A Stranger in This World (7 page)

Tina takes the gun from his hand, it’s no more complicated than that, and puts the barrel into Lyle’s mouth through his parted, pleasuring lips.

Her hands feel stiff and clumsy still in their tight-laced braces, and she can’t quite understand how she got the gun from him, or what she’s going to do next; only the anger, her own anger this time. She’s inside Lyle now. “I ought to fucking kill you,” she says.

He looks at her around the hand that’s holding the gun in
his mouth, and his eyes are resigned, hidden from her. Go ahead, if you can.

Then Lyle reaches for the gun, clumsy in her stiff hands, and for a moment she thinks that he’s got it again and she tries to hold on tighter to keep it from him and somehow she gets the trigger instead and squeezes and Lyle’s head explodes against the wall behind him.

When she opens them again, none of this will have happened: she’ll be lying in her bed, driving home next to Bobby, watching television.

She can still feel the cool steel of the pistol in her hand.

Suddenly she remembers the spray of blood and brains across the textured carpet behind his head, and she wheels and vomits onto the floor, dropping the gun, and vomits again, as if she could empty herself out, become blank again. As if she could remove from herself this thing she’d done.

“Come on, baby,” Bobby says. “We’ll get you out of here.” One arm around her shoulders, he leads her blind to the kitchen, magazines rustling under their feet. Tina notices how quiet it has become in the trailer, and how cool. There must be a window open somewhere.

Bobby sets her down, leaning against the side of the refrigerator. When she opens her eyes she can see nothing of the
main part of the living room. Bobby is staring at the blank yellow side of the refrigerator, then turns to face her, fierce. “What the fuck did you do that for?” he asks. “He’s fucking dead.”

Well, I hope so, Tina thinks, after all that. And then Bobby’s betrayal sinks in, and she sees that he’s abandoning her, and the fear kicks in, shivering in the center of her body. “I’m cold,” she says.

“I don’t give a shit.”

She says, “I didn’t … I didn’t …”

She wants to say, I didn’t want to, or I didn’t intend to; but what she really means is I
didn’t
.

“I don’t care,” Bobby says. “He’s fucking dead. Stay here.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to see if I can figure something out.”

“Like what?” she asks, suddenly irritated with him. But he’s already gone, left her alone in the dead man’s sideways kitchen. (The decedent, she remembers; the perpetrators, the incident, the decedent, the suspect.)

Tina thinks it’s bad luck to stay here, remembering what the Indians said: the souls of the dead are always looking for a body to ride. Stay away from the houses of the dead. She remembers this from public TV.

Although she hasn’t smoked in two years, she takes an open pack of Lyle’s Merits from the side of the refrigerator and lights one, taking the smoke deep into her lungs, welcoming the familiar pain and the faint dizziness that comes a moment
later. I’m not sorry he’s dead, she thinks—and then she’s surprised when she feels that thought echo inside her, yes, yes, yes, a bone-deep satisfaction. A nameless, inappropriate anger, the anger she felt at the doctor as he laced up her arms, at Mr. Beveridge, at Bobby. Most of her is still horrified, making excuses, pretending this never happened, but somewhere inside, a voice among others, she hears herself:
Motherfucker, I’m glad you’re dead
.

Then she realizes this is Lyle’s soul, taking her over: helplessness turning to anger, anger turning to rage, rage turning to violence, violence turning against anyone who’s handy. Not that Lyle was a bad target, exactly. But she feels herself turning into a thing she hasn’t been before. “Bobby,” she calls out, still sitting behind the refrigerator. “Bobby, can we get out of here now?”

No answer.

She stands up and finds herself alone, neither Lyle nor Bobby, only the spray of blood across the wall behind the sofa, or the floor. The window at the far end is open, blowing cold salt air, and she’s alone, at the end of this road, waiting for the police. “Bobby,” she says; then screams it: “Bobby! Bobby! Bobby!”

After a long, dull moment of panic his head pops into the window, sideways, upside-down relative to the floor, so that Tina just gives up. She doesn’t know where she is.

“Let’s go,” Bobby says. “Bring the gun.”

