the street was a place that used to be a frozen meat locker, and then it turned into a chicken sexing plant, which attracted a lot of Japanese people to town, for some reason, and now it was mostly just an empty building, except when they could rent it out to the Pentecostals for revival meetings, who played “Easter Parade” for the benediction one time, if you can believe such a thing.
On the second floor of the Arrow, in a room seldom used, Solon Gregg was lying on the bed thinking he better kill somebody tonight. He couldn’t think of no way else to keep from thinking about his boy that got burned up on account of him and was laying back home in an iron bed surrounded by Get Well cards. Kill himself, is what he had in mind.
Nobody else was staying in the Arrow Hotel tonight, not hardly, anyway. Solon signed in the big book, “John Smith,” and left two one dollar bills under the shot glass on a low table next to the lamp.
Solon hoped his sister Juanita didn’t have to sleep in a dump like this, or like the one he just left in New Orleans. He fingered the trigger of the little gun. He wondered how many shots he could get off into his own head, or his heart, say, before he dropped the pistol. He didn’t think one shot would do the trick, even in the head, his gun was so light. Pretty soon Solon would be just like the dead man he helped pull out of the bed in New Orleans, if things went the way Solon was planning.
Solon was naked, he couldn’t stand them wet clothes no longer. He took them off the minute he come in the door and slung them up in a corner. He wished he could take off his whole skin and hair. He wished the gas fire had burned all his skin off instead of his boy’s. He wished he was the one laying up in an iron bed instead of his baby, that’s what he wished.
The Arrow Hotel was best known as being a place to commit suicide. It had a pretty good reputation in the past, lot of people successfully died here. In the good old days you could end your sorry life in the Arrow Hotel and Miss Peabody or the housemaid would find you first thing next morning, when she’s making up the bed. Or somebody would miss you at breakfast.
Well, them was the days. Now you could lay up in the Arrow for two weeks and rot before anybody found you, slow as business was since they stopped serving meals.
He was laying stretched out on the bed in a quarter inch of dust, didn’t bother to turn back the covers. There was a street light outside his window, and so the room was not completely dark, there was yellow light and shadows, filtered through rain.
There was an empty chifferobe, that’s about all the furniture there was. Enormous trees stood all around the hotel, ancient, really, and the rain falling through them was like whispers. Solon didn’t know what the whispers were saying to him. Kill somebody, you’ll feel better. Something like that.
Up on his bare stomach Solon had rested the pistol, the little .25 caliber revolver with the wooden handle-grips. He had took it out of his pants pocket when he slung his pants up in the corner to dry.
Just .25 caliber—it was most too light to kill anybody with, probably, less you hit them just right, vital organ, and then you couldn’t really be sure, it was a crapshoot.
He put the pistol barrel in his mouth and pulled back the hammer with his thumb, until it cocked into place. He was surprised and pleased to find that the gun barrel tasted like oil.
Gun oil, well, sir, sweet as peaches. Just before he left New Orleans, he had wiped the gun off with an oily rag and so most of the oil was still there, right where he left it, doing its job of preventing undue corrosion, in spite of this wet weather we been having. This fact just seemed extra nice to Solon, warmed up his sad heart a little bit.
The thing was, though, there was something he might could do to be helpful. He took the gun barrel out of his mouth.
What he could do was get dressed again and slip back over to his own house and go back around to his boy’s window, Glenn, scope him out a little, you know, up under that light bulb his mama kept burning day and night, and shoot the child in his bed. Put him out of his misery, so to speak.
Seem like the least a daddy could do, after he caused so much trouble to the tyke. It’d be the one act of kindness Solon was ever responsible for. It gave Solon a good feeling to be thinking of others for a change. It made a difference in the way he thought about himself, too. It increased his self-esteem, which had done reached a low ebb lately, to be perfectly honest.
Plus, it’d be a nice way to go out, for him as well as Glenn. In a family setting, so to speak. And that’s what he would do, of course, put the lights out on himself right afterwards.
He wished he had a heavier pistol. That was the one drawback, this durn puny little pistol. If he had him a .38 pistol, why, hell, boy, it wouldn’t be no question at all. He’d pretty much be obligated to do it, if he had a .38. If he had a .38, or even a .32, really, he’d feel completely at ease in sticking his arm into the bedroom window, snapping off a couple of quick shots at his boy and then asking Glenn’s mama did she and the rest of the children want they lights put out, too, just make it a family affair, the more the merrier, seem like. Last himself, of course.
Well, wait, now, let’s see, hold on, he better think about this. This durn thing don’t hold but six bullets. He didn’t have no extras, six was all he had left, all the excitement of coming back to Mississippi, he didn’t think about picking up an extra box of hollow-points.
Shit. Now ain’t that the limit. Goddamn, if it wont one dang thing, it’s another. Well, okay, let’s see, how many children did he have, anyway, counting Wanda. And Glenn. Four, wasn’t it? Plus hisself and his wife, that’s six.
