Colonel Rutherford's Colt (6 page)

“I'm gonna call my professor,” Jimmy said. “He finds out I got a buyer down here, he'll bid it up over the phone. I was you, I'd go home and pack. We might get this thing done by Labor Day.”

A drop of suspicion added itself to her mix. “Why're you doing all this?”

“It ain't ‘all this,' ” he said. “I'm gonna make serious money. I let them bid it up, hell, the Colt might move for five figures. When two men think a gun means something, they can be extremely impractical.”

He couldn't read her expression.

“Thank you,” she said, and put her arms about his neck.

Her body eased up against him, and the hug lasted so long, Jimmy did not think it could be legally construed a hug. More of an embrace. It brought a character out from the shadows of his story, one with a new slant on the situation. A man. The character was gone too quickly for him to identify, but its brief appearance caused Jimmy to ignore the tension the hug had bred in him, and to become an active participant in the embrace, smelling Ms. Snow's hair, his right hand going to her waist. Her mouth grazed his cheek, skittered up to his ear.

“I don't believe you,” she whispered.

 

* * *

 

Rita wasn't mad like Jimmy had expected. She had moved a mid-range piece and someone wanted to take a look at the gas-cylinder Thompson they kept locked in the van. It wasn't often she closed a sale, and it had boosted her spirits. She limited her displeasure with him to a disgruntled shake of the head. But when he told her he needed the van that evening to visit Borchard, she arched her back and spat.

“You messing with that white woman?” she asked. “Is that what this shit's about?”

“Christ, Rita.” He brushed a scrap of candy bar wrapper off the top of a display case.

She reached across the table and punched his arm with the heel of her hand. “I saw you scoping her out. You wouldn't look no sharper, you'd been trying to guess her goddamn weight.”

Somebody had left a book on the back corner of the table.
The Golden Age of Shotgunning.
He wondered when the Golden Age had been. Probably depended on where you were living.

Rita punched him again, harder, and a bubble of anger boiled up from the surface of his thoughts, as if something big down below was blowing its tanks, preparing to rise. “Fuck's wrong with you?” he said. “I'm trying to sell a gun and I'm working on a story. You know how I get. So leave me the fuck alone!”

Her eyes spiked him, but his anger was taller than hers for a change, or else she was too sick to fight. She sat looking into her partial reflection in the top of a display case. “I'm a real bitch this morning,” she said. “I'm sorry, baby.”

“You a bitch most of the damn time,” he said. “Most of the time I kinda like it. But I could stand you easing off some today.”

“I'm sorry.” She reached out a hand, as if to touch him, but didn't complete the gesture. “Y'ain't messing with her, are ya?”

“Think I'd screw up what we got?”

“No. But you get tempted when you're telling a story. I know it's only part of the story, but it worries me.”

“Nothing's gonna happen.” His anger had subsided, but he couldn't jump down yet from the peak it had left him standing on.

“Maybe I'll go back to the motel and sleep for an hour,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Sure you can handle things?”

“Buncha assholes saying”—he did a cartoon voice—“ ‘That really Teddy Roosevelt's gun?' I reckon I can handle that. It gets busy, I'll give you a call.”

“All right.”

She moved out into the aisle, then leaned across the table and kissed him, her tongue flirting briefly with his.

The kiss brought everything inside him back to even. “That a promise?” he asked.

“Not hardly, lover. That's a gift subscription.”

 

* * *

 

