Colonel Rutherford's Colt (2 page)

“Are you Mister Guy?” In its gentle probing, the woman's sugary voice reminded Jimmy of his third grade teacher asking if she could see what he was writing in his notebook. He said, Yeah, he sure was. She offered her hand and said, “My name is Loretta Snow,” almost making it into a question. She had a quick look behind her. “I'm told you buy guns?”

“We buy historical weapons,” Jimmy said. “Y'know . . . guns belonged to famous people, or else they were used in some famous battle. Or a crime.”

“I might just have one for you, then.” She opened the purse and removed something covered in a gray cloth. The instant she began to unwrap it, Jimmy knew she had brought him the palm-tree gun, and when she handed it over, a Colt .45 Model 1911 with a well-oiled gray finish, he could feel a tropical heat in his head, and felt also the shape of a story. Blood and passion, hatred and love.

Rita leaned in over his shoulder, and he held it up for her to see. “Original model. No crescent cuts back of the trigger.” She made a noncommittal noise.

“It used to belong to Bob Champion,” Ms. Snow said. “He might not be famous enough for you, but people know him around here.”

Jimmy didn't recognize the name, but Rita said, “You mean the white-power guy?”

Ms. Snow seemed surprised that she had spoken. She folded the cloth and said quietly, “That'd be him. I was his wife for eight years.”

Rita scoured her with a stare. To Jimmy she said, “Champion's the one robbed them armored trucks over in Idaho. Son-of-a-bitch is a star-spangled hero to every racist fuck in America.”

Ms. Snow took the hit fairly well, but when two pre-pubescent boys juked past behind her, laughing, jabbing and slashing at each other with sheathed knives, she gave a start and looked shaken.

“You sell this privately, you'll get more'n I can pay,” Jimmy told her, ignoring Rita, who was making angry speech with her eyes. “I can move it for you, but we get forty-percent mark-up.”

“I know.” Ms. Snow stuffed the cloth back into her purse. “I had a man offer me four thousand, but I wouldn't let him have it.”

“Four thousand's high,” Jimmy said. “I'd do 'er, I was you.”

“No sir,” she said. “I won't sell to him. In fact, I don't want you to sell to him, neither. That'd be a condition of me selling it to you.”

Rita started to object, but Jimmy jumped in first. “How come you won't sell to him?”

“I believe I'll let that stay my business,” said Ms. Snow.

Rita snatched the gun from Jimmy and held it out to Ms. Snow. “Then you can let this here stay your business, too.”

After a moment's indecision Ms. Snow said, “The man's name is Raymond Borchard. He calls himself Major, but I don't know if he was a real soldier. He's got a place up in the mountains where he marches around with some other fools and shoots at targets and talks big about challenging the government. He venerates Bob. They all do. He told me Bob's gun was a symbol. If they had it to look at, he said it'd make them stronger for what was to come.”

“I can't understand why you got a problem with that,” said Rita. “Seeing how you in the same damn club.”

Ms. Snow met Rita's contempt with cool reserve. “You don't know me, ma'am.”

This tickled Jimmy—Rita hated to be called ma'am. She set the gun down on the table and said to Ms. Snow, “I don't wanna know ya . . .
ma'am
.”

“I was barely eighteen when I married Bob Champion,” Ms. Snow went on in a defiant tone. “Far as I could tell, he was a good man. Hard-working and devout. Something went wrong with him. Maybe it was the money trouble . . . I still don't understand it. It just seemed like one minute he was Bob, and the next he was somebody else. I was twenty-three and I had three babies. Maybe I should have left him. But I simply did not know where to go.” A quaver crept into her voice. “If you want to damn me for that, go ahead. I don't care. I've got a good job's been offered me in Seattle, and all I care about is getting enough money to move me and my kids away from here . . . and away from Ray Borchard.”

Rita gave Jimmy a you-deal-with-this-shit look and had a seat at their second table. Jimmy picked up the Colt and settled the grip in his palm. He felt the weight of the story accumulating inside his head. “Tell you what,” he said to Ms. Snow. “I'll take the gun on consignment this weekend and the next. For the show they got over in North Bend. If I move it before I leave North Bend, I'll cut myself twenty-percent commission. If it don't move, I'll make you an offer and you can do what you want.”

