Colonel Rutherford's Colt

by Lucius Shepard

  “You’re an actress, too,” Rita said. “Right?”

  Dee was still breathing hard from the dancing. She caught a drain, swallowed. “How’d you know?”

  Rita pointed to her brain. “We sense these things. You worked any?”

  “I did some modeling when I was younger. But I didn’t like it. Now I’m in Theater Arts down at Berkeley.”

  “I’ll give you my number in LA before I leave. If you want, I can introduce you to some people.”

  “That’d be awesome! Thank you!”

  “With your looks,” Rita said, “couple years I might be thanking you for givin’ me a crumb from your table.”

  A silence slid in between them. Rita read some of the graffiti. To the right of Dee’s head were eight felt-tip representations of a hand with its thumb and forefinger held apart, measuring distances ranging from miniscule to small. Under each drawing was the name of a man. Marty Kass. Jack Sauter. Clay Homanski. Someone had gone to great pains.

  “You’re an amazing dancer,” Dee said shyly. “Really amazing.”

  “I was inspired.” Rita reached out, caressed her cheek, and Dee rubbed against her palm.

  ’No.” Dee peeled Rita’s hand from her cheek, kissed it, then let it fall, only the fingers touching. “You’re so alive. You’re the most alive person here. I saw it when you were walking toward us. It wasn’t how you moved, it was just who you are. Everyone was staring.”

  “A female skunk would draw stares in this crowd.”

  Dee’s manner was all naive fire and sincerity. “Don’t put yourself down! You’re so beautiful!”

  Rita honeyed up her voice. “I’m not the one’s beautiful here.”

  The girl’s mouth shaped itself into a pout. “I’ve got a face . . . but there’s nothing behind it. I’m ordinary.”

  “How you figure?”

  “When I look at myself . . . it’s just a face.”

  “You can’t see nothing in a mirror.” Rita laid a finger beside her right eye. “This here’s where you wanna look.”

  Keeping her back to the wall, Dee tilted her head toward Rita, and there it was again, that flash from inside, a ray of gemmy brilliance sawing wildly out, like a klieg light gone off its moorings.

  “What do you see?” she asked.

  “I see myself,” said Rita.

  The answer appeared to stop Dee, to cut her juice for a second. Then she said, “Don’t lie to me,” in a damaged voice.

  Rita caught up her hand. “That’s what I see. Myself without all the healed-up places, all the shit of life.” She played with the girl’s fingers. “I see an actress waiting for the right part.”

  A change in Dee’s face, as if the wild thing was eased and had withdrawn, leaving her a girl again. Anxious. Innocent and smitten.

  “Did you come with Janine?” Rita asked.

  “Yeah, but . . .” Dee blushed. “But . . . uh . . .”

  “You’re not together?”

  “No.” Dee shook her head with solemnity, as if she knew this to be a step taken.

  A toilet flushed; somebody said, “Oh, shit.”

  Rita stroked the inside of Dee’s wrist with her thumb. “I wanna kiss you again,” she said. She moved close, and Dee looped both arms about her neck. A stall door banged, and two girls shrieked laughter, the sound reverberating in the tiled space. Dee tensed, but relaxed when Rita sipped freshness from her mouth. Tequila and toothpaste. Rita liked the way Dee took control of the kiss, aggressive with her tongue, the wild thing starting to slither free. Dee pushed her gently away, slipped off her T-shirt. Her breasts were milky white, largish and high, the engorged pink nipples like mints on hotel pillows. Rita cupped them, hefted them, squeezed them together so she could serpent-kiss both nipples at once. Dee whispered, “Oh god. . . .” Fingers tangled in Rita’s hair.

  “Now you!” Dee said urgently. “I want to see you.”

  Rita straightened. She rolled a nipple between her fingers, gave it a pinch to regain control. “Don’t rush it,” she said. “Something this sweet, you let it simmer till the flavor’s strong.”

