Colonel Rutherford's Colt

by Lucius Shepard

  “I don’t know it’s such a good idea to celebrate before you got something to put in the bank.”

  “Well, I do.” She returned with the vodka bottle and two glasses, which she placed on the coffee table. She gave him the plain one and kept one with a partly rubbed-off Pokémon figure on the side for herself. “I haven’t had anything to celebrate for so long . . .” She poured a stiff measure into his glass, leaning toward him as she did, the pink cloth falling away from her chest, revealing the slope of a plump breast encased in satiny cloth and lace. She poured herself about a finger and lifted the glass to him. “Thank you,” she said in a quiet voice. “Thank you so much.”

  “Just business,” he said.

  They sipped, then set their glasses down on the table in almost perfect unison.

  “You must do a lot of traveling,” she said after a silence.

  “Well, we do and we don’t,” he said, leaning back. “We hit the shows in Yakima, Missoula, Boise, Sand Point. Pretty much all over the Northwest. Don’t seem much like traveling to me. But once or twice a year we do a national show. In LA or Las Vegas. One time in New York.”

  “I’ll bet that was exciting.”

  “It ain’t like we got time to see the sights. Mostly it’s we fly in, do the show, and fly out again. ’Course Rita likes to hit the bars. She loves finding a new bar to tear up.”

  “I imagine you meet a lot of interesting people,” Ms. Snow said with less vivacity.

  “Some,” said Jimmy, and tried to think of them—the only one he could come up with at first was a guy he’d run into in Billings who could stand next to a school bus and shoot his piss clear over the roof of the thing. Then his brain served up a better candidate. “There was a fella in LA. A producer. He was after me to do technical advising on some movie, and he invited us to a party. He had this big ol’ house in the hills with a deck and a pool. About five minutes after we got there, we met up with Kevin Costner.”

  “You did?” Ms. Snow gave “did” two syllables. “I love him! What was he like?”

  “Didn’t seem like all that much to me. He grabbed my hand and tried to bust it off, then he give me a real sincere smile . . . Y’know, kinda smile a preacher gives ya when he’s sizing up your wallet. He was took with Rita, though. He dragged her off into a corner and tried to impress her with his knowledge of Indian lore. I thought she was gonna rip him a new one, but she played along. She acted all impressed, like ‘Ooh, Mister Costner, you’re so smart! My people’re so grateful for all your service to them.’ Then she got to telling him about Blackfoot ways. Just filling his head with absolute horseshit. Costner was so into her, he started taking notes. It was funnier than hell.”

  Ms. Snow laughed politely. “Did you meet any other movie stars?”

  “There was a guy used to be somebody on TV, but I can’t recall the show. He was all the time making funny faces.”

  Ms. Snow said, “Maybe it was Jim Carrey,” and Jimmy told her that the guy had been chubby and about sixty. Having exhausted his immediate supply of interesting people, he prodded Ms. Snow to tell about herself. She said there wasn’t much to tell, but as was the case with most people in the habit of saying that, she proceeded to tell it all. It was like he’d tapped a keg and didn’t have a stopper. She told him about her kids—Brandy, Job, and Celine (for her favorite singer), ages eight to twelve—and her job as an apprentice beautician (in Seattle she’d be full-fledged and licensed), and about her church (The Church of Apostolic Union over in Kent), and about the pet cat who’d recently had a fatal encounter with a yuppie in a Beamer. The passion with which she invested these meager details fascinated Jimmy. She was a woman, he realized, whose passion had been kept down for quite a while. Every gesture and expression embodied a release of furious energy. Her voice, though it remained shaky and frail, seemed to tremble as a result of strength, as if the instrument were too weak to carry the freight of emotion. In her enthusiasm, she shifted closer to him. Her top button had come undone, and when she leaned forward he could see the shape of a nipple pushing against the fabric of her bra. The sight muddled him, knocked down a wall in his mental storehouse, and things kept separate tumbled together. One of the characters in his story stepped forward and slipped him a thought. It had been so long . . . so very, very long. He shook himself to restore focus. Ms. Snow never noticed. She was off onto a trip she and the kids had taken to Vancouver Island, saying how someone had tried to sell marijuana to her oldest. The whole island was nothing but dope growers and sex maniacs. Someone had told her they had nude drug festivals twice a year. Eventually the engine of her conversation sputtered and died, gasping out a final few exaggerations about crime in Canada, and they sat without speaking. Jimmy’s character kept sticking his nose in, offering suggestions, observations. How forlorn she seemed, so unlike the girl he had played with late into the summer dusk, a smell of boxwood thickening the air . . .