By one o'clock the crowds had grown heavy, thick with teenage shoplifters and once-through gawkers. Jimmy propped his
SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY
sign against a display case, turned his chair sideways to the aisle, and sat holding the Colt in his lap. The buzz and mutter of the show seemed to be etching a pattern of static in his head, but the oil-smooth patina of the gun soothed him, and he fell to thinking about Colonel Hawes Rutherford, a big cold man, wide shoulders racked beneath his dress uniform, dark beard trimmed neat as a pencil sketch, standing beside the breakfast table, staring down at his wife's breasts, nestled in the lacy shells of a peignoir. The sight caused him frustration—he had not been with Susan for several weeks—and also inspired a feeling of disdain toward this display of female softness, the very same that provoked his arousal. He was happiest when focused upon affairs of duty, whether negotiating with the sublimely corrupt officialdom of the country or directing the movements of materiel. He perceived himself to be a soldier in the service of, first, order and then the United States, and it sometimes galled him that the rigor of his mental life should be diluted by an addiction to the feminine, with all its cryptic delicacy and attendant confusions. This inborn condescension aside, there was no doubt the colonel loved his wife, even respected her in some pale fashion. Women, he felt, were due respect for the exact reasons they deserved protection. That they were weak and sought to prevail in life spoke to an admirable persistence. As for love, the colonel had written a treaty with his brain, ceding a certain portion of his mental life to the nourishing of a smallish flame notable for its steadiness. Each day prior to returning home—or if he was away—before retiring, he would think those thoughts he deemed essential to the maintenance of the flame, including appreciations of Susan's beauty and sense of style, her effectiveness at state functions, her efficiency in overseeing the servants, her fidelity. For the duration of the exercise he would faithfully put from mind those elements of her personality he found wanting. He excused his proprietary attitude toward Susan and the abuses that arose from it by countenancing them necessary in order to make the flower of her womanhood bloom, and on those rare occasions when he was confronted by the realization that he had misused her, he forgave himself—in his view, when it fell to an older man to instruct a young woman, the acts of instruction themselves were bound to stimulate certain primitive albeit godly desires, and he was nothing if not a natural man. So it was that he managed to sustain the self-image of an honorable, kindly, and loving husband, a far cry from the unfeeling, humorless monster Susan perceived him to be.

As he stood that morning gazing down at his wife's charms, his faith in this self-image caused him to dismiss all doubts relating to the fact that he knew Susan would likely not wish to hear what he intended to tell her. “My dear,” he said. “I'll be leaving tomorrow for Guantanamo.”

Susan, who was reading a letter from her mother, did not lift her eyes from the paper and murmured an acknowledgement.

“I would hope,” the colonel went on, “to be received by you this evening.”

It appeared to him that Susan flinched an instant before she whispered her assent, yet she offered no objection or excuse as she had done in the past. Feeling that he was making good progress with her, the colonel picked up his hat, bid her good day, and left the house.

While stopping in Santiago, on his way back from Guantanamo several days later, the colonel, having satisfactorily settled a thorny problem of miscommunication between the commandant of the base and a loose association of local fisherman, treated himself to a night at the house belonging to Sra. Amalia Savon, an establishment known more famously amongst the locals as Tia Maria's. The colonel almost never frequented such places, but on those occasions when he did he justified the indulgence by telling himself that the tutelage of a wise professional would serve to inform his own instruction of Susan. On this particular evening, after spending several pleasant hours with a young lady by the name of Serafina, he repaired to the downstairs bar where, in the company of several Cuban gentlemen, he helped himself to a large post-coital brandy and a good cigar. As he sat in a comfortable chair of red velvet in a quiet corner, nursing his brandy and less thinking than savoring the quality of his satisfaction, he was approached by a distinguished elderly man with a full head of white hair, wearing a cream-colored suit and walking with a malacca cane; he had in tow a much younger fellow, a reedy, sallow sort wearing fawn slacks and a yellow
guayabera
.

“Your pardon, Colonel Rutherford,” said the elderly man with a bow. “I am Doctor Eduardo Lens y Rivera. You may recall that we met last April in Havana at the American Embassy. We had a brief discussion regarding the regulatory body that oversees imports into your great country.”

“Of course! Doctor Lens!” The colonel's pleasure was genuine. Lens had struck him as a reasonable politician, an anomaly among his grasping, shortsighted colleagues.

“May I present my wife's cousin?” Doctor Lens indicated the younger man. “Odiberto Saenz y Figueroa.”

“Mucho gusto,”
said Odiberto, and shook the colonel's hand.

