Mohawk (36 page)

“Don’t talk about that. If there was one, he’d of settled with you a long time ago.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. I’m made in His image, so I don’t blame myself.” He zipped his fly by way of punctuation and pulled his shirt from the tangle of bedding. “Who gave you this trailer to live in when
you was swelled up like a balloon and no husband and no place to go?”

Tucking in his shirttail, the old man went to the window and pulled back the curtain. The rain had slowed to a drizzle.

“He’ll take me away from here if I ask him.”

Now she had rolled over and was looking at him. Without bending over he pushed his feet into leather moccasins.

“Sure he will,” the old man said. “Admires the hell out of you, he does. Plans to marry you. Which is how come he give me the keys to the trailer and told me I could keep you company.”

He took the keys out of his trouser pocket and tossed them to her.

“You don’t really think I’d believe any thing
you
said.”

“Don’t believe me. Tell
him
all about it.”

“I won’t have to. He’ll smell you on the sheets.”

“Then change ’em.”

“We could put you in jail,” she said, as if unsure.

“Nah,” he said. “I didn’t force my way in here, and you didn’t put up no fuss. At least no more’n usual. Besides, who’d believe you and professor longhair?”

“I know somebody they’d believe. Your own brother. He’s in love with me, in case you don’t know. Everybody down to the diner says so.”

“Wrong again,” he said. “He loves
me
, the dumb fuck. Always has. Besides, people don’t tell. Too embarrassed. They look at guys like me and see theirselves. They’ll squeal on some guy that robs a bank, maybe, because they can’t imagine doing it. But what we just done is what all of them are thinking about doing every time they look at a girl like you. I’m just them, and nobody rats on theirself.”

“The whole world isn’t like you,” said the girl.

“Enough of it.” He ran his fingers through his hair and stooped to examine himself in the mirror. On the way out, he peered into the darkness of the child’s room.

The girl sat up in bed. “Get,” she said. “I may not be able to keep you out of here, but that’s one room you don’t go in ’less you want to wake up with a slit throat some morning.”

“The way you talk,” he said, grinning over his shoulder. “Cover yourself. I’m too old for thinking about double headers.”

He shut the door behind him. The rain had stopped, but the breeze blew heavy drops from the trees overhead, hitting the ground at the old man’s feet like tiny grenades. The air was fresh after the storm, and Rory Gaffney felt freshened as well. On nights like this, it was good to be alive. Of course, it always
was
good to be alive, but these nights he could see himself living to a hundred.

It was roughly fifty yards through the trees to the house. He’d left a light on in the kitchen to see by, but when he started up the path, something passed between him and the yellow window. “Who is it?” Rory Gaffney said, feeling a flicker of fear. Then, “Oh, it’s you.”

The first bullet caught him in the shoulder and spun him around as if he’d been grabbed from behind. He regained his balance and looked at his ruined shirt. “What—” he began, but his voice was stopped by two sharp explosions and he staggered back toward the trailer. The impetus flung him off the path, but he kept running through the thick underbrush anyway. By the time he got to the trailer, everything was going black.
Even before he hit the door face first and slumped into it, his knees resting on the cinder block, he suspected that he wouldn’t live to a hundred. And by the time the girl inside could get to the door that his solid body had buckled, he was dead.

Randall drove past the diner, but there were no lights upstairs or down and he didn’t want to drop Wild Bill off in his present state. Randall hadn’t expected him to speak. For years now he hadn’t. But huddled in the corner of the van, shivering like a dog that’s misbehaved, Bill looked even more pitiful than usual. “We’ll get some coffee,” Randall said. “Then I’ll take you home.” Wild Bill showed no sign of having heard. He was staring straight ahead, but whatever he saw was coming from inside.

Main Street glistened beneath the street lamps. Though the rain had ceased, Randall kept the wipers on, reassured by their gentle rhythm. “You’re cold,” he said, though the air after the storm was clear and still warm.

The closer they got to the outskirts and the Gaffney house and trailer, the more Wild Bill shook, his shoulders hunched up beneath his ears, his hands clenched prayer-fashion over his groin. “Almost home,” Randall reassured him. “We’ll get you taken care of.”

