Gutshot: Stories Read online

  You found my knife, I said.

  This would mean something to me, she said. And what’s more, she said, I think this really might work. She was coaxing me into tumescence through the sheet. I held her hand still with both of my own.

  It involves some sacrifice for the both of us, she said. She removed her hand from my grasp and took the plastic sheet from the box, unfolding and spreading it over the comforter. She lay down on the plastic and gestured toward me.

  A few items made an appearance in my head in quick succession, dominated by the thought that it was difficult to find a person with whom I shared so many of my hobbies and habits and that if I left her, our dual presence would be missed on the court by our badminton league for months to come. But it was more than that; this was a woman who gave up a job in the city to be with me. She made a pastry for us to enjoy each Sunday, featuring food items of individual or mutual significance to us. There was the lemon cake for my years in the seminary, the chocolate ganache for one of her long illnesses. I knew from her kindness and her spinach torte that she was my spiritual equal.

  Thinking of her value, I entered her easily and we held there for a moment, looking into each other’s eyes while she readied her hand. She touched my hip, kissed my neck. When I was positioned properly inside her, she grasped the base of my member with a firm hand and sliced it off, the knife’s clean cut blinding me as if it had severed my optical nerve as well. I collapsed to the side and felt pressure from her hands holding something to my body, a cloth, and upon regaining my vision, saw her injecting herself with a compound, and upon waking some time later, saw her sewing her bloody sex closed, my own still inside, with a hooked suture needle, a look on her face of such steady concentration that she seemed to express a controlled rage, and I saw that my body was already closed and cleaned and healing under a fresh linen bandage.

  We woke much later, pale and thirsty, the plastic sheet sticking wetly to our bodies. Her breathing stuttered as she moved her head in the crook of my arm and then she was quiet. There were things that we would do for each other, sacrifices we would make, and the proof of that fact was before us as plain as an hour in the day. It was a beautiful morning or afternoon.

  Journey’s End

  Once you counted eleven hundred days, you lost the desire to count. You threw out your notebooks, which freed up some space for fuel. Those days we were looking either for fuel or for places to store it. We opened every closed space, every fridge and trunk, every clotted gallon jug, finding mostly rot and the occasional mummified corpse of something small like a squirrel, which either had tried to hide itself or had found its end at the hands of others. I began to fantasize what might happen if we discovered glowing cubes and cracked them open to find blistering stuff of the universe within. I didn’t miss you counting the days like you needed a record. Like any authorities picking us up would want to know the details of our survival. I figured things would be better when you gave all that up and I was right.

  We found fuel in plastic bottles and tins, some mixed in with orange juice. I would have almost rather had the juice. There was one double-zip bag of fuel and one of vinegar that used to be wine at the base of a pile. I found a cooler of urine buoying rotten cans, their metal bowed out, contents sunk in a haze at the bottom. Some industrious individuals filled every light fixture in an empty house with gasoline. We marveled; they had freed delicate glass from metal and filled each bulb, soldered to reattach, and affixed in place. If the power ever came back on the whole thing would go up. It wasn’t clear why anyone did the things they did. You remembered your father obtaining a wood-boring drill-bit set; after he died, you found that every book in his house had been ventilated and the trees out back as well.

  Behind the bulb house we found our third video-game cartridge, maybe the first that might actually work in a console. You saw it first, its black half-moon tucked under a pile of makeup tins, their pressed powder turned out beside like a fleshy pyramid. Our goal after some walking was to settle down, and such a cartridge was on our short list of essential items. We would find what we needed and once we got everything we would stop.

  We settled that week in a nice place. There was a bed for us, the cellar was clean. Someone had semiprofessionally engraved his family crest into the door. There was an old set and console. I hooked up the generator and didn’t immediately die. You blew on the cartridge and snapped it in. We held each other when the old familiar sound emerged. I wanted to break the screen and employ the services of its glass on my face but you warned me to be careful after all we had been through. You were thoughtful like that.

