Look at that! she shouted. You’re traumatizing the goddamn dog again. Stop it. Just stop!
You can’t just get into the car with a bag of clothes and head out into the night.
How do you know, how could you know? Let me go, you bastard. I’ll kill you!
She twisted in his grasp and chopped at his throat with her fist. He deflected her blows, backing up.
Stop, he said. You’d better stop.
He backed away and she immediately stooped to gather her clothes back into the bag. He rushed into his study and snatched the little pistol off the shelf next to the dictionary and went back into the living room and stood over her. She looked up, saw the gun in his hand, and froze.
You don’t have the guts to use that ridiculous thing, she said. Even you’re not that insane.
He stepped back, shucked a round into the gun’s chamber, and for a moment thought he would shoot a bullet into the floor near her, just to let her know he would do it. But at the last moment he pointed the muzzle toward his right foot and fired.
The pain was blinding. He fell to the floor.
Jesus! Jesus fucking Christ! she kept saying as he writhed on the floorboards, moaning, touching and then recoiling from his bleeding foot. Somewhere in another room the dog barked frantically, as if an intruder were breaking down the door.
ON THE WAY TO the hospital, while he gritted his teeth and poured out a cold sweat, they did not fight verbally but carried on a battle of silence wherein each believed himself or herself superior to the other, she because he had been enough of a hysterical idiot to shoot himself in the foot in order to make a point, he because he was in agonizing pain and knew that anyone who could drive another person to shoot himself in the foot just to get her to shut up and stay put must be out of her mind.
The young, balding emergency room doctor ordered X-rays, anesthetized and cleaned the wound. The police came and required them to fill out a report. Luckily they were not police officers who had ever been to their house, called by one of them or by their neighbors. And then they went back home.
Miraculously, the bullet hadn’t cracked through any bones. It was five a.m. He hobbled off to bed, his foot bandaged and throbbing. He took one of the sample Percocets they’d given him and slept.
She stood over him for a long while, watching him sleep. It was difficult for her to gather her thoughts. She was rather stunned, a little in shock. She went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee and forgot what she was doing and stood for a long while at the sink staring at her shaking hands and the stained porcelain in the basin of the sink.
In the afternoon he woke to find she was not there, had left a note that she was going away for a while, that she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to come back or not, whether there was any point to coming back at all, and that the insanity with the gun was truly frightening to her and caused her to wonder whether things had finally gone too far, that if he could shoot himself in the foot in order to make a point, then who was she to say that one day, in order to make a point, he would not shoot her in the foot or the hand or point-blank right between the eyes?
He stood at the sink reading over the note, trembling at first with rage that she would leave while he lay wounded in the other room, then awash with a flood of shame and grief. He could hardly believe that she had gone and might not come back and that he hadn’t been able to keep this from happening, yet another disaster, his third marriage down the drain.
He limped back to bed with the note crushed in his fist and lay down and stared at the ceiling. Theirs was an old house with real plaster on the ceilings and walls and he lay there for a long while looking at it, its hidden patterns slowly revealing themselves. How had the workmen made that simple but beautiful finish on the plaster? As if it had been pressed into place with crushed flowers. There were no craftsmen such as that at work anymore. He couldn’t imagine how they might have done it, and he wondered for some minutes about the various ways in which they possibly had.
The dog, who’d been hiding somewhere in the house, crept into the bedroom, her head low, still trailing the leash clipped to her collar, her eyes wary and vulnerable. Then she crept backward from the room again and he heard her claws clicking across the kitchen linoleum and the sound of the leash dragging behind her on her way back to the den.
It was not all over, surely. She wouldn’t stay away forever. He was fairly certain of that. She would’ve taken the dog, surely, if she meant to be gone for good. She was right that he should somehow get rid of the gun. The whole thing was at least as absurd as anything else they’d ever done, and the gun was the most absurd thing that he’d ever done, he’d have to grant that, and the painful embarrassment, the horror he was feeling, as he lay there, was nearly as excruciating as the throbbing pain returning to his foot. He fought against a great creeping weight of despair. What a fool he was. My God. He sighed heavily and reached for the foil packet of Percocets, popped one out, and swallowed it with water she’d left in a glass on the bedside table within reach. He took a pillow from her side and put it underneath his injured foot, to elevate it.
BACK IN THE DEN, the dog was not at all certain the woman would ever return. She had only watched the woman leave the house and drive sadly away in her vehicle, without saying a word to her, the dog. Now the dog didn’t know what she would do. She thought all this was at least partly her fault.
With her previous owners, before she’d escaped and been taken to the shelter, she’d been beaten for simply crossing from one room to the next. For crapping in the very yard into which they had kicked her in order to crap. For barking when the very real threat of another dog entering their yard had been imminent. She had protected them! Defended their honor and territory! And they’d beaten her! It had scrambled her mind. She ran away. She was captured and put into yet another cage. The man and woman came by one day and took her home, and were kind to her, but almost immediately the daily loud barking and snarling started up, and even if she could usually tell when it was about to start she was always frightened and wanted to run away. Now here she was beneath the coffee table, licking her paws, with their leash fastened to the collar about her neck, and nowhere to go. No walk. No drive up into the mountains to chase squirrels. No quick trip to the prairie to jump jack rabbits, harass the cowardly pronghorn herd. She could trip open the back screen, jump the fence, and walk until another man or woman or couple saw the leash and took it up. She could offer herself to someone else this way, take her chances.
But another couple, another family, would only present a new set of baffling circumstances. Of this she had no doubt. In spite of their bad behavior, this couple had loved her and cared for her and served her well. She resolved to stay under the coffee table, the leash clipped to her collar in hope, and wait for the woman to return.
But she couldn’t rid herself of the darkening fear that once again everything had gone to hell. She didn’t know if she could take it all happening all over again. She had tried so hard to be smart, to stay out of trouble. But she had been distracted by her own anxiety, hadn’t paid proper attention, and if the woman had been driven away, maybe she would have to go away now, too. She began to gnaw hopelessly at the end of her leash, but that didn’t comfort her at all. For the first time in a long time, since she was very young and homeless and hungry, she raised her muzzle into the air and let out a long, mournful howl.
IN THE BEDROOM, the man felt the howl penetrate to the very center of his wretched heart. He lay there looking at his discolored toes sticking out from the white gauze wrapping, blinking back tears, and tried to console himself. However horrible he had been, he had not actually harmed her and perhaps she’d consider this and come home. However colossally stupid he had been, concerning the gun, at least it had put an end to that terrible argument.