Colonel Rutherford's Colt (23 page)

“Fuck you!” Rita squirmed around so she was almost sideways in her seat. “I don't wanna hear any shit about what a man's got. Like you some kinda unique creation I can't understand. I hate that shit!”

“All right. Fine.
I
got pride!
I
don't wanna see my woman runnin' off with somebody else!”

“Then you best look away when the occasion arises,” she said. “Just like I do when you start fooling around with the Loretta Snows of the world.”

The thought of Ms. Snow tangled Jimmy in a confused memory, and he lost track of being angry. He backed off the gas and drove along in the smoky wake of a furniture van, which was laboring up the first dark green step of the Cascades.

“That man-woman rules-for-living bullshit ain't about us,” Rita said a while later. “You know that, Jimmy. We got our own thing.”

“I'm still a man,” he said. “You still a woman. No way you can eliminate the fact.”

“Don't get simple on me. Y'know what I'm talking about.”

He drove for a half mile without saying anything, then asked, “What was she screeching for back there?”

“I was advising her about life,” said Rita.

“She sure was acting crazy.”

“I don't believe she was acting. But you never know.”

“What kind of advice you give her? Musta been pretty fucking heavy.”

“Jesus, Jimmy! What do you care?” She tapped his leg. “Pull over! I wanna drive.”

“I'm okay,” he said. “I'll let you know when I'm tired.”

“Come on. Pull over!” she said. “I'll drive and you can tell me the end of your story.”

The story took them through the Cascades and down into the rolling brown hills of the Palouse. Traffic was almost nonexistent and as Jimmy talked, Rita let the van drift over the center line when the wind buffeted it, swerving to avoid the tumbleweeds that rolled like bewitched nests across the two-lane road. The sky had opened up to the north, a gunmetal-blue streak ledging the horizon, and clouds raced low above them, their bellies swollen dark, hurrying to join the greater darkness gathering over the mountains they had left behind. They passed through cuts with yellow walls of packed earth tufted by sage and emerged onto vistas from which they could see more hills, more tumbleweeds, more brown and yellow, the highway winding and humping off toward the edge of the world like a dirty white rope dropped by a giant fleeing the apocalypse that had stripped all but a spark of life from the land.

As Jimmy wound it down, Rita wondered how much he knew of what of he'd done, or, for that matter, how much she knew. She had a pretty good idea, but there was a world of difference between knowing and knowing for sure. His stories troubled her as much as they stirred her, because while she could nudge them this way and that, in the end he was the one who controlled the situation, both their own and that of the story. Being swept along with him, the risk of it, worried that he might make a bad mistake, it was exhilarating, it was what she wanted; but she wished she knew for sure what he had done so she could sweep up his mess if need be. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, the long, formal sentences spooling forth, telling the doom of Colonel Rutherford. With his dull exterior and the incomprehensible machinery inside, he was like, she thought, a bomb that shined a beautiful light when it exploded, then reassembled itself, ready to go again when the right command was given.

“Didn't come out good as I wanted,” he said after he had done. “It's like I had something else in mind, and it didn't get done.”

“You always feel like that,” Rita said. “And don't I always tell ya, you turn out the best damn stories I ever heard? This one turned out extra good.”

“Yeah, but it don't make sense to the way I thought it was going.”

“Which way's that?”

He thumped the latch of the glove compartment, trying to piece together the unrealized parts of the story.

“Reach in there and see if there's a candy bar,” Rita told him.

He rummaged about, found nothing edible. “Okay,” he said. “I was planning to have Susan recognize that she loved Aaron, too, and they'd consummate their love, 'cause forbidden though it was, there was something pure about it, something they couldn't find with nobody else. That'd give her the strength to leave the colonel.” He closed the glove compartment, said, “I'm not sure what was gonna happen after that.”

“I like how you told it better,” Rita said. “You leave the colonel alive, he'd take his temper out on Susan's daddy.”

“Her daddy wasn't important . . . wasn't hardly in the story. And the colonel, a man like that, somebody's gonna get around to killing him sooner or later. Thing I wanted was for Susan to leave him without getting more screwed up'n she was.”

“Maybe she heard an inner voice told her not to do ol' Aaron.”

A note of satisfaction in the words grated on him. “Hell you so happy about? I screw up my story and it makes you happy?” The glove compartment door fell open and banged his knee; he jammed it shut. “Inner voice . . . shit!”

“Women get voices telling them things. Female intuitions. Susan come to life on ya is what happened.”

“Saying women hear voices, that's like me saying a man's got his pride.”

“No,” said Rita. “It ain't the same thing at all.”

Jimmy's head lolled against the window, and she thought he had gone to sleep, but then she heard him muttering, whispering, maybe off on some loop of the story that hadn't quite finished with him. Or thinking ahead to another story that had yet to find its .45-caliber inspiration. The wind blew stronger, steadier, and she had to fight for the road, especially at the tops of the hills. From one of those heights she observed a herd of tumbleweeds stampeding over a wide brown and yellow plain, hundreds of them, aiming for the highway about half a mile farther along. Dried-up yellowish-gray wheels, some as big as semi tires. When they hit the margin of the pavement, a few hopped high, like frightened kangaroos; the rest kept up their dervish pace, traveling west by north into the Devil's country. Signs everywhere, she thought. She was back in Browning, she might run to see Mrs. Buffalo Knife and ask what they meant. But she didn't need a wise woman to read them now. They all told the same meager, miserable thing about life.

Jimmy's muttering grew louder, and then he said something in an odd lilting delivery.

“What's all that?” Rita asked.

He blinked at her and said, “ ‘One man's gun shot out the sun.' ”

“Yeah, that's what you said. What is it?”

He took to repeating the line with varying emphasis until Rita grew irritated.

“The first time,” she said, “it was like you sang it kinda.”

He tried singing the words, softly, hoarsely, then said, “Guess that's all I can do for now. But I believe we got us another one coming.”

They came up over a rise, and directly ahead, lying in the middle of the road, was an open suitcase with someone's clothes still in it, the sleeves of a sweater flapping emptily, looking as if a magician's assistant who had been made invisible was now being drawn down inexorably into his master's bag of tricks. Rita had to cut the tires hard to avoid it.

“I don't know,” said Jimmy, tired now, and indifferent to the world. “Maybe it'll be a song.”

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