Colonel Rutherford's Colt

by Lucius Shepard

  This stumped him. He hovered, betwixt and between. He had, she saw, a good face. A little fleshy, but sound. A solid fundamental person. She wondered what he was doing hanging out with Walter.

  “You really an actress?” he asked.

  “Can’t you tell?”

  “Not really.” He laughed appreciatively. “I guess that means you are. You’re good-looking enough, for sure.”

  “I forget your name,” Rita said.

  “Miles . . . Miles Ludwig.”

  She imagined a ludwig, a khaki German bug goose-stepping on eight legs, carrying eight shiny rifles.

  “Junior,” he added. “My dad’s the Miles Ludwig Motors guy. Maybe you caught his commercials? Every other word he says is ‘miles.’ ” He affected, presumably, his dad’s bombastic delivery. “ ‘We’re miles ahead in low prices, miles ahead in value, with miles and miles and miles of cars . . .’ ”

  “That what you do?” she asked. “You work for your daddy?”

  “For now. I’m thinking about going back to grad school next year.” He shoved his hands into his pockets, drew a line in the dirt with the point of his loafer. “So what happened in the bathroom?”

  “You’re old enough to figure that out.”

  Nonplussed, he said, “Maggie said something happened in the bathroom with you and Janine and Dee.”

  “Maggie?”

  “You were sitting next to her in the bar.”

  “The blow-job queen,” said Rita.

  “Wha-at?” Miles sort of laughed the word.

  “I forgot her name. Probably not an accurate description.”

  “Well, actually . . .” Miles laughed again.

  Rita poked his arm. “Miles! You dog!”

  “Hey, she never did it with me! I wasn’t saying that.”

  Rita scowled. “Why would I give a damn she sucked your dick? You think I believe oral sex is an impropriety?”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  A biker roared into the parking lot, sat gunning his engine in front of the entrance, checking things out. The fools by the door gave him a wide berth. When he left they resumed their pushing and shouting.

  “Fucking bikers,” said Miles, and then, as if those words had been intelligence enough, he fell silent. With forced animation, he asked, “You ever work on a picture with bikers in it? Y’know . . . like as extras?”

  “This the reason you’re out here with me, Miles?” she asked in a syrupy voice. “To ask questions, to learn my opinion on various subjects?”

  “No,” he said defensively. Then he caught her meaning and said, “No, I . . . I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Talk to me?”

  “Yeah,” he said, getting bashful. “Y’know.”

  “That’s what you been doing is it? Talking?”

  Miles was at a loss.

  “Whyn’t you come a little closer?” Rita patted the fender. “I bet you can talk a whole lot better over here.”

  She spread her knees so he could walk up between them, push himself against her. He went at it like he loved her. Careful with her mouth. Tasting the corners. Taking the tour before he stuck in his tongue. His dick fattened against her thigh. Miles, she thought. Good dog, good lad. When he broke for air, he appeared to be searching for something to say. A compliment, a suggestion as to change of venue. She pulled him back into a kiss. One hand squeezed her ass, another timidly settled on a breast. She writhed against him, a pretense. Dee had a better style, though she liked the hungriness that swept over Miles each time she responded . . . Then a furious yell and somebody ploughed into them. Rita toppled off the fender, landing on her belly. The fall took her wind. More yelling. Sounds of struggle. Gasping, she got herself turned and saw Walter standing over Miles, who was on his knees. Walter had him by the shirtfront and was punching down into his bloody face. Each blow made a flat smacking noise, and as he threw, Walter would let out a truncated scream and a spray of spittle. Miles looked to be borderline conscious, not defending himself. Rita came to her haunches, slid the hunting knife from her boot, held it hidden beneath her thigh.

  “Hey, Walter!” she called sweetly.

  His fist drawn back, he glanced sidelong at her. His mask had rotted way to reveal the unnatural Aryan motherfucker beneath. He released his hold. Miles sagged, slumped in the dirt. Walter squared up to Rita. His smile had gone on break. In his face was wormy loathing and the joy of violence. Blood dripped from his hand.

  “Fucking Indian bitch!” he said.

