The Fool - Chapter VI
May 22nd 2007 14:22
VI
His eyes snap wide open and his body jerks forward, his hand automatically going for the holster under his shirt. It freezes on the butt of his gun, and he blinks once, twice, in confusion.
He's sitting in the driver's seat of his truck, in front of the motel where he left it. Some autonomic part of his mind automatically gauges the position of the sun, tells him that no more than twenty minutes have passed since he knocked on Nino's door.
He belts the door open and gazes around, his eyes taking in everything. Everything in its place, an old dog sleeping in the shade across the street, the one-eyed old crone eyeing him balefully from her vantage point on the porch a few doors up. He turns in place, looking for something out of the ordinary, any indication that someone might have taken notice of how he got back out here. But there's nothing. The street could be a faded painting in an attic somewhere.
He leans heavily on the open door of his truck and stares down the dusty road, running off into the desert, out of this weird little town. Part of him wants to go back down to the cellar, to drag some answers out of Nino. But, remembering the desolate terror of the hallucinations the fortune-teller had wrought, the better part of him wants to start his truck and drive straight out of this fucked-up little town.
He sighs and drops back into the driver's seat. His groceries are still sitting on the seat, and he flicks the cap off the whiskey and takes a healthy swig. A pleasantly warm numbness slides down his gullet and spreads through his belly. The engine coughs and roars into life on the third twist of the ignition key. He notes with displeasure the rattling wheeze the old truck makes, shuddering as though having convulsions as it turns over, and makes a mental note to trade up in the next town. The truck rolls around in a slow 180 degree arc, then roars past the old hag on the porch. He realises, finally, what's so weird about the silence in the cabin – he can't seem to get any radio stations in this town, none at all. A white-noise roar of static follows him out of the town and over the horizon. He starts to hum tunelessly, an old Hank Williams number, in an attempt to drown out his unusally stubborn thoughts of the fortune teller and the desolate end foretold by her cards.
He has been on the road a couple of days when he comes to a place that captures his almost nonexistent imagination. As far as he can see in either direction, there is no landmark and no change of scenery, not a building, a hill, a tree, a crooked old fencepost. Just flat dead hardpan stretching to forever, reflecting a harsh white glare, bisected by one thin black stretch of highway.
He feels a sudden strange premonition, that he is caught in some sort of endless loop where he will keep driving along the same road forever, nothing behind him and nothing in front, never arriving anywhere, like moving along a repeating backdrop in an old play. And were he a superstitious man, he might suspect that this thought causes his truck's engine to finally cough and splutter out with a terminal wheeze. The old car careens on in silence for a few hundred metres, then gradually rolls to a gentle stop on the featureless roadside.
He sighs and rubs his tired eyes with one hand. He doesn't know much about automotive repair, and doubts he could do much even if he did – the truck is on its last legs and he knows it. He does not recall when he last saw another car on this road, but that alone tells him that it was some time ago. I might be here for awhile, he thinks. Climbing out of the cab, he lights a cigarette and looks up at the sky.
The sun swims lazily across the sky and the light changes gradually. In the early afternoon, Vincent sits in the cab of the old truck, smoking and reading his tattered copy of The Old Man And The Sea. It is much dog-eared, grimy and stained, bent in the middle from being tucked into pockets so many times. The spine is coated with a moldy smattering of binding glue left behind from when the hardcover fell off, somewhere many miles back. The dust of a thousand small towns is smeared on the edges of its pages in vague approximations of its owner's fingerprints. Vincent can recite much of it by heart. He has read it many times.
The light goes from its early-afternoon dead-white bleach, glare like phosprous, to a less severe shade, winding down as it prepares to slide into evening. When it is in this phase, Vincent begins his exercises. Words spelling ideas drummed into him at great length have ingrained themselves in his mind, becoming action through his hands. A one-handed weapon need not be sighted down its barrel. Feel the dimension of the weapon and understand its position relative to your hand. If you can point your finger at something without sighting along your arm, you can shoot from the hip.
He stands, legs apart, boots planted on the hardpan. His spindly fingers flex and stretch by his sides. The revolver sits in the oiled leather holster under his left shoulder, his shirt folded neatly on the hood of the truck. He pulls a potato from his pocket, purchased from the coot in the last town. He tosses it up and catches it idly a few times. Then, suddenly, he draws his arm back and flings the potato straight up in the air, his hand becoming a motion blur. He draws a bead, aiming with his eyes. The potato reaches its apex in midair and its upward climb slows as gravity begins to pull it back down. In another motion too fast for the eye to follow, Vincent draws his gun and fires. The potato explodes. Tiny chunks patter to the earth like rain.
Again and again he does this.
He keeps at it doggedly, with a dispassionate eye for his every mistake, every graze instead of a clean hit. He does it with two potatoes in the air at once. Then with three. With three, he always misses the last one. He once knew a man who could shoot three small objects from the air at a single pass, a one-eyed man, no less. That was a long time ago.
And, Vincent reminds himself, what of it? Parlor-tricks are well and good, but no man was ever killed by a falling potato. The one-eyed man died with a knife in his Adam's apple, a knife made from a sliver of tin, gurgling his last through a throatful of blood. Vincent could never hit that third potato, but he is still alive, and he reckons that's something.
After awhile his eyes grow tired squinting up into the cloudless desert sky. He sets more potatoes on the roof of his truck and plays at Wlliam Tell. First five paces, then ten, twenty, thirty. From straight on, then pivoting on his left foot and firing from the hip.
The gun cracks its cannon-fire report into the silence of the plain. Its weight kicks back and up in his hand. He stands with the barrel pointed at the sand, a thin tendril of smoke curling up. He stretches his arms above his head and rotates his shoulders. He leans his head to either side and a series of cracks erupts from his neck, like firecrackers going off.
You see that? You'll never be any good with an automatic. You absorb the recoil with your elbow. That's a revolver technique. So if you can't learn to reload a sixgun with one hand in less than five seconds, you're worse than useless.He swings out the revolver's cylinder, emptying clattering shells between his boots. With an easy, mechanical speed, he plucks six shells neatly from the loops on his holster with his left hand and slides them into the empty chambers, rotating the cylinder with the thumb of his right. He spins the cylinder, making a whir like some insect, and flicks it back in with a snap of his wrist.
He spins the revolver once on his index finger, then slides it neatly back into its holster.
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- Andrea