Thanksgiving (5 page)

There was a deafening bang, as if someone had struck the roof of the trailer with a huge hammer.

‘What in hell’s that?’ gasped Allen.

Before I could react, he was at the front door. I followed him out, gun in hand. The wind had died away, leaving an unblemished stillness.

‘There she is,’ I cried, pointing to a triangle of white lights in the sky.

Allen followed the pattern of lights for some time.

‘Must be military,’ he said at last. ‘Area Fifty-one’s just over those hills. Groom Lake Base. Lots of secret, high-tech stuff going on there. Some kind of sonic boom, I guess. We’re miles away from any regular flight path here.’

The lights receded in a wide arc, disappearing over a ridge of high land to the west. Allen shivered.

‘Fuck, it’s cold.’

He went back inside and I followed, still holding the gun. Allen turned on a small lamp on the shelves above the stereo.

‘Runs on a battery,’ he explained. ‘For when the wind fails.’

We sat down again.

‘So what’s going to happen now?’ he asked.

‘I have no idea.’

‘Okay, here’s my proposition. That gun cost you how much?’

‘Two hundred.’

‘And you’re planning on flying back? Well, they won’t let you take the gun on the plane without some fancy locked fibreglass case that’ll cost more than that. Plus I can’t imagine you needing a firearm at home. So how about this? I buy it off you right now for one hundred fifty in cash.’

He finished adjusting the stove and gave me a quick glance.

‘I’ll go and dig out my savings account. Make yourself at home. Have a drink. Watch a video. Listen to a tape.’

He disappeared into the darkness at the back of the trailer. There were various noises, then a blinding flash.

‘Smile, you’re on
Candid Camera
!’

I raised the gun, and was answered by another flash.

‘I like to take a few snapshots when folks visit,’ Allen remarked. ‘Kind of a souvenir. Doesn’t happen that often.’

He put down the camera and a battered candy tin on the table. Then he opened the tin, counted out eight twenties from the bundle inside and spread them on the table like a hand of cards.

‘You see, the fact of the matter is I never got over Luce kicking me out. I mean, okay, maybe I wasn’t the perfect husband and father, but who the hell is? She’d married me for better or worse, and I assumed we’d stick at it one way or another and hang in there, the way most people do. But she had other ideas. You got a ten?’

I looked at him through the dim yellow light and raised the gun.

‘I’m going to shoot you now.’

‘No, you’re not, Tone. I know it and you know it. It’s like sex. Eye contact. The smell in the air. There are certain rules in life, like you can’t stop pissing once you’ve started. And you’re not going to shoot me. We both know that.’

He sighed wearily.

‘Strange, that plane coming over. I’m not one of those UN black helicopter wackos you read about, although there’s more than a few of them around here. But I don’t recall anything quite like that happening before.’

While still speaking, he reached up in one smooth movement and took the gun from my hand. He pushed the spread of twenties across the table, then lifted one and put it in his pocket.

‘Okay, if you can’t make change, I have a new deal for you. Let’s say one-forty, and I’ll throw in one of my compilation tapes as a sweetener. Give you something to listen to on the drive back.’

He pushed the cassette across the table to join the seven banknotes.

‘There’s some good stuff on this one. I seriously recommend side two. It’s a real killer. Don’t worry, this is just a copy. I’ve got the original around somewhere.’

He picked up the revolver.

‘Taurus, eh? I’ve heard of them. Supposed to be good. I’ve been meaning to get a gun for some time. In this state it’s practically mandatory to have one. Plus you never know when you might want to end it all, right? I’ve been tempted more than once. It’s the how that always stops me. Knives and razors are out for me. I have this thing about blood. I know it makes me sound like a wuss, but there it is.’

He smiled reminiscently.

‘Fact is, about the only problem Luce and I used to have in bed was that she liked to fuck right through her periods. Pills? I don’t even have a doctor, let alone the feelgood variety. Carbon monoxide sounds good in theory, but in practice it always feels like too much like work. Getting a tube the right size to fit the exhaust pipe and long enough to reach in the side window, all the rest of it. It’s like you want to kill yourself, that’s fine, but first you have to remodel the basement. You end up thinking, the hell with it, I’ll do it tomorrow.’

He gave me one of his trademark beaming smiles.

