A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel (15 page)

 

When he opens them she's at the half-open door with her back to him and the gun hanging from her hand. Outside it's completely dark, still raining.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

She starts—then freezes. Firelight plays on the leather jacket's fractured back, makes him think of shields hung in a medieval banquet hall. He can't believe he fell asleep. He feels refreshed but the two injuries are filled with cellular gossip.

“Take your finger off the trigger and turn around slowly.” He speaks as if he's the one with the weapon, it's so obvious she's terrified. “Don't panic. Just turn around slowly. It's okay.”

She lowers her shoulders and turns around. Her eyes are wide, her mouth slightly open.

“Take your finger out of the trigger guard. Just hold it by the barrel and put it on the floor. Pointing away. I don't want it to go off, that's all.”

“I've no touched your wallet,” she says. “Honest to God I've no touched your wallet.”

“I believe you. It's okay.” He keeps still and continues in the tone of gentle authority. “That's it, easy onto the floor. Pointing away. Good. Okay.”

She straightens, staring at the gun—now with a twinge of
loss, he thinks. Whatever else it's power and she's relinquishing it. A gun in your hand even for a few seconds denudes the mystery of killing. You see a new no-nonsense version of history.

“I'm just going to sit up,” he says. “That's all. So I can talk to you. Everything's okay. Do you want to sit down?”

“I've no robbed you,” she says. “Check your wallet if you don't believe me. I've no touched your money.”

“I told you I believe you. Why do you want the gun?”

She doesn't answer; not strategically, but because her incredible actions are just catching up with her.

“If you're not going to sit down then promise me you'll leave the gun alone.”

She puts the gun hand in her jacket pocket. The other hand's gone reflexively to clutch the shoulder bag shut. “Don't tell anyone,” she says.

“I won't.”

“No but I mean really.”

“I really won't tell anyone.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

“Swear?”

“Look who would I tell? I'm not supposed to have a gun either.”

“I haven't done anything, you know. I haven't done anything wrong. You'll no believe that.”

“I do believe it.”

“You're just saying that.”

“No, I'm not.”

The flow of this exchange surprises them into silence. But that forces a worse intimacy.

“What do you want it for?” he says. She looks at the floor. He waits, then asks, “Protection?”

He can feel disappointment coming off her. Familiar disappointment: her ideas never work out. This is another stalled point from which she can fall back into herself, where it would be better to stay if it weren't for things from the world rousing her impulses. This is what happens: she acts, gets ahead of herself, fucks it up. She's been getting things wrong as long as she can remember.

“Well whatever,” he says. “I'm guessing it wasn't for a bank job.”

Tiniest move of the head to acknowledge he's trying to be nice about it. (But behind that the older wiser tireder version of herself saying aye but there'll be a catch there's always a catch. This older wiser tireder version is the thing her impulses get ahead of, then have to stand there over the mess they've made, waiting.)

“You a crim then, are you?” she says, looking up.

“What?”

“Only crims and coppers have guns.”

Crim is criminal. The difficulty wasn't getting a firearm. The difficulty was getting one from someone you could trust. It had taken a three-day trawl through the pubs of South London. You got a beef wiv me? You lookin like you got a beef wiv me guy which for a ole man iz not a good plan y'get me?

“Neither,” he says. “Don't you know in America everyone has guns? Look can I get a drink of water? I'm thirsty as hell.”

She's not sure, looks down, takes her hand out of her pocket.

“I'm not going to do anything. You can stay right there next to it. I just need some water.”

She probably thinks he's feigning (he imagines) hobbling on his stick to the cluttered sink with his tin cup, but he's not. The shin and the knee he doesn't want to look at because they're on fire. Infection means you either ignore it and get septicemia or gangrene or you go to the hospital or you do it yourself. Sutures he doesn't have. He needs antibiotics. He closes his eyes against the weight of all this practical shit. Plus her. It's as if the croft's filling with clutter. All at the behest of the fire like a little grinning god.

He drinks three tin-flavored cups. The clarity with which he feels the wounds in his legs says the rest of the confusion's cleared.

“What're you gonnie do about your legs?”

He fills the cup and goes back to the cot, by degrees sits down on its edge. “I don't know. Get them looked at, I guess.” With a
pop
the fire spits out a tiny glowing shard. He catches himself sketching her past, sees her in a city, hours on the streets because she doesn't want to go back to where she's staying. He can't help it, it's in her face. The big leather jacket's a friend to her, as is the shoulder bag. These are small forces at work on him, a feeling like injured flesh knitting but speeded up. He's tempted to laugh.
That I may not weep
, he thinks, remembering one of Selina's habitual quotes.

“Why'd you give me that fifty quid?” Fefty kwed.

“Thought you could use it.”

“You really loaded then?”

Now thirst's out of the way there's hunger. Can't remember the last time he ate. Yesterday there were items: rice, a can of tuna. He wonders if they made it home with him. In any case there are soups and if he's not mistaken a can of creamed chicken.

Wind pulls the croft's flimsy front door shut, at which she jumps again, laughs once then stops as if the laugh was a mistake. “Put it this way,” Augustus says. “I've got more than enough money to last me the rest of my life.” He's surprising himself, talking, all the while knowing it's pointless, a reversion to habit. But at the same time he's impressed—it's as if there's an orchestrating presence in the room to whom he's conceding a point—by the unexpectedness of her and the gun, the vivid image of her wandering city streets confiding in her brotherly jacket. That sudden nearness to laughter just now was like one of those invisible road dips that catch you mid-sentence. Can't recall the last time he laughed, either. Meanwhile the thought of creamed chicken's going to work on him. His stomach yowls.

“Whatsisname took your coat off,” she says. “Passed it to me to hang up. He didn't notice the gun.”

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Otherwise I'm out on my ear.”