  Three

  These Are the Fables

  We were in the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts in Beaumont when I told Kyle. I figured I’d rather be out under God as I announced the reason for all my illness and misery.

  I said Well shit. Guess we’re having a baby.

  “Lemme see,” Kyle said, frowning at the test for a second before tossing it into a planter. He flipped the double deuce to a stranger who had set his coffee down to applaud. “People these days,” Kyle said.

  I said my folks would be happy.

  “Here’s the thing though,” he said. “Your folks are dead. And I have a warrant out for my arrest. And you’re forty years old. And I am addicted to getting tattoos. And our air conditioner’s broke. And you are drunk every day. And all I ever want to do is fight and go swimming. And I am addicted to keno. And you are just covered in hair. And I’ve never done a load of laundry in my life. And you are still technically married to my dealer. And I refuse to eat vegetables. And you can’t sleep unless you’re sleeping on the floor. And I am addicted to heroin. And honest to God, you got big tits but you make a shitty muse. And we are in Beaumont.”

  I said these were minor setbacks on the road to glory.

  “And,” he added, “the Dunkin’ Donuts is on fire.”

  Indeed it was. Customers streamed from the doors, carrying wire baskets of bear claws, trucker hatfuls of sprinkled Munchkins. “Get out of here,” one of the patrons said. “The damn thing is going up.”

  Listen, I said. We’re going to have to make it work, we’ll forge a life on our own and the child will lead us.

  The wall of donuts had fueled a mighty grease fire. The cream-filled variety sizzled and popped. Each ignited those within proximity. Their baskets glowed and charred. The coffee machine melted. The smoke was blue and smelled like a dead bird. I popped the lid off Kyle’s coffee cup and puked into it. All I had wanted that morning was an old-fashioned and the absence of puke. I said that everything would be all right, that we were living in the best of all possible Dunkin’ Donuts parking lots.

  He pushed some dirt over the test with the toe of his boot. “Poor thing,” he said. Between his sensitive nose and sour stomach, we both knew the next nine months plus the eighteen to twenty-two years after that would wreak some manner of havoc. I put the coffee cup on the ground because the trash bin inside was consumed by flames.

  He took my hand and we got out of there before the cops showed up to the fire and started checking IDs. He stopped at the Kroger and came out with half a dozen roses, which he laid between us on the dash.

  “Let’s get back to the Rio Grande,” he said. I tipped my seat back and dug in to sleep while he took the tollway. The coast was speckled with cities with names that would suit the spines on a grandma’s bookshelf. Sugar Land. Blessing. Point Comfort. Victoria.

  We ended up at the Days Inn in Corpus. Kyle examined a road map in his underpants while I took the bucket to the ice machine. A crowd of tourists were standing in the laundry room. They were speaking languages.

  A young woman touched my ice bucket. “We are looking for where Selena was murdered,” she said.

  I said I didn’t know what she meant.

  “Fifteen years ago at this very Days Inn,” the woman said. “I am disappointed in you.” An older woman was leaned up against the ice machine. She had her face pressed into her hands
and her hands were pressed into the ice machine.

  “They won’t tell us where,” the younger one said. “They changed the numbers on the doors so we won’t find out.” She pulled me close. “There are secrets at this Days Inn,” she said.

  I said that there were secrets at every Days Inn. The ice machine was broken and the women wailed for unrelated reasons.

  “Our angel,” one of them said. She was holding a gilt-framed photograph of Selena singing on stage. She did resemble an angel. I wanted to lie down on the laundry-room floor.

  In the room, Kyle was eating a waffle the shape of Texas and reading the syrup packet. I stood in the open doorway.

  “The first ingredient is corn syrup,” he said. He was a shadow in the back of the long room in his buttoned shirt and a clean pair of pants. He had his shaving kit out on the table. The blade was drying and his face was shorn and cold. He said, “The second ingredient is high-fructose corn syrup.”