  * * *

  Jimmy located a spot where he could pull the van into the bushes off the road leading to Major Borchard’s compound, just past the abandoned shack with the target tacked to one collapsed wall. He cut the engine, climbed cautiously out, watching where he stepped. Dry leaves crackled underfoot, fallen twigs clawed his bootheels. He walked back along the road to the shack, using a flashlight to point the way, then pushed through thick brush until he was standing by the steps. Rotten-looking boards. He gave them a kick to see if anything scurried away, tested them to learn if they would bear his weight, and shined the flashlight underneath them. He probed the skewed doorway with the light, illuminating yellowed magazines, a broken chair, an empty cartridge box from which the printing and color had been scrubbed by the weather. An old smell of decomposition, almost subsumed by the resiny scent of pine, issued from within. Satisfied by the absence of pests, he sat himself down. The board step was damp and creaked beneath him. At his back, the ruin seemed to release a faint moldy breath. He wondered how the shack had served Major Borchard. Maybe a place of initiation. Send a racist cub down to sit in it until he had visions of Ivory Joe Jesus or the town of Maumbad Heiglitz where Hitler got his first woody. Might be it was holy ground, the primitive shelter where Bob Champion, possessed by the spirit of Liberty, had come to plan his sacred bank robberies and write his irresistible screed. Or maybe the shack was pre-Borchard, being the ancestral home of the elusive and terrible Caucasaurus, the progenitor of those noble savages whose cave paintings of lynchings and burning crosses could still be found in sewer tunnels beneath certain land-grant universities in the South. The more he talked to Borchard, the more Jimmy thought the major had been snagged by his own hook, reeled himself in, and was now preparing to mount his own stiffening body on a trophy plaque. His claim of being the exemplar of a philosophy purified of any taint of racism . . . What a hoot! Borchard had lost contact with his true imperatives. He was like a man who thought he could reach the Heavenly City by swallowing a Bible, and having done so, had proceeded to shit out the best parts, the parts he most believed in . . . It started to rain. Drops splatted on the roof, but the canopy was so thick overhead, Jimmy scarcely felt a one. He listened to the dark. Apart from the rain, there was only the distant humming of the expressway, a streak of sound that seemed to run alongside the rest of reality, measuring some fundamental quality, like the bar registering the levels of a soundtrack beside a frame of raw film. He supposed he should go on up to the house and give the major the bad news, but he didn’t feel like dealing with him just yet.

  The story tugged at him, trying to drag him under its surface, but he wasn’t ready to go there. It had taken an unplanned turning, and though this had been true of other stories, it never was easy to accept. It felt like a hand had reached in from somewhere and reconfigured his characters. The way he’d laid it out, Susan and Aaron would run off together, and the narrative would have eased to conclusion. Not every loose thread would get tied, but that was how he wanted it to be. Like life. Sloppy and unpredictable. Now that Susan had rejected Aaron, things were going to play out badly for everyone. Having used her cousin, manipulated him with her flesh, how could she wash that stain from her soul? The last of her innocence spent, she’d follow a cynic’s road to hell, engaging in desultory affairs, trying to recapture something she would never have lost if she’d obeyed the rule of her nature, and ultimately would sink into depravity, into foulness of every description, becoming herself the thing she had hated. And Aaron . . . it was over for him. Hope crushed; love destroyed; stumbling in tears away from Susan’s bedroom. What other end could he pursue apart from that to which he had been turned? How else exorcise rage and frustration than by confronting the monster who had transformed his cousin’s sweetness into perfidy? That was how he viewed it. Susan’s ardor had seemed of unalloyed quality, yet she could not of a sudden have abandoned th
eir involvement unless the involvement itself were false, unless she were false. All her complaints about the colonel, her suggestion that if she were free of him, unmarried, then she and Aaron might further explore the attraction between them—they had been tools with which to shape his rage. Recognizing this, it might be assumed that he would resist such usage, but seeing how she had been molded into this duplicitous form goaded him into a fury whose force went beyond what even Susan might have hoped, all of it directed at the man who had murdered her heart.

