Page 43 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. V #3

place a “milking parlor?”
over their rims and things brightened up out there considerably. Then it hit him. Of course, these goddam shades! All those other cars pass- ing him were thinking I’m like Ted Bundy or the Hillside Strangler. Relief flooded through him; he almost laughed out loud.
This old man had a long, tubular nose and wore black horn-rimmed glasses which gave him a
sort of scholarly look. Otherwise his head re- sembled a pile of bread dough, with a ring of closely cropped white hair topped by a silver and white Massey Ferguson cap. He wore green work clothes with frayed red suspenders and his hands were swollen and nicotine-stained. His back was bowed and he’d completed all his shifting, a pro- cess that seemed endless to Benson.
He pushed his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose and slipped his hand into his windbreaker pocket where the .22 lay. His fingers played along the chrome barrel, as he visualized it in his hand and pointed at somebody. He had bought the gun at a sporting goods store in Barre just the day be- fore, using a forged driver’s license. The fellow be- hind the counter, an elderly man with long bushy white sideburns, had asked him good-naturedly if he was planning on robbing a bank with it.
Now he held the steering wheel in a death grip and stared out the sliver of windshield. The kid’s eyes slid to the speedometer. They were doing a steady thirty miles an hour in a fifty–mile-per- hour zone. Even so, the chassis kept up a steady rumble, on account of the bare tires. Every hitch in the road jarred them. Springs are most likely shot, too, the kid thought.
“No sir,” Benson said, “I’m just buying it for my own self-protection.”
The old man had still not answered his question about where he was headed. It was as if he’d for- gotten Benson’s existence.
“That’s the best reason of all,” said the man with a wide smile. “The law says I got to ask the ques- tion, though. How much ammo you want?”
The kid clucked to himself and looked out his side window. The houses and trees and driveways and cornfields went by so slowly it was as if they were passing for his personal review. Every once in a while an odd detail struck him: a bright green mailbox, a group of Holsteins in a muddy barn- yard loitering around a salt-lick, a gigantic black Ford Gran Torino with a 4-Sale sign on it, “$400 or B.O.,” looking seedy and abandoned even with a new paint job, two crew-cutted boys shooting baskets in a dirt driveway, raising a small cloud of dust with each dribble. He took note of the qual- ity of light, a late-afternoon September sun, low in the sky behind them as they headed east, how it cast everything in a temporary, forlorn bright- ness, like the afterglow from a Polaroid flash at the end of a party.
“A box will do her, I guess.”
“You handled one of these babies before?” “Beg your pardon?”
Then he remembered he was wearing dark glasses and felt stupid. He looked out cautiously
to himself now, fondling his pistol. The thought
“Ever fired one of these guns, son?” the old man asked in a low, confidential tone, which Benson greatly resented. “Cause if not I can recommend a fine shooting instructor. Best in the business.”
Benson had an urge to load the pistol right there at the counter and pop the guy one. Instead he smiled politely. “No thanks. I was in the navy. I did all that in basic training.”
“Is that so? Well, that’s fine then.”
Sooner or later I will kill somebody, Benson said
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