Church began to whine. I looked down through the glass-top case. I pointed at one of the items.
The owner nodded.
“Good eye,” he said.
I’d done a lot of research for a novel of mine entitled The Bone Palace. I’d printed out pages of material and studied up.
He unlocked the case and brought out the Smith amp; Wesson. 38. I handed him back most of the money he’d just paid me. He set the. 38 in my hand. I’d never held a gun before. I knew better than to dry fire it. I snapped it open, cocked the hammer, checked the line of sight. I eased the hammer back down. I’d done my homework.
He said, “I’ll give you the cleaning equipment for free.”
“Throw in a box of ammo too,” I told him. “And a speed loader.”
The voice still didn’t sound like mine, but I knew I was going to have to start recognizing it from now on.
His face registered some surprise. “Speed loaders are illegal.”
“I know, but you’ve got them. I want one. Get it.”
His lips parted and he started to argue, but I flared at him and he shut his mouth. He handed me some paperwork to fill out. I shoved it aside. He stared down at it and took a breath. I took one too. It went on like that for a dozen heartbeats or so. Then he got the ammo and the loader and slapped them on the counter in front of me. I filled my pockets. I caught sight of my reflection in the glass. My eyes were so black they looked like they’d been gouged out with an ice pick.
With the Rockies in my rearview I drove east across Denver and pulled into the drive-through of a fast food joint. I ordered four burgers and fries and a large drink. It’s what I used to have for lunch every day when I was busy writing. No wonder I’d been so much fatter and softer and sleepy. No wonder my wife would have to climb up on top of me during sex because she didn’t want my weight bearing down on her. No wonder the minimum wage kids would practically laugh in my face whenever they saw my fat ass pull up again.
I rolled down the driver’s window and Churc-hill crawled over my lap and balanced himself against the driver’s door with his chin jutting. When we got up to the cashier she was afraid to take my money. Church looked that hungry. I asked her for a cup of ice. She said it would cost an extra dollar.
“But I don’t want another soda,” I told her, “I just want some ice.”
“It doesn’t matter. That’s what it costs.”
“But it’s just ice.”
“That’s what it costs.”
My busted nose was throbbing badly. My eyes had started to get puffy and were just going to get worse until I couldn’t drive. I had to get the swelling down.
“Do you have any aspirin in there?”
“Aspirin?”
“Yeah.”
“We don’t sell that.”
“I know you don’t sell that, I just wondered if you had any. For the employees maybe. In the first-aid kit.”
“You’re not an employee,” she said. It wasn’t snark, she was actually just reminding me.
“I’m aware of that.”
“We don’t have a first-aid kit. I have some in my purse, if you want them.”
“Please, that would be great.”
She vanished from the window for a moment and then returned. “I can’t find them.”
I smiled pleasantly at her. “Fine.”
I smiled pleasantly at everyone. I smiled pleasantly at the bank guy who stuck the foreclosure sign on my front door. I smiled pleasantly when Church was a puppy and caught parvo and the vet told me to have him put down. I smiled pleasantly at my editor when the publisher remaindered two thousand copies of my last novel and I found them stacked in the thrift store with pink stickers, going for a quarter each, and still not selling.
After I picked up the food, I parked, fed Church three burgers, and ate the rest myself. He contentedly burped, passed gas, then circled the back seat and dug at the comforter until he laid down with a huff of air. He started to snore immediately.
I adjusted my seat back, wrapped the ice up in a couple of napkins, laid it on my face, and let myself drift to the music on an oldies station. I grew a little nostalgic while I hummed along. I sounded almost happy.
After an hour the ice had melted and the swelling had gone down. I got back on the road and floored it towards New York.
I’d come out to Colorado to be with my wife. We met on the Internet in a singles cafe. I really was that guy, she really was that girl. We met face to face in Vegas a few months later and started a long-distance relationship. I’d fly into Denver a couple of times a year and she’d come out to New York to visit me. She hated the bustle and action of Manhattan and spent most of her visits hiding in my apartment with the windows shut, tossing potpourri around to kill the smell of the city. Eventually came the point when one of us had to make a move or we’d have to split. I could do my job anywhere so I went to her.
The first few years were rough but righteous. I was slowly chipping out my career in the bedrock of publishing. I was the darling of the awards committees and won some pretty, shiny, tiny statues. I hoped the wins would translate into book sales. They didn’t. The reviews got better but my advances got smaller. The bills stacked up. We were hurting financially but had reached a delayed yet progressive spiral of debt by borrowing from one credit company to pay the next, transferring the balance from the second card to pay down the first. I knew it would eventually lead us to hit the wall hard, but I hadn’t expected the wall to rise up so soon or climb so high.