  Anger armored his thoughts against the process of reason, and he drove his right fist into a door that, by chance, he happened to be passing. The door, which had not been completely closed, swung inward, and, shaking his hand in pain, he gazed into what appeared to be the colonel’s sitting room, a carpeted space furnished with sturdy chairs and a leather sofa and a massive desk. Military memorabilia on the walls. Aaron thought it most ordinary to be the den of such a malignant beast. But upon entering and lighting a lamp, after walking about and touching the room’s contents, he gained a profound sense of the colonel’s vileness. The man’s essence clung to his belongings. It was in the shine of the several pairs of boots arranged as though on regimental display in the closet; in the alphabetized dispatches occupying various files; in the gilt-framed painting of an eagle rendered in a style apparently intended to portray the bird’s majesty and ferocity, but that had in its excess succeeded rather in portraying it as mad and ludicrously proud; in the loops and flourishes of the florid signature affixed to documents on the desk; in the cold gleam of the holstered sidearm now doing duty as a paperweight. Afflicted by these and other glimmers of the colonel’s gross spirit, flooded with hatred, Aaron slumped into the chair beside the desk and, acting from a stance of less purposeful inspection than perverse curiosity, began to examine Colonel Rutherford’s papers. Letters, dispatches, orders, government contracts—nothing caught his interest until he came upon a letter posted a week earlier from an address in Matanzas informing the colonel that his lodge was ready for occupancy. Aaron pocketed this letter. He sat without moving for a considerable time, his thoughts running a tedious and unproductive circuit, ranging from intent to determination to the desire to flee Havana, to travel somewhere beyond the influence of his beautiful cousin, if such a destination existed anywhere on earth. But each stop on the circuit directed him onward to the next, and he came to understand that thinking would afford him no escape. He slipped the gun, a Colt of recent vintage, from the holster. It, too, he pocketed. When he stood, the weight of the gun caused him to feel overbalanced, as if his flesh and bones were by comparison insubstantial.

  Instead of going immediately to the front door, as he had commanded himself to do, he returned to Susan’s door, pausing before it. Her light remained on, yet he detected no sound from within. He had presumed that she would be weeping, perhaps not for the same reasons he had wept, but expressive of some feeling at least akin to his own. The silence made him wonder if she had injured herself, or if she might have fallen into a dangerous fugue, one prompted by emotional conflict. He thought to investigate for the sake of her well being, but then recognized that he was merely attempting to justify having a last glimpse of her. He wrenched himself from the door and hurried down the stairs and then sprinted out onto the grounds, in his anguish moving away from the house but not along the driveway that led to the gate. Within a matter of seconds, he became disoriented, lost in a darkness of palms, a space thick with shrubs bearing large blooms lent a sickly white luster by angling shafts of moonlight. He saw the lights of the house behind him, but could find no sign of a path. Pushing aside branches, he forced a path through the shrubbery, emerging at the rear of the house, beside the trunk of a tree with an enormous spreading crown. A window on the second floor, one overlooking a sapling palm, had been thrown open, and Susan was standing in it, her filmy nightdress molded to her by the breeze, much of her comely shape revealed. Aaron’s emotions upon seeing her were too complex to be summed up by a single word or even several, though a sickly yearning colored the surface of his feelings. He approached the window and when she saw him, he withdrew the Colt from his pocket and brandished it aloft.

  “This is what you want?” he shouted. “This?”

  She said nothing. Her face appeared in repose.

  “For God’s sake, Susan!” Aaron lowered his arm and let the gun dangle at his side. For a long interval he was unable to speak. Finally, in calmer voice, he said, “Susan, come with me. Please! We can catch the morning boat.”

  She maintained her silent pose, and Aaron had the urge, both formed and fully imagined in an instant, to fire at her, watch her fall, and then turn the weapon on himself. But his urge did not translate into action. His fingers had grown as cold and inflexible as the Colt itself.

  “Will you not speak to me?” Tears came into his eyes and he pressed the heel of his free hand to his brow, trying to restrain them.

  Her voice drifted down to him, seeming—despite the character of her words—pitiless, devoid of feeling. “I’m sorry, Aaron. I don’t know what to say.”