  Jimmy slammed the door on his story, glanced at Ms. Snow. She stole a peek at him, let out a disappointed-sounding sigh, as if to say, “Oh, well. Guess that’s that.” The only way he could think to keep the evening going was more business.

  “There’s something else we should go over,” he said.

  She straightened, freshly alert.

  “I got a feeling we could jump Borchard up into five figures and get you a serious stake. He’s dying for that Colt.”

  “No,” she said, laying the word out there like a stone on top of a casket.

  His character demanded the floor—Jimmy shouldered the door shut again. “I know your objections,” he said. “But it might be the best way to get him gone. He’d be satisfied, and you’d wind up with maybe near twice as much money.”

  She tucked a strand of hair into place behind her ear and sat primly, tightly gathered. “You don’t understand.”

  “Try me,” he said.

  “He calls me three, four times a day . . .” She broke off, fighting back tears.

  How beautiful and strong she was in her sadness. Emotion might grip her, but she would always shrug it off and go on. The character’s thought was so similar to his own, Jimmy didn’t bother kicking him to the curb.

  “He calls you?” He touched her arm, consoling. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “You don’t understand! You can’t tell him anything—he does whatever he wants.” Her voice deteriorated into a sob. “Every time he calls he talks about how he’s gonna hurt me and the kids if he doesn’t . . .” The tears came, their weight bearing down her head.

  “Thought you was gonna get in touch if he bothered you?”

  She was weeping profusely now, unable to speak. He eased closer, draped an arm about her shoulder, and she collapsed against him.

  “All right. Settle down,” he said. “We ain’t selling to him.”

  She lifted her face to him, and there it was, the yearning, expectant look he’d been hoping for . . . years of hope, years of silent endurance and despondency. Her cobalt eyes went down for miles. He kissed her, and she turned into the kiss, looped her arms about his neck. His left hand fitted to her waist, thumb pressuring the side of her breast, rubbing the undercurve. He kissed the hollow of her throat, fingered a button and popped it free. She gave a melodious cry, the last gentle note of a despairing music, and deepened the kiss. His fingers worked feverishly, advantaging himself of her abandoned resolve. Between the lace-trimmed cups of her undergarment was a snap, and when he disengaged it, her breasts spilled forth, a plush, almost indescribable softness nuzzling his palms. “Oh, cousin,” he whispered, his mind drugged with warmth and beauty. His hand fell to her knee, slid higher until he touched the core of her warmth, the convulsed secret she had finally dared to reveal. He wanted the scent of her, the taste, and lowered her to lie upon the couch. “My beautiful cousin,” he said, pushing the dress up past her hips. The lacy white mound of her sex. The inside of one thigh glistening and damp.

  “Wait!” She pushed at him with the heel of her hand. A weak push, but it
muddied his waters, and though she kept on speaking, he couldn’t hear her at first.

  “. . . . cousin?” she said, and waited; then: “Well, why?”

  He didn’t catch her meaning.

  “Why’d you call me ‘cousin’?” she said insistently.

  He felt like a man whose baggy clothes were flapping in a high wind and was trying to hold himself together. “Just a habit. Y’know, like a family thing.”

  Tension ebbed from her face, but not altogether.

  “Guess I’m feeling close to you,” he said.

  “I know.” A smile melted up. “Me, too.” She kissed him pertly, clasped her hands behind his neck, inviting him closer.

  He chose a mole on her white shoulder for his mark, pressed his lips there, then to the upper slope of a breast. She quickened, her breath shallow. He flicked his tongue across the nipple and whispered, “I love you.” Her body stiffened against him. “All these years,” he said. “I never thought this night would come.” Her sugary voice answered, but there was a singing in his ears, the rush of blood and heat, and he couldn’t hear. He imagined she was saying the same word his blood sang, love over and over. “There is no wrong in this, cousin,” he said. “We are of one blood and one heart.” Then she was pulling at his hair, slapping, hurting him.

