Colonel Rutherford's Colt by Lucius Shepard Page B

of things. Most times he enjoyed doing the shows, but today it unnerved him. Lights were too harsh, chatter troubled his ears. And the smell . . . It was as if cleaning agents and neat’s-foot oil and people and freshly dried T-shirts and corn dogs and everything else had canceled each other out, and what remained was a faint oily residue of deadness left by the passage of thousands of rounds through the barrel of an enormous gun.
    He tried to climb back into his story, but couldn’t find an opening. A sun-drenched linoleum floor sprang to mind. Dirty; with pieces of lettuce mired in a gravy film; the whole thing iridescent with grease. Under the scum lay a pattern of weird abstract shapes. Once when he was fifteen he’d dropped some acid and spent all day tracing the shapes on flimsy, opaque paper. Cowboys, Indians, devils hiding in clouds, winged monsters—dozens of images surfacing from the family filth as if he had unearthed their true genealogy, their spiritual history. The sheets of paper adhered to the floor, ripping when he tried to peel them off. A total mess. He didn’t feel like cleaning it, so he went out to the barn and sat watching swallows fall like tiny desperate angels born from the holy radiance pouring through a loft window, their flurried wingbeats chasing the stillness. Whitish gold bars of light crumbled between long gaps in the boards. You could see anything within them. You could almost go inside them, visit the incandescent country they bordered. Moldy hay and ripe horseshit thick in his nostrils. The little stallion whuffling in his stall below. Hours like that. The light gapping the boards burned orange. The swallows nested. Then he heard his father scream his name. Nobody screamed like his old man. “Jimmaaaaay!” Spoken that way, it had the weight of a deadly Arabic curse, a word that meant “kill” or “die.” It hadn’t scared him that day. It seemed part of nature. An eagle sighting its violated nest would sound so. Such strength and fury, its red-hot edge had sliced a smile onto his face . . .
    Rita was talking to a customer, a shrunken old man sporting a VFW pin on his baggy sports jacket. She stood one-footed, her left knee on a folding chair. Her ass shifted when she gestured, jeans clinging to every curve, and that got him remembering the morning. Who’d think you could fit so much meanness and so much sweetness into the same woman? She’d snap your dick off with a stare, then go soft and take your breath away. Between those contrary states, her arrow usually swung into the mean, but that was just her survival posture. Didn’t bother him any. The old man wobbled off and she caught Jimmy staring. She tried to hide a smile, lost the battle, and sat down. She glanced over her shoulder at him, still smiling, her hair flipping away from her face—he saw her younger, how she must have looked before bad love walked in and money luck ran out. She didn’t let that pretty girl loose too often. Jimmy remembered the days when she hadn’t ever let her loose. She’d glared at everyone with hateful intensity. Their first conversation, she was working this armpit club in Billings on a slow Wednesday night, sitting on a barstool in a tight one-piece black dress that showed off her legs, tits, and shoulders. She’d priced herself at two hundred dollars. He said he didn’t have that much, but he would tell her a story. A real story, not some bullshit. A genuine just-for-her work of the imagination. Whatever kind she wanted. A unique creation with hearts and lives on the line.
    â€œWhat do I have to do?” she asked.
    â€œStick around for the telling is all,” he replied. “Sometimes it takes a while.”
    He kicked out his legs, crossed them at the ankles. Still thinking about Rita, he relaxed, checked out the passing parade. He idly followed the progress of a skinny black guy who must have