Gutshot (7 page)

Gutshot

The man was gutshot. His blood welled around his hands and soaked his shirt. “I’m gutshot!” he said.

The man who had shot him lowered his weapon. “That is definitely what I intended to happen,” he said, “but now that it’s happened, I feel things have gone too far.”

The gutshot man drove to a hospital. “Doctor, I’m gutshot!” the man said.

“This is terrible,” the doctor said. “Wow. What are we going to do?”

“I hoped you would know.”

“It has been many years since I practiced medicine. They let me stay here. Soon they will name a surgical ward after me, where men who are gutshot can be cared for.”

The doctor drove them to the home where the gutshot man’s mother lived. “Mother, I’m gutshot!” he cried.

“My sweetheart!” his mother said. “Woe descends upon us all!”

“I’m not sure it’s as bad as all that,” the man said.

“Upon the beginning and the last end, view only the comfort of darkness!”

“He seems to be pulling together,” said the doctor, who had returned with a set of towels to stanch the blood.

“All ye who pass through these walls and halls will know only pain through the end of days! Please don’t use the guest towels.”

“We’re going to go sit outside,” the man said.

The doctor helped the man to a place behind the house where an elm tree made a bed of fallen leaves. “Good luck,” the doctor said, climbing over a fence and running for the road.

“Jesus Christ, I’m gutshot,” the man said.

“Well, now I won’t help you,” Jesus Christ said. He was seated on a low branch. The bottoms of his sandals gently brushed the man’s forehead. “It speaks to a lack of respect, you know.”

“Truly?”

“Just kidding. I love you. I also love the man who gutshot you and I love what you’re doing to those guest towels.”

“Will you help me?”

“Oh, sure. Do you see that airplane up there?”

Jesus Christ pointed until the man saw a silver glint in the sky.

“The people in that plane are flying to Dallas,” Jesus Christ said. “There is an old woman who feeds the stray cats in her neighborhood, and a dentist, and a little baby who will grow up to be in asset management. There is a pilot who loves the smell of masking tape and a woman who doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life and will eventually stop wondering.”

“And they’re all going to Dallas.”

“Does that help?”

The man leaned against the tree trunk. His vision flared and blurred. “I think so,” he said.

How He Felt

“I love this woman!” the man told the empty room. “What should I do to prove my love?”

He bought a billboard by the main road and ascended its ladder with a can of paint and a broad brush. But the board was much larger than he had figured from the ground, and he could only reach the lower third of it.

“I live this bath mat,” a mother read for her child as they drove by.

The man had his message printed on a massive banner with the thought of flying it over the bay, but the pilot he hired was an inexperienced crop duster and a drunk, and he rigged the banner upside down and backward. People on the beach craned their necks to look. A pair of jet skis collided, killing three.

He rented a movie theater, but the reels were accidentally switched and his invited guests puzzled over a sex-education video from 1964. He composed a song and taught it to a children’s choir, but they contracted food poisoning at a pizza party and spent the evening drinking Gatorade and playing video games. He wrote it into a sermon, but the pastor threw the whole thing out as sacrilege.

Discouraged, the man drove to the site of his billboard and ascended its ladder again. At the top, he held on to the platform as the panels groaned in the wind.

The man wanted to share. He knew that if they only understood, the population would be forever changed. He rested his head against the billboard. He heard in the protests of the steel a message from the mechanized world. He thought it was a love song, but he was mistaken.

Labyrinth

Dale had been doing a lot of reading on Hellenic myth, and so when he said he had a surprise for us at his Pumpkin Jamboree, we knew he wasn’t screwing around. The Jamboree—a weekend he organizes on his property to bring the town together and raise a little money for the fire department—features a hayride, face painting, and a cakewalk occupying the side yard entire, but his corn maze tends to be the highlight.

A crew of hardcore maze-runners formed a line before he had even finished setting up. I deposited my five bucks like everyone else. “Only it isn’t a maze this time,” Dale said, arranging a last bale of hay around the pumpkins from the patch. “It’s a labyrinth.”

