Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [42]
“Wanna drink?” Larry asked. “I got muleshit whiskey.”
I looked around for a place to sit. There wasn’t much furniture, just a dinette table, a wooden swivel office chair with its back missing and a futon. And hardware. Thing-busters.
Larry savored my curiosity. “You like it?” He dropped to the floor, stretched himself flat on his stomach and squinted into a sleek piece of weaponry.
“What is it?”
Inside every man lives a Henry Higgins. Larry described it in precise detail. A Ruger M-77 Mark 11 Countersniper Rifle with Leopold Varix 111. 3, 5x–10x variable-power tactical scope, mounted on a Harris bipod.
“Capable of serious mayhem.” He beamed at me. “Did I hear yes to mule piss? And did I ever tell you about your smile?”
“What about it?” I smiled.
“What?” he asked.
He scrounged around for a clean glass or cup. I prowled his room (a cheetah’s walk, Hari), touching his things (a killer’s hands, Larry). I turned over ashtrays that turned out to be tape recorders, played with pens that concealed air-powered bullet-shooters, flipped through a copy or two of Machine Gun News. Larry was crazy for ownership. He kept mean little pyramids of knives and daggers on the floor by the futon, within easy reach. The bulkier toys he’d lined up against the walls, like gallery exhibits. I dusted a pistol crossbow with a sleeve. Some of the toys I had no names for; I hadn’t ever seen them, not even in Frankie’s Flash extravaganzas. I took in the bowling trophies and the war trophies lined up neatly on the dinette table. The war trophies were in jam jars: pickled mushrooms and ginseng roots labeled “Charlie Ears.” I wandered into the kitchen alcove and checked out the snapshots held in place with magnets on the refrigerator door: buddies looking like summer campers grinned out of pedicabs. Okie faces, some African American faces. All of them romantics and innocents. And, all of them, fated to be victims or villains. I identified with those guys. I’d been drafted, too.
We sat with our whiskies, I on Larry’s only chair, Larry on an ammo crate. He started on his stories again. Some I’d heard before, but I heard them differently that night; I heard them as Muzak in the museum of needs and loss.
He told the story of the time he’d come across a codger sleeping in his hooch, and shot him six times in the head because you never know when Charlie’s dead or just playing dead. We’d warned them; we’d told them to clear out. We’d told them this was big-time pacification. And the story of the old gal fishing in a canal, just a line in the water coming out from under a broad hat, and he’d figured where her head had to be, and he’d let her have it.
You can never be sure, never get careless: that was Larry’s motto. It was also the tragedy of the loco. You kill someone doing what you do all the time, like sleeping, or what you used to do, like fishing, or what you want to do, like beating off—he took out a teenaged boy once—and you can never do it again. Larry could be rolling in proteins, fishing off the shallows, but every time he saw a fisherman the big, round peasant hat bobbed and teased, daring him to line up its center like a bull’s-eye. And if Larry could line up, so could someone else. I learned the lesson Larry was teaching. Things are out there. The war Ham had protested wasn’t the war that Larry had fought.
“How about those sleepy pills you offered?”
“I have a better idea,” Larry said. He pulled me up off the chair without the back. “Wanna dance?” He didn’t ask it as a question. We stumbled around the room in a clumsy foxtrot a couple of times.
“Not tonight,” I said.
He loosened his grip. “Let’s have a kiss