“I suppose that's reasonable,” Ms. Snow said hesitantly.

“It's a helluva lot more than reasonable!” Rita scraped back her chair and came over. “We don't take nothing on consignment.”

“We can do this one,” said Jimmy calmly. “We got enough we can help someone out once in a while.”

“Jimmy!”

“We going to move the goddamn Beretta, Rita!” He fished out a handful of twenties from the cash box. “Here. You go on ahead and celebrate. And get us a room at the Red Roof.”

He thought he could feel the black iron of her stare branding a two-eyed shape onto the front of his brain. She grabbed the bills and stuffed them in her shirt pocket. “I'll leave you a key at the desk,” she said. “I'll be at Brandywines.” She expressed him another heated look. “You better sell the damn Beretta.” Then she stalked off, shoving aside a portly balding man wearing a camo field jacket and pants.

“I didn't mean to cause trouble,” Ms. Snow said, but Jimmy gave a nonchalant wave and said, “That's just me and Rita. We got what you call a volatile relationship.”

“Oh.” Volatile relationships did not appear to be within the scope of Ms. Snow's experience.

Jimmy began writing a receipt. “You better tell me what this Borchard fella looks like 'case he tries to pass himself off as someone else.”

“That's not his style. He'll come right out with who he is. He expects everyone'll be impressed.”

“Yeah, but . . .” Jimmy stopped writing. “Supposing he sends one of his men to buy it? Whyn't you hang around, and I'll buy you a cup of coffee? You can tell me if you spot someone familiar.”

Ms. Snow faded back from the table, clutching the purse to her stomach. “No sir,” she said. “I won't deal with those people. That's why I gave you the gun. So I won't have to.”

“All right.” Jimmy finished with the receipt. “But I'm going to need your information. That way I can check with you when I get a buyer.” He handed her a business card and she scribbled down a number and an address.

Ms. Snow pivoted out from the table, smooth as a dance turn, then stopped and glanced back, affording Jimmy a view of a sleek flank sheathed in flimsy, flowered blue. “I should be home most of the weekend if you need to give me call,” she said, and smiled her cherry smile. “Thank you so much . . . for everything.”

“I'll be in touch real soon,” Jimmy said.

 

* * *

 

It was in Cuba where the palm tree grew. Jimmy sat facing away from the table, head bent to the Colt, turning it in his hand. Cuba a long, long time ago. Ten years after the Spanish-American War. No, he'd have to make it fifteen years after, because John Browning had not even made a prototype of the Colt before '09. The man who originally owned the gun, Col. Hawes Rutherford, had been posted as a captain to Havana in 1901, where he served as an interpreter . . .

Interpreter, Jimmy decided, wasn't enough of a job for Col. Rutherford. He had to be a powerful man, or else he wouldn't be able to manipulate people the way Jimmy wanted. A liaison, then, between various American missions and the Cuban government. That would do the trick.

Over the course of a decade, thanks to his nefarious dealings with the corrupt Cuban officialdom, Colonel Rutherford amassed considerable wealth and power; and in 1910, following hard upon his promotion to colonel, recognizing that his position required a suitable companion, he returned to his native Virginia and presented himself at the plantation home of Mr. Morgan Lisle—where his father had worked the fields as a sharecropper—pursuant to seeking the hand of the Lisle's youngest daughter, Susan.

Jimmy stretched out his legs, cradling the Colt on his belly, and stirring the possibilities around. He believed Colonel Rutherford should have some leverage over the Lisles—he wasn't sure why yet, but the narrative absence where that leverage would fit felt like a notch in a knife-edge, a place that wanted grinding and smoothing. He did not use logic to resolve the problem, just kept on stirring and letting his thoughts circulate. The character of Susan Lisle pushed forward in his mind, shaping herself and her circumstance from the whirled-up materials of the story, and as she grew more clearly defined, he came to understand what the leverage should be.

