FORTY-TWO
LITTLE LADY HANDS
Miriam needs a gun.
She’s got money, but no gun. She ditched the .38 —the one she used to shoot that robber. Or mugger. (That poor kid is who he was.) There’s a difference between the two, isn’t there? Whatever. She can’t be bothered by that right now. And she can’t be bothered by that dumb kid, either— even now, with his face leering back at her, reflected in the streetlight flashes on the windshield glass of the Malibu. His blood-streaked, ashen mouth. He was a murderer. (You’re a murderer too, a small voice reminds her— a voice carried around the inside of her head, a ricocheting bullet.)
She can’t mourn him.
He made his choices. She made hers.
That’s how she hardens her heart against it.
Because she has no time to do anything else.
Getting that gun (don’t you mean the murder weapon?) took time. She saved up some money from her little will-psychic-for-food experiment. Then she went to a gun show north of the city in a place called Oaks. Table after table of people selling ammo, ammo cases, knives, Nazi propaganda, KKK propaganda, Vietnam-era artifacts—
And oh, yeah, guns.
Buy from a private seller, slip through the loophole. No background check. No signing anything. Fork over cash, get handed a gun.
Guy at the table was all bro-macho about it. “What’s a little girl like you need with a gun?”
And she got cocky with him. “To make sure I don’t get raped by flannel-wearing survivalist assholes like you.”
She thought: He’s either gonna get mad and try to break my jaw or he’s gonna tell me to fuck off and buy a gun from someone else. But all he did was shrug and say, “Whatever, bitch. Your money’s still green.”
That’s how she ended up with a little .38 Smith & Wesson snubnose.
Guy who sold it to her got one last jab in: “Little gun for little lady hands.” She let it slide without pistol-whipping him, a fact she still upholds as a significant achievement and a clear watermark for personal growth.
Now, though, parked in the shadows of a long highway cutting down through the Keys, she doesn’t have that option. No gun show here. Not tonight. And tonight’s when she wants to do this.
No waiting.
Because time’s the wolf at her door.
So, what to do, what to do?
No gun shows right now. But this is Florida. It’s like a hillbilly Hawaii down here. Every time you see the news it’s Florida Man Did This and Florida Man Did That. Florida Man gorges on bath salts, eats some lady’s face. Florida Man tries to fuck an alligator, gets his dick stuck. Florida Man tries to hang-glide onto a cruise ship and take a shit on the shuffleboard deck. Plus, down here it’s like everyone thinks they’re Charles Bronson from Death Wish. So, they have gun shops.
She just has to hope that one of them is open after 10 at night.
A pawn shop, maybe.
For this, she needs to go back to the motel and grab the phone book she saw sitting on the bedside table. That’s not too far from here— another twenty to thirty minutes. Won’t kill her plans.
At the motel, everything’s quiet. Moths and flies and mosquitoes gather around the glowing light of a Coke machine under the stairway to Jerry’s office. Miriam heads around the back end of the property, following the path until she gets to her door—and someone clears his throat behind her.
She wheels.
It’s the burn-out. Sitting on his lawn chair.
Behind him, a zapper sends bugs to their crispy, crackly dooms.
“They call these islands Los Martires,” he says, like they’ve been in conversation for hours, like their last conversation never really stopped. “The Martyrs. When explorers came up in the night, they saw these shapes in the moonlight looking like suffering men hunched over the water. Like, prostating themselves before their god and shit.”
“I think you mean prostrating.”
“I don’t think there’s a difference.”
“There’s a pretty big fucking difference.”
“Oh. Okay. Anyway, so, I think that’s pretty cool. Because this place is all easy like Sunday morning and shit, but even in paradise we suffer, you know? We suffer.”
“That’s great. I have to—”
“Gotta lot of great names for some of the Keys, too, you know. Shelter Key. Knockemdown Key. Soldier Key. The Ragged Keys—”
“I really enjoy our time together, Florida Man,” she says, suddenly realizing this is the guy eating faces and fucking alligators and hang-gliding onto cruise ships to take shuffleboard dumps. “Lemme ask you something else. You know where a girl can buy a gun?”
“A gun? Whoa.”
“That’s right.” She mimes a gun with her thumb and forefinger and makes pchoo pchoo sounds.
“Most places are probably closed. I know Billy’s Pawn up in Key Largo would be open, but shoot, Billy’s on a fishing trip and the shop’s closed while he’s out there.”
“That doesn’t help me.”
“South of here is Kitty’s Range and they sell ammo there, and sometimes you can find fliers and whatever on the corkboard, but Kitty’s is definitely closed by now.”
“That still doesn’t help me. Listen, Florida Man, it’s been supercrazy-fun-times hanging out but I gotta—”
“You could have my gun, I guess.”
“Your gun?”
“Uh-huh, yeah. It’s a Springfield knock-off of the Colt 1911 .45. Or maybe it’s a Colt knockoff of the Springfield. Shit, I dunno. I’ll go get it.” And then he gets up out of his chair— an act so slow it’s like watching a glacier form over the epochs of time—grunting and groaning and moaning as he does, before tottering off to his double-wide.
Miriam stands out there. Bugs biting. Sunburned skin growing tighter and tighter— so tight she thinks it might split like a sausage casing.
Two minutes. Five minutes. Fifteen.
He went in there and . . . well, she has no idea what. Fell asleep on the toilet. Drowned himself in the bathtub. Got eaten by the alligator he was trying to cornhole.
That was fun while it lasted.
She turns around with her keys—
And sure enough, here comes Florida Man.
He’s got the pistol in his hand like he’s ready to start shooting people. He strolls up, walking less like a person and more a self-propelled collection of dirty rubber bands, and he points the gun right at her.
“Here you go,” he says.
She stares. “That’s maybe not the best way to hand someone a gun.”
“Huh?” He looks down. “Oh.” He gingerly uses both hands to turn the gun around so the grip is facing her.
As she takes it, his finger brushers her finger and—
He’s 105 years old and looks like some kind of sun-baked beach mummy. He sits on a dock with a can of Schlitz in his arthritic claw and his body just . . . gives up. Everything goes slack. All his organs power down like someone turned off a breaker somewhere. The can drops out of his hand and rolls into the ocean, beer foaming over the edge. He laughs and farts a little fart and then it’s a slow, comfortable brain death.
— and she pulls back, honestly surprised. No bath salt cannibalism. No hang-glider defecations. Zero alligator fucking. She’s almost disappointed, but she finds solace in the fact that Ashley doesn’t find him, too.
“You die well,” she says.
“Thanks.” He nods like he understands, though he surely does not. “My name’s Dave.”
“My name’s Miriam.”
“Cool. You gonna shoot some cans or something?”
“Or something.”
“Cool.”