Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [96]
She had the feeling Gary was making it up. "This cop told me if I get the guns back to the store, nothing will happen."
Kathryne said, "Gary, why don't you come back tomorrow and pick it up when you're sober."
He said, "I'm not drinking, and I'm not going to get in trouble. Moreover, if I want to use a gun"-he pulled his jacket open-"this little baby takes care of it all." That was one pistol she recognized. A real German Luger stuck in his pants. "In addition," he said, "I got a sackful." At that point he opened the truck door, and a burlap bag tipped over. By the clanking it sounded like it held half a dozen more guns.
Kathryne said to herself, What does it matter? She took the Special out from under the mattress and gave it to him, and stood with Gary in the twilight trying to calm him down. He was so angry.
Then, April came running out of the house. She was close to hysterical. "Where's Pat?" she asked, "where's Pat?" "She's gone, April," Kathryne said. "Oh," cried April, "Pat promised to take me down to K-Mart to get my guitar string."
At this point, Gary said, "I'll run you over." Quickly, Kathryne told her, "You don't need to go," but April jumped into the truck, and Kathryne barely had time to repeat, "Gary, she don't need to go," when he replied, "That's all right. I'll bring her back." They were gone.
It was in this moment that Kathryne realized she didn't know Gary's last name. Knew him as Gary, just Gary.
They sat in the kitchen among all the boxes of cherries they'd picked. Kathryne wasn't about to call the cops. If the police stopped Gary, he might open up on them. Instead, she waited till Pat got back and went out with her to look for the white truck. They drove till one or two in the morning, going up and down roads. No way they were going to find him, it seemed.
April moved in close, turned on the radio, said, "It's hard to get along if you have to wait too long. The rooms get narrow and very often there is a dog." She began to shiver as she thought of the dog. "Every day," she said, "is the same. It's all one day," and nodded her head.
"You have to get them used up."
"That's right," he said.
Just before he arrived, she had been lying in the grass, watching others pick cherries. She was playing the guitar with the broken string. It came over her that grandmother was going to die if she didn't fix the string. April was letting her soul run wild as she played, and thought of Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding dead and that made her start thinking hard about the diseases. The bugs, spiders and flies bring it in, and the fevers give a humming sound until they are amused, then they make a noise like a breaking string. Death would certainly come to Grandma if she didn't fix the string. That was her thought in the grass. As she looked up, there was a dog in front of her.
This dog started crying. It sounded like a man crying his heart out. The recollection of the tragedy of that sound got April nodding full force in Gary's truck. She didn't like such feelings. When she nodded that way, she might just as well have been galloping on a horse. Her head was certainly being snapped each step the horse came down. It got her to the point where her personal motor turned on again as if Satan was running her body, and pulling in all the people who usually floated around as personalities from Mars and Venus. The black man was staring at her with his cold black eye, and the white man had started acting like he was ecstasy in the worst way the entire galaxy. The guitar needed a new string to attract more harmonious spirits. "I," said April to Gary, "am the one swinging on the string." She nodded, careful not to do it so hard that the galloping horse would snap her neck.
"Look," she said, "my grandma's washing machine is next to the sewer. That's why those people are floating around. I hate filth." She could feel her mouth twisting from her nostrils to the lips. "Oh, Gary,