  I told him he looked like he was preparing for a funeral.

  They say that hotel-room floors have E. coli but I lay down anyway. Kyle came and settled near me. When he pressed his cheek against my belly I could feel the machine motion of his jaw grinding tooth on tooth. I said These are the fables we will tell our child.

  Gutshot

  The man was gutshot. His blood welled around his hands and soaked his shirt. “I’m gutshot!” he said.

  The man who had shot him lowered his weapon. “That is definitely what I intended to happen,” he said, “but now that it’s happened, I feel things have gone too far.”

  The gutshot man drove to a hospital. “Doctor, I’m gutshot!” the man said.

  “This is terrible,” the doctor said. “Wow. What are we going to do?”

  “I hoped you would know.”

  “It has been many years since I practiced medicine. They let me stay here. Soon they will name a surgical ward after me, where men who are gutshot can be cared for.”

  The doctor drove them to the home where the gutshot man’s mother lived. “Mother, I’m gutshot!” he cried.

  “My sweetheart!” his mother said. “Woe descends upon us all!”

  “I’m not sure it’s as bad as all that,” the man said.

  “Upon the beginning and the last end, view only the comfort of darkness!”

  “He seems to be pulling together,” said the doctor, who had returned with a set of towels to stanch the blood.

  “All ye who pass through these walls and halls will know only pain through the end of days! Please don’t use the guest towels.”

  “We’re going to go sit outside,” the man said.

  The doctor helped the man to a place behind the house where an elm tree made a bed of fallen leaves. “Good luck,” the doctor said, climbing over a fence and running for the road.

  “Jesus Christ, I’m gutshot,” the man said.

  “Well, now I won’t help you,” Jesus Christ said. He was seated on a low branch. The bottoms of his sandals gently brushed the man’s forehead. “It speaks to a lack of respect, you know.”

  “Truly?”

  “Just kidding. I love you. I also love the man who gutshot you and I love what you’re doing to those guest towels.”

  “Will you help me?”

  “Oh, sure. Do you see that airplane up there?”

  Jesus Christ pointed until the man saw a silver glint in the sky.

  “The people in that plane are flying to Dallas,” Jesus Christ said. “There is an old woman who feeds the stray cats in her neighborhood, and a dentist, and a little baby who will grow up to be in asset management. There is a pilot who loves the smell of masking tape and a woman who doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life and will eventually stop wondering.”

  “And they’re all going to Dallas.”

  “Does that help?”

  The man leaned against the tree trunk. His vision flared and blurred. “I think so,” he said.

  How He Felt

  “I love this woman!” the man told the empty room. “What should I do to prove my love?”

  He bought a billboard by the main road and ascended its ladder with a can of paint and a broad brush. But the board was much larger than he had figured from the ground, and he could only reach the lower third of it.

  “I live this bath mat,” a mother read for her child as they drove by.

  The man had his message printed on a massive banner with the thought of flying it over the bay, but the pilot he hired was an inexperienced crop duster and a drunk, and he rigged the banner upside down and backward. People on the beach craned their necks to look. A pair of jet skis collided, killing three.

  He rented a movie theater, but the reels were accidentally switched and his invited guests puzzled over a sex-education video from 1964. He composed a song and taught it to a children’s choir, but they contracted food poisoning at a pizza party and spent the evening drinking Gatorade and playing video games. He wrote it into a sermon, but the pastor threw the whole thing out as sacrilege.

  Discouraged, the man drove to the site of his billboard and ascended its ladder again. At the top, he held on to the platform as the panels groaned in the wind.

  The man wanted to share. He knew that if they only understood, the population would be forever changed. He rested his head against the billboard. He heard in the protests of the steel a message from the mechanized world. He thought it was a love song, but he was mistaken.

