In California was a squat little man, newly back from war, named Moller. His mother had moved to the old gold town of Oroville, and he went there to live with her, in a house that meant nothing to him at all, so he could shake off some of the heebie-jeebies. The mother looked like the son except maybe with a wig on, and had bought a convenience store in which to grimace and prosper. Moller worked second shifts for her, took his pills, and in his free hours went out toward the lake hunting reptiles with a pistol he’d brought home. He found himself to be a fairly good shot, which was a surprise to him, though not a wholly welcome one. He began counting only the ones he hit in the head. He walked between the lake and the ATV trails and sometimes one of those machines would rip through in its dust and frenzy and no creature would show itself afterwards. He’d shoot at stones then, tossing them into the air and missing until he got the right size one, then tossing smaller stones until he was missing again. Kids would come into the store trying to buy beer or cigarettes, but he would not sell to them. His mother warned him about decoys and said if he lost her her livelihood she would take his pistol, put it to his head, and shoot him herself. She had never laid a hand on him, the rhetoric had always done its job. It was late spring and there were short cutoffs and halter tops, and he got into an unwholesome habit with the security tapes for a while.
◆
One night a pretty little woman came in and bought a hot dog, a bag of potato chips, and a four-pack of hard lemonade.
“Lady’s night in,” she said.
She was slight and ropy, like a rodeo girl maybe or a casino lady, and her hair was freshly laundered in the way some women will get about it at a certain age, very careful about their hair. Moller asked for ID without thinking, and she beamed at him and said he’d made her day. When she left, he sat there and thought about it.
He started asking any woman who looked between 35 and 50 for ID. That was how he met Loanne. She was 41 years old, on disability, a chain-smoking Buddhist. She knew exactly what he was up to, and within a week they were gratifying each other regularly. She was sensual and pedantic, and found his complete lack of competence irresistible. She got him to stop shooting lizards and re-direct all aggression to his chi. The pills he took interfered with that somewhat. He could get all worked up but then his chi didn’t seem to know what to do next. Loanne suggested the pills weren’t the most natural or holistic approach and so he quit taking them and things started perking right up. Twice a month he visited a psychiatrist at the VA who asked him how he was doing and prescribed him his refills, and Moller took the script just to avoid the fuss but he stopped filling the bottle.
◆
He did his best to keep his mother out of his business. She was a choleric woman and had odd ideas about courtship, and women in general. But his clothes had begun to smell of tobacco.
“Who is she?” she said.
“A lady I met.”
“A lady?”
“Some lady.”
She stood there purse-lipped before him, her arms folded over her bosom like she was returning an item.
“ ’sername?”
“Not important.”
“You don’t even know her—”
“Course I know her name.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little soon to start wildcatting around like some pretty boy?”
He did not even know what that meant. He had never been accused of resembling anything rowdy or handsome before. The two of them faced off pluggily in the living room, both of them in their jeans, their t-shirts, the only difference the hair pretty much—hers teased and sprayed and resembling a hat made of fiberglass insulation, his close-cropped and often a little damp at the temples. He was no taller than she was.
“Her name is Loanne and she is helping me center down.”
The mother squinted at him. “She some kind of hippie?”
“She’s a Buddhist.”
“Buddhist!” she said immediately, with great bitterness, then glared out the kitchen window as if that were the direction all her good luck had gone. “I gotta be at the store,” she said. “You call it off with that slut.” He turned sulking toward his room, his thumbs in his belt loops. “I mean it,” she said.
He understood she intended it affectionately, but he was calling nothing off. Only a limited number of women went in for a man like himself and there probably wasn’t another in Oroville. He had the shape and comportment of a marmot, his was a very specialized appeal. He figured he would keep a couple shirts at Loanne’s apartment, a pair of jeans.
It wasn’t clear what disability she was suffering from, and Moller felt it impolite to ask. She appeared to be heavier than she had been once, the forced idle days having turned her voluptuous. She told him she had once been a dancer, but all that was left of that, if it were true, was a graceful and languid way. Her apartment was in the nook of the building and quite dim, with exotic clutter bought up from garage sales and Unicef stores. Their sex had the restrained and oriental movements of a shadow play, they were two things you might see moving in the deep, or in the recess of a tree. It was positively unsettling. Moller’s experience was scant and he figured, since his last adventure had been at thirteen, that he was just being initiated into a way of things. They would spend hours on her floor, then he would go to the bathroom and shower off all trace of her and change back into his unsullied things and go straight to the store.
