“Yeah, we had a deal,” Lester said. “But you want to know?” he added, as if about to reveal something important. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “It’s all where you stand. It’s all where you stand at any moment. You see? You see what I’m saying?”
Jenny said, “You’re wrecked, Lester. You’re not making sense.”
“I’m making sense,” Lester said. “You just ain’t gettin’ it.” He pointed the gun at T. “You gettin’ it?” he asked.
T said, “I wish you wouldn’t point that thing at me.”
Lester ignored him. “Deal was Jenny for sixty grand,” he said. “Bottom line. Right?” When T didn’t answer, he repeated himself: “I said,
right?
”
T shook his head. He didn’t seem to be fully in control of his actions. “No,” he said, and could hardly believe the word had come out of his mouth. It was clearly not what Lester wanted to hear.
“What’d you think the deal?” he asked.
“I give you the money,” T said, “to get your lives straightened
out. After that Jenny’d be free to make whatever choice she wanted.”
“You a fool, you really think that,” Lester said. “You’ll pay sixty so Jenny can choose? I don’t think so. I think you making a buy and you know it.”
“I don’t think I’m a fool,” T said.
“Lester,” Jenny said. “Is it registering, what he just told you?” She spoke loudly and articulated each word, as if desperate to get through to him. “He’s going to give us sixty thousand dollars. We can pay off Willie—and we’ll still have twenty left. Do you get that? Do you hear what he’s saying?”
Lester smiled broadly. “I’m spun,” he said. “I ain’t deaf, and I ain’t dumb.”
“Then what are you doing? What are you doing, Les?”
Lester held the butt of the gun against his forehead, as if the cool metal were helping relieve a headache. “What I’m doing is fuck the money,” he said. He looked up at Jenny sadly. “I’m a dead man, Jen. You know that. It ain’t like you don’t know it. Willie kills me and you take the extra twenty and come back to your sugar daddy. You know that how it plays out we go back there. All I’m doing going back is getting you off the hook—and only reason he won’t kill you is because Chuck. He killin’ me, why should I give his money back first? You think I’m stupid? You think I don’t know what you’re doing?”
Jenny said, “I don’t think you’re stupid. I think you’re out of it.”
“I’m not out of it,” he said. “I’m deep into it. I’m inside it,
Jenny. I see it perfect clear.” He stood up, pointed the gun at T’s heart, and pulled the trigger.
T jumped as the gun went off, the explosion resounding like a car backfiring. The bullet hit him just under the collarbone. It felt like being punched hard in the shoulder, and was followed by a surprisingly minimal amount of pain. It felt like what he’d imagine being stabbed would feel like: heat, intense heat on the surface of the wound, rawness, instant radical soreness, and burning—but inside only a dull sickness and not that much pain. The bullet knocked him into the tub and he fell over the porcelain lip, landing comically with his feet sticking up. Falling, he had struck the back of his head on something, and his neck hurt more than the bullet wound. His neck felt like it was broken, and the first thing he did, lying in the bathtub with a bullet in his chest, was wiggle his toes to make sure he wasn’t paralyzed.
Jenny appeared at the edge of the tub, followed by Lester. She looked down blankly at T and then turned to Lester. “I played him,” she said. “I played him perfectly. We could have had sixty thousand dollars.”
“Nah,” Lester said, staring at T. He watched the bullet wound where blood welled up and spilled out. A rough black circle of blood spread across T’s chest, saturating much of the shirt. “That’s what you said, but that ain’t it. You playing me, not him.”
“That’s not right.”
“Yes, it is.” He nudged T’s foot. “How you doing there, bud?”
Weirdly, surreally, T heard himself answer, “I’m okay. You shot me.”
“Sure did,” Lester said. “Meant to put it through your heart. You should rightly be dead.”
Jenny sat on the lip of the tub and rested her head on her fists. She looked like a little girl pouting. “If you were afraid Willie’d kill you anyway,” she said, “we didn’t have to go back. We could have taken the money and gone on ahead to Canada.”
“Really?” Lester said. “Didn’t you say no to that this afternoon? Didn’t you say no way?”
“You didn’t tell me what you were thinking,” she said. “All you said was—”
“Shut up, Jenny.” Lester raised the gun and pointed it at her temple.
