The Sharp Time

by Mary O'Connell

  As he looks over at me from behind his puffy air bag. I feel a thud of pain where my head struck the window and my mouth is warm and salted, filling up fast.

  Bradley says, “Hang on.”

  And here he has his miracle moment.

  The Taurus is banged up against a tree, two feet off the ground in the front. I am blinded by the air bag in front of me, but when I look out the side window, the unnatural elevation makes me even queasier. But then there is Superman, ungloved hands on the grille, pushing the car off the tree. With a little rocking, with a snow-filtered “Fuck!” from Bradley, the car bounces and aligns. I am back on solid ground.

  Bradley opens my door, his cold, labored breath in my face. “Are you okay? I should have gotten you out of the car before I did that. I’m not thinking straight.”

  Squashed beneath my deflated air bag, I look up at him and smile. I try to say “Superman,” but my tongue goes slushy.

  “Oh, God,” Bradley says. He squints down at me, the wind stirring his bangs. “Can you get out of the car?” And so I do, I stagger out, dizzy and stumbling in my cumbersome platforms. My body is ringing and ringing, the feeling of Catherine Bennett kicking my desk, that vibration amped up and shooting through my limbs, radiating my heart and organs, that part of my body known in the obtuse lingo of yoga classes as my core, and it’s all Fuck you fuck you fuck you and Wow, so wearing a seat belt is a practice I should probably look into.

  Bradley puts his hands on my shoulders. I blink up at him, at the telephone wires and snowy tree branches, all the refreshing cold after the hot chemical smell of the air bags, the lit-up houses in the distances, sweet as cottages in the Black Forest. It is suddenly very, very important for me to tell him: The world is brutal but beautiful, but I can’t get the words out.

  “Can you spit?” Bradley turns into a bossy dental hygienist and says sternly: “You need to spit, Sandinista.” And so I hang open my mouth and lean over. A fat Rorschach of blood stains the snow around my shoes.

  Bradley looks down at me, his face so kind and full of worry that I feel a wintry jolt of happiness, and smile.

  “Your teeth look a little bloody. Are they okay?”

  I run my tongue over my teeth. I wipe my mouth with my hand.

  Like a magician, like Cary Grant, Bradley whips a handkerchief from his back pocket and blots my face with it. I think of church—the cloth swiped over the goblet.

  “My teeth are fine!” I say triumphantly. I lean over and spit into the snow again. “I think I just bit my tongue or my lip or something.” I run my tongue over my teeth again. “My teeth are exactly the same!”

  “Okay,” Bradley says. “We better get out of here.”

  He takes me gently by the shoulder and helps me back into the car, where the air bags are already deflating, drooping like ancient breasts. He walks around to the driver’s side, pausing to look at the grill and saying, “Shit,” under his breath.

  He pulls open the door and gives me the news: “The front of your car is pretty messed up. But I think it’s still drivable.” He shuts his car door. “Jesus.”

  “Yeah,” I say, as if blaming the so-called savior or pleading with him like some imperiled Bible-beater. “Jesus Christ.”

  Bradley runs his hand over his neck and says, “I don’t know if we should call your insurance company, or do we need to file an accident report with the police—”

  “Let’s just go,” I say. “Let’s just move.”

  Bradley nods and pulls the spent air bag to the middle of the front seat. It has sprouted from the center of the steering wheel that hangs open like a stunned mouth; there’s no honking my horn now.

  The gun falls from the front seat to the floor.

  “Whoops-a-daisy!” I say, my voice saccharine and strained.

  Bradley reaches to the floorboards with a wince, giving up a little ugh of pain as he grabs the gun. It gleams in his hand, pink and white as Easter. He chuckles under his breath, before he says, slowly and instructionally, “Of course, we should probably get rid of the gun if we are considering calling the police to report the accident.”

  “Probably,” I agree.

  “Where did you get it?” he asks, frowning at the candied handle.

  “It’s a bit of a long story, but I got it at Second Chance?”

  “Arne sold you a gun?” Bradley snorts. “Jesus, that guy’s a stone-cold freak.”

  “No. I mean, he didn’t sell it to me. He gave it to me. It was a gift. A donation. And he’s not a freak, either.”