My wife refused to acknowledge the truth and continued buying whatever she wanted so long as it was on sale. Purchasing three pairs of shoes that had been marked down 30% was her way of helping out the situation. The fact that they’d originally cost $250 each didn’t factor into the formula. Her math skills had always been weak.
I still held out hope though. I was as naive in my own way as she was in hers. I kept waiting for the break. The crossover. The big push. The major hit. You needed an insane amount of overconfidence to make it in the art world, but it usually cost you in other ways. I could fore-go health insurance because I saw myself one day teaching at an Ivy League school and passing on my fount of knowledge. I didn’t need a European vacation because we’d eventually own a villa on the coast of France like every other hotshot bestseller. Whatever was missing today would be made up for later. I held onto the chance like a retarded kid unwilling to give up a broken toy.
The grey in my beard didn’t wake me up to reality, but the grey pubes started to spook me a touch.
Then she got pregnant. My unsophisticated dreams managed to press back the edges of a clinical depression. Church sensed the difference and started prancing around the house like a happy uncle ready to pass out cigars in the waiting room.
The word father took on a whole new meaning. It stopped being about my old man and started being about me. I saw a little girl in a pink bed holding her arms up and calling for “Daddy” after a bad dream. I saw myself sitting in my library recliner with the kid on my lap, reading her Through the Looking Glass.
My wife wasn’t as certain about being a mother, but she was willing to ride it out until the serious pain hit and she began to spot. The doctor told her to stay in bed for the next twelve weeks. My wife liked to go out dancing, if not with me than with her friends. Some of the friends were male. I wasn’t jealous, or at least not as jealous as I should’ve been. I stewed behind my obesity and ate even more. I sometimes stopped off at the ice cream shop across the street from the club where she liked to go on Friday nights. Churchill was especially fond of butter pecan.
She talked abortion. I stayed up night after night sweating it out. I wanted kids. I didn’t want to be alone with my wife for the rest of my life. I knew we were falling apart even then. I didn’t just want glue to hold us together. I wanted someone who needed me, who would help me to fulfill the myth of myself. I thought I could wake up to cries in the middle of the night almost happily. I would pick up my little girl and shush her with my lips to her chubby cheek and press my forehead to hers and will all my love into her life. She would quiet and coo and giggle, and I’d put her back on her pink pillows and stare at her for another hour in the dim grey light of the wolf’s hour.
But my anxiety medication didn’t always help out. My mind raced and my teeth buzzed. The money wasn’t there. The marriage was on the skids. I’d overshot being a father by years. I was old and fat. I needed silence when I wrote. I wasn’t going to suddenly get strong and pure this late in life. I was greedy. I didn’t want upset, I’d already had enough of that. How was I going to have a kid when I had no benefits? How was I going to pay off the hospital, the babysitters, the pre-K, the clothes, the food, the college tuition? I heard the baby screeching and wailing and it wouldn’t stop and I was too lazy to get out of bed on my darkest days when the antidepressants weren’t working.
She made an appointment. That morning, I followed along after her in a state of trauma. I felt the same way I had while watching my mother’s heart monitor continuously slow throughout the course of her last night, stalling, redlining as her breaths came in agonized gasps, and I found myself halfway between hoping it would end and wanting to scream out, “Mommy.” I trotted after my wife to the car and drove to Planned Parenthood.
Protesters walked their picket line in the freezing morning air, calling for me not to murder my own child, saying my baby wanted to live, please give it a chance at life.
Christ, if only I’d had a gun on me then. I would have killed every one of those fuckers. I would have used the speed loader until my flesh seared and the shells were too hot to handle. The cops would have potshot and tasered and billy clubbed me before dragging me away in cuffs while I shrieked. I wouldn’t have been able to stand trial. They would have put me in a rubber room. I would have butted my head against the soft walls in a straitjacket, rocking like a newborn myself. Christ fuckall, if only.
I sat in the waiting room with young men who looked expectantly relieved. Some of them were boyfriends, some only one-night stands. Some might’ve been husbands who, like me, thought about bills instead of baby booties.
At that moment I realized, This is the thing I will never be forgiven for. This is what is now being written in the great Book of Life by the weeping saints and martyrs. This is the moment God will point to with his burning hand at the hour of my death. This is my chance to have and love my own child and I am freely passing it by. I am committing my baby to oblivion because I’m too fat and lazy and intellectual to work a factory job where I can receive insurance. I am consigning my soul to hell because my taxes are too high. I am sacrificing myself and my blood on the ancient stone altar of mediocrity and the monthly terror of my mortgage.
A nurse appeared and told me it was all over. And it was.