Once they had taken chairs adjoining his, the colonel said, “I apologize for not recognizing you straightaway, Doctor. I was . . .”

“Please!” Doctor Lens held up a hand to restrain the colonel's excuses. “There is no need to explain. Following an evening at Tia Maria's, a man tends to re-order his perspectives.”

After further pleasantries, compliments all around to the women of Cuba, those of America, as well as various other Caribbean nations, Doctor Lens slid forward in his chair and rested both hands on the macaw-shaped gold head of his cane. “Colonel,” he said, “there is something I wish to discuss with you, but I hesitate because it is a matter of considerable personal delicacy.”

“Personal?” The colonel set his brandy down. “Personal in what way?”

“In the deepest and most fundamental way. It relates to your family.”

“I'm afraid I have no real family,” the colonel said. “My sister and parents have passed on. There is only my wife and . . .”

“Exactly,” said Doctor Lens; then, after a pause: “Truly, colonel, I do not wish to offend. I bring this matter to your attention only because I would wish it brought to mine were our positions reversed.”

“Let me get this straight. You have information concerning my wife?”

“Information is, perhaps, too strict a word. What I have is a story told by one young man to another. Young men are prone to boasting. All I can do is offer you the opportunity to hear the story and make your own judgment as to its authenticity. Should you not care to hear it, then I will beg your pardon and take my leave.”

Shaken, the colonel curled his fingers round the brandy glass, but felt he did not have the strength to lift it. The idea that Susan had been unfaithful, and he could think of no other circumstance that would cause Doctor Lens to come forward in so oblique a fashion . . . It was insupportable, implausible, unfathomable. She would not be the first American wife to take a Cuban lover, but given her isolation and the inquisitive nature of his servants, he could not imagine how she would manage it.

“Go ahead,” he said with some confidence.

“Do you know a man named Luis Carrasquel? The nephew of General Ruelas?”

“I know of him. We may have met . . . I'm not sure.”

“Odiberto is employed at the Banco Nacional, where Carrasquel also works. And that is not their sole association. They have been friends since childhood. Our families have vacationed together. A week ago, Carrasquel asked Odiberto to have a drink with him after closing. He seemed quite distraught and said that for some time he had been involved in a romance with a beautiful American woman. The woman loved him—he was certain of that. Yet for reasons he could not understand, she refused to leave her husband, a man she described”—Doctor Lens offered the colonel an apologetic look—“as a monster.”

Colonel Rutherford suffered this slur without visible reaction. But a numbness began to spread from his extremities, and along with the numbness, though he rejected the notion that whatever their personal difficulties, Susan could ever think so badly of him as to call him a monster, there came a feeling of certainty that the story was no boast.

“I think it might be best if Odiberto told the story from this point on,” said Doctor Lens. “I have heard it but once. Thus I cannot recall every detail . . . and it is from the details, I believe, that you will be able to determine its truth. Since Odiberto regrettably speaks no English, I will translate.”

“That's fine,” said the colonel, and favored Odiberto with what he intended as an encouraging smile.

The story unfolded in a curious fashion, alternating between Odiberto's bursts of passionate narration, accompanied by florid gestures and woeful faces, and the calm, almost lectoral translations of Doctor Lens. The emotional opposition of these two styles set up a dissonance in the colonel's thoughts, and it came to seem that he was listening to both a lie and the truth at once, and that at heart they were the same.

“ ‘I have never seen Luis so upset,' ” said Doctor Lens. “ ‘Once we reached the bar, he began to cry. When I asked what was wrong, he said he could not tell me. He could tell no one, and the pressures of the situation were driving him mad. But at length I prevailed upon him to confess his secret. I swore I would never reveal it.' ”

“Apparently this was not a sacred oath,” the colonel said with wry bitterness.

Doctor Lens let out a heavy sigh. “It is shameful, I know. Odiberto's motives in coming forward were less than pure. He was passed over for promotion at the bank and blames this upon Luis, who is in a supervisory position. But since the story is out, I thought it best that you be made aware of things.”