The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

Whimpering to myself like a frightened child, a guilty child fumbling in Pitman’s gun closet. Overhead the light bulb swings on a chain. This closet I have avoided, never open. Disliking and fearing Pitman’s weapons. Repugnance for Pitman’s weapons. But now I need the rifle. Have not seen Pitman’s deer rifle in years but I recognize it on the shelf at eye leveclass="underline" the long sleek blue-black barrel, polished wooden handle Pitman so admires. Loaded and ready.

Safety lock off.

You have been so reckless. You have made a mistake. Drunk reckless mistake. Others can forgive, but not Pitman.

The rifle is much heavier than I expect. You think of a rifle as a graceful weapon unlike a shotgun but this rifle is awkward in my arms, and so heavy. I’m not drunk but I feel faint, sick. My heart is beating like a crazed thing inside my rib cage. My breath comes so fast and ragged, I’m having trouble focusing my eyes.

Trying to see where the trigger is. How my fingers should fit.

He’d wanted to teach me. He’d taunted me, I was Daddy’s little princess, content to have others do my shooting for me.

I love him! Want him to forgive me.

I will beg him I didn’t mean it, I was only pretending. I knew it was you, my friend on the phone. Pitman, I knew!

Seems like I have already told him this... Then my head thump-thumping against the wall.

It’s a bad sign, Pitman arrives home early. Lately he’s been staying out until the taverns close at 2 A.M., doesn’t get home before 2:50 A.M. but tonight his headlights swing into the driveway at just 1 A.M.

So I know. I can’t not know.

I am waiting for him, hiding. I think that I am starkly sober as a creature that has been skinned alive but still my hands are shaking and my teeth are chattering and I’ve been crouched so long my knees are beginning to buckle.

Ask me why I did not run away, I am that man’s wife. Nowhere for that man’s wife to hide. He would find me if I ran to hide with my parents. He would hurt my parents, too.

Pitman enters the house through the back door, into the kitchen. Making no effort to be quiet. Stumbling, cursing. In the bedroom where I am crouched behind the bureau, amid a smell of spilled rum, animal panic, perfumey steam... from the bathroom, the TV is on, muted. The phone receiver is off the hook. Only the bedside lamp is burning. At the foot of the brass bed, the quilt of lavender and purple squares has been neatly folded. In the night Pitman kicks the quilt off, in the morning I haul it up, spread it back over the bed neatly. Pitman has acknowledged, yes, the quilt is “nice.” Like other things I’ve brought into the house. If “nice” things matter.

The heavy deer rifle I’ve laid across the bureau top, aimed toward the doorway. This could be an intruder, any night a woman is alone in a house in the country is a night of danger, risk. I think it must be a child’s desperate strategy. A hope that magic will intervene. I don’t know how to shoot a firearm except to aim, shut my eyes, and pull the trigger. Thinking it might be a Pitman trick, what if the rifle isn’t loaded?

“Hey, baby. What the fuck.”

Pitman stands swaying in the doorway. His face is dark and glowering, but bemused. His jaws are stubbled; he hasn’t shaved since 6 A.M. the previous morning. The eyes are Pitman-eyes, horsey eyes, glassy but alert, interested. There’s a relief in this, I’m thinking that I will never again have to smell another woman on him. I will never again have to smell the fury leaking through his pores... A slow smile breaks over Pitman’s face. His big horsey teeth bared, almost happy. You’d say it was a mean taunting smile but mostly it’s teasing.

“Baby, you better take careful aim with that fucker. You got one shot before I’m on you.”