A general murmur rose. “What’s the distinction?” asked a woman holding a whorl of candy floss.

“I’m glad you asked. It’s largely the fact that the path is unicursal, not multicursal. There’s only one road, and it leads to only one place.”

“There’s no point if you can’t get lost,” said a townie kid who was known for pulling girls into hidden corners of previous corn mazes and taking advantage of their confusion.

“Also,” Dale said, “each of you has to go in alone.”

“It’s no fun alone,” shouted a pretty girl who was implausibly holding the townie’s hand.

“My kids aren’t going in there by themselves,” said the high-school football coach, taking a knee to clutch two boys to his chest.

Dale held the bucket back from folks reaching for their money. “Calm down,” he said. “Nobody has to go if they’d rather not. To be clear, the labyrinth is known to possess magic. Some say that once you find the center, you discover the one thing you most desire in the world. Others claim that God sits beyond the last bend. Individuals must learn for themselves. Go check out the jam contest if you’re not feeling up to it.”

“There’s no way,” one of the firemen called out, a little drunk. The man was undoubtedly a guest of honor for the weekend and held some influence over the group, which began to turn away and head for the fest’s other features. The rope pull was another favorite.

Dale watched them leave, fingering a pumpkin’s thick stem and surely considering his hours of lost work. A few months beforehand, he cuts into the young corn when it’s tall but not yet sprouted, taking a pass first with the tractor and then with the riding mower to pull out the brace roots and tamp it down. He does the maze plans on drafting paper and displays them in his swept-out garage addition—he calls it the Hall of History—with other jamboree memorabilia: the gearshift from the original hayride truck, trotter prints from the winning pigs. We gather around to remember which wrong turn we took and what was waiting on the other side.

Knowing what he put into it, I thought it was a shame to stand by and see everyone go. The sun was still low in the sky and it was lonely at home, where the TV had been broken for a week and the tap water had begun to taste oddly of blood. “I’ll go first,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

A few of the others stopped their exodus. The pretty girl—whose name, I remembered, was Connie—let loose of the townie’s hand. Unfazed, he ambled off to do drugs behind the house.

“That’s the spirit,” Dale said. “Jim will do it, everyone. He’ll start us off.”

I shook my friend’s hand. “I know you worked hard on this maze and I intend to take full advantage.”

“It’s a labyrinth, but thanks. That’s the kind of brave spirit we’re known for around here.” Dale made a point of looking at the coach, who was still on one knee. Shamed, the man stood.

“All right then,” I said, and made to get started, but Dale stopped me. He dug in a bag at his feet to extract a piece of clay trivet, the type that allows a hot dish to sit on the dinner table.

“You’ll need this,” he said.

The trivet was etched with strange symbols. There were men and warriors and saws and a shield and something that resembled the buttock of a woman. I became keenly aware and deeply uncomfortable with the knowledge that the others were crowding around to observe the etchings, which were in my hands now, a fact that implied my consent. “I don’t know about all this,” I said, to clarify.

“It’s the Phaistos Disk,” Dale said. “I paid a pretty penny, so mind where you set it.”

It did seem to be imbued with some significance.

“How’d you get that?” one of the women asked.

He waved her off. “Let’s say I got lucky during a period of government oversight on the part of the Greeks. It puts a finishing touch on my project. Now you go on, Jim. This is my life’s effort distilled. Find out what it’s all about.”

It was a few degrees cooler inside the labyrinth, which imparted a sense of magic though in truth it was only that the low sun was shaded by the corn. The soil smelled wet and new and the path was wide and curved slightly to the right. Following its progress proved the bend continued on thirty feet before coming to a switchback. The stalks didn’t do much to block conversation on the other side of the wall, and it was possible to hear the others discussing the merits and folly of my decision.