Jenny backed away from the gun, into the wall. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “You’re planning on killing us both? Is that what you’re thinking?”
“I knew this afternoon,” Lester said. “When you were all we got to go back and pay off Willie. I knew right then, but I didn’t want to believe it.”
Jenny said, “You’re wrong, honey.”
Lester said, “I ain’t wrong. And don’t be calling me honey. It too late for that now.”
Jenny clasped her hands over the back of her neck. “This is all just you’re high,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”
“It ain’t all just I’m high.” Lester climbed up on the john
and sat on the tank with his feet on the bowl. “You make me tired,” he said to Jenny. “You know that? All these years. You make me tired.”
“You’re a sad case,” Jenny said. “You’re tragic.” She looked back to T, her eyes moving from his face to the blood-soaked shirt and the bullet wound. “We had all that money,” she said. “We had it in the palm of our hands.”
Lester rested the gun on his knee. “Nah,” he said. “That ain’t it.”
In the bathtub, with his feet sticking up ridiculously, T had the urge to pull himself into a more respectable position. He was acutely aware of his breathing, which went in and out, in and out, tossing his head back with each inhale and forward with each exhale—or at least it felt that way. Little movements seemed amplified. The burning under his collarbone had spread through the left half of his chest, spread and dulled so that now it was more like a throbbing heat. He lowered his eyes to look at the wound and saw that blood was still welling up out of it, and then he saw that it was spilling off him somewhere around his waist and collecting under him in the tub. He considered that the bloodstain on the back of his pants would be embarrassing once he stood up. He hated messes. He’d always hated messes. He was a neat man by instinct. He was a neat man by history. Even when he was a scruffy hippie, he was a
neat
scruffy hippie. Even when a child, when he was only a boy, he cleaned up after his parents. They were messy. They were bad. His father hadn’t loved him. His father hadn’t loved anyone. His mother left the dishes out overnight and hardly
ever cleaned the house. They embarrassed him. The blood embarrassed him, the blood on the back of his pants. “Think someone might help me up?” he said. His voice was both harsh and whispery. He coughed.
“Where you want to go?” Lester said. He smiled. He had the look of a man amused by the innocent questions of a child.
“I’d like to get out of this bathtub,” T said. He lifted his right arm and was pleased that he was able to do so without much pain. He knew for certain that lifting his left arm was going to be excruciating. He took a breath and the movement and the breath together seemed to clear his head a little, to wake him up some, as if he’d been sleeping.
“Look at you,” Lester said. “You whiter than the bathtub. You scared?” he asked. “You that scared?”
“The guy’s probably in shock,” Jenny said. She turned to look at T and touched his calf gently. To Lester she said, “Do you want to sit here and watch him bleed to death?”
Lester tapped his knee with the gun. “I don’t think so,” he said. “That ain’t the plan.”
“There’s a plan? You have a plan?”
“Uh-huh.” He slid down from the john, grabbed the blue towel off the tank, and tossed it to Jenny. “Bandage that for him.”
Jenny spread the towel open over her knees. “Want to get me something to cut this with,” she said, “so I can make some strips?”
“Why would you want her to bandage me up?” T heard
himself say, loud, almost shouting. “Don’t you mean to kill me?”
“We going fishing,” Lester said. He disappeared a moment into the hallway and then returned with a penknife, which he tossed to Jenny. “You ever been night fishing, T?”
During the few seconds Lester was out of the bathroom, Jenny had turned to T and gestured with a vertical finger over her lips. Beyond telling him to keep quiet, he wasn’t sure what the gesture meant, and he wanted to ask her. He thought there had been a look of resolve and collusion in her eyes, as if to suggest that she was with him, that he should trust her, that she would do what she could to get him out of this—but he thought that might have been wishful thinking on his part, and he wanted to hear her say it.
“Can you hear me all right?” Lester said. He leaned over the tub. “T?”
“I can hear you fine,” T said.
“You soundin’ a little better,” Lester said, as if pleased.
“Help him out of there.” Jenny had ripped the towel into several strips, which she laid out over the sink before she opened the medicine cabinet and rummaged through it, apparently looking for anything that might be useful.