  He looked up to her again, saw nothing familiar, no cousin to whom he might appeal on grounds of history or natural affection, only the figure of a beautiful woman, smiling, yet of an aspect one could only describe in terms of ferocity, posed like the Helen of her age, gazing at a sight she alone could envision, a conflagration whose every particular she was happy to have inspired. He could not bear to see her so. He turned and walked unsteadily off along the drive, unable to think of an immediate destination, a new heaviness in his chest. Outside the gate, he stopped and looked about. His eyes were blurred. He heard a noise that, when he glanced up at the trembling bright signals in the sky, he imagined to be the stars rattling in their dice cups. Seconds later, a hansom drawn by two blinkered roans, the driver’s face obscured by a wide-brimmed hat, hurtled past with a shattering noise. Lights veered at him, and the outlines of trees and street and houses shifted about like jackstraws, assembling the likeness of a grotesque netherworld where shadows watched from the triangular windows of spindly towers and huge impaled spiders waved their legs atop long curving pins. Even after his eyes had cleared, he recognized nothing of the night.

  * * *

  Dee was enraptured by Rita’s tattoo. She kissed each scale of the snake and licked the apple shiny. Then she pressed herself against Rita, going breast to breast. She put her mouth to Rita’s ear, fingered her belt buckle, and whispered, “I want to go down on you.” Rita inhaled the mango-rinse cigarette-smoke smell of her hair, slid her breasts back and forth against Dee. This perfect, tit-slippery, ice cream girl, all soft and desiring, kneeling on the floor of the john and getting wet-faced between her thighs. . . . The picture fit an empty frame in Rita’s album.

  “Baby,” she said. “You go ahead do what you want.”

  Dee worked her jeans and panties down, so Rita could free up her right leg and plant a foot atop the toilet. The women in the other stalls weren’t talking now, maybe listening for sex . . . maybe having sex themselves. Music filtered in from another world, ponderous and bass-heavy. Dee’s tongue put a charge into Rita, and Rita restrained her with the heel of her hand. “Go easy, baby,” she said. “Take your sweet time.” But Dee wasn’t hearing her. She was all over Rita’s pussy, into every fold, like a hungry cat in a hurry to catch all of a spill, short on technique but her enthusiasm was way off the scale, and Rita told herself to hell with lessons, let’s ride this honey train. She thought she heard the crackling of a fire in her mind, a sigh that might have been hers, and then her singularity of focus was washed away by a million thoughts, observations, urgencies, each surfacing from oblivion and scrapping to be number one, none of them sustained. The bathroom door swung open, admitting a gust of guitar drums screams, and then swung closed, sealing out the beast. Water ran, women chattered, the door opened and closed again. Rita was carried beyond it all. Orgasm slapped her back against the cold metal wall, then bent her nearly double an
d left her hugging Dee’s head, which was turned to the side, eyes closed. Rita felt stuck in the moment, as if the air in the stall had hardened into a Lucite block entrapping them. She was happy there, happy for innocence and wildness, happy to be hugging this girl whom she believed she could change. From another stall came a sardonic, southern voice: “Ya’ll try not to hurt yourself over there!”

  Giggles.

  Rita urged Dee to her feet. “Baby,” she said. “You mind if I take you outa here?”

  Big-eyed and pale, like what she’d done had scared her, Dee said, “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay.” Rita yanked on her panties and jeans.

  The bathroom door opened, clattery footsteps, and then an alarmed cry: “Dee!”

  Under her breath Dee said, with exasperation, “Oh, Christ!”

  Rita finished buckling her belt. Somebody pounded on a stall door. “Fuck off!” said the southern girl.

  A third woman said, impatiently, “She’s not here, Janine.”

  Rita thought she recognized BJ’s voice. She opened the door. Janine was leaning against one of the sinks, looking fat and pitiful, hair mussed, a damp splotch mapping her blouse like a dark continent on a plaid sea. The fluorescents painted her ghastly pale. She stared off behind Rita, to where Dee was holding up the T-shirt to cover her breasts. Standing to the right of Janine, BJ touched a hand to her forehead and said to Rita in an aggravated tone, “Did you have to open the fucking door?”