“You get that faucet fixed?”
In her spite his mother invented work to occupy his day. The house was a fixer-upper, and she had him truing the door frame, clearing gutters, putting in a lo-flo toilet—all in order to give him as little time on his own as possible. But true love knew no obstacles.
“Yup.”
He sat behind the counter from five until one in the morning. Except to clean the restrooms, he barely moved. The last hour could go by with no customer at all, and in that time he was as still as an adept. What were his thoughts? Where was his mind in that pale hour? Since giving up the Paxil, his vigor had returned, but also dark dreams. His time in the desert had given him a leery outlook. He had never been what a person would call chipper, but until Fallujah he’d assumed there was an order to things, with common sense on one side and outrage on the other. The miscibility of the two had never occurred to him. He had come home a confused person.
◆
He was wiping down the men’s room one night when he heard the beep of the door and then kids’ voices shouting and them making themselves at home.
“Fuck!”
“Shut up, I’m getting me a snack!”
They were young and rangy and loud, the girl loping wolfishly along an aisle and the boy at the counter in his torn shirt and chains.
“You don’t need a snack, you ate a burrito an hour ago. We got to go,” he said as he picked up a Corn Nuts. Moller made his way. The girl paced and peered, her hair hanging like a pelt she wore. They were fifteen-sixteen maybe and didn’t appear to have been home awhile.
“I want a candy bar where are your candy bars?”
“There.”
Moller pointed her one aisle over. He stood by the boy, didn’t go behind the counter. The girl went around the far end of the store, leaning to pick something up as she turned, then came up the other aisle.
“I changed my mind. Burrito’ll still do me, I guess.”
Moller looked at her. Over her shoulder a stringed bag maybe as big as a kitten.
“You can put back that fruit pie then, I guess.”
“What fruit pie?”
“The fruit pie in your satchel.”
She looked at the boy all aghast and laughing. “My what?”
“And you want that Corn Nuts, I’ll ring it up too for you.”
But that was nowhere to be seen anymore either.
“The hell you saying? This some kind of con?” the boy yelled.
“You’re on tape.” Moller pointed up to the camera.
The girl said, “Oh, my God!” They both went out the door. “Oh, shit,” gasping, “we’re on tape!” He followed them. In the lot the girl twirling like a little dog, the boy grinning over his shoulder. He stood there looking at them, remembering other helpless days. The two of them crossed the road through a circle of streetlight and on into hysterical darkness. He stood there, still in his rubber gloves, and under his shirt the gun.
◆
His mother posted a photocopy of the two kids on the glass door saying NOT WELCOME for every customer to consider as they entered. She told Moller if he wasn’t in the store to prevent that sort of thing she had no use for him, but he kept on working there, and she kept on paying him. His status seemed to be that of a runt kitten she didn’t have quite the heart to drown.
“I drove cheese,” he said.
“What?” Loanne said.
“Iraq. I drove cheese there.”
“Cheese.”
“Among other things. I never once fired a gun over there.”
They sat in the middle of Loanne’s living room in the nude. Their legs were crossed, and a stick of frankincense gave off smoke in little paisleyed whorls between them.
“I should’ve been a sharpshooter, I don’t know why I wasn’t.”
Unburdened of raiment. That was how Loanne expressed it. Because the body is the soul. Loanne was a mystic. Moller figured if he’d have been a mystic before he went off to Iraq he’d have gotten to be a sharpshooter instead of a cheese delivery man.
“Because you didn’t understand your soul is naked.”
“I guess that might’ve been part of it.”
Sometimes she would read cards for him. She had a deck of Native American fortune-telling cards—a tradition he had never heard of, but there was a book that explained it all. The owl often came up with the trickster.
“It could mean a lot of things,” she said. “Death and life. Work and play. You have to have both.”
“Is it us?”
Everything was everything, she said, as the smoke of her cigarette wafted into the incense.
He didn’t follow.