Lester tucked the gun into his underwear and got into the tub to stand alongside T. He looked down at the blood that was now following a wide path to the drain. He positioned his feet on either side of the blood and started to crouch toward T, as if meaning to lift him up, but stopped suddenly and then flew
into the tiled wall beneath the shower head as if a force had thrown him back. He gasped and stepped out of the tub, sliding against the wall, then backed out of the bathroom and into the hallway.
Jenny and T stared at Lester as he grasped the door frame to steady himself. “Whoa,” he said. Then he laughed. “Fuckin’ A.”
Jenny said, “You’re hallucinating now? What the hell did you take, Lester?”
Lester breathed deeply, laughing in between breaths, and then went back to the tub and lifted T out of it, one hand around the back of his neck and the other under his knees. “You just turned into my father,” he said, putting T down on the john. “I mean, fuckin’ unbelievable. You just, bang— There he was.”
T said, “I’m not your father.”
“Look at this,” Lester said, holding his arms up and looking down at his chest. “You got blood all over me.”
“Forgive me,” T said. “Thoughtless of me.”
Jenny stepped in front of T with the strips of towel flung over her shoulder, putting her body between him and Lester. She gave T a look which seemed to again ask him to be quiet. “So what are we doing?” she asked Lester, with her back to him. Gently, she grasped T’s shirt by the collar and pulled it away from his chest.
Lester leaned over the sink to wash the blood off. “Just like I said.” He found another towel and wiped himself off. “We
making a mess of this place.” He tossed the towel into the bathtub. “Ol’ Chuck’ll have a fit.”
“What do you mean, just like you said?” Jenny cut away a piece of T’s shirt and then folded a square of towel and pressed it hard against the bullet wound, sending a shock of electric pain through T from his toes to his forehead. He gritted his teeth and moaned. Jenny kissed him on the temple. “I’m sorry,” she said coldly, and went about taping the towel over the wound with a roll of adhesive tape, which she must have found in the medicine cabinet.
Lester said, “I mean we goin’ night fishing.” He stood behind her and watched as she wrapped the remaining strips of towel around T’s chest and shoulder and then taped them as best she could.
When Jenny was done with the bandaging, she washed her hands in the sink. “Lester,” she said. “Please…”
Lester had taken a seat on the edge of the tub. “Please what?” he answered. To T, he said, “Can you stand up? Can you walk okay?”
“Please don’t do this,” Jenny said. She stood in front of him and placed the palm of her hand gently on his waist. “Can’t you and I take a walk, try to talk this all over?”
“Help me with him,” he said. He pushed her hand away and knelt on the right of T.
T said, “I don’t need help.” He leaned forward, shifting his weight onto his feet, and then lifted himself up slowly in spite of the green mosaic that blinded him as he rose and then dissipated
only slightly as he tried to take a step and his knees started to buckle.
Lester held him up with an arm around the waist. T leaned against him reluctantly.
“Shit,” Lester said. “Look at you. Walkin’ with a bullet in you like the man!”
Lester laughed and then said something to Jenny about the guitar, about taking the guitar with them, and Jenny argued and he heard Lester say something back with a laugh, say
my stash,
but then T gave up on making out what they were saying because the loud buzz in his ears that had started softly grew deafening as they moved through the dark hall and toward the kitchen before it eased up some as they went out the back door. “What?” he said, but no one seemed to hear him, and he wasn’t really sure he said it. After a few steps outside, down the hill, toward the river, the buzzing diminished and then it was completely gone, as were the green mosaics around his sight. He leaned against Lester as they walked along the grass. The moon was bright. It cast shadows through the trees. He concentrated on walking, putting one foot in front of the other. He thought Lester was probably taking him to the river to dump his body there. He imagined that Lester would shoot him again, probably in the head this time, or the heart, and so he thought he must be moving step by step closer to his death—and the only hope he had, far as he could think it through, was Jenny. How crazy was that? How strange? Out here under a pale bright moon on the Thousand Islands with a bare-chested murderer guiding him toward the last river, and
the only hope of salvation this beautiful girl out of the dregs of the world, from the dregs, trying, T thought, probably her whole life to find her way out of the ugliness she was born into, and here she was his only hope when an hour ago she probably thought the opposite was true. “Jenny,” he said. “Jenny?”
“She right here,” Lester said, reassuring him.