Actually, that was perfect, if he didn’t have to shoot anybody twice. Well, but, anyway, Wanda might want to just pass on her turn, see, with her getting married and all. Wanda might want to go on down to Missouri to the ranch, so, you know, Solon could shoot somebody twice, if necessary. That possibility certainly had to be taken into consideration. He’d just wait and ask Wanda, that was the thing to do, now that he thought about it. Better safe than sorry, like the poet said. Solon didn’t want to act impulsively, spoil the whole surprise.
Solon’s pile of rain-drenched clothes was flopped over there in the corner of the room like wet roadkill. It looked like a big, cold carcass of a hellhound that’s done shucked off its mortal coil with the help of a Kenworth hauling pulpwood out on Highway 61 to Memphis.
He didn’t want to put back on some wet clothes, now that he was settled in. Comfort meant a lot to a man about to kill himself, even if others had to want.
He began to feel a little chilly, just thinking about putting those wet clothes back on. He fingered the trigger of the pistol and placed the barrel against his teeth and tongue again, tasting the sweet oil. This had been one long, hard day, have mercy, he felt like he deserved him a long rest.
He took the pistol barrel out of his mouth and thought about going in the bathroom down the hall and seeing did the tank have any hot water in it, he might like to take hisself a good
steamy tub bath. Warm his bones, although right now he believed he’d try not to think about his bones.
Instead, he got up off the bed and turned the covers back and slid in between the sheets, oh Law, they felt good upon his nekkidness, yes they did.
He pulled the covers back up to his chin and felt the warmth close around him. It seemed pretty durn lonely to die all by yourself in the Arrow Hotel. He looked at the pile of clothes. He might put them back on, go out one more time tonight.
He thought about New Orleans. Was it only yesterday, last night, he’d taken his earnings from the robberies and bought hisself a bus ticket and slept so sound to the music of the wheels, trucking on down on the road? He thought about himself asleep on that Greyhound, and the thought of it was so sweet it almost made him cry.
It was like he was outside of himself, watching Solon Gregg fall asleep in his seat. Looking at himself there, up by the tinted-glass window of that old Greyhound cruiser, it didn’t seem possible that he was who he was, the robber and killer and wife beater. Confession makes the heart grow fonder, as his crazy wife used to say.
Who he really looked like to himself, sleeping there in that bus, was Bo Peep, the one in the song. Like he was Bo Peep. She came trucking, back on down the line.
It scared him to think that murder and suicide might be just another vain dream, an ideal hope that, once it was accomplished, would turn out to be just like New Orleans, just like everything else in this life, nowhere near what it was cracked up to be, and only another way of feeling bad about himself.
He had the pistol under the cover with him, in his hand, and he dreamed that he had killed everybody, his whole family and himself. Glenn, of course, laying dead and smiling in his bloody sheets. Killing him had healed his burns and taken away his scars. He was the same beautiful child he once was, with a Roy Rogers school satchel and a milk jug full of gasoline.
Even Wanda, too, and her new husband, who had said they didn’t want to be left out. They were there, dead and covered with blood. Even Juanita and her pimp husband, and their sweet little nigger baby, covered with blood, hair all over the walls, legs and arms crisscrossed everywhere on the linoleum floor of the Gregg’s house.
It was a happy dream, and filled with hope, although Solon wondered where he had come up with so many bullets. He must have won the bullet lottery. And he must have gotten holt of a heavier pistol too,. 38 caliber at least, Solon would have to guess, judging by the amount of carnage.
Well, so that was a load off his mind. Everybody was cold, stone dead. In the dream Solon was dead, too, of course, but he could still see the whole scene and know that he had done the right thing.
So it surprised him that when he woke up, found out he was not only not dead but that he seemed to have been having a completely different dream from the one he thought he was having, and this one, the one in his waking head, was not even about himself and his family. He seemed to be having a dream about the Montberclairs.
They were in the Mexican house. Solon saw the great trees, the birdbaths and fountains and pools, the sun porches and Mexican furniture and framed pictures of horses, the pure white rooms and glass tables.
Sally Anne Montberclair seemed to have fixed up a little room of her own, a former utility room, off the main carport. Had it been only this morning that Solon visited in this home? It seemed so long ago.
Sally Anne’s narrow little bed was arranged neatly along one wall of the room, and the bed was made up with an Indian blanket of some kind, with geometric designs woven in, in bright colors. The blanket was turned back in a casual way to reveal a triangle of the taut, white sheet. At the head of the bed lay two fat, clean pillows with white pillowcases.
A portable typewriter with a clean page of typing paper sat on a low table. A small, simple, red-painted ladder-back chair that Sally Anne had bought for herself in Mexico was pulled up to the typewriter table, and that was where Sally Anne was now sitting. There were a few other things that you could tell belonged only to her as well, including a handmade basket with a book in it that Solon somehow knew to be her diary.
Poindexter Montberclair had read the diary. That’s what this scene was all about. He picked up the diary and accused her with it, a book bound in red leather, and then he flung it back into the basket.