Mr. Lisle, a gentleman alcoholic renowned for his profligacy and abusive temper, had squandered most of the family fortune in a number of ill-considered business ventures, and the prospect of a marriage between Susan and Colonel Rutherford seemed to him, despite the colonel's lack of pedigree, a fine idea in that it served to rid him of an expense and, most pertinently, because the colonel had offered substantial loans with which Mr. Lisle might renew his inept assault upon the business world. And so it was that the marriage was arranged and celebrated, whereupon the colonel then whisked Susan away to Havana, to an elegant two-story house of yellow stucco with a tile roof and an extensive grounds where flourished palms, hibiscus, bougainvillea, bananas, mangos, ceiba trees, and bamboo.

At the age of twenty-four, Susan Lisle Rutherford was an extraordinarily beautiful woman with milky skin and dark hair and blue eyes the color of deep ocean water. She was also a woman for whom the Twentieth Century had not yet dawned, having been nurtured in a family who clung stubbornly to the graces, manners, and compulsions of the ante-bellum period. In effect, by marrying at the urging of her parents, she had merely exchanged one form of confinement for another, emerging from the cloistered atmosphere of the plantation only to be encaged in a luxurious prison of Colonel Rutherford's design. Since the ceremony, she had not had a single day she cared to remember. The colonel was a stern, overbearing sort who kept her fenced in by spying friends and loyal servants and tight purse strings. She had not grown to love him, as her mother had promised she would, but to hate him. His demands of her in the marriage bed, though basic, had become a nightmarish form of duty. For nearly five years, she had been desperate, depressed, prone to thoughts of suicide. Not until recently had any glint of light, of life, penetrated the canopy of the colonel's protective custody.

Aside from the odd official function, Susan was permitted no more than three trips away from the house each week. Each Sunday she attended church in the company of the colonel's housekeeper Mariana, a stately bulk of a woman with light brown skin. Tuesday afternoons she went to market with Porfirio, the colonel's chef, and on Thursday evenings, escorted by the colonel's driver, Sebastian, she would make an appearance at the weekly dinner given by the President's wife for the wives of American and Cuban staff officers.

The dinner was held in a small banquet room at the Presidential Palace and was sometimes attended by other family members—it was on one such occasion that Susan struck up a conversation with Arnulfo Carrasquel y Navarro, the nephew of General Oswaldo Ruelas, currently employed by the Banco Nacional but soon, he informed Susan, to become the owner of an export company dealing primarily in rum and tobacco. Ordinarily Susan would have been reluctant to speak with such a handsome young man, knowing that Sebastian reported her every movement to the colonel. But Sebastian had formed a romantic attachment with one of the palace maids; after leaving his charge at the banquet room door, he hurried off to meet his girlfriend. Thus liberated, Susan . . .

 

* * *

 

“Excuse me!” Someone tapped Jimmy on the shoulder, making him jump. A tall middle-aged man with a bushy brown mustache, wide shoulders and an erect bearing. He wore a gray sport coat over a polo shirt. His face was squarish, a bit lantern-jawed, and his brow scored by what struck Jimmy as three regulation furrows, each the same wavy shape as the one above or below, like an insignia of rank in some strange army. He smiled broadly and stuck out his hand. “Raymond Borchard,” he said, sounding each letter in every syllable, as if expecting Jimmy might have a need to spell the name.

Jimmy didn't care for being interrupted in the middle of a story, but he supposed he had no one to blame but himself for working on it in a public place. He gave Borchard a limp hand so as to minimize what he presumed would be a serious massaging.

“I want to inquire about a gun,” Borchard said. “The very gun you're holding, as a matter of fact.”

Jimmy looked down at the Colt. “You after a Nineteen-Eleven, you can find one cheaper somewheres else.”

“I believe,” Borchard said, “that's Bob Champion's Colt.”

“Sure is.”

“I'd like to buy it.”

“Well, that's good to hear,” said Jimmy. “But it just now come to me, and I ain't had time to check it out . . . figure what it's worth. None of that.”

“Four thousand,” said Borchard. “You won't do better than four.”

“Hell you say!” Jimmy said testily. “You ain't a dealer. You don't have a clue what I can get.”

Borchard was big-boned and thick-waisted, and he surely went six-four, six-five. A man, by Jimmy's estimation, accustomed to having his way. The Borchard smile quivered, as if it was a strain to hold. A sharpness surfaced in his polished baritone, like a reef showing at low tide. “I apologize,” he said. “I'm not usually so disrespectful. Chalk it up to eagerness.”