Shots Fired (19 page)

Lyle wasn't back in time to catch a ride to the Wild West Show with the cowboys. Jimmy expected to see him there, and looked for him all the way to showtime.

After the 9:30 performance, Jimmy was brushing down the horses in the corrals with a currycomb when three police officers came backstage. He saw them talking to Buffalo Bill, then one of the haughty Nez Perce. He saw the Nez Perce point at him, and lead the police his way.

“They're looking for James Two Bulls,” the Nez Perce said, shaking his head. “They say they found your bloody jacket by the river with your Disney ID badge in the pocket. They think you got into something with some Arab guys. You want to set them straight?”

Jimmy thought,
Marcel
.

•   •   •

L
YLE'S BLOATED BODY
kissed the milk chocolate surface of the Seine River two days later. The police who escorted Jimmy to the morgue to identify his cousin didn't speak English. The only
thing Jimmy could understand was they thought Lyle had wandered into the wrong neighborhood.

Which is what he told Lyle's mother when he called her.

Afterward, he called the airline to make a reservation home. Due to a general strike, there was no availability for a week, and even that was subject to last-minute change.

He told no one he was leaving. Or that he'd booked reservations for two.

Then he stole letterhead stationery and sent two tickets to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show with backstage passes to Monsieur and Madame Duxín courtesy of the Walt Disney Company.

•   •   •

H
E TRIED
not to look at them, tried not to stare. They sat in the front row in the dark, wearing straw cowboy hats with green bands that read
Wyoming.
Marcel seemed to be enjoying himself immensely, cheering when he was supposed to, calling for more and more wine from the waitresses. Sophie looked wary, and despite his face paint, Jimmy was sure she recognized him during the mystical ceremony act. The test would be if she turned to her husband and pointed him out. She didn't.

Jimmy watched from the shadows of the stock entrance as Annie Oakley did her trick-shooting. The audience loved her. When it came time to select an audience member to fire at targets, she selected Marcel. Jimmy had arranged it with her. Spotlights found Marcel, and the rest of the crowd cheered him on. Buffalo Bill helped him into the sandy arena, joked in
French about “not shooting any of the performers in his Wild West Show,” and Marcel hammed it up in the limelight, clowning with exaggerated gestures and pretending to reach into his jacket for his own gun instead of taking the rifle filled with blanks. He blew a kiss to Sophie, who responded with a frozen, cadaverous grin.

“Have you ever fired a gun before?” Annie asked over the speakers.

“Oui,”
Marcel said, winking at her, “many times!”

“Ooooh,” Annie said, pretending to be impressed.

Marcel gave her a kiss on the cheek, and acted as if he were going to squeeze her buttocks. The crowd howled. Sophie looked mortified.

Marcel fired the blanks and the targets exploded by remote control. Annie pretended to be impressed, and escorted Marcel from the arena. He waved to the crowd like a soccer player who'd scored the winning goal.

Jimmy stepped back into the shadows as Annie led Marcel past him, thanking him in French for being such a good sport and saying he would receive a special marksmanship certificate with his name on it. She had him write out his name on a slip of paper, and told him to wait a moment while she delivered it to the calligrapher.

Jimmy took no chances, thinking Marcel could very well have a gun beneath his jacket, and hit the man as hard as he could in the back of the head with a Sioux war club. The sound it made was a hollow
pock
, and Marcel staggered forward, crashing against the wooden chute panels. Jimmy threw the club
aside, opened the gate, and shoved Marcel inside and closed it. Just in time for Buffalo Bill's announcement, in the arena, that “the scariest thing that can happen out on the plains is when the buffalo
stampede
!”

On cue, the arena lights went off. Fake lightning crackled. Children screamed. And forty-eight buffalo came thundering down the chute, their hooves shaking the earth beneath Jimmy's feet. And as he did twice a night, he slammed back the steel chute gate to the arena to let them out. He thought he heard Marcel moan,
“Merde”
(
shit
), seconds before the herd stomped him into the sand. Blood flecked Jimmy's shirt and hands.

•   •   •

S
OPHIE CAME BACKSTAGE
before the buffalo stampede act was over, showing her pass to the man guarding the door, telling him, Jimmy assumed, that she was looking for her husband.

The first thing he noticed about her when she came into the area was the diamond necklace and diamond ring, a huge one, the biggest he'd ever seen up close.

“Jimmy,” she said, gesturing through the room. “Marcel?”

“He's gone.”

She looked at him, puzzled.

Jimmy raised his hands so she could see the blood. “Gone,” he said bitterly. “Did you forget who I was?”

She gasped, fist to her mouth, her eyes wide. She staggered back.

“Come with me,” Jimmy said, leading her down the length of
the chute, through the corrals, into the sultry night. She stumbled in her fine shoes in the muck of the corrals, so he kept a tight grip on her elbow so she wouldn't fall.

“Which one is yours?” Jimmy asked as they entered the VIP parking area. She stopped at the gleaming white Citroën C6.

“He's been spending some money on you, I see,” Jimmy said, opening the door for her and firmly helping her onto the passenger seat.

•   •   •

T
HEY ROARED
out of the parking lot into the night, raindrops on the windshield, puddles on the road that he shot through.

“Are you going to kill me, too?” she asked in that baby-talk French.

“Non.”

“What will you do?”

“As long as you're carrying my baby,” Jimmy said, “I'll take care of you. After that, you're on your own, lady.”

She shook her head violently, either not understanding or not wanting to understand.

“We're going to America,” he said. “South Dakota. You can live with me and my mom until the baby comes. Then to hell with you. You can come back here, or get a job in a whorehouse in Deadwood . . . I don't care. I don't want my baby born here or to be with you in this place I don't understand.”

“Jimmy, no . . .” she whined.

