WHEN SHE STOOD ON THE FRONT PORCH OF HER FIANCÉ’S sister’s house—Boy Howdy! It was hot today—and rang the bell, Stella thought of gunfire—the sound was that penetrant. It was as though she, Stella, had pulled a trigger by poking the doorbell button with a fingertip. No, Cat Cartwright actually was shooting. Cat was target practicing with her father’s gun in the indoor shooting gallery that Mr. Cartwright had built. When Don left for the Peace Corps—some six months earlier—his sister had taken up shooting, aided and abetted by their father.
NOT A RICH MAN, a night watchman, Mr. Cartwright had brought home old sofa cushions from the junkyard, had straightened out quart tomato juice cans and quart grapefruit juice cans; he had cut thicker steel out of wrecked cars. With the old cushions and the metal he had lined the shooting gallery, a square tube, two foot by two foot. Cat sat in the pantry to shoot; the tube supported by stilts, jutted straight into the backyard for thirty feet.
She’s a pretty good shot, Harvey Cartwright often told himself, but even if her little hands was to tremble, the bullet likely couldn’t get out of the tube. In any case, by the time a stray bullet got through all his cushion-and-metal linings it would near ’bout be harmless.
From the time of his own hardscrabble boyhood, he had trained himself to accept and not to test out any idea that offered comfort. It gave Mr. Cartwright satisfaction to believe in the efficacy of his shooting contraption. Being a night watchman, he slept with earplugs so Cat could practice during the day when he had to get his rest. ’Course when he worked, he had to have the gun back in its black leather holster (he wished the holster were bigger; that might be safer if somebody ever tried to grab it away from him).
There wasn’t no safety from germs. That’s what Harvey Cartwright had told himself when his daughter, who used to run down the dirt road to meet him when they lived in the country, before they had to move to Birmingham, lay in her iron lung. There was no way I could of protected her from germs. The doctors had said it wasn’t polio, and then it was polio, and then it wasn’t polio and she could certainly come out of the iron lung for most of the rest of her life, till all systems would one by one shut down; it was degenerative what she had, somebody’s ataxia. These days you could vaccinate against polio, if it had been that.
His daddy had given Harvey an air rifle when he was ten. Yes, Cartwright was comfortable with a gun: he’d grown up in the country after all. At his job interview in the city, they’d asked two questions—“Are you comfortable with a gun?” and “Can you walk all night?” Yes, he could walk all night.
With his next paycheck he would buy Cat her own weapon so she wouldn’t be scared—he imagined his daughter’s terror all too easily and had to imagine it, since she had never uttered a word of fear—her unprotected alone in the house at night, the world coming to what it had. His son gone, not to the army but to the Peace Corps.
His crippled daughter needed a gun. Especially since she was determined to do what she said she was going to do, starting tonight, and who could know what colored boy might track her home, break in, seeing how she was nearly helpless. Tomorrow, he’d visit the pawnshop, this time to buy, not to sell. At least she could still use her hands some. He had to take his gun to work, and Catherine needed one of her own.
The shriek of Stella’s doorbell penetrated even new rubber earplugs, though gunfire did not, and Mr. Cartwright wished he’d hung out the sign Just come on in, Stella. He shambled toward the front door, zipping his pants;she’d seen him in his strap undershirt before.
And now Stella and Don were engaged. Mr. Cartwright shook his head—why would his son get engaged and then go off to an island in the Pacific Ocean? Maybe Don thought he needed some home tie to keep him off the native women. Well, being engaged or even married didn’t stop most men—he could have told Don that. But Don never had seemed to be wild that way.
Harvey Cartwright had come to like Stella, at least to like that she visited. When Don was around, she’d been friendly, but Mr. Cartwright never noticed any spark between Don and Stella. She had been a faithful friend to Cat from high school on into college and all the way through college. Last May, she’d pushed Cat in her wheelchair up to get the bachelor of arts diploma. Mr. Cartwright would have liked to have done that part himself.
Now he rubbed sleep out of his eyes, looked through the sheer curtain over the front door at Stella’s slender form. Like a good ghost, he thought and remembered he’d been dreaming of his dead wife. In the dream, she was scolding him when the doorbell drilled his mind. Yes, he believed in ghosts. His wife’s ghost had visited him many times to give him good advice.
“Come on in, Stella.”
“I’m sorry. I woke you up.”
“That’s all right.” He turned away, padded barefoot back toward his bedroom. Then he remembered he ought to have confronted this able-bodied girl about where she was intending to take his handicapped daughter tonight, but he was too tired.
Climbing back into his bed, he thought, Poor little thing, lost all her family in that car wreck, lives with those two old aunts, one of them crippled up ’bout bad as Catherine. He liked to sleep under a sheet, even in the summer. Him a doctor, first to die. One, two, three, four. Father, mother, two brothers, all four in her family—dead.
Mr. Cartwright pictured the car rolling over: like a single dice. People tumbling like clothes in a dryer at the Laundromat. In bed, he rolled onto his shoulder, pulled the sheet with him. Five people rolled around inside, damaged to death. Only one lucky little girl climbed out the window, car lying on its side. She had told Cat and Cat had told him. Stella was covered with blood; her whole skin was red with it.
WHEN STELLA STEPPED INSIDE, she felt the blessed coolness of the room air conditioner. She walked through the house and stopped in the kitchen to cup her hands over her ears. In the pantry, Cat sat sideways, sighting down the jerry-built shooting gallery; she was going to squeeze off another shot. Goliath, sitting in Cat’s lap, looked at Stella with large, longsuffering eyes. Cat fired the gun, and as soon as the noise was over, Goliath leapt down from Cat’s lap and rushed Stella. The little dog’s barking exploded in jealous rage.
“Goliath! Goliath,” Cat said sternly, but the little dog barked till he was satisfied. Cat left the gun in its short stand (a reclaimed wig stand from the junkyard) and turned her wheelchair. As she repositioned, sunlight glanced from the spokes, threw a spoked wheel of light toward Stella.
“Baked apples in the oven,” Cat said.
Stella’s nose told her it was true.
“Dad said we could take his car. But he doesn’t like it. Here are the car keys.” Haltingly, Cat groped in her lap, held out the necessary key ring to Stella.
The keys were still warm, Stella noticed, from Cat’s lap and from Goliath sitting on them. Cat’s short hair was newly washed—she didn’t wash it often enough and it tended to get greasy and stringy (funny, Stella thought, how dirty hair made a person look poor), but today it was a light brown haystack capping Cat’s head.
“Your hair looks pretty,” Stella said. “So we’ve got the car.”
Although Stella’s Aunt Krit owned a car, she took it to school with her every day. She’d taught Stella to drive, and she let her use the car once a week.
“Dad said to get to Miles we go out Eighth Avenue.”
“So you told him where.”
“Seemed best.”
“I’m not going to tell the aunts.” Stella knelt before the hot stove to take out the baked apples, something Cat couldn’t manage. “At least not till we’ve got the jobs.”