  “Guess what?” Bradley says quietly. “That’s even weirder: that he gave you a gun. Do you have a license for it?”

  “Well, you know, not as yet. To tell you the truth, Bradley, I didn’t know that you needed a license for a gun.” I try to downplay the weirdness of this postcrash talk with humor. “Now that I think about it, that policy strikes me as highly un-American.”

  “Well, aren’t you quite the patriot.” He reaches down and takes the box of bullets off the car floor. “These flew out and hit my knee like a boulder.”

  “Sorry,” I mutter.

  He looks at the box. “You know, these are not bullets for a handgun. This is deer-hunting ammo. These bullets wouldn’t fit in your gun.” He chuckles. “God bless Arne. He probably wanted you to have the gun so you would feel safe, but not actually be able to harm anyone. Yourself included. You never tried to put the bullets in?”

  “Well, no,” I say, a little testy, ever the duped and dumb girl. “For safety reasons I didn’t want to load it before I needed to use it.”

  Bradley frowns.

  So. How could I have known those bullets wouldn’t work in my gun? The culture of violence is new to me; my mother would not kill a bug. If she found a daddy longlegs in the house, she would pick it up and cup it in her bare hands; she would giggle and scold it. “You stop! That tickles!” I would stand at the kitchen window and watch my mother crouch down in the backyard, the sun in her hair, and open her hands for the spider. Wow, I would think, what a freaking nutjob.

  Bradley switches on the dome light, examines the gun with his eyes squinted in concentration, like a jeweler. “The serial number has been sanded off. This is nobody’s gun. But it’s highly illegal.”

  He puts the gun on the seat and drums his fingers along the top of the steering wheel before he starts up the car, and I’m thinking that the stress of this night will make him hit the ganja pretty hard. He smokes way too much; I see that it affects his decision making, though probably I shouldn’t judge.

  “You know, in any case, a gun isn’t the smartest item to be toting around in your car.”

  This from someone never without a bag of weed!

  “I know. But thanks for the tip.”

  He looks into the rearview mirror, and then opens the car door. He flings my gun into the banked snow; he heaves the box of bullets out with a wince.

  “Hey! What—”

  “Sorry. Just an impulse.”

  “But Jesus, it’s mine. The gun was a gift,” I say, as if I’m wearing a pink frilly dress and have fluffy curls. I notice that my whole trunk hurts, not just my rib.

  “The last thing you need is a gun,” Bradley says.

  As if we are so different, as if he’s suddenly a bearded sage sitting cross-legged on a hilltop, meditating and eating unsweetened yogurt whereas I’m a random meth head swilling Dr Pepper for my sugar jones, having sex with strangers for quick cash.

  “Well, Bradley, what’s the first thing I need?” My face is sleeved in pain. I touch my hand to my forehead and feel the Cro-Magnon bump. “Could you perchance tell me the seventeenth thing I need?”

  Bradley ignores me. As we drive off, the Taurus pulls to the left, so Bradley has to constantly correct it with sharp little turns to the right, but it drives. It will get us home.

  * * *

  So it’s good-bye to my gun-girl self. But say I really wanted to get a gun. Say I sought out bullets that worked, that were the right fit.
How hard would that be? Given that I didn’t even know I wanted a gun in the first place? Given that I learned I have the gift of good aim?

  * * *

  Bradley takes the interstate downtown, the car miraculously chug-chug-chugging away in the slow lane, the little midsized economy car that could. He drives us to Thirty-Eighth Street, where the Pale Circus glows with its warm lit windows, with the headless mannequin and her implicit scarecrow’s lament: If I only had a brain.

  “Back to work?” I say.

  Bradley tries for a bit of levity. He sings the Snow White song: “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s back to work we go!”

  But with the spent air bag brushing my sore legs, with no gun amping up my badass self, I think of Snow White in her agony, Walt Disney’s poisoned princess laid out in her clear coffin, wearing her yellow dress with the starched collar, awaiting a kiss. And of course Catherine Bennett appears in my mind, holding up her teacher’s textbook like a poisoned apple, smiling at Alecia Hardaway, at me.

  Bradley parks, gets out of the car and walks over to my side, gallant and limping. He motions for me to unroll the window.

