With each missed day of work his paycheck dwindled. After taxes his full-time every-two-weeks pay hovered around two hundred and twenty dollars, but he had taken the advance and now had missed four days and what remained for him to pick up at the office would be closer to eighty. Rent was due on Monday. That would be two hundred. And of course he feared the inevitable knock on the door that would be Mike coming to collect for his debt to Johnny Aguirre. He listened for that sound all day long and well into the night.
On Friday afternoon the fever broke and for the first time since the night in the casino parking lot he felt like he might survive whatever illness had descended upon him. Rick and Susan arrived after their shifts — Rick’s at the Peppermill coffee shop washing dishes and Susan at a video rental store across town — and that night they remained in the apartment with him, watching Rick Hunter and Dee Dee McCall track down bad guys in Los Angeles at nine and then watching Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs track down bad guys in Miami at ten. He tried not to look at her and he mostly succeeded. When she left just after midnight she embraced him gently, leaning down to where he lay prostrate on the sofa. I’m glad you’re feeling better, she said.
Thanks for taking care of me.
She glanced over at Rick briefly, giving him a look that might have held some meaning he could not trace, and then she was gone.
In the morning he came out of the bedroom to find Rick seated at the little kitchen table with the guns spread out on a ratty dish toweclass="underline" the Savage 99 he had inherited from his dead brother and the.38 Special Rick had inherited from his absent father.
You’re not going on a killing spree now, are you? Nat said.
Feeling better?
Finally.
Just thought we might get outside and do some shooting.
Really? he said. It’s been a while.
No shit, Rick said. Might make you feel better to get outside. We can go out toward Pyramid Lake. Pick up a bottle of Mad Dog. It’ll be like old times.
What about your parole?
What about it?
Isn’t it against your parole to have guns around?
Only if they find out, Rick said.
And so a few hours later they stepped out onto the pale burned earth of the desert with the rifle and the pistol, a six-pack of beer, a bottle of Banana Red MD 20/20, and a couple of sandwiches they’d picked up from a deli on the way. Rick had received his first paycheck from the café the day before and so he paid for all of it and the ammunition as well.
Nat had hoped he would feel better out in the desert but he could not stop thinking about what would happen when Mike returned to find his pockets empty once again. As he aimed, he imagined Mike as a tin can down there, the sights swinging around that silver shape, but each time he pulled the trigger the can remained and he was left with a sharp arc of pain shooting across the broken finger bone.
So I went over to Bishop’s this week, Rick said from the boulder behind him.
Yeah? He aimed but did not fire this time. His whole hand had begun to throb.
That guy with the weird shirts was there. You know that guy?
Not from that.
He’s got that mustache that curls up. You know. The guy who looks like the guy on the Monopoly box.
Oh yeah. That guy.
Yeah, so I’m just sitting at the bar and out of the blue he said to me, “So you’re with Susan now?” and I was like, “What do you mean now?” and he just sort of laughed like it was a joke.
Yeah?
Yeah so … Rick’s voice trailed off. Then he added, Just seemed like a weird thing to say.
Nat looked over at him but Rick was not looking in his direction now, holding the bright red bottle of 20/20 in one hand and peering out behind them to where the draw opened into the desert beyond, out into the abandoned and unused BLM landscape all around them. I didn’t know what else to say to the guy, Rick said. It didn’t make any sense, but then I was thinking about it, you know, later, and I was like what the fuck?
I don’t get it.
You don’t get what?
So the guy said you were with Susan now. You are with Susan. So what?
It was the way he said it. Like I’m with Susan now but I wasn’t before or something. Shit, I don’t know. It was weird, man. That’s all. It was just weird.
Doesn’t seem weird to me.
I don’t know, Rick said. Maybe it’s not. He had lit a cigarette now and sat puffing at it, the bottle in the dirt between his feet, the collar of his leather jacket held tight against his throat. Just seems like there’s something going on that I don’t know about.
Nat tried to aim again but the sights wobbled everywhere across the cans and the rocks and the water jug and he lowered the rifle again. There’s nothing going on, he said.
Yeah. Shit, you’re probably right, Rick said.
Nat lifted the rifle and squeezed the trigger, not even bothering to aim this time. When he opened his eyes against the shot, the water jug remained unchanged. Shit, he said. It’s impossible to hit.
Rick was silent behind him for a long time. Then he said, quietly, It’s just that she’s my girlfriend, you know?
Yeah I know.
No, I mean like when I was locked up she’s all I could think about. Seriously.
Yeah, she’s your girlfriend.
Yeah, well, it’s important. That’s all I mean.
Nat turned back to the targets and sighted quickly and squeezed and closed his eyes and fired and squinted and again the water jug remained there, unmoving. Dang, he said. In his mind, he could see her naked on his stained mattress, the Van Halen poster above them. Her breasts were small and had felt soft and warm in his hands.
The shadow at the bottom of the shallow draw had shifted as they spoke, crawling sideways across them both. His stomach was a tight ball now, a tight hot ball. So you’re in love, he said. Rick Harris is in love.
Yeah, I guess so, he said. I guess I am.
Didn’t see that coming, Nat said.
Me neither, Rick said. He took another draw on the cigarette. Goddamn, he said. Goddamn.
Nat tried to speak but his throat felt small and tight and the only sound he could make was a faint, dry rasp. He coughed and looked back down the draw at the water jug and the cans. They seemed in motion now, as if adrift on some ocean that was invisible all around them. He breathed in slowly but the motion did not stop.
Hey, let’s blow this fucking thing to pieces, Rick said.
Nat had not heard him come but Rick stood next to him now, the pistol held up in the air before him.
Hang on, Nat said. He reached down and levered a shell into the chamber.
You ready now?
Ready.
Rick leveled the pistol, both hands gripping the handle. Then he counted to three.
Nat squinted against the sound. Rick squeezed off shot after the shot. The cans jumped and fell. The water jug remained. Nat stood with the rifle against his shoulder and aimed and aimed and kept his eyes open, his broken finger pointing down at the targets. Then he squeezed off a round and watched the water jug as it exploded at last.
13
ALL WEEK CAME THE SNOW AND WITH IT A SERIES OF BLEAK dreams that he awoke from each morning in confusion and terror, a night spent scrambling through a blizzarding forest gone black and malevolent, his movement hindered by snow that lay everywhere in his path, clinging to him even as it seemed liquid, fluid, like quicksand. He did not know how many hours he labored in those frozen and claustrophobic landscapes but when he awoke at last it was, each time, to the muffled and strangling darkness of a trailer nearly buried, as if the waking world had come to mirror the dream he had fled, the details of which blew away with each gust of the storm, leaving only the sense of it — fear, panic, terror — his body shaking with cold even though the trailer itself was warm, the propane heater at a low constant hum. And yet he awoke trembling, as if somehow his skeleton had frozen in the night and he woke with cold dry bones everywhere inside him.