“You remember what he did on the hayride last year,” someone said. “Some asshole was screwing around and let his cigarette drop, started a fire in the hay right in front of a bunch of kids. Jim there took it upon himself to jump out of the truck and run for the fence. He wouldn’t come back and so we put it out and went out looking for him and when we found him, when we found—” As always the tale involved some heavy laughter at this point.

“That’s enough,” said Dale.

“When we found him—”

“Oh my God,” a woman said, preemptively, though at that point the story may have easily been finished in gesture. And so the shame of the fire found purchase once again. You could live your whole life in the smallest town and still find strangers to tell a story like that.

The trivet was a good weight, conducting my hands’ heat. It was further comforting to trace the etched shapes, settling a fingernail in the arc of a scythe or buttock, which on closer inspection could just as easily have been a winding river, so simply it was carved.

Turning another switch, it became apparent I had lost some sense of place. The corn walls rustled. The voices faded and the only sound was the grouse pond on the far edge of Dale’s property. On I walked, holding the trivet to my chest. I wasn’t accustomed to carrying much of anything and so the disk’s weight was fatiguing indeed. I made a sincere promise to start up again with my dumbbells in the garage.

The sun had begun to set and a cool breeze filtered through the leaves. After another switch and twenty paces, the voices returned.

“You’ve got to hand it to him for going in there alone,” the man said, the same one who had told the terrible story. “Maybe he has that adventuring spirit after all.”

The surprise I felt at this praise stopped me and I held my breath to listen, but there was no sound until I started up walking again.

“He’s got balls,” said Dale, a true friend.

“I never knew he was so brave,” a woman said. I stopped again and waited longer this time, counting out the seconds and reaching a minute, then three minutes, five, hearing only silence as if they had all of them lost interest and left. I took a step in the direction I had come but it felt like pushing against a strong wind. The trivet was exhibiting a lateral weight as if it was magnetized to the far horizon. Still I labored against it. The pressure nearly tipped me on my rear, causing me to experience a devastating picture of myself emerging from the maze soaked down the back of my jeans, clocking in for another year of ridicule. And so I turned and continued into the labyrinth, at which point the conversation began again.

“I’m glad to know him,” I heard Connie say.

It was a thrilling statement, but I knew better than to stop and try to hear more. The journey was providing an immediate reward, and though I was panting and making a heavy noise in my footfalls, the conversation seemed somehow amplified the closer I came to the center. Their voices provided sound’s equivalent of a compass star in the dusking sky.

“He has a strong heart,” a man said.

“I’m so proud of him,” said Dale.

“Actually, I find him pretty handsome,” added Connie.

Their voices buoyed me on, losing only slight volume when I was heading away from them, and I broke into a trot that carried me around the far side, taking the turns without pause, drawn all the while by the trivet, which seemed towed on a wire. “I wish he’d come out here so I could shake his hand,” someone said wistfully, but there was no way to stop. The switches were coming faster and the path narrowed, as if Dale hadn’t quite figured out the proportions required. Young leaves brushed my shoulders.

I didn’t realize my exhaustion until, turning the last corner, I found the center. The moon shined a straight beam into the clearing, which was six feet wide, with a divot in the dirt the size of a man. The trivet was straining toward the ditch. It took my whole strength to hold it back and my strength was failing. But I had to keep it safe. Dale had given it to me with two hands, looking me in the eye.

With the last of my power, I turned to stand between my burden and the pit. The trivet did its work from there, pushing me back and down, into the hole that seemed to have been dug to suit me, complete with a rise in the dirt for my neck and a uniform pile just below my feet. The trivet settled in the center of my sternum. It grew cold there and heavier than before, though I felt no desire to move from under its wind-removing weight. I saw now that it was a stone like any other. I found that once I stopped struggling and held very still, barely breathing against its mass, I could hear the crowd again. They were telling stories of my heroism and bravery, of underwater rescue and diplomacy—tales I couldn’t remember being a part of, though surely I was involved in some way, if so many recalled them so fondly. Eventually I did try to stand, at which point I realized the trouble.