‘But now I’ve got a gun, I can do it tonight.’

‘Do what?’

There was a long silence.

‘You came here to kill me, but you didn’t,’ Allen said at last. ‘So now I’m going to have to kill you. I don’t want to, you understand. I have nothing against you, Tone. On the contrary, you took Luce off my hands and gave her another interest in life. Without you, she might have spent more time wondering how I managed to make ends meet, maybe even hired a lawyer to check my assets. But thanks to you she was all wrapped up in love’s young dream. Well, love’s middle-aged dream, anyway.’

He waved the gun in the air.

‘Anton Chekhov – one of my favourite authors incidentally – said that if there’s a gun hanging on the wall in Act One, then it must go off in Act Three. We wouldn’t want to disappoint Mr Chekhov, so this baby’s going to have to be fired, no?’

‘You’ll never get away with it. The police will find out that I flew down here and rented a car. They know we were both married to Lucy. You’ll be the obvious suspect.’

Darryl Bob Allen smiled.

‘“Suspect”, maybe. But that’s all I’ll be. It’s your gun, after all. And I’m not going to make any stupid mistakes like trying to sell off the car to make some extra cash. No, this is going to be the perfect crime. When the gun is discovered next to your body and the rental car, out in the desert a long, long way from here, they’re going to say it was a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Suicide while of unsound mind. Wife just died tragically. Guy was shocked, depressed.’

He extended his arm, the gun pointed straight at my forehead.

‘It’s time to move on, Tone. Change is always painful, but that’s how we grow. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.’

He laughed and lowered his arm.

‘Mock execution, like they did with Dostoyevsky. Another of my favourite authors. The piece about him in the encyclopaedia is kind of snotty, but I guess there were some things even those guys didn’t get. Anyway, the shock effect sure worked for Fyodor Mikhailovitch. Who knows, maybe you’ll write a masterpiece too, make yourself a fortune. You could call it
I Loved Lucy
. “Honey, I’m home!” But listen, I want a piece of the movie action, okay?’

I started to weep uncontrollably, shaking all over.

‘Speaking of movies,’ Allen went on, ‘there’s another reel you might be even more interested in. This one was a video right from the start, not like that one I got switched from a different format. Because this one I made later, right at the end of that memorable period I was talking about before. The one when I was still sleeping with Luce for months after she’d given me the big speech she’d conned out of some book on how to dump your partner, all about how it would be better for everyone if we separated.’

He plucked a black plastic box down off the shelf, laying the gun in its place.

‘I’m kind of proud of this, tell you the truth. Setting it up was bitch central. You know those surveillance cameras they have in stores and offices, real small, about the size of a pack of smokes? Well, they had them at the building where I had that janitorial job I mentioned. Now I knew that the building would be shut down over the Thanksgiving weekend, so I stayed late the night before, disconnected one and took it home. I was still hanging on there by the skin of my teeth, see, because although I’d got the job I hadn’t had a cheque yet, so I couldn’t pay the deposit on an apartment. Luce offered to lend me the money, but I told her a man has his pride. And she couldn’t very well insist, it being the great American family holiday and all.

‘On Thursday, she and the kids were out buying the turkey. Luce didn’t usually bother that much about Thanksgiving, but she wanted to make this one special, because right afterwards she was going to have to break it to Claire and Frank that their daddy wasn’t going to be living with them no more. While they were out, I clamped the camera to a lamp stand and set it way back in the closet, on my side. We had a his-and-hers arrangement, know what I mean? Maybe it was the same with you. I guess it would have been. Luce was pretty conservative when it came to those kind of things. So I guess your pants were hanging where mine used to.’

He drank more whiskey, waving the tape around as though unaware he was holding it.

‘Then I snagged the video player from the living room, plugged everything in on an extension cord from my workshop down in the basement, stuck a blank tape in the player and pulled my clothes along the rack to cover it up, all except one little crack I left open for the camera. So far, so good. The really tricky bit was getting Luce drunk. I knew that after a few belts I could get her to do anything. The problem was, she knew it too, and the way we were fixed she wasn’t going to take the risk with me around. So I had to kind of sneak it up on her.

