Colonel Rutherford's Colt (17 page)

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 their 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 and 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?”

Rita stepped clear of the stall. “What's the problem?”

Janine made a glutinous noise, as if to spit, and staggered a little. Tears crystalled her eyes, then flowed.

“Let's go,” said BJ, tugging at her arm as Dee came out of the stall, fully dressed now.

A
guk-guk
sound, a hiccup, issued from Janine's throat

“Come on!” said BJ.

Janine shook her off, petulance uglying up her face. “Cunt,” she said thickly to Denise. “Fucking cunt . . . slut.”

“You left out ‘bitch,' ” said Rita.

The blond's eyes skipped to her. “You. . . . you're the bitch.” She said it without much conviction, as if she had only just noticed and had not yet processed all the evidence.

A stall door closer to the exit flew open, and three girls emerged. “ 'Scuse us,” one said, hand-signaling apology. “Just passing through.”

They fled into the din.

Rita turned to tell Dee they should leave, and the blond rushed her, a mushy weight slamming her into a partition. Rita braced, grabbed a handful of half-tit, half-blouse, wrenched and spun the blond into a stall and pinned her against the wall with an elbow barred under the chin. A scream from BJ. The blond's blue eyes went buggy. She clawed ineffectually at Rita. Slobber filmed over her chin. A few ounces more pressure, Rita thought, and it would be thumbs down for this first-time gladiator. Her heart, speedy from the coke, had slowed. The skin of her face felt cold, bloodless.

“Don't hurt her!” Dee laid a hand on Rita's shoulder. “Please!”

Rita slung the blond about, shoved her down onto the toilet. She sat with knees spread, holding her throat and gagging.

Dee pulled Rita away, then toward the exit. “Let me talk to her.”

“You start talking to her,” Rita said, “and we might as well say our goodbyes right now.”

“That's not true.” Dee kissed her. “I'll be out soon as I can. Wait for me?”

“All right,” Rita said off-handedly.

Dee rested her arms on Rita's shoulders. “You don't believe me?”

“If you say so.”

“Do you know what you are?” The girl enveloped Rita in a hug and whispered. “You couldn't! If you did, you'd know I
have
to be with you.”

Her intensity touched off Rita's paranoia, but she had already decided to disregard such signs. “I believe you,” she said.

“It might take a while, but I promise I'll be there.” Another kiss. “Promise you'll wait?”

“Yeah, I'll wait. I might be in the parking lot. If not, I'll be at the bar.”

Rita passed back into the club, BJ at her heels. The band was on another break, and the jukebox was down so low, the song it played was all but drowned in a surflike babble. People milled on the dance floor. Shouts demanding music arose. Rita felt the ruler of all she saw.