Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [53]
“Hey, forget that.” He grinned. “You bring the ammo. I got me the genuine article. Steel cored, with mega mayhem capacity.” He handed me a heavy-enough box. I locked up after us, and lugged the box to where Larry’s panel truck was parked, in front of a fire hydrant a block and a half away on Cole.
Larry had a right to think his luck had changed for the better. The truck hadn’t been ticketed. The only paper under the windshield wiper was a flyer for a new Shabazz Bakery.
We loaded our gardening equipment and the dolly into the back of the truck, which was already a mess of sleeping bags, movers’ quilts, water canteens, baseball bats, tire irons. “Where to, sweetheart?” Larry rammed the key into the ignition.
“What makes for a good garden site?”
“A weekend hideout of a rich bastard who owns too many hideouts to visit any of them regularly.”
The upside of being included on Ham’s A list was knowing people with more than one house in more than one country. “No problema,” I echoed Larry, and suggested we check out Beth Hendon’s once-or-twice-a-summer shack in Lafayette. It was a joke, but I talked up the property’s remoteness from roads and from other houses, its treed grounds, its skinny, twisty, unpaved driveway. Easy to defend in postapocalypse days, I tempted. Larry grilled me on details: the layout of the shack, the physical contour of the grounds, estimate of total acreage. I told him what I remembered from the one time I had dropped off her out-of-town hunk of the moment, and invented what I didn’t. “Sounds doable, pardner!” He shot out of the illegal parking space, and speed-merged into traffic. Behind us on busy Cole, I heard drivers hit their brakes.
The month was January. When Larry and I started our dig on a rise with a floaty night view, the cabin’s windows were shuttered closed, the pool covered with tarp. Beth was smoking dope on the deck of Ham’s houseboat and giggling her grief at the stars. She didn’t spend winter nights in the cabin. The chance of her showing up in Lafayette was one in a million.
I didn’t recognize the car throttling up the loopy driveway because it wasn’t Beth’s white Camry. I’d had to re-parallel park that Camry too many times or had had to drive her home. The car inching up the driveway was a dark green VW bug. It stalled halfway up the loop, and Beth Hendon tumbled out of the driver’s side and lifted its snub hood. Beth was wearing the same short, dark sheath she’d grieved in. She wasn’t a thing, but I worried about Larry. You popped up at the wrong time in the wrong spot on Larry’s horizon, you became one fast.
Beth minced her way from the hood to the passenger side, reached in and helped a woman out. It was the Hairless Salome of the Wüsthof knives and Crate & Barrel platter. In the bug’s cockeyed headlight, I saw Beth hold up and prop her against the car. There was a connection—moral, or at least poetic—between Beth, Salome, dead Fred, Larry, me, Ham—but I couldn’t stay with it long enough to figure it out. I didn’t have the time.
Mayhem in real time happens faster than in the movies. One moment I was standing on the rise near where Larry was drilling deep holes, feeling good about all that women bonding with women below; the next I was on the ground, cheek pressed into dug-up clumps of grass and earth, throwing up. One moment there was an efficiently lifted, ex-model’s gaunt face; next a pulpy mess, exploding in record tropical heat like overripe fruit.
I heard the shot that killed Beth, but I didn’t see the dying.
Larry was fulfilling the promise he’d made me earlier that evening: an alfresco date with mega mayhem. The vet who made it home from the ruby-red paddy fields is a survivor on permanent metabolic overdrive. The moralist’s low-tech radar tracks the Larrys’ guilt but not their pain. I was throwing up in the starved light of a stooped moon because I’d nixed Larry’s original plans for a beer and a blowjob; you nudge one block out of line, and all