  “That’s me.” Rita eased up into a crouch, backed toward the rear of the Buick.

  Walter followed, not in a hurry. He seemed to feel he was on top of the situation. “Bitch! You think you can cocktease me?”

  “Didn’t I already do that, Walt?” Rita turned the corner of the Buick, kept on backing, one hand on the trunk for balance. When he turned after her, she showed him the knife, edge out, ready for business.

  His smile resurfaced, and she took it as a good sign. The smile, she thought, was his hedge against insanity, the place he retreated to when his confidence dimmed. “You better mean that,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m gonna bleed ya, Walt. Don’t you worry. You just keep coming.”

  He braced, legs wide. She could tell he was expecting it low . . . if he expected it at all. His knees were stiff, his torso canted forward. Bad move, Walt.

  “Well, do it,” he said, his voice amped with repressed laughter.

  “Please,” she said, whining, lowering the knife a little. “Please . . . just go away!”

  He relaxed the slightest bit, the tension leaving his shoulders, and she slashed at his eyes. His weight was set all wrong, and when he tried to twist away, his heel caught and he went sprawling onto his back, falling behind the car parked beside the Buick. Before he could recover, she had straddled him, her knees pinning his arms and shoulders, back hunched to lower her center of gravity, the knife poised above his right eye.

  “One twitch,” she said, “they be calling you Patch.”

  He stared at the knife as if seeing God.

  “Oh-oh!” she said blithely. “Guess you fucked up, huh?”

  He licked his lips, said, “ . . . unh . . .”

  She cocked an ear. “Say again.”

  “Don’t . . .” he said.

  A groan from the front of the Buick. Sounded like the groaner was in miles and miles of pain.

  “You did a job on your friend,” Rita said. “What was on your mind, Walt? What caused your outrage? Surely you didn’t think I was gonna fuck you?”

  A car passed on the road, headlights flashing over them. His eyes tracked after it.

  “No hope there, man,” she said. “They saw us at all, they probably think you just giving me some sugar. And nobody can see us from the bar, so we got all kindsa time. We can get to know each other.”

  She felt him tensing, brought the point of the knife closer to his eye, and said, “Relax.”

  More groaning.

  “I don’t believe you gonna be getting a sweetheart deal at Ludwig Motors anytime soon.” Rita edged up higher on his chest, her crotch tight to his chin. “I know why you kicked his ass. ’Cause you could. I can relate to that.”

  His glare weakened, and Rita could see inside him. The fear, the razors that had reshaped his reason. The mechanics of his stop-and-go cycle, the on buttons and off switches. Boy was damn near crazy mean enough to be a Senator. They saw the same things, but from different angles. He was God’s invention, or maybe his parents’, but she had come to her notion of the world through cold experience. What in him was madness, chaos, the erratic, was in her the product of a simple decision. He had nothing to tell her, but she had a few words for him.

  “Anger management,” she said. “It’d be a real benefit to you, Walt. Teach ya to harness all that raw emotion.”

  He seemed to flash forward behind his eyes, the thing that was most of him scooting up to his eyeball to take a peek, then scuttling back into the dark.

 
; “You get that anger working for ya. Like it’s a little engine inside your skull. Get it fitted with gears so you can wind ’er out and back ’er down . . . You do that, I see great things ahead for you.”

  Walter, Rita realized, was not paying attention, no doubt rummaging his brain for some idiotic tactic and not listening to her words of wisdom. He was not a listener. It was the least of his crimes, but it made him worthless as a subject for instruction. She sliced a line straight across his forehead with the knife. He bucked against the pain, screeched, tried to grab her as she sprang away. She moved out of range, wiped the blade on some weeds growing behind the Buick. He rolled back and forth, holding his head and grunting. Blood spilled over his cheeks and nose.

  “You ain’t hurt,” Rita said. “You might need some work, but you ain’t hurt. I marked you is all.”

  He cursed her again, and threatened vengeance.

  “Vengeance is easy when you don’t give a shit,” Rita told him. “If you do, it’s damn near impossible.”

  “I’m going to kill you,” he said with admirable venom. “I am going to fucking kill you.”