  “What’re you talking about?” she cried, shoving him away. She struggled up, bunched handfuls of the pink dress to hide her glorious breasts. She gazed at him with confusion and dread. “I want you to leave,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I . . . I just want you to leave.”

  He sat mutely, watching shattered pieces of the moment fly outward beyond the corners of his eyes. The head of his erection was jammed against his jeans—he resisted the urge to adjust it.

  “Will you please go?” She had begun to weep again, and he wanted to comfort her, but the old restraints were back, iron bands clamped about his arms, his tongue.

  “Oh, God! You’re not going to be like him, are you?” She let the dress slide from her breasts and tucked in her elbows to cover them, buried her face in hands.

  He wondered briefly who “him” might be, then said, “I was merely responding to your summons.”

  She peered at him over the tips of her fingers, terrified. She shut her eyes. “Please . . . please please please go!” The words were squeezed out, as if they were the dregs of her resistance.

  He got clumsily to his feet, swayed, searched for his hat. His tread shook glassware in a kitchen cabinet. He scooped the hat up from the counter, held it in both hands. “Forgive me,” he said.

  She refused to look at him.

  “All right,” he said. “All right.”

  The cold air shocked him—he had dressed for a warmer climate. He walked unsteadily away from the place, unable to think of a destination, a heaviness in his chest. He recognized nothing of the night.

  “Mister Guy!”

  The name alerted Jimmy. He turned to the trailer. The door was cracked to show a line of light thin as a crosshair. He wasn’t entirely clear about what was going on.

  Ms. Snow said, “Would you mind next time when there’s business letting Rita handle it?”

  * * *

  He drove the van recklessly, speeding through slow zones, stomping on the brakes at lights. He was less upset over what had happened than anxious for it not to happen again until he reached the motel. Five, maybe six miles from the trailer court, he began to think character thoughts, to see the imagined. Worried that he might lose control of the van, he pulled into the lot of a closed-for-business drive-in with a tall sign on the roof from which the neon lettering had been removed. The windows blank and lightless, booths vacant, counters dusty and littered with old packaging. He killed the engine, sat staring into the abandoned place, peopling it with sore-ankled waitresses; amphetamine-edged truck drivers; three kids working on the downside of a blotter trip, laughing at the menu and the blotchy colors on each other’s faces; seniors looking for a conversation with a stranger, something to remember of an unmemorable day. This time he didn’t have to search for a way into the story. It bore down on him like an angry old man waving a stick, chasing ordinary thoughts off, as if they were barn cats sprinting for cover, and then he was with Susan, wandering the swamps of grief. Looking for something that would reconnect her to life, and finding it in the cold airless regions of hate where, distant from everything, her judgments refined, made icy, she could withstand the howling emptiness that poured up from the grave.

  Hate perfected itself in Susan’s heart more efficiently than had love. Whereas love had possessed her, hate was something she possessed, something she could wield. She imagined it at first to have the likeness of a gleaming steel needle revolving on end and growing sharper with every turn, hovering inside her, lit by a mysterious radiance like a relic on museum display. But as grief faded . . . No, faded was not the right word, not the word she would use. As grief merged with her, the way a shroud over time will rot and combine with the rotting flesh it surrounds, becoming one substance, she learned to view hate as an organic quality that sprouted from a rich soil fertilized by grief. Whatever its nature, it was more easily satisfied than love, and perhaps more durable, though of this last she was not certain. Her love for Luis seemed undimmed, as if it took its charge from an entirely different source. It was smaller now, not—as it had been—a vast cloud in which she wandered, but rather a cloud adrift inside her. Yet she had no doubt that if she were, through some art of God’s, to encounter him on the street or at the Palace, everything she felt would suddenly be enlarged and she would be lost again.

  Each morning she would sit at her writing desk, poring over his letters and poems, lingering over those passages in which he most lived, so that she, too, could live. But time and again she encountered passages that disturbed her nostalgia, sentences fraught with anxiety and pain, and with intimations of a tragedy to come:

  I have followed you / along a trail of obsession / to the edge of my life / where a solitary star broods / above a blood-dark sea / spilling into a void / into which furniture / galleons and diamonds / centuries and horses / are also falling endlessly / and there you hover / beyond the last firm ground / daring me to leap . . .