“I've got two tickets for a flight tomorrow from Charles de Gaulle. We can go to your house and you can pack tonight.”

“I'm not leaving,” she said defiantly.

“Sure you are.”

“No!”

He would have backhanded her pretty mouth if she wasn't with child. His child.

“So old Marcel decided to start paying attention to you, huh? Is that what this was about?”

She clammed up and stared out the window.

“You don't understand my English?”

She refused to answer him.

“You got pregnant so you could show
him
, huh? And not just any kind of baby, either. A child of nature, to show what a
rebel
, what a free spirit you are. Was that it?”

He realized that in his rage he had taken several turns and exits and was now on a secondary highway. He saw a sign for Champs-sur-Marne, another for Lagny-sur-Marne.

“I don't know where we are,” he said.

“The baby,” she said, “we got rid of it.”

He didn't react. Kept driving, increasing his speed, trying to pretend he didn't hear what she'd said. Hoping he had heard her wrong.

“Jimmy,” she said, “the baby is gone.”

“So that's why he bought you this,” Jimmy said calmly, dead calm, caressing the dashboard of the new car, “and the jewelry. You made a deal with him, then?”

“A deal?” she said, curling her lip.

“Boy or girl?”

“Oh, Jimmy, no . . .”

“Boy or girl?”

“I don't know,” she said. Then: “It was for the best.”

“My son might not agree,” Jimmy said.

Sophie seemed to be burrowing into the passenger door, keeping as far away from him as she could. Her eyes were on him, cautious, scared, waiting to see what he did.

“Jimmy, don't be angry,” she said.

“I'm not angry,” he said, a cold tumor growing exponentially in his chest. “I understand. I come from a broken nation, too, the Lakota nation. That's what we have in common, Sophie, the only thing. We're both on the wrong side of history. The only difference is you can't see it.”

•   •   •

“
Y
OU'RE SCARING ME, JIMMY.”
She pronounced it
Jee-mee
.

He looked over at her and laughed bitterly. “I'm
scaring
you?”

She screamed, “You must turn around, Jimmy! Jimmy!”
Jee-mee! JEE-MEE!

He read the sign as he they passed it: Clichy-sous-Bois. No Man's Land. She had seen it, too, screamed again for him to turn around.

But too late. Stunted trees gave way to low-slung buildings
on both sides, broken windows, Arabic graffiti on the plaster walls illuminated by the flames of burning cars.

Jimmy hit the brakes and swung around the charred skeleton of a tiny car, clipping it with a fender, slowed down before he plowed into a large group of people in the middle of the street who had appeared from nowhere.

“Don't stop,” she screamed. “Go!”

He stopped as the group closed in around the car, the white Citroën with the now-damaged fender. He saw dark faces in the undulating firelight, second-generation Arab faces, men and boys of the night in a suburb the police wouldn't even enter, the men dressed in the same kind of grunge clothes the college demonstrators had worn, probably their hand-me-downs.

The car began to rock. Sophie screamed. A back window smashed in, spraying glass across the seat and floor. Someone kicked the passenger door. Gobs of spittle hit the windshield.

“JIMMEE! JIMMEE!”
she screamed.
“Go! Drive!”

Instead, he hit the button that unlocked the doors.

“They don't want me,” he said to her as they opened the door, dragged her out, brown hands gripping her white arms. She kicked out, threw a spike-heeled shoe that landed on the dashboard.

He said, “It's for the best,” and eased away, the crowd parting to let him go, and was soon clear of them. He couldn't see her clearly in his rearview mirror, but thought she was on the street on her back, surrounded, kicking up at them.

Kept his head down as he drove through Clichy-sous-Bois, wipers smearing the spit into rainbow arcs across the glass, driving fast enough that most of the thrown bricks missed him. He thought he heard a gunshot as he turned a corner, but couldn't tell if the bullet had been aimed at him.

And somehow made it through to Livry-Gargan and the N3, which would take him to Paris. He parked well short of the exit, at a bus stop, wiped his prints off the steering wheel and gearshift, and left the car with the keys in it, doubting it would make it through the night.

•   •   •

J
IMMY
T
WO
B
ULLS
drank coffee with a trembling hand at a twenty-four-hour roadside restaurant and gas station near the exit to the N3. It took over an hour for his breath to come normally and not in shallow gasps. He tried to eat but couldn't. The black tumor inside him had stopped growing but was still there. He doubted it would ever leave.

He'd never know his son, but he now knew why the boy asked who his mother was. Jimmy couldn't answer the question in the dream, and couldn't answer it now. He had no fucking idea who she was.

They didn't bury aborted babies, did they? He doubted it. Probably burned them with the other medical waste in a clinical incinerator, the flames no different than the fire of a burning car.

There was a tap on his shoulder.

“Parlez-vous français?”

He turned. She was in her thirties, attractive, blond. It was obvious she'd been drinking, the way her eyes sparkled. Her girlfriend sat in a booth watching the exchange, a wolfish expression on her face. A pair of straw cowboy hats sat on the table between them—they'd been to the Wild West Show. Gotten all heated up, he guessed.

“Ni glasses toki ye he?”
Jimmy said in Lakota.
“Ni
TV Guide
toki ya he?”

She was obviously thrilled. He knew he could go home with them. Instead, he tossed one of the plane tickets in a trash can outside the door.

No, he explained with hand signals, he didn't want to go home with them. He wanted to go to the airport. He held out his arms so they looked like airplane wings. They agreed, reluctantly, to take him there, obviously disappointed.

Although they were talking over each other to him in French and he found himself recognizing a few of the words, his eyes were to the east, toward the dark maw of Clichy-sous-Bois, lit only by isolated fires, wondering how long it would take the flames to reach those who
remained.