  “This might punch a dent in your self-esteem, but I ain’t all that scared.” She sheathed the knife in her boot. “Let me tell ya what’s gonna happen. I’m going back inside and hook up with Dee. I want you to sit here and figure out a story about how your head got sliced. One that don’t involve me. You involve me, I’ll say you tried to rape me and I cut your ass. I believe Miles might just back me up on that.”

  His face was all over red. Hands, too. His eyes were shiny studs poking through a new kind of mask. Red clay and base metal.

  “Maggie told me ’bout those girls you beat up,” said Rita. “Bet they’d make good witnesses.”

  He wiped away blood that had pooled in the seam between his lips, his anger simmering. The mark she’d carved was straight and true. With stitches, he’d look like Frankenstein.

  “Cops can’t even bust me on a weapons charge,” she said. “I ain’t no actress, Walt. I sell guns and knives. I’m licensed to carry.”

  She heard voices, commotion, and peered over the roof of the car. Miles had tried to walk, gone about twenty-five feet before he collapsed. The doll people had found him and were on their knees beside him, squeaking. Rita dusted off her jeans.

  “Make up a good story. A good story’ll get you a long ways in life.” She laughed and tapped Walter’s leg with her toe. “I was you, I’d take that for my motto.”

  * * *

  The fire in the great hearth dimmed, the room became a long shadow with a ball of orange light nestled at its center. Aaron slipped minute by minute from alertness, eyes fixed upon the stair, to near-stupefaction, gazing into the embers, his thoughts proceeding in a morose parade, like black riders coming on gloomy missions from one of the deserts that stretched beyond his mental horizon. He had no good sense of the passage of time. Hours might have elapsed since he had entered the lodge. He began to suspect that the colonel had retired for the evening, and since he had no knowledge of the layout of the second floor, he was hesitant to invade it. Then, too, the colonel might keep a weapon by his bed and wake to the creaking of a loose board. Nonetheless, Aaron did not think it wise to wait for morning. A disturbance, one that would summon the colonel to investigate—that might be the best tactic. Nothing that would alarm him overmuch. A noise that he would attribute to the bungling of his servant. He cast about for a suitable object and spotted a rack containing a number of rifles mounted on the wall of the entranceway. He crossed the room and saw that the rack was loosely affixed to the wall—it could be brought down without much effort.

  Standing so near the door prompted Aaron to think that he could run out of the lodge and leave the colonel to explain the death of his servant. But he would find a way, surely, to explain it—that was no solution to the problem posed by his existence. And then there was the question of where Aaron might go. Havana? New York? He did not believe he could return to his life, his business. It was not that those things held no value to him, but rather he was about to take a step that would render them valueless, that would so transform him, he would no longer conform to the niche into which he had inserted himself, imprisoning the more turbulent aspects of his nature within an armor of serge and respectability. He had half-taken that step already, and perhaps, he thought, even half-a-step would be too much to retrace. He felt for an instant confused, the world of his purpose murkily defined, but then he imagined that in the glass panel of the front door he saw Susan at her window, her nightdress blowing around her like the ghost of a flame, the image of beauty and the anger that was destroying her. With a savage twist, he sent rifles and rack clattering to the floor and returned to his chair in the shadows.

  Seconds later he heard footsteps overhead, a voice bellowing: “Randy!” He heard another shout, nearer to hand. Then the colonel’s tread as he descended the stair. He wore a red-and-white checkered bathrobe and slippers. His beard had been shaved, leaving in place a set of mustaches and exposing a too-prominent jaw. Upon noticing the wreckage of the rack and the scattered rifles, he paused in his descent. “God damn it!” he said. He strode to the door and threw it open. “Randy!”

  The sight of the colonel roused no special feeling in Aaron’s breast. He must be, he thought, brimful of hate. The only change he detected in himself was a reduction in perspective from the abstract to the strategic. The colonel shouted again, listened, then with a profane outburst slammed the door and entered the room wherein Aaron was sitting. He turned the switch of a lamp. “Shit!” he said when the lamp failed to provide a light. He tried a second lamp, a third. Muttering, he went to stand in front of the hearth and warmed his hands, doubtless thinking injurious thoughts about the man who lay dead on the sofa behind him.