His companion seemed far from comforted, and if they hadn’t been so close, Randall would’ve pulled over. When they turned into the drive and something flashed
in front of the van’s headlights, Wild Bill howled in panic. Randall hit the brake just as Rory Gaffney rammed the side of the trailer so hard that it rocked. Bill lunged forward, his head striking the windshield, then sat back dazed, fingering the knot that immediately started forming on his brow.

Randall got out of the van. Rory Gaffney had hurtled in front of the van so suddenly that he hadn’t been able to make out who it was. Now the body lay crumpled and still near the cinder block step, its back to the van’s headlights. There was a large dent in the trailer door, which had sprung inward from its hinges, then jammed on the carpet. Inside, the baby was crying, the only sound besides the water dripping from the trees. Randall waited for the man to get up off the ground. Utterly still, he looked like a big pile of someone’s dirty wash left outside a laundromat. Randall approached cautiously. Only when he saw the blood smear on the caved-in door did he begin to guess, and he wasn’t sure the dead man was his grandfather’s tormentor until he rolled him onto his back.

“Dead,” said a voice a few inches away. The trailer’s sprung door left a gap about three inches wide between the door and the frame. Behind it, on her knees, was B.G., and Randall could see she was naked.

Rory Gaffney was blood from shoulders to groin. “Yes,” Randall said, stepping back. The headlights illuminated the old man’s face, a mask of horror and perplexity.

“Good,” the girl said. “You love me, then. I didn’t know.”

“What?”

The baby had stopped crying, and a sudden gust of air shook a shower from the trees arching overhead.
Randall could see he had blood on him from touching the dead man. “Call the police,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll tell ’em it was me. He had it coming. I’ll say it was self-defense.” He could see that in the split second it took to invent the lie, she had adopted it as the only reality.

“No,” he said, but she was gone. Then he heard her dialing the phone in the living room. At the same moment he became aware of the policeman standing a few feet away, just outside the focused headlights. The gun in his hand was pointed at the ground. “Step away,” Officer Gaffney said. “Don’t touch my brother.
My
brother.”

Randall was quick about it.

“This is wrong,” said Officer Gaffney. “All of it. I know wrong when I see it, and this was all wrong from the beginning. I tried to tell him. All those years and all of it wrong. Not just him. The two of us. We never did nothing our whole lives that wasn’t wrong.” He raised the revolver and aimed it at Randall. “This here will be wrong, too.”

As the policeman spoke, Randall became aware, somewhere on the periphery of his conscious thought, that a door on the van had opened and closed again. Gaffney had sighted Randall’s middle along the gun barrel, then looked up, as if assailed by a sudden doubt. His sad expression was suddenly transformed into something more like fear, and the gun wavered. If he pulls the trigger now, Randall thought, astonished at his own objectivity, he’ll miss me.

“I warned you. Keep him away from me. Tell him to shut up!”

Wild Bill had stepped in front of the headlights and become an approaching silhouette.

“Make him!” Officer Gaffney screamed.

“Stop,” Randall shouted, but Wild Bill didn’t appear to hear or notice either of them. In the glare of headlights he stalked toward them on fire. It occurred to Randall that he could step between the gun and the man it was now fixed on, but in the time he took to decide not to the gun roared twice, then clicked several more times. As Randall drove forward, the revolver sighted him again, and he distinctly heard a click before burying his shoulder in the policeman’s soft belly. Both of them went down. As Randall got to one knee, he caught a glimpse of Wild Bill, still in silhouette, bending over his father. Then the shots had missed, Randall thought, before Officer Gaffney’s revolver, swung like a club, found his right temple.

Cool. The sensation was enough to fix on. Lovely, like diving into a flooded quarry on a hot day. Maybe, Randall thought, I am underwater. If so, he made a mental note not to stay down too long or he’d … what? Something was bound to happen if he stayed down too long, but he couldn’t think.… The cool moved to the back of his neck. Drown, that was it. If he stayed down too long he’d drown. He kicked toward the surface.

“Sit still,” the girl’s voice spoke to him from somewhere.

“Save me,” he tried to say, but only gurgled.

“Don’t,” she said, closer now.

He opened his eyes, then shut them against the bright lights. “Off,” he croaked, and the girl went away. Suddenly it was dark and he opened his eyes again. He wasn’t underwater. The trailer was there and, far away among the trees, the yellow window of the Gaffney house. Something was missing, he reminded himself, something important. Rory Gaffney. Rory Gaffney was missing. No body in front of the door. One was slumped and twisted up against a tree, though. Randall couldn’t see the face, which was turned away. He didn’t have to. Somewhere, a siren whined.