“What're you gonnie do?”

“About what?”

“You gonnie report me?”

“I already told you I won't say anything. Stop worrying.”

The rain comes down harder, calypso on the assortment of bits outside.

“Sorry,” she says.

“What?”

“It's still stealin. Still wrong.”

She looks at him and suddenly he knows he has to get her out of here, but when he opens his mouth to tell her suffers a feel
ing of prosaic lousiness because it's sheeting down out there and manifestly she's on foot. Another image of her, head down, hair plastered, shoulder bag clutched tightly.

“You can wait till the rain eases off,” he says. “But then I think you should go.”

 

M
ichael, who'd been nowhere near My Lai, came home on leave that Christmas and refused to meet Augustus. It was a wall between Augustus and Selina, who of course had to see him.

“What do you expect me to do?” she asked. “Boycott my own brother?”

Augustus sat very still on the floor of the apartment, rolling a joint. “I expect you to boycott your own
racist
brother, yes.”

She'd been kneeling opposite him. Now she sat back on her heels neatly with her hands flat on her thighs. She was wearing a plaid pinafore minidress, black turtleneck top and black woolen tights. This was the morning after a much worse argument the night before (from which he'd stormed out and gone back to his room at his mother's and Cardillo's) and he could see she'd made a special effort. In the apartment's shaft of sun her feline face looked glamorous, which naturally made him angry all over again.

“You're doing it,” she said, calmly. “You know you're doing it.”

“Doing what?”

“Making this worse than it is. Making him sound like a
Klansman
, which you know he isn't.”

“Yeah I forget this oversensitivity I've developed.”

“We both know you're
comfortably
bigger than this.”

Augustus lit the joint and inhaled deeply. Too early to smoke but fuck it. She'd had breakfast with her family at the Gramercy Park house and retained he thought the glister of renewed identity: healthy, wealthy, white, Their Daughter, His Sister. He imagined the family around the table of blinding linen and silver cutlery; if not Ruthie then some other white-gloved black maid (Yessum Mister Trent); Michael, who from photos Augustus knew had Selina's blond hair and fine bones, though with his father's sleepy brown eyes instead of Selina's complex blue, possessed of a new quiet masculinity. Selina had felt it, Augustus could tell, thrummed guiltily from it. Turned out Michael was just the type to be made a man by the Marines. With some guys it worked: The brutality of training reduced them to an essence from which surprising strengths grew. Whatever you thought of war, soldiers in it became the bearers of the world's strange tidings. Among which was the news from My Lai. America faced a tumorous question about itself from its own sons. Haeberle's color photographs of the massacre had been splashed all over
Life
magazine. Eyewitness accounts said bayoneting of women and children, rapes, indiscriminate butchery and shooting. The Inspector General had turned the case over to the Criminal Investigation Division and the Secretary of Defense had said anyone involved in the killings would be prosecuted. So far only a Lieutenant, William Calley, had been charged. Selina said it was there in the house with them at home; Michael's uniform, cleaned and pressed, hung on the back of his bedroom door like a sentient thing, a smirking intelligence. She made him hang it in the wardrobe out of sight. After her brother's denunciation of Charlie Company—If that's what they did then they need to face criminal prosecution—her father
had declared the subject off-limits, the whole subject of the war, in fact, if Selina was in the house. Then stay out of the house, Augustus had said, along with many other dumb or ungenerous things. Selina just said, quietly: He's my brother and I might never see him again. That's the reality. That's the personal reality I can't get beyond. If that means I'm a moral failure in your eyes I'm sorry. I don't have what it takes. Besides which neither do you. Your objection to me seeing Michael isn't political, it's personal in the most obvious way. It's about
him
. You're right, Augustus had said. He's got the drop on me because he objects to
all
niggers. At least it's a principle, at least it's not just about
me
.

“Would it help if you fucked me?” Selina said. They'd been silent for a few moments, working out what was going on in each other. Now Augustus couldn't meet her eye because yes of course that was among other things what he wanted. Perhaps not even among other things, perhaps
only
that, animal ownership of her. She knew and was prepared to act on the knowledge. It was what the prim parentally approved clothes were for, so she could give him, as well as the version of herself he already had, Mom and Dad's Golden Girl. “Give me a hit of that,” she said, taking the joint from him. She took three quick pulls then handed it back. “I know you hate me right now,” she said. “It's okay. I'm not crazy about you either. Come on.” She got up and went to the mattress, knelt down on it with her back to him. Businesslike, she pulled her tights and panties down, hiked her dress up and dropped onto all fours. Augustus watched, for a moment didn't move and in that moment saw she was at the very edge of herself, conducting what might turn out to be a decisive experiment. He stubbed out the joint and shuffled on his knees to get behind her. Through
everything else in his head the sight of her fully clothed but for her bare ass presented in contemptuous submission made him quickly hard, the thought of the cold weather out there and her supple softness kept warm by these clothes. “Go on,” she said.

Augustus didn't let himself think, just went into her quickly. To his surprise she was wet, presumably because she'd been playing this out in her head in the silence. Worried he'd come before her he worked her clit with his fingers. The whole thing would be wrong if he came first, which she, after a moment's resistance, seemed to concede. She could have three, four, five orgasms before she'd had enough. After her second she reached around and guided his cock to her asshole. They'd done this before but the challenge now was to dispense with all occlusion or denial. She lay on her side with him behind her, concentrated through the initial discomfort, then when he was fully in twisted and looked at him. This was new, her calmly and in full clarity accepting his hatred. It made him feel psychically smaller than her, exposed as if to a giant intelligence. She just stared and moved cooperatively against him, the slightest affirmatory lift of her eyebrows when he came, violently. He realized he was like Cardillo, went to a woman for the answer to the question of whether he was acceptable.