Amelia Gray - Gutshot - Stories

I said these were minor setbacks on the road to glory.

“And,” he added, “the Dunkin’ Donuts is on fire.”

Indeed it was. Customers streamed from the doors, carrying wire baskets of bear claws, trucker hatfuls of sprinkled Munchkins. “Get out of here,” one of the patrons said. “The damn thing is going up.”

Listen, I said. We’re going to have to make it work, we’ll forge a life on our own and the child will lead us.

The wall of donuts had fueled a mighty grease fire. The cream-filled variety sizzled and popped. Each ignited those within proximity. Their baskets glowed and charred. The coffee machine melted. The smoke was blue and smelled like a dead bird. I popped the lid off Kyle’s coffee cup and puked into it. All I had wanted that morning was an old-fashioned and the absence of puke. I said that everything would be all right, that we were living in the best of all possible Dunkin’ Donuts parking lots.

He pushed some dirt over the test with the toe of his boot. “Poor thing,” he said. Between his sensitive nose and sour stomach, we both knew the next nine months plus the eighteen to twenty-two years after that would wreak some manner of havoc. I put the coffee cup on the ground because the trash bin inside was consumed by flames.

He took my hand and we got out of there before the cops showed up to the fire and started checking IDs. He stopped at the Kroger and came out with half a dozen roses, which he laid between us on the dash.

“Let’s get back to the Rio Grande,” he said. I tipped my seat back and dug in to sleep while he took the tollway. The coast was speckled with cities with names that would suit the spines on a grandma’s bookshelf. Sugar Land. Blessing. Point Comfort. Victoria.

We ended up at the Days Inn in Corpus. Kyle examined a road map in his underpants while I took the bucket to the ice machine. A crowd of tourists were standing in the laundry room. They were speaking languages.

A young woman touched my ice bucket. “We are looking for where Selena was murdered,” she said.

I said I didn’t know what she meant.

“Fifteen years ago at this very Days Inn,” the woman said. “I am disappointed in you.” An older woman was leaned up against the ice machine. She had her face pressed into her hands and her hands were pressed into the ice machine.

“They won’t tell us where,” the younger one said. “They changed the numbers on the doors so we won’t find out.” She pulled me close. “There are secrets at this Days Inn,” she said.

I said that there were secrets at every Days Inn. The ice machine was broken and the women wailed for unrelated reasons.

“Our angel,” one of them said. She was holding a gilt-framed photograph of Selena singing on stage. She did resemble an angel. I wanted to lie down on the laundry-room floor.

In the room, Kyle was eating a waffle the shape of Texas and reading the syrup packet. I stood in the open doorway.

“The first ingredient is corn syrup,” he said. He was a shadow in the back of the long room in his buttoned shirt and a clean pair of pants. He had his shaving kit out on the table. The blade was drying and his face was shorn and cold. He said, “The second ingredient is high-fructose corn syrup.”

I told him he looked like he was preparing for a funeral.

They say that hotel-room floors have E. coli but I lay down anyway. Kyle came and settled near me. When he pressed his cheek against my belly I could feel the machine motion of his jaw grinding tooth on tooth. I said These are the fables we will tell our child.

The man was gutshot. His blood welled around his hands and soaked his shirt. “I’m gutshot!” he said.

The man who had shot him lowered his weapon. “That is definitely what I intended to happen,” he said, “but now that it’s happened, I feel things have gone too far.”

The gutshot man drove to a hospital. “Doctor, I’m gutshot!” the man said.

“This is terrible,” the doctor said. “Wow. What are we going to do?”

“I hoped you would know.”

“It has been many years since I practiced medicine. They let me stay here. Soon they will name a surgical ward after me, where men who are gutshot can be cared for.”

The doctor drove them to the home where the gutshot man’s mother lived. “Mother, I’m gutshot!” he cried.

“My sweetheart!” his mother said. “Woe descends upon us all!”

“I’m not sure it’s as bad as all that,” the man said.

“Upon the beginning and the last end, view only the comfort of darkness!”

“He seems to be pulling together,” said the doctor, who had returned with a set of towels to stanch the blood.

“All ye who pass through these walls and halls will know only pain through the end of days! Please don’t use the guest towels.”

“We’re going to go sit outside,” the man said.

The doctor helped the man to a place behind the house where an elm tree made a bed of fallen leaves. “Good luck,” the doctor said, climbing over a fence and running for the road.

“Jesus Christ, I’m gutshot,” the man said.

“Well, now I won’t help you,” Jesus Christ said. He was seated on a low branch. The bottoms of his sandals gently brushed the man’s forehead. “It speaks to a lack of respect, you know.”

“Truly?”

“Just kidding. I love you. I also love the man who gutshot you and I love what you’re doing to those guest towels.”

“Will you help me?”

“Oh, sure. Do you see that airplane up there?”

Jesus Christ pointed until the man saw a silver glint in the sky.

“The people in that plane are flying to Dallas,” Jesus Christ said. “There is an old woman who feeds the stray cats in her neighborhood, and a dentist, and a little baby who will grow up to be in asset management. There is a pilot who loves the smell of masking tape and a woman who doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life and will eventually stop wondering.”

“And they’re all going to Dallas.”

“Does that help?”

The man leaned against the tree trunk. His vision flared and blurred. “I think so,” he said.

“I love this woman!” the man told the empty room. “What should I do to prove my love?”

He bought a billboard by the main road and ascended its ladder with a can of paint and a broad brush. But the board was much larger than he had figured from the ground, and he could only reach the lower third of it.

“I live this bath mat,” a mother read for her child as they drove by.

The man had his message printed on a massive banner with the thought of flying it over the bay, but the pilot he hired was an inexperienced crop duster and a drunk, and he rigged the banner upside down and backward. People on the beach craned their necks to look. A pair of jet skis collided, killing three.

He rented a movie theater, but the reels were accidentally switched and his invited guests puzzled over a sex-education video from 1964. He composed a song and taught it to a children’s choir, but they contracted food poisoning at a pizza party and spent the evening drinking Gatorade and playing video games. He wrote it into a sermon, but the pastor threw the whole thing out as sacrilege.

Discouraged, the man drove to the site of his billboard and ascended its ladder again. At the top, he held on to the platform as the panels groaned in the wind.

The man wanted to share. He knew that if they only understood, the population would be forever changed. He rested his head against the billboard. He heard in the protests of the steel a message from the mechanized world. He thought it was a love song, but he was mistaken.