“Go where?” she asks, but he’s gone again. She takes the crumpled pack of cigarettes, and some matches, and finally the gun (carrying it gingerly between two fingers, as if it might come to life again if she held it the right way), and follows him out the window, out into the relief of solid ground, of trees
that grow from the bottom up and cars that sit on their own four wheels. Bobby’s leaning against the trunk of the blue Monte Carlo, staring off into the low, soft sky. He won’t look at her.

“Why?” she asks.

“Why what? You want to go to jail?”

“What are you going to do with him?”

“What are
we
going to do with him, you mean.” Bobby glares, but he still isn’t seeing her. It’s all for effect, to keep her away. “We’ll take him to the ocean,” he says. “Maybe they’ll never find him.”

Tina tries to make herself think. “What if they catch us?” she asks.

“We’ve got to do something. You think of something.”

“Maybe we should just call the cops,” Tina says. “We didn’t do anything. I mean, it was just an accident.”

“You think they’re going to believe us?”

“I don’t know. I just want this to be over.”

“You think it’s worth that chance? What if they don’t believe us? What happens then?”

“What happens now?” Tina asks, feeling soft and white and weak. The corridors of her body seem to echo with empty space, the night around her seems no more substantial. Nothing matters but Bobby’s anger.

Restless in its banks, the Atlantic surges against the shore. The horizon is lit by the first faint difference of morning, far away on the metallic surface of the water.

The Monte Carlo sits a hundred yards from the edge of the water, buried up to its axles in sand. “You stupid—fucking—bitch,” Tina says, resting her forehead against the cool plastic of the steering wheel, eyes closed.

“No, it’s OK,” Bobby says.

“I’m just so fucking stupid,” she says, and he doesn’t disagree. Lyle’s in the trunk, morning is coming.

Bobby’s Volvo waits in the safety of the turnaround at the end of the road. She can almost see it.

“We’ll just have to carry him, then,” Bobby says. “Give me a hand. Hurry, before it gets too light.”

Curled like damp laundry into the irregular spaces of the trunk, Lyle doesn’t want to come out. Tina’s nerves are sanded raw, and every approaching minute of daylight makes them worse, but nothing seems to work: he’s too heavy, too cumbersome, too floppy. He has a loose-limbed grace in death that he never had in life.

Finally they pry him over the lip of the trunk, and he falls in slow motion onto the sand, one joint at a time. They each take a leg, and drag him toward the surf. Lyle’s heavy. He leaves a smooth furrow of sand behind, a trail from the Monte Carlo. Every few yards they have to stop and rest; the sand is so soft and heavy that Tina feels like she may just bog down completely, collapse weeping in the sand and just wait for the cops. Not that Bobby would let her.

They reach the water and they keep walking, out into the skirts of white foam. Lyle seems to float, or maybe it’s only
that the water eases his slide—either way, he gets easier to pull, and they drag him out until they’re both waist-deep and then let him go. The next wave carries him back to shore. Tina begins to cry.

“Shut the fuck up!” Bobby shouts over the wind and the roar of the waves. “Give me a hand.”

“I just want to go home,” she says. The machine is starting to break down, nerves, no sleep, no food, the poisons of last night’s vodka coursing through her blood. And Lyle, looking strangely whole and clean and rested, on his side in the sand. The water is bone-deep cold, cold as a headache. The air feels warm by comparison.

They drag him deeper into the water, out beyond the breaking waves, and for a moment it seems like he’ll go: he floats nine-tenths submerged, only the tips of his shoes and the moon of his belly and the soft outlines of his face above the water. Slowly, like a movie of a shipwreck, he rolls onto his side, and then face-down, drifting parallel to the shore. But then the ninth wave, the big one, catches him and sends his bones tumbling toward the sand again. Tina and Bobby watch from the shallows, weeping. Bobby’s weeping too, she can see it.

Again, and again, and a fifth time they try it, each time deeper, until Tina’s losing her own footing, until they are both bone-chilled with the cold Atlantic water. Bobby shoves the soft body out as far as he can; it seems to catch an undertow, and as they retreat to the shallows they can see it drifting, a little farther out with every wave.
Good-bye, Lyle
, Tina thinks.
You deserved it
. She takes the little chrome pistol from her overcoat pocket and sails it out as far as she can, where it lands with a small splash. They watch the body out of sight, shivering,
then trudge the long yards back across the sand toward the Volvo past the Monte Carlo, not touching, not talking, not seeing each other.

