Paul Kavanagh - Not Comin' Home to You

And then the gun was in his hand.

He even had time to aim. He was so fast and the rest of the world so slow. He snapped off a shot and the bullet took Frank Deinhardt in the groin and spilled his legs out behind him. He plunged on forward, piled onto the footstool, crashed to the floor at Jimmie John’s feet.

Betty, I just shot your father’s balls off. Now there’s nobody you belong to but me.

He caught a glimpse of the grandmother’s crazy old eyes. She was watching them now instead of the television set, but her expression was as it had been before. As if to say that the action was crisp and interesting enough, and she would as soon stay with this particular channel, at least until the next Polident commercial.

Betty’s mother was keening, making a thin wild sound, like something he might have heard vaguely in the mists of a cough syrup dream. Deinhardt moaned and his feet twitched. Jimmie John walked around him, turned up the volume on the television set.

He caught sight of Betty’s face but wrenched his eyes away. He could not look at her just now.

He shot Frank Deinhardt in the back of his fat neck and the twitching feet went still. He turned to Betty’s mother and drank in the horror in her eyes. She had one hand to her open mouth, but she was still making that weird sound. She took small backward steps until the wall got in her way. She flattened up against the wall. Her housedress had a floral pattern and so did the wallpaper.

You can’t hide that way, Mother, he thought. And wanted to laugh.

He took a step toward her and shot her in the chest. The bullet pressed her even tighter against the wall and she was a long time falling. He shot her again on the way down.

Before she hit the floor he wheeled around and headed for Granny. She didn’t try to move and her face showed no change in expression. She farted noisily and laughter bubbled hysterically in his chest but stayed inside. He put the muzzle of the gun to die old woman’s temple and blew her brains out.

That emptied the gun. He took three shells from his jacket pocket and loaded three chambers. He gave them each one more round in the head.

Everything was spinning. He took deep breaths and held them in and made the spinning stop.

He looked at Betty. Her mouth was moving but he couldn’t hear her over the television set and didn’t know whether she was talking or merely mouthing words. He dug a shell out of his pocket and stuffed it into a chamber, and he caught a look of terror in Betty’s eyes, but of course the bullet was not for her, how could she possibly think it was for her, and he spun around and shot the television set. The picture tube exploded with a noise greater than the gunshot. Glass clattered for long seconds, and then the room was as silent as death.

She said, “Oh God, oh God. They’re all dead. You killed them all, they’re all dead, you killed them all.”

He moved toward her. Don’t draw away from me, he told her silently. Please, please, don’t draw away from me.

She very nearly did. He saw her muscles tighten and thought she was about to take a step backward, but then the tension fell away and her shoulders dropped an inch and he knew it was all right.

She was his now. And he had to have her now. Now, right away, this minute.

He advanced on her, tearing his own clothes off with one hand, shrugging out of the jacket, opening the pants and stepping out of them. His other hand still gripped the gun. He got hold of her and drew her moaning down to the carpet. He pulled up her skirt and got her panties down and took her.

Took her just like that. Fiercely, without preliminaries, on the floor of her parents’ living room in the center of a triangle of corpses. Her father and her mother and her grandmother lay dead around them and the gun that had killed them was clutched tight in his right hand, its hot barrel inches from her cheek, and he hammered at her with measured powerful strokes, pounded against her ridge of pubic bone, buried himself again and again in her flesh.

At first she was simply present. Then she began to respond, and he felt her fighting her own response, resisting it. But she could not resist it, and soon she was no longer trying to resist but was moving with him, and he was completely in control, perfectly in control, able to last forever if he had to, and her fingernails were in his shoulders and she was crying and moaning and yes, now, now—

First for her. Because he could not possibly get off until she did, it was all for her now, and then it happened for her and she went with it, embraced all of it, and then he could will the mechanism that was holding him back, could permit it to let go, and he stroked twice more, in and out the sweet length of her, and erupted.

And Richard Sturdevant of nearby Elbow Ridge was standing there with sweat pouring off his fat face, hands out in front of him to catch bullets in midair, but instead he caught one in the belly and one in the chest and one in the middle of his forehead. He missed one, let it get away from him and bounce off the ceiling, but he caught three out of four and that wasn’t a bad average for a kid his age.

Bodies pressed together and his heart hammering and his whole body so alive, so alive.

And Walker P. Ferris was stretched out on his back in a Texas cow pasture, stark naked and unconscious from a blow on his head, and a piece of pipe went up and came down and went if and came down and went up and came down, and Walker P. Ferris was stretched out on his back in a Texas cow pasture, stark naked and dead from a blow on the head.

Her head was turned to the side, toward the revolver that he still held tightly in his hand. She might have been staring at it but her eyes were shut.

And her father, roaring like a bull, charging like a bull, until a matador timed the thrust just right and the bull fell like a ton of dead meat at the matador’s feet. And her mother spread out against the wall like a butterfly spread on a mounting board, and pinned in place with a bullet. And her grandmother, watching live television until the picture tube blew out and took her head along with it.

He took more deep breaths and let everything slide back into place. He eased his weight off of her and stretched out at her side. They did not have time to waste. Still, he could let her sleep for a minute or two. He loved the look of her face when she slept. And it was amazing to him the way her passion took her immediately into unconsciousness. He had heard of such things but had never believed they actually happened.

He put out a hand and stroked her cheek and throat. He flashed the rabbit that had hurled itself against his car, the rabbit he had held in his hands before covering it over with grass. But the rabbit he flashed was alive, lying gentle and secure in his hands, trusting his hands, little heart fluttering under soft fur, long ears laid back, little nose twitching, safe and warm and alive in his hands.

He moved to kiss her face. “Okay, little girl,” he said. “Time to wake up. C’mon, baby. We got places to go.”

She opened her eyes and blinked at him. She started to cry, but he held her and stroked her hair and she stopped crying and was all right.

“A terrible, terrible tragedy.”

“They were a fine upstanding family. They were Christians. When something like that happens to ordinary people you wonder what kind of a world we’re living in.”

“I’m sure that little girl will never be seen alive. They’ll find her lying dead in a ditch. I can’t bear to think what she’ll have gone through first.”

“Whoever did it should be shot down like a dog.”

“I keep a gun in my house. Always have. My wife doesn’t like the sight of it. Doesn’t care for guns. Well, she is going to get used to the sight of it, and the touch of it, and the sound of it. By God, starting tonight she is going to learn how to use it.”