There was a movement below in the dark of Bobby Dove’s room, the sliding of a drawer. Then the crash of a shoe.
He came noiselessly up the stairs, one pause for every step. He gave the appearance of someone who had been laid out by the funeral home but was up and about, taking a breather from death — in complete black suit, white shirt, and maroon tie. He had given a brush stroke to his hair. There was a red spot on his crown where perhaps the brush had been drawn. He licked his lips on his way over to my bed. The fool was carrying that long-barreled.22 with both hands.
“I wonder where one might find a bullet or two in this room” he whispered’ “I pulled the trigger to test this thing. There isn’t anything in it” I shook my head.
“Don’t try to look wise at me.”
“I’m just wishing I didn’t have to be in the same room — my room — with a crazed person.”
“Get out,” said Fleece. He flickered a cold merriment behind the glasses.
“What’s the suit for?”
“I’m going to Houston. I already bought the ticket. I have a feeling Houston is my kind of town.”
The light went off in Silas’s room, I saw through the un-derchink of the door. There was a stomp on the floor overhead. Then his bed wrenched. The merriment left Fleece’s eyes. He tried to hold his face together in a sneer. But his glasses fell forward to the end of his nose, his eyes watered, and his mouth came apart with an intake of air. He dropped the gun on the bed.
“I know where the good one is,” he said. He eased out my dresser drawer — had the gun, and it was loaded — before I could get off the bed. I stood up but made no advance. The way he was, I didn’t think I should.
“I’m not going to shoot you. I’m not out of my mind, roomie, old Harry, believe me. This is the one,” still softly, merrily again, “You realize I never have missed with this gun?”
“Crime is wrong; I got out “No right to—”
“How do I look?” He pulled his lapels forward.
Above us, the light was on again. It had only been off a couple of minutes. We heard their voices. Then there was a crash on the floor. Fleece glared straight at me as if nothing had happened.
“Don’t worry about me, man. You don’t think I’d really shoot either one of those pitiful creatures up there? Would I go to the trouble? Those are two sad people up there,”
“I think maybe she just hit him,” I said.
“Look me in the eye and see if you think I don’t know what I’m doing.”
I did, and he did look sane and familiar, the blue eyes coming to life. He looked fine.
“What I want to see is the two of them coming down from there. I’m going to be sitting on the bed, instead of you. Move the light a little, see. I want it to fall over my hand with the gun. I’m going to twirl it a few times on my finger and then pitch it on the bed. I’m going to be giggling. This will show them they’re not even worth shooting. You laugh too, now. We’ve heard their rendezvous, and this is what we think of it, how sad and trashy it was … laugh! or this isn’t going to make its effect.”
We had to wait thirty minutes, with absolute silence up there. Then the door opened, and Bet’s hand appeared, carrying her shoes. Silas escorted her down four steps or so and they peered over at my lighted bed, I started laughing, hoping, but it was no use.
Fleece yanked the pistol up off the bed and fired it at Silas. I could see he was shooting at Silas’s ass. I moved, with my own laugh still ringing in the room, and jerked the pistol out of his hand. The shot fell flat against the wall and was not much louder than a cap gun. Silas didn’t know he had been hit and laughed himself, before he saw it was Fleece sitting on the bed.
They had walked several steps below the spray of blood on the wall before Silas fell backwards on the stairs and cried hoarsely, “Awwwrrrr!” Bet crouched by him.
“It wasn’t me,” I told them, trying to keep the fun in it.
“It was me,” said Fleece. He walked over to the stairs and held to the supports like somebody looking into a cage. “Where did it get you?”
Silas gave a fatal moan.
“I was low. It just crosses over the bottom of his thigh.”
“Were you aiming at his heart?” asked Bet. “Bobby!”
“What’s her name?” Fleece said, not looking at her. Then he fainted, like a suit flopping off a coathanger.
“I don’t blame him. He didn’t know what he was doing,” said Silas. “I forgive you, Bob. I understand it.” He talked with his head thrust through the banister, looking down at the body of Fleece. He sort of waved at Fleece.
“We have two choices,” I said. “We can take you to the hospital, which will bring about an investigation. Or we can wake up Fleece and see if he can’t clean it out for you so you won’t get gangrene. You see it’s not even bleeding much. It looks like more of a burn.”
Silas had taken off his pants and sat there holding the underside of his thigh. It is my guess he wasn’t too, too unhappy to be doing this. Bet looked straight down the stairs, sitting on the step below him with her hands in her lap.
“Of course, we don’t go to the hospital. But can we count on Bobby Dove?”
Bet’s eyes enlarged and she pointed behind me to Bobby. Fleece was crawling across the floor toward my bed. He achieved the bed and picked up the pistol lying on the covers. Silas got up and Bet screeched.
“That one isn’t loaded,” I said.
“Don’t, please don’t shoot me!” cried Silas. He gimped down the stairs and dropped into Fleece’s room. Fleece staggered away from us to my bathroom.
“He’s going to kill himself,” said Bet.
As I got to the bathroom the door whammed to. There was no lock on the inside. I called him. I heard him heaving away inside. When I opened the door I saw him holding himself up with his hands spread out on the bare pot, the top of his head just showing over the rim. “HaarrfffI”
“Where’s the gun?”
He rolled over on his side, pink-faced, tears rolling. “Did you drop your glasses in the commode?” He held up the glasses. But in the commode I noticed the barrel of the pistol sticking out of the barf and water.
“Flush it,” he told me.
“You know this pistol isn’t going to flush.”
“Flush it.”
I hit the handle. The pistol didn’t go down. All that happened was the barrel moved across and lay on the other side.
“Try it again.”
“Be sane, damn yon.”
“I shot two people now. I haven’t missed yet. What am I doing with guns?” He was crying. His tie was wet from the bowl water.
“You can throw yours in the river any day you want to.”
“Throw yours in too?”
“Nope. I like mine,” I said.
Bet and Silas came to the door quietly.
“This man has been shot, you remember,” I said.
“What do I need, Bob? A tetanus shot? Can you get me one?”
“Turn around,” said Fleece. Silas did. “You. Big useless thing. You get out of his light.” He waved Bet over. “Well, look at that. Couldn’t you get this girl to even wash it out for you? That would’ve been hunky-dory for him, in his Tarzan underwear. I don’t remember blowing his pants off. Course if I’d hit him in the ear, he’d probably have them off to make a tourniquet or something.”
Silas went upstairs to get some more pants. Fleece picked himself up off the floor. “Yes sir, it’s old Doctor Fleece. Y’all come into the right place. I know ever’ truth of the human body.” He shuffled like an old man. He stopped and reached back for the gun in the commode, yanked it up dripping. “And I brought this from the water baptized, ‘cause I live by this now. The die is cast. What you say, podnah? It puts a fine edge on things of the future? Put a little edge on Silas, didn’t it?”