The Times Are Never So Bad (8 page)

The gun, her father said, looked like a scaled-down Colt .45: a .380 automatic which they bought because it was used and cost a hundred and fifteen dollars (though he would have paid three hundred, in cash and gladly, for the .38 snubnose she looked at and held first; they were in the store within twenty hours of his bringing her home, then driving to Newburyport, to Ray's empty apartment, where he had kicked open the locked door and looked around enough to see in the floor dust the two bars of clean wood where the weight-lifting bench had been, and the clean circles of varying sizes left by the steel plates and power stands); and because of the way it felt in her hand, light enough so it seemed an extension of her wrist, a part of her palm, its steel and its wooden grips like her skinned bone, and heavy enough so she felt both safe and powerful, and the power seemed not the gun's but her own; and because of its size, which she measured as one and a half Marlboro boxes long, and its shape, flat, so she could carry it concealed in the front pocket of her jeans, when she left home without a purse.

They bought it in Kittery, Maine, less than an hour's drive up New Hampshire's short coast, at the Kittery Trading Post, where as a virgin, then not one but still young enough to keep that as secret as the cigarettes in her purse, she had gone with her father to buy surf rods and spinning rods, parkas, chamois and flannel shirts. It was also the store where Ray, while shopping for a pock-etknife, had seen and bought (
I had to
, he told her) a replica of the World War II Marine knife, with the globe and anchor emblem on its sheath. It came in a box, on whose top was a reproduction of the knife's original blueprint from 1942. When he came home, he held the box toward her, said
Look what I found
, his voice alerting her; in his face she saw the same nuance of shy tenderness, so until she looked down at the box she believed he had brought her a gift.
I don't need it
, he said, as she drew it from the sheath, felt its edge, stroked its blood gutter.
But, see, we gave all his stuff away
. That was when she understood he had been talking about Kingsley, and she had again that experience peculiar to marriage, of entering a conversation that had been active for hours in her husband's mind. Now she brought her father to the showcase of knives and showed him, and he said: ‘Unless he's good with it at thirty feet, he might as well not have it at all. Not now, anyways.'

Next day, in the sunlit evening of daylight savings time, at an old gravel pit grown with weeds and enclosed by woods on three sides, with a dirt road at one end and a bluff at the other, her father propped a silhouette of a man's torso and head against the bluff, walked twenty paces from it, and gave her the pistol. He had bought it in his name, because she was waiting for the license, and he could not receive the gun in Maine, so a clerk from the Trading Post, who lived in Massachusetts where he was also a gun dealer, brought it home to Amesbury, and her father got it during his lunch hour.

‘It loads just like the .22,' he said.

A squirrel chattered in the trees on the bluff. She pushed seven bullets into the magazine, slid it into the handle, and, pointing the gun at the bluff, pulled the slide to the rear and let it snap forward; the hammer was cocked, and she pushed up the safety. Then he told her to take out the magazine and eject the chambered shell: it flipped to the ground, and he wiped it on his pants and gave it to her and told her to load it again; he kept her loading and unloading for ten minutes or so, saying he was damned if he'd get her shot making a mistake with a gun that was supposed to protect her.

‘Shoot it like you did the .22 and aim for his middle.'

He had taught her to shoot his Colt .22, and she had shot with him on weekends in spring and summer and fall until her midteens, when her pleasures changed and she went with him just often enough to keep him from being hurt because she had outgrown shooting cans and being with him for two hours of a good afternoon; or often enough to keep her from believing he was hurt. She stood profiled to the target, aimed with one extended hand, thumbed the safety off, and, looking over the cocked hammer and barrel at the shape of a man, could not fire.

‘The Miller can,' she said, and, shifting her feet, aimed at the can at the base of the bluff, held her breath, and squeezed to an explosion that shocked her ears and pushed her arm up and back as dust flew a yard short of the can.

‘Jesus
Christ
.'

‘Reminds me of what I forgot,' he said and, standing behind her, he pulled back her hair and gently pushed cotton into her ears. ‘Better go for the target. They didn't make that gun to hit something little.'

‘It's the head. If we could fold it back.'