  “I’m going to try out my neighborhood connections,” he says with a wink.

  I roll up my window and watch him lope across the snowy street, my sore head pressed to the glass. He goes into the liquor store; through the front windows it looks like a blurred carnival of boozy light and moving bodies, as if in the midst of a late-night clearance sale. There is just enough light to see a monk coming out of Erika’s Erotic Confections. He has his head lowered, his hood up. He waits on the sidewalk next to Erika’s car. And out comes Erika: jeans tucked into storm-trooper snow boots and a leather jacket with the collar flipped up. She has her purse on her shoulder, but it slips to the crook of her arm when she turns and locks the metal door of her shop.

  The monk stares down at the sidewalk, which the soft new snow has turned to silk. I cup my hand to my sore mouth and touch my puffed lips, watching. Erika and the monk exchange no words. With his hands in his robe pockets, the monk watches her get in her car and drive away. Perhaps what they are giving each other is more than forbidden, starlit romance; perhaps it’s not that at all, but the protection of friendship. The monk stands on the sidewalk until Erika’s car lights fade into the darkness. And then he trudges up snowy Thirty-Eighth Street in his sandals, heading for home.

  Bradley comes out of the liquor store triumphant, flashing a thumbs-up sign as he slip-slides across the street, brown bag raised over his head like a bowling trophy. Not cool: if any undercover cops are lurking, we are further screwed. I haul my sorry self out of the car, and together we cross the frozen sidewalk in front of the Pale Circus.

  I take a quick look back at my car, the crunched front end. From behind you would never know anything was wrong. And I mourn my mother yet again as I remember using fingernail polish remover and a putty knife to take off her embarrassing, self-aggrandizing bumper stickers: KEEP YOUR THEOLOGY OFF MY BIOLOGY, THANK GODDESS, THE ONLY BUSH I TRUST IS MY OWN. I wish I’d left them on, in memoriam, instead of scraping them off, because the bumper stickers were a sign of my mother’s essence. The bottle of lemon-scented fingernail polish remover and the putty knife, well, that was pure me: Little Miss Lemming.

  Bradley takes a ring of keys from his jacket pocket and unlocks the front door.

  “Let there be light,” he says, his voice grandiose as Vegas Elvis’s.

  And he flips the switch and here is the glorious landscape of cotton and wool and acetate, satin against the night sky, and yes it’s lovely, but I’m thinking My gun my gun oh my sweet gun. And Catherine Bennett smiles and says, Have you been paying attention?

  Does no one understand how completely easy it is to get a gun? Will no one give me an ounce of respect?

  Bradley puts the brown bag on the cash desk. He takes off his jacket and rubs his elbows as he looks at the thermostat. He turns up the heat, which will take a long time to kick in. Bradley takes the bottle—champagne—and two plastic cups out of the bag. He pops the cork, and champagne bubbles up and spills on the gleaming hardwood floors. Both of us go lurching for the paper towels beneath the register; Henry Charbonneau has us trained.

  Bradley snaps a square of paper towel off the roll and wipes up the spilled champagne. Then he folds two paper towels into elegant octagons and hands me one. I pour the champagne and we raise our cups in a mock-glamorous toast, our aching arms linked. He looks at me very seriously, as if he might cry, and says, “Sandinista, we survived the car wreck—”

  And here he seems like a drama mama most supreme, because a car careening off a suburban street and smacking into a cottonwood tree is rarely a death sentence. It is just what it is, some bad luck, just like the Cutlass that jumped the curb and killed my mother was pure bad luck and Catherine Bennett was—is—Alecia Hardaway’s bad luck. Or do we have the power to change fate? If not our own, someone else’s?

  I blot my hurt lips with the paper towel and come away with a red-russet stain, the color of an autumn lipstick.

  Bradley puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “We survived the car wreck. And had I died, oh, it would be tragic, heaven knows, and Robert could do my funeral Mass, he could plant the old Judas kiss on my embalmed lips and whisk me off to heaven.”

  “He would certainly weep for your handsome young corpse.”