When Randall struggled onto all fours, the girl at
first tried to prevent him from standing, then helped. To get him on his feet took a long time, and he couldn’t have remained upright without her. “You shouldn’t,” she said. “Your head … they’ll be here in a minute.” It now seemed to Randall that there were several sirens, some close, some miles away, from all different directions. He saw that the damp rag she’d been using to bathe his head was bloody. So was the policeman slumped against the tree. So was the door of the trailer and the cinder block. Randall checked again to make sure that Rory Gaffney had not reappeared. “Bill …” he started.

The revolver lay on the ground a few feet from the policeman. So, Randall thought, he hadn’t dreamed the dead man. “Help me,” he said, not knowing what he meant, and wanting to cry because he didn’t.

One of the many sirens had now drawn close, and bouncing headlight beams reflected halfway up the trees from the street below. When the cruiser pulled up next to the van, Randall and the girl were again blinded, and he briefly lost consciousness. He came to, still on his feet, a moment later. One young policeman was pointing a gun at Randall, and the other, who couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than Randall, stood over the dead man, his arms hanging limply at his sides. “His face,” he said to his partner. “Look at the look on his face.”

“Call it in,” said the other. “Step away, miss.”

“He’ll fall. He’s hurt.”

“Drunk, you mean.”

“No. Come look at his head.”

“I’m staying right here, and you’re staying right there.”

His partner hadn’t budged. “Look at his goddamn face,” he said.

The radio in the police car barked off and on. Randall
still heard sirens, but they were fading. “Call!” said the man with the gun. His partner finally got into the car and rolled up the window as if he were embarrassed about what he had to say and didn’t want anyone to hear, not even his partner.

Randall felt himself slip in and out of awareness. The policeman with the gun was now looking at the trailer door. The streaks of blood had dried brown, but there was no doubting what they were. The policeman looked first at the door, then at the dead officer twenty yards away at the treeline. “Jesus,” he said.

His partner was a long time in the car, and looked disgusted and scared when he finally returned. “We won’t be getting no help.”

The policeman lowered the gun and turned. “Why the hell not?”

“Everybody’s up to the hospital. The son-of-a-bitch is burnin’ down. I can’t raise nobody.”

“So what the hell are
we
supposed to do?”

“We could toss ’em in the car and head over there ourself. Captain’s there. Everybody’s there.”

“What about Gaff?”

“Gaff’s dead.”

“But I mean, Jesus Christ—”

“We should go to the hospital,” the girl said. “My boyfriend needs a doctor.”

The two young policemen looked at each other. Clearly they were thankful for advice. Anybody’s. “Go look at his head,” said the policeman with the gun, again waving it at Randall. “And stay off to the side.”

The young man approached Randall as he would a snake. Randall managed to stay on his feet until the young cop had a good look. Then his legs went. Next thing he knew, they were all in the back seat of the
moving vehicle. Himself. The girl. The baby. The two policemen were up front, the steel grill in between providing their security. The driver braked suddenly to avoid something in the road. “What the hell?” he said.

“Drunks,” said his partner.

“Didn’t look it.”

“Keep going,” the younger cop said. “We already got trouble enough.”

All in all, the fire at the new hospital is disappointing. From the outset it’s obvious that despite the rather impressive columns of flame, the firemen will soon contain the blaze in a single wing. The drive has been barricaded too far up for spectators to enjoy the full effect. Inevitably they draw comparisons between this blaze and the razing of the Nathan Littler, which everyone agrees was high drama. There is little danger here, since the fire broke out in the maintainance wing.

The crowd can only encourage the flames to leap into the night sky. Their Saturday night has been prolonged, and they’re thankful for the diversion. Some have brought bottles. “Don’t let it go out ’til I get back,” people say, hurrying home to call friends and neighbors or to stock up. Within half an hour, their number has quadrupled and grown festive. The Velvet Pussycat has emptied out, and the other bars are closed. Some of those gathered had come with injuries, hoping to be sewn up and gauzed, but what they find is even better. Bottles of cheap whiskey circulate and their complaints are forgotten.