He patted her shoulder.

‘Just aim for the middle, and shoot that piece of cardboard.'

Cardboard
, she told herself as she lined up the sights on the torso's black middle and fired six times, but
shoulder
she thought when she saw the first hole,
missed, stomach, chest, shoulder, stomach
, and she felt clandestine and solemn, as though performing a strange ritual that would forever change her. She was suddenly tired. As she loaded the magazine, images of the past two nights and two days assaulted her, filled her memory so she could not recall doing anything during that time except kneeling between a knife and Ray's cock, riding in her father's truck—home, to the studio, to City Hall, to Kittery, home, to this woods—and being photographed and fingerprinted and questioned and pointing guns at the walls and ceiling of the store, and tomorrow night she had to wait tables, always wiping them, emptying ashtrays, bantering, smiling, soberly watching them get drunk, their voices louder than the jukebox playing music she would like in any other place. She fired, not trying to think
cardboard
, yielding to the target's shape and going further, seeing it not as any man but Ray, so that now as holes appeared and her arm recoiled from the shots muted by cotton and she breathed the smell of gunpowder, and reloaded and fired seven more times and seven more, she saw him attacking her and falling, attacking her and falling, and she faced the target and aimed with both hands at head and throat and chest, and once heard, herself exhale: ‘
Yes
.'

Two weeks later her father brought her license home, but he had told her not to wait for it, no judge would send her to jail, knowing she had applied, and knowing why. So from that afternoon's shooting on, she carried it everywhere: in her purse, jeans, shorts, beach bag, in her skirt pocket at work and on the car seat beside her as, at two in the morning, she drove home, where she put it in the drawer of her bedside table and left her windows open to the summer air. At Timmy's on that sunlit afternoon in July she rested her hand on it, rubbed its handle under the soft leather of her purse. She knew she was probably drunk by police or medical standards, but not by her own. Her skin seemed thickened, so she could feel more sharply the leather and the pistol handle beneath it than her fingers themselves when she rubbed them together. For a good while she had been unaware of having legs and feet; her cheeks and lips were numb; sometimes she felt an elbow on the table, or the base of her spine, or her thighs when they pressed on the chair's edge, then she shifted her weight. But she was not drunk because she knew she was: she knew her reflexes were too slow for driving, and she would have to concentrate to walk without weaving to the ladies' room. She also knew that the monologue coming to her was true; they always were. She listened to what her mind told her when it was free of the flesh: sometimes after making love, or waking in the morning, or lying on the beach for those minutes before the sun warmed her to sleep, or when she had drunk enough, either alone or with someone who would listen with her; but for a long time there had been no one like that.

Only three men were at the bar now. She brought her glass and ashtray to it, told Al to fill one and empty the other, and took two cocktail napkins. She paid and tipped, then sat at the table and wiped it dry with the napkins, and waited for Steve. At ten to five he came in, wearing a short-sleeved plaid shirt, his stomach not hanging but protruding over his jeans. Halfway to the bar he saw her watching him and smiled, his hand lifting. She waved him to her and looked at his narrow hips as he came.

‘Steve? Can I talk to you a minute?'

He glanced over her at the bar, said he was early, and sat. Even now in July, his arms and face looked newly sunburned, his hair and beard, which grew below his open collar, more golden.

‘You're one of those guys who look good everywhere,' she said.

‘Doing sports outside, drinking in a bar—you know what I mean? Like some guys look right for a bar, but you see them on a boat or something, and they look like somebody on vacation.'

‘Some girls too.'

She focused on his lips and teeth.

‘You're always smiling, Steve. Don't you ever get down? I've never seen you down.'

‘No time for it.'

‘No time for it. What did you do today, with all your time?'

‘Went out for cod this morning—'

‘Did you catch any?'

‘Six. Came back to the lake, charcoaled a couple of fillets, and crapped out in the hammock. What's wrong—you down?'

‘Me? No, I'm buzzed. But let me tell you: I've been thinking. I'm going to ask you a favor, and if it's
any
kind of
hassle
, you say no, all right? But I think it might be good for both of us. Okay? But if it's not—'

‘What is it?'