  Cautiously, Aaron came to his feet and walked toward Colonel Rutherford, hiding the Colt behind his hip. The colonel gasped to see him and staggered to the side, his arms outflung in shock. “Jesus!” he said on recovering. “You scared the crap out of me!” Then: “What’s going on? Why didn’t Randy tell me you were here?”

  Aaron could think of no response he wished to extend.

  “Did you bring the gun?” the colonel asked.

  His hand shaking slightly, Aaron aimed the Colt at the colonel’s chest. “On your knees.”

  Disdain firmed the colonel’s features. “What the hell is this?”

  “On your knees!” The shout exploded from out of Aaron’s lungs, as if it had been building inside him for a long time.

  The colonel went stiffly to his knees; his expression retained an element of scorn. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to lie down . . . on your face.”

  The colonel made no move to comply until Aaron fired above his head; then he dropped onto his belly. The bullet shattered glass in the darkness across the room, and the detonation set up a ringing in Aaron’s ears. He kneeled and bound the colonel’s hands behind his back with a lamp cord. A mild fragrance of bath oil arose from the man. His breath came hugely, as if from the bellows-sized lungs of a horse. Aaron urged the colonel to his feet and sat him down in a chair facing the hearth. Then he pulled a second chair around so he could himself sit and watch him. This accomplished, the object of his errand essentially achieved, he felt somewhat at loose ends. He had no desire to prolong things, but it was as if a gulf had materialized between the fortress of his intent and the army of his will. He was content to bide his time. Sooner or later, the colonel would supply him with the inspiration to act.

  “I’m not alone here, you know,” the colonel said.

  Aaron chose not to disabuse him of the notion that help was at hand. He had withdrawn from the moment, become an observer, though he was not sure either of what had compelled him to this distance or what, in fact, he should observe. The colonel presented no great puzzle. As a specimen of mankind he was in no sense extraordinary, his character informed by a typical mixture of animal needs and human perversions. But what if t
his were not the case? Looking at the colonel, at the belly protruding from his bathrobe, the foolish mustaches, it was difficult to credit him with other than the most banal ration of evil; but perhaps this was a disguise, a shabby sheath enclosing a black knife of a soul. Aaron decided to question him.

  “Why have you treated her so?” he asked, and was amazed by the soundness of his voice.

  The colonel grimaced. “Oh, God! What has she been telling you now?”

  “Of threats, rape, the suffocation of her spirit . . . no more than is your general custom.”

  “How many times do I have to say this? The woman is a user. A manipulator. She . . .”

  Aaron pointed the Colt at the colonel, and he did not complete his accusation.

  “I will not hear you speak against her,” Aaron said. “Whatever she is, you have made her so with your maltreatment. When I knew her she was unstained in her devotion to the good.”

  The colonel looked with bewilderment at Aaron, then winced as he struggled to shift his bound hands to a more comfortable position. “You’re not letting me defend myself,” he said. “If I can’t comment on what she’s said about me, how do you expect me to answer your questions?”

  “You misunderstand,” Aaron said. “I am not asking you to offer a defense. You have no defense. I am interested in an explanation of your behavior. But if your explanation involves nothing more than an attack upon my cousin, there is no need to continue.”

  “Your cousin?” The colonel laughed.

  “Yes, my cousin. Do you find the term inaccurate?”

  “Are you telling me she’s actually your cousin?” With an impassioned confusion that might have persuaded a less cynical witness than Aaron, the colonel said, “I didn’t know. I . . . Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Aaron felt that to answer would be to encourage the colonel’s pretense of insanity—such, he believed, was the man’s intention in denying knowledge of the blood bond between Susan and himself.

  His anxiety increasing, the colonel asked how could he have known, how could he have possibly known? When Aaron remained silent, the colonel railed against the silence, insisting that he be told what was happening. And when this failed to bestir Aaron, he resorted to threats. “I have friends . . . due any minute,” he said. “They’ll be armed, and I can assure you, they won’t hesitate to use their weapons.”