  “I hope he would slit his throat,” Bradley says dreamily, staring off at a canary-yellow coat on a display form, the genius of its jeweled white buttons, the softly flared collar. “But really, it’s only important that you didn’t die, Sandinista. You are … the last of your tribe. Which I realize is a corn-dog thing to say—add a root beer float and order of fries and you’re good to go, Miss. But, you are … the last.”

  I feel my throat close, so I take a long drink of champagne.

  “And so the whole business with the gun—which is your business, granted—it just seems like a bad idea. You can’t do anything that is going to hurt you.”

  And there’s a lot of h in his hurt. It is a long, awkward softness of hhhhh. The sound of it makes my mouth hurt even more.

  I’m afraid he’s going to cry; I’m afraid I’m going to cry, so I take the wheel and drive us off this steep road. I say: “You know, I thought you were in love with Henry Charbonneau. I thought I picked up that vibe.”

  “No,” Bradley says sadly. “God, no. Did you really think I would find his dissertations about the proper way to Swiffer for maximum detritus pickup to be some sort of red-hot aphrodisiac? Give me some credit, Sandinista.”

  “True, his cleaning advice is a bit of a cold shower. But technically he’s so beautifully handsome,” I say.

  “Technically, yes, he is,” Bradley says. “Last summer when I first started working here, we almost kissed one time when we were both drunk. We were, like, a half centimeter away from it. But then Henry Charbonneau said, ‘Do you want me to burn in hell for all of eternity? Go forth and live your life with fellow young people.’ Do you know that he’s positive?”

  I look at my fancy, snow-stained shoes and take another gulp of champagne. “That sucks. But, can’t you live, like, for fifty years on all the good medicines they have now? The new HIV cocktails?”

  Bradley shrugs. “Well, sure,” he says, his voice charged with sarcasm. “But still, it would trouble a person. It’s still kind of a bullshit thing to have at the back of your mind all day long: I have HIV. Will my medicine let me live for fifty years?”

  And I’m thinking who in their right mind would want to live for another fifty years, and also: What is wrong with me? “Right,” I say. “It’s terrible. Of course it’s a terrible weight.” I take another sip.

  “Although Henry Charbonneau is filthy rich, so there’s that,” Bradley says. “He can get the best medical care. He’s Mr. Trust Fund.”

  He runs his tongue over his chapped lips, a brief comfort. With his finger and crucified thumb, he pulls away a flake of dead skin. “Still, anyway, when I take
money from the register I always pay it back. Even though Henry Charbonneau doesn’t need the money from the Pale Circus to live on; it probably doesn’t even pay for his personal dry cleaning. I pay it all back anyway.”

  And I know this isn’t quite true, but it doesn’t matter to me in the least. “Borrowing isn’t stealing,” I say, and Bradley could not agree more.

  * * *

  By the time we finish off the bottle, we both feel a lot less sore. The champagne gives us a kick of wheeeee! And all the sublime colors of the Pale Circus pinwheel through my mind, the blues and lavenders, the soft cherry-pinks and groovy greens. We sit in front of the display window and stare out at our white city, the velvety snow-globe fantasy of it all.

  Bradley looks down at my platforms and says, “Take off your shoes.”

  And I take them off, thinking of all the little adventures my shoes have known today, envisioning them on the shelf of a secondhand store, how the next person who owns them will not know that they hold the energy of candy-pink guns, of Catherine Bennett and car crashes.

  Bradley stumbles over to the shoe display and brings back a pair of ski boots from the shelf; they are wide and fat as marshmallows and my feet squish around in them. I have to admit they feel better than my platforms. He’s changed out of his shoes too; he’s wearing the Ziggy Stardust boots with his jeans tucked in.

  He puts his hand down and helps me up. “And now we go,” he says dramatically. I do not ask where we’re going; I let Bradley lead me to the door. Bradley locks up the store with great effort, as if masterfully solving a Rubik’s Cube. I look across the street and see three guys in army fatigues and berets getting out of a car in front of the liquor store. They’re joking around—one guy using hand gestures to tell a story as his friends laugh. They don’t look much older than me, so maybe they are nineteen-year-olds on leave from Iraq in search of alcoholic beverages. No matter, if they aren’t twenty-one yet they’ll have to rely on their uniforms or a decent fake ID to buy their beer.