  This particular passage, from one of his final poems, reminded her how greatly her indecisiveness had contributed to his death, and that was sufficient to shift her attention away from love and inspire her to contemplate the products of hate.

  The colonel had cut back on his traveling, and thus claimed his husbandly rights with increasing frequency. She would lie in bed, in the dark, pretending to sleep, dreading the peremptory sound of his knock, and when he entered, conceding that she had lost the right to deny him by virtue of her failure to take the Colt from his hand, she would feign a sleepy acceptance, her thoughts clenched like a fist, trying not to notice his heaviness, the antiseptically perfumed flavor of his mouth, his fumbling caresses, his grunting mastery, how even in his lust he conveyed a mechanical style. But notice these things she did. She could no longer, as once she had, pretend that the colonel was Luis—it was too monstrous a pretense now. Her only refuge lay in denial. After he left she would wash his stink from her skin and sit staring blindly out into the shadowy confusion of the grounds, hopeless and uncaring. At times she felt an unraveling within her, a loss of cohesion, and worse, she also felt the urge to surrender to this dissolution. Madness could be no more cruel than her current existence, which seemed a colorless nightmare by day, and by night a vivid one. Her life, she believed, was over.

  Four months after the murder she received a letter from her cousin Aaron. She did not bother to open it immediately. They corresponded regularly now, but she was past needing a confidante. At any rate, Aaron had proved a disappointment in the role. He lectured too much, his advice was always the same—“Leave!”—and lately a distinct note of ardor had been creeping into his writing. She had yet to tell him of the circumstances surrounding Luis’ death, because she knew his response would have little v
alue.

  Eventually, for want of any more compelling pastime, she opened Aaron’s letter. The first few paragraphs were as expected—news of his business, projections of growth, plans for expansion. But on the second page, the tone of the letter changed:

  . . . I can no longer refrain from speaking what is in my heart. When we began this correspondence, I informed you that I was not certain whether some portion of the feelings I once expressed to you still remained. I believed, however, that if they did, it would be in the form of a dark residue, a shadow of what was. But your letters, dear Susan, and the memories they conjure have proved the lie of this. What I perceived to be a shadow was merely an accumulation of dark time and darker shame, a covering I contrived to hide an emotion that even I, to whom it seems natural and true, know is wrong, and it is as strong in me now as ever it was. I fully expect that you will wish to end our correspondence after hearing this news, and I will not seek to influence you to the contrary. Perhaps that is for the best. I cannot think that this renewal of an emotion I assumed to be moribund, if not dead, can have any benefit for either of us . . .

  Susan let the letter fall listlessly from her hand. She had grown weary of Aaron’s self-absorption and she did not have the patience to read through what looked to be several more pages of confession and analysis. Only Aaron, she thought, could make an incestuous passion seem boring. Even when they were young and lively in their play, he had always exhibited a mature sense of incaution, carefully balancing the joys of every mischief against the potentials of the woodshed, as if already studying for his career in accounting. Thus it had amazed her all the more when he had initially announced his love—how had a man so frightened of her father’s hand dared such iniquity? He must, she told herself, have truly loved her. And, by his own declaration, he still did. If she had known that evening in the garden what she knew now, offered a choice between contemptible perversion and a future with Colonel Rutherford, she believed she would have opted for the former . . . This sentiment, though it came as whimsy, lingered in her thoughts, as if begging for her notice, and when, upon examining it more closely, she realized its implications, she was inclined to reject out of hand the scenario it engendered—yet it was so perfect a design, so potent a deceit, she could not completely dismiss it. She sought to peer inside herself, trying to find the spiritual lesion that she knew must exist or else she would never have come to reflect upon this evil machination. She seemed in all particulars herself, every portion of her psyche in, if not good then at least working, order. Yet she was unable to accept this self-judgment. Something must have changed, some vial of glandular poison spilled, subtly affecting the heart of her nature; otherwise she could never have entertained that serpent of an idea slithering joyfully about her brain, infecting every cell with its flicking kiss.