“What?”
“There was a little girl who was ten years old when you went into the army and the only one who walked you to the railroad station. You said when you came back you’d marry her and you stopped in the dime store and bought her a green ring. She wore it for all the years until she thought the man she was waiting for was dead.” She smiled, dipped down into the pocket of her blouse and took the silly little ring out and put it back on her finger. “It must be awful having to wait for a virgin this long. I hope the going isn’t too tough.”
It was all too fast, too ridiculous and too true. It came back with the effect of a tidal wave, sweeping over me, washing out the old and planting the new. She was all beautiful and slippery and blonde and brunette at once with those crazy curving hills and sloped, wet banks like a rained-on race course that heaved and undulated with tiny muscular spasms aching to be relieved in a gigantic orgasm and I was there in her little room where she slept as a girl, in a room something like where my pop slept with my mother and now it was going to be all right, the factory, the old men, Linton, the coming home ... it was going to be all right because they had given me that little ball of metal that would turn the world upside down.
And as I was rolling onto her I heard the voice say, “How pretty. How pretty.”
But he shouldn’t have said it the second time, enjoying the scene of naked flesh, part soft and part hard, wondering where to put the bullet, because wherever a .45 hits you it tears one hell of a hole and the .45 was right next to my hand and the first shot took his arm off and the second left no memory of Arnold Bell’s face in anybody’s mind because he had no face left to remember. His skin and bones were indented on the wall behind the headless body and tomorrow I’d have to get another crew out here to clean up and patch the hole and if I were lucky, the quarts of blood wouldn’t flow through the cracks in the floor and ruin the ceiling downstairs.
“Now?” I asked her.
The two shots were still reverberating in her ears. She looked at the mess by the door and didn’t get sick at all. She didn’t hear me, but she knew what I said.
Sharon smiled and turned the old brass ring around so it looked like a cheap wedding band. “Shut up and fuck me,” she said, “like a dog.”
The Erection Set Page 36
