“That’s all you got out of the film? That a great director like Nicholas Ray didn’t know anything about guns? That the cops did what they were supposed to do? Maybe James Dean had already cleared the chamber. It just wasn’t on camera. Or maybe a piece of footage hit the cutting room floor. Many of the people on the set were veterans of World War Two or Korea. You don’t think they knew how to clear a semi-auto?”
“I was just making an observation.”
“Don’t pass it on to anyone with a brain. You’ll embarrass yourself.”
“You know a lot about firearms,” he said.
“Duh,” she replied.
He bent behind the TV and pulled out the plug and turned off the overhead light. Even with the pillows packed down on his head and his face shoved into the sofa cushions, he couldn’t get Gretchen’s words out of his head. What had he expected? For Gretchen to turn out to be someone other than the figure in the Orioles baseball cap and red windbreaker he had watched raise a semi-auto eye level to Bix Golightly’s face and pump three rounds into his head and mouth? Gretchen not only knew about guns, she was the kind of person whose residual anger was so great that, given the chance, she would burn out the rifling in the barrel of an automatic weapon and stay high as a kite on it.
He didn’t fall asleep until the first gray light of dawn touched the eastern sky and the fog from the bayou billowed through the trees and surrounded the walls of his cottage and closed him off from the rest of the world.
WHEN CLETE AND Gretchen woke, he fixed cereal and coffee for both of them, then fried four eggs and several pieces of bacon and slathered eight slices of bread with mayonnaise and made sandwiches that he wrapped in foil. He went outside and picked a handful of mint leaves from a wet spot below the water hydrant in the flower bed, then washed the leaves and sprinkled them inside a quart bottle of orange juice. He put the sandwiches and orange juice and a sack of frozen shrimp in his ice chest.
“Want to tell me what you’re doing?” she said, flipping through the pages of a Newsweek magazine.
“We’re going fishing.”
“We traded the French Quarter for an Okie motel so we could go fishing in water that smells like the grease pit at the Jiffy Lube?”
“You know what my favorite line is in Rebel Without a Cause?” he asked. “After James Dean and Buzz have made friends, Buzz says they still have to play chicken with the stolen cars on the cliffs. James Dean asks him why, and Buzz says, ‘You gotta do something for kicks.’ Did I make you mad last night?”
“No. The only people who ever made me mad are dead or doing hard time,” she replied.
“Say again?”
“I’m talking about some of my mother’s boyfriends. One way or another, they got cooled out. The guy who burned me with cigarettes got his out in the flats somewhere. That’s on the back side of Key West. They say his bones and some of his skin got washed out of a sandbank in a storm. Whoever did him stuffed his cigarette lighter down his throat.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy. I just have one regret,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“I wish I’d been there for it.”
They drove to a rental dock and boathouse on East Cote Blanche Bay where Clete kept an eighteen-foot boat mounted with a seventy-five-horsepower Evinrude engine he’d bought at a repo auction. He loaded his saltwater rods and tackle box and ice chest and a big crab net into the boat, and a plastic garbage bag containing six empty coffee cans capped with plastic lids, then hit the starter button and drove the boat out of the slip and into the bay. The sun was hot and bright on the water, the waves dark and full of sand when they crested and broke on the beach. Gretchen was sitting on the bow, wearing cutoff blue jeans and shades and a V-neck T-shirt, without a hat or sunblock.
“You need to get behind the console and sit next to me,” he said.
“Why?”
“I can’t see.”
She turned her face into the breeze, her hair blowing. Then she took off her shades and rubbed her eyes and put the shades on again. She slid her rump along the bow and stood up in the cockpit and finally sat down on the cushions. “What do you catch out here?” she asked.
“A lobster-red sunburn, if you’re not careful.”
“How many times have you been married?”
“Once.”
“Where’s your ex?”
“Around.”
“Therapy, the methadone clinic, electroshock, that sort of thing?”