She said, “I should have told you. I was going to tell you.”
Sally Anne Montberclair looked really scared.
He said, “You were going to tell me. Oh, well, that’s fine, that’s just fine, that makes it all right, then, doesn’t it? When were you going to tell me?”
She said, “I don’t know. I’ve been praying about it. I was trying to choose a good time to tell you.”
He said, “You’ve been praying about it. That’s rich, Sally Anne, that’s really rich.”
What the diary told Poindexter was that Sally Anne had slept with another man. It just came right out and said it, described it, in fact, you didn’t have to read between the lines.
A younger man at that, ten years younger than Sally Anne, a kid. He played the organ on Sundays in the Episcopal church, St. George by the Lake. In her diary, Sally Anne compared the two of them, this kid and her husband, and said that sex with this other man was like a whole different experience, that nothing could ever be so good. She went on and on about fucking this boy. She said she had never felt so filled up with goodness, it was an aesthetic experience, time stood still, it was spiritual, goddamn.
Poindexter carried the Luger in the front of his pants, as usual.
She said, “Poindexter, I do want to talk about this, if you want to. You deserve that much, and more. But please, you’ll have to put the gun away, won’t you? Please put the gun in your drawer until we finish talking. You’re scaring me.”
Poindexter said, “How many times, bitch?”
She said, “That’s not fair. It just isn’t. You can’t expect me to answer questions like that.”
What really galled the living shit out of Poindexter Montberclair was that the boy who was fucking his wife was a known homosexual. Biggest goddamn queer Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, ever produced, and it had produced a few. In a town the size of Arrow Catcher, not much escaped the notice of its citizens.
The boy’s name was Hoyty-Toyty McCarty, that’s what they called him, Poindexter didn’t know his real name, puny little cocksucker with pale skin and pale hair and known to have a dick like a goddamn Mexican donkey. Just nobody knew he was using it on married women. Or maybe everybody did. Maybe everybody in Arrow Catcher knew except Poindexter.
He said, “How many times?”
She said, “A few. I don’t know. Not many.”
He said, “How many?”
Sally Anne was trembling, she was scared not to answer.
She said, “Do you mean, how many different occasions, or how many times on each occasion?”
Poindexter said, “Jesus Christ!”
She said, “Really, Dexter, that gun makes me nervous.”
He said, “Occasions! Oh, Jesus, Sally Anne, how could you do this to me!”
He took the gun out of his pants and pointed it at her. One time in Korea when he was a cavalry scout, second lieutenant, he sprayed automatic-rifle fire into some dense brush around a stand of baobab trees outside of a jungle village called Sing Tu and killed eight people before he even saw anything move. That was the drill, that was the way it was done, preventative action, shoot first, ask questions later.
After he stopped shooting, he heard some groaning, so he opened up again until the groaning stopped. He told a sergeant and a couple of younger boys to drag them out by their feet. Now, right now!
Half of the dead were men in uniforms, half of them, he didn’t know, kids, old folks. Any one of them could have killed him. He remembered that his rifle barrel was hot as a firecracker, you could light a cigarette on it.
The other soldiers looked at Lieutenant Montberclair with something like awe.
The sergeant said, “Jesus, Lieut
enant, I didn’t see a thing.”
They thought he had known what he was doing.
Lieutenant Montberclair held the rifle barrel up to his lips and blew the smoke away, or pretended to, and when he did, his breath across the barrel made a little whistling sound, wheeee. He flashed them his big, bright southern smile.
He said, “Sharp eye, sergeant, sharp eye,” and winked. He said this in his southern way, “Shop eye, sah-junt, shop eye,” for increased effect.
In Sally Anne’s little room, he held the pistol against Sally Anne’s forehead until it made a little red ring on the skin between her eyes. He said, “How many more were there? I don’t mind killing you, I don’t mind killing you in the least, so let’s just have a few answers, all right, Sally Anne? How many more did you fuck?”
She said, “Dexter, honey, please, don’t do this.”
He said, “Open your mouth, Sally Anne, like you opened it for all those men’s cocks.”
He slipped the pistol barrel between her teeth.
Solon Gregg didn’t know how Lord Montberclair had found him here in the Arrow Hotel. Maybe he went by Solon’s house and found out from his wife. Maybe the Arrow Hotel was only the obvious place for a person at the end of the line, like Solon, to wind up.
Anyway, when he finally started to come to a little bit, out of this heavy sleep, he realized that Lord Montberclair must have been standing in the room talking to him for some time. The story Lord Montberclair was telling him, about Sally Anne’s adulteries, had gotten mixed up into Solon’s dreams. He wondered what he had missed, which parts he had added. He wondered if it was true that the Episcopal organist was really a queer, Hoyty-Toyty McCarty. He heard it often enough, but you never can tell, you don’t want to jump to conclusions about people and their preferences. People are all time claiming somebody’s queer and they ain’t. Still, Solon had always admired the way that young man looked, and talented, too.