‘In the end I went down to the video store and rented an old movie.
White Cargo
. 1942. Hedy Lamarr as Tondaleyo. One of her favourites. On the way home I stopped off at 7-Eleven and bought a big bottle of Coke and some popcorn. Then I hit the liquor store and picked up a twenty-sixer of Smirnoff Blue Label. Back home, I poured about a third of the Coke down the sink and topped up with the vodka. Both the kids were spending the night with friends, so they weren’t a problem.’

It seemed that the battery-operated lamp had started to fail too. I could hardly see Allen’s face.

‘Well, like a charm it voiked, as they say. I salted the popcorn pretty heavily and kept topping up Luce’s glass of Coke, and by the end of the movie she was pretty well sideways. I told her I’d run her a bath, and while she was in it I turned on the VCR and the camera, leaving the closet door on my side open just wide enough. Luce came back from the bathroom in her robe and nightgown. First of all she tried to get me to sleep in Frank’s room, and when I started to undress she made a show of protesting, but I knew her heart wasn’t in it.’

He set the tape down and laughed heartily.

‘I’d bought this tape. Ninety minutes. I figured that should be enough, but you know what? It ran out before we did. You want to watch it?’

I couldn’t speak.

‘Well, it’s your call,’ Allen went on.

He sighed lazily.

‘So tell me, Tone, how was it for you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How did you like fucking her worn-out old snatch?’

I finally found my voice.

‘It was just great once I got past the worn-out bit.’

‘Yeah, I heard that one already. Not bad, though. You’ve got a sense of humour, anyway. That’s good. A loser needs that. Winners don’t need to be witty. They’ve won. Humour’s a loser’s saving grace. And that’s what you are, Tone, let’s face it. A loser.’

‘You’re the loser, if anyone is.’

‘Oh, I guess I’m a loser in the eyes of so-called society, no question about it. But in this particular little area, you are. You know why?’

I heard him splash more whiskey into his glass, then drink it.

‘Because I got to fuck her when she was twenty. Not to mention when she was thirty. You should have seen her when she was thirty. Luce once told me that she would have a three-act life. Gauche adolescent, knockout midlife and sweet old lady. Well, I guess I got the first two, while you were stuck with the sweet old lady. Plus you know what? Ben Franklin was right about the oldies being grateful and all the rest of it. What he didn’t say was that there’s a downside too. Same with the uglies. You ever fuck the uglies, Tone? Ever get that desperate? Sure they’ll let you do it. Sure they’re grateful. But they also despise you, just like the sweet old ladies do. For not getting better-looking, younger stuff. It’s kind of a Groucho Marx take, you know? They don’t want to get laid by anybody who’d fuck someone like them.’

There was a long silence.

‘Fifteen years, Tone. One hundred eighty months. Over five thousand days and nights. When she was in her twenties and thirties, with a body to die for and a cunt that wouldn’t quit. We used to do it four, five times a day in the early years. And everywhere. On the kitchen counter, in the shower, on the floor. One time we did it in the toilet on an airplane. Even after the babies we still did it at least once a day. And after I left there was Scott and at least three other guys she had on the side. And then along comes you, a big-time journalist and all. And a distinguished English gentleman, to boot. Well, Luce wasn’t stupid. She could tell a meal ticket when she saw one. She never cared about money when we were together. All she cared about was me and her babies. Nothing else mattered. Nothing.’

I stood up and groped my way to the door. Outside, the night was eerily still. The wind having failed, the sign suspended from the metal mast gave no light.

‘Tone? Come back. I need you, Tone! Don’t leave me alone here.’

I groped my way forward, stumbled on something and fell painfully, grazing my shin. I could just make out the figure of Darryl Bob Allen framed in the faint light from the doorway of the trailer. I stood up, trying to get my bearings in the darkness, then made my way back to the car.

NOT HERE

She said, ‘He said I had the best breasts at San Francisco State.’ It was a casual aside in some conversation I don’t otherwise recall, quite early on in our relationship, and spoken in an almost self-deprecating way, like someone mentioning that they happen to be of the blood royal, as though she were embarrassed at having raised a topic which had nothing whatsoever to do with her personally, but which she felt an obligation to disclose lest the other person learn it later from some other source and feel hurt. Such aristocratic tact can easily come to seem like disdain, however, to those subject to its power.