‘No, but wait. I'm sitting here, right? and looking out the window and thinking, and I've got to leave home. See'—she leaned forward, placed her hands on his wrists, and lowered her voice—‘I'm living with my folks because I had a nice apartment and I liked being there, but last month, last month Ray broke in one night while I was sleeping and he held a knife on me and raped me.' She did not know what she had expected from his face, but it surprised her: he looked hurt and sad, and he nodded, then slowly shook his head. ‘So I moved in with my folks. I was scared. I mean, it's not as bad as some girls get it, from some stranger, like that poor fifteen-yearold last year hitchhiking and he had a knife and made her
blow
him; it was just Ray, you know, but still—I've got a gun too, a permit, the whole thing.' He nodded. ‘It's right here, in my purse.'

‘That's the way it is now.'

‘What is?'

‘Whatever. Women need things; you're built too small to be safe anymore.'

‘Steve, I got to move. But I'm still scared of having my own place. I was thinking, see, if I could move in with you, then I could do it gradually, you know? And when you leave in the fall I could sublet, I'd pay the whole rent for you till you get back, and by then—when do you come back?'

‘Around April.'

‘I'd be ready. Maybe I'd move to Amesbury or Newburyport. Maybe even Boston. I don't know why I said Boston. Isn't it funny it's right there and nobody ever goes to live there?'

‘Not me. Spend your life walking on concrete? Sure: move in whenever you want.'

‘Really? I won't be a problem. I can cook too—'

‘So can I. Here.' He reached into his pocket, brought out a key ring and gave her a key. ‘Anytime. Call me before, and I'll help you move.'

‘No. No, I won't bring much: just, you know, clothes and cassette player and stuff. My folks won't like this.'

‘Why not?'

‘They'll think we're shacking up.'

‘What are you, twenty-five?'

‘Six.'

‘So?'

‘I know. It'll be all right. It's just I keep giving them such a bad time.'

‘Hey:
you're
the one having the bad time.'

‘Okay. Can I move in tonight? No, I'm too buzzed. Tomorrow?'

‘Tonight, tomorrow. Better bring sheets and a pillow.'

‘I can't believe it.' He looked at the bar, then smiled at her and stood. ‘All worked out, just like that. Jesus, you're saving my life, Steve. I'll start paying half the rent right away, and look: I'll stay out of the way, right? If you bring a girl home, I won't
be
there. I'll be shut up in my room, quiet as a mouse. I'll go to my folks' for the night, if you want.'

‘No problem. Don't you even want to know how much the rent is?'

‘I don't even
care
,' and she stood and put her arm around his back, her fingers just reaching his other side, and walked with him to the bar.

Polly's father comes down the slope of the lawn toward the wharf and I'm scared even while I look past him at the pickup I heard on the road, then down the driveway, and I look at his jeans and shirt; then I'm not scared anymore. For a second there, I thought Polly or maybe Vinnie had pressed some charges, but it all comes together at once: he's not in a cruiser and he's got no New Hampshire cops with him and he's wearing civvies, if you can call it that when he's wearing his gun and his nightstick too. I decide to stay in the deck chair. He steps onto the wharf and keeps coming and I decide to take a swallow of beer too. The can's almost empty and I tilt my head back; the sun is behind me, getting near the treetops across the lake. I'm wearing gym shorts and nothing else. I open the cooler and drop in the empty and take another; I know what my body looks like, with a sweat glisten and muscles moving while I shift in the chair to pull a beer out of the ice, while I open it, while I hold it up to him as he stops spread-legged in front of me.

‘Want a beer, John?'

I don't know what pisses him off most, the beer or
John;
his chest starts working with his breath, then he slaps the can and it rolls foaming on the wharf, stops at the space between two boards.

‘You don't like Miller,' I say. ‘I think I got a Bud in there.'

He unsnaps his nightstick, moves it from his left hand to his right, then lowers it, holding it down at arm's length, gripping it hard and resting its end in his left hand. This time I don't shift: I watch his eyes and pull the cooler to me and reach down through the ice and water. I open the beer and take a long swallow.