A solitary gull stands on the edge of the open trunk of Lyle’s car, pecking diligently at a dark bloodstain. Tina reaches in through the window to get the pack of cigarettes, and the gull flies off.

A solitary gray shark, working the shallows at daybreak, tastes blood in the water and approaches the passive floating body. Slowly, cautiously, it circles closer and closer, watching for a sign of life. No hurry for him, not this fish.

At long last he takes a fast, plunging dive at the thing, hooks the pant-leg in his razoring teeth and then lets go as Lyle’s shoe jerks up and clips him under the jaw.

The shark retreats. But he doesn’t surrender: he watches closely, carefully, waiting for another angle of attack, another chance—until Lyle drifts into a backwash, catches the wave that sends him tumbling to the beach again.

The sun is rising behind the Texaco stations and Wal-Marts and Burger Kings, casting long, lovely shadows and yellow frames of light among the gas pumps and stop signs. They have the strip to themselves, for now. The Volvo is the same this morning as it was when the sun went down last evening: stolid,
reliable. The heater is blowing hard, and Tina’s hands and face are warming, but the warmth seems to stop at her skin. Nothing can penetrate her insides, where the cold seawater still chills her.

Tina starts to close her eyes, but stops herself—she knows what she’ll see. She looks at her hands in their braces, filthy now with the night’s work. The hands of a murderer? Maybe, Tina thinks. It doesn’t seem to matter. In this lovely dawn she’s reached a moment of peace.

Everything seems equal to everything else. They’ve made a mess of things—she can picture fingerprints everywhere, blood in the trunk of the beached Monte Carlo—but that will work itself out. She sees that events have their own current, and that she and Bobby have no choice but to be drawn along in them. But for now, for this quiet moment beyond tears, she can stand outside that endless stream of events and consequences. She can see with perfect clarity the uselessness of justice, and the need for pity: she looks at Bobby, for instance, and sees him with Lyle’s cock in his mouth and a gun at his throat, and knows that she will never see him any other way, that if she ever kisses him again they will both remember, and this seems sad.

“Bobby,” she says, “I love you.”

He doesn’t say a word. He keeps his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road. An empty paper bag, a grocery sack, blows out into the road from one of the abandoned parking lots and Bobby swerves to avoid it but he can’t—the bag is crushed under the wheels, with a loud surprising sound, then left behind them in the road. That’s it, Tina thinks. That’s it exactly.

I WAS OUT ALL MORNING JUNKING WITH MARGARET AND HER KIDS
, combing the yard sales and estate sales and rummage sales and garage sales, even some of the cheap secondhand stores. Margaret did this every Saturday. She had a business, somewhere
between a business and a hobby, where she’d buy up broken small appliances, mixers, blenders, toasters, and fix them up to sell at the swap meet. It didn’t seem like much but it was good for the rent on her trailer space and some pocket money besides.

This was the first time I’d spent the night with her, the first time I met her kids. It had taken us a couple of months to work our way up to it, since we met at the Vo-Tech. Margaret was in copier repair, I was in bookkeeping, which still seemed ridiculous whenever I thought about it. Shane and Alicia were dark pretty kids, Indian-looking, which they got from Margaret, who was mostly Crow Indian from up around Hardin, Montana. Shane was five and Alicia was eight and they were shy as deer mice. They shook my hand one after the other and then locked their eyes back on the cornflakes. I got the feeling this didn’t happen too often, Mom bringing a man home, which was fine with me but scary.

We were both a little gun-shy, both of us still married, though I wasn’t sure where my wife was that morning. I hadn’t seen her in months or maybe years.

Margaret gave me a cup of instant and made me drive while she navigated a route to the sales. It was a good fall morning, with the sun just balancing over the plains, already winter in the shadows, the cottonwood trees losing their leaves and the aspens turning yellow. A morning breeze was blowing the refinery haze out of the valley and the sky was almost blue. We were early birds, garage-sale pirates, and I felt fine. I woke up with a dream of myself where I would get my job back at the carbon black plant or maybe go out strip-mining up north and then set up housekeeping. I liked the company of women and children, I’d almost forgotten how much.