  Labyrinth

  Dale had been doing a lot of reading on Hellenic myth, and so when he said he had a surprise for us at his Pumpkin Jamboree, we knew he wasn’t screwing around. The Jamboree—a weekend he organizes on his property to bring the town together and raise a little money for the fire department—features a hayride, face painting, and a cakewalk occupying the side yard entire, but his corn maze tends to be the highlight.

  A crew of hardcore maze-runners formed a line before he had even finished setting up. I deposited my five bucks like everyone else. “Only it isn’t a maze this time,” Dale said, arranging a last bale of hay around the pumpkins from the patch. “It’s a labyrinth.”

  A general murmur rose. “What’s the distinction?” asked a woman holding a whorl of candy floss.

  “I’m glad you asked. It’s largely the fact that the path is unicursal, not multicursal. There’s only one road, and it leads to only one place.”

  “There’s no point if you can’t get lost,” said a townie kid who was known for pulling girls into hidden corners of previous corn mazes and taking advantage of their confusion.

  “Also,” Dale said, “each of you has to go in alone.”

  “It’s no fun alone,” shouted a pretty girl who was implausibly holding the townie’s hand.

  “My kids aren’t going in there by themselves,” said the high-school football coach, taking a knee to clutch two boys to his chest.

  Dale held the bucket back from folks reaching for their money. “Calm down,” he said. “Nobody has to go if they’d rather not. To be clear, the labyrinth is known to possess magic. Some say that once you find the center, you discover the one thing you most desire in the world. Others claim that God sits beyond the last bend. Individuals must learn for themselves. Go check out the jam contest if you’re not feeling up to it.”

  “There’s no way,” one of the firemen called out, a little drunk. The man was undoubtedly a guest of honor for the weekend and held some influence over the group, which began to turn away and head for the fest’s other features. The rope pull was another favorite.

  Dale watched them leave, fingering a pumpkin’s thick stem and surely considering his hours of lost work. A few months beforehand, he cuts into the young corn when it’s tall but not yet sprouted, taking a pass first with the tractor and then with the riding mower to pull out the brace roots and tamp it down. He does the maze plans on drafting paper and displays them in his swept-out garage addition—he calls it the Hall of History—with other jamboree memorabilia: the gearshift from the original h
ayride truck, trotter prints from the winning pigs. We gather around to remember which wrong turn we took and what was waiting on the other side.

  Knowing what he put into it, I thought it was a shame to stand by and see everyone go. The sun was still low in the sky and it was lonely at home, where the TV had been broken for a week and the tap water had begun to taste oddly of blood. “I’ll go first,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  A few of the others stopped their exodus. The pretty girl—whose name, I remembered, was Connie—let loose of the townie’s hand. Unfazed, he ambled off to do drugs behind the house.

  “That’s the spirit,” Dale said. “Jim will do it, everyone. He’ll start us off.”

  I shook my friend’s hand. “I know you worked hard on this maze and I intend to take full advantage.”

  “It’s a labyrinth, but thanks. That’s the kind of brave spirit we’re known for around here.” Dale made a point of looking at the coach, who was still on one knee. Shamed, the man stood.

  “All right then,” I said, and made to get started, but Dale stopped me. He dug in a bag at his feet to extract a piece of clay trivet, the type that allows a hot dish to sit on the dinner table.

  “You’ll need this,” he said.

  The trivet was etched with strange symbols. There were men and warriors and saws and a shield and something that resembled the buttock of a woman. I became keenly aware and deeply uncomfortable with the knowledge that the others were crowding around to observe the etchings, which were in my hands now, a fact that implied my consent. “I don’t know about all this,” I said, to clarify.

  “It’s the Phaistos Disk,” Dale said. “I paid a pretty penny, so mind where you set it.”

  It did seem to be imbued with some significance.

  “How’d you get that?” one of the women asked.

  He waved her off. “Let’s say I got lucky during a period of government oversight on the part of the Greeks. It puts a finishing touch on my project. Now you go on, Jim. This is my life’s effort distilled. Find out what it’s all about.”