He still went out to the lake with his gun alone sometimes. Worrying she might get bored with him soon. He was about done being happily oblivious of the nature of his appeal and wanted to know what it was specifically, so that he could foster it. He’d been thinking about her for an hour or more one morning when he almost stepped on a snake. It coiled before him, shaking its tail and tightening its ungodly loops in on itself, cocked for a strike. Moller’s pistol was already in his hand. Over the weeks of his meanderings, he had come across a couple gopher snakes and each had been so close that he’d shot it in the head with no effort at all. As he stared down the rattler, he palmed the breach and then very quickly, like a card trick, cocked, aimed, fired, and missed. The snake struck in the same fluid moment. It was as if they were an act—as if they had practiced it many times, many hundreds of times. The gun firing, the puff of dirt, the snake’s launch, the bite in the pant leg, the little man’s leap. The snake was already coiled again when Moller shot a second time and hit it behind the head an inch or two, which did not kill it, but he didn’t shoot again. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus.” He looked down at his leg, then he looked back at the snake and said, “You die slow there now. Just like me.” He went cold and sat down in the dirt. The snake didn’t stop looking at him the whole time it took to die.
“What’s that?” Loanne said when he stood at her door with the snake hanging from his hand.
“It’s a dead son of a bitch.”
“You cowboy talker, you.”
They made frenzied love, the door left open, things clattering all about. The snake lay across the threshold. Loanne, he moaned in her bosoms as he bucked and squirmed, held locked in her thighs like some virgin in a seasonal rite. When he was spent, she sloughed him off and he lay beside her gleaming.
“I have taken its spirit.”
“Oh punkin, now let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
◆
Minutes later, still there on the floor, he asked, “Then what does it mean?” Reached down to his pants around his ankles and showed the fabric to her, the little holes in the denim. She ran her fingertips along his calf, unmarked, pale as a cut potato.
“I guess some snakes are just not as good at it as others.”
“I thought it might be more of a sign kind of deal.”
She got up, went to the door still unadorned, picked up the snake. Held it up before her. It did not look quite dead enough, though, so close to her face there and its demony eye still so bright. She lifted a red fingernail to its lip, pried open the latch of its mouth. It gaped in affront, as if summoned back from the pit.
“Well, would you looky there,” Loanne said and turned the head to show him. She put her thumb in the mouth, tugged at the sheath, the two little fangs come showing. Very small, very short. The most unfortunate set of pin teeth a viper could wish for. “Poor little freak.”
He skinned it nevertheless. Hung the strip on the back of one of the carport posts like a Zen scroll. His mother told him to take it down, it was awful and ridiculous. He said he would not. “It is my banner.”
“It’s your what?”
“It’ll show all the other ones who they’re dealing with.”
“I can tell you who they’re dealing with,” she said, squinting at him. “Don’t go slipping off level with me.” But she did not take it down.
◆
Four months before he’d come home, his mother cashed out on the place he had grown up in and bought a house and store outright in a part of California few had heard of. “You were out,” she’d said when he asked her why. “Was mine to do with what I want.” Which explained why she could, maybe, but not really why she did. It had seemed like an act of spite for his having left her alone. Their love was gnarled that way. And so now he was living in an ex–gold town that felt in its forlorn breadth not quite different enough from the hopeless battlefield from which he’d just returned.
He deposited his paychecks and saved his money. Now and then bought soap or other intimates for Loanne but spent money on almost nothing else.
“I want to get back home,” he said to her one day. He had grown up in a fogbound suburb of shopping malls and cineplexes called Daly City, the closest place to San Francisco you could still afford to buy pants.
“Do the cable cars go out there? I’ve always wanted to ride a cable car.”
“Cable cars?”
“I’ve always wanted to ride one.”
He thought a little moment of an apartment the two of them might rent. He might sell cars or something like that, show the high school mob how well he had done for himself.
“Just bart.”
He had never ridden a cable car and had been on a bart train just once. There was a cosmopolitanism about his hometown he let her go right on imagining.
◆
The river that ran by the town had a park beside it, and Moller walked along the water alone, his cigarette in his fingers. His lady friend was not partial to being out of doors. Whether this added to her mystique or was merely indolence, he had not yet decided. He would have liked to show her off a bit. He would like, someday, to have people see him with a woman. And to know him as a marksman, too. He had started carrying the gun everywhere now, stuck in his pants under his shirt, as if he were in a gang. As if the snake had been his initiation into a fellowship of some chosen few. The day was warm, and his shirt had a dark spot of sweat on the front. He walked with one thumb hitched into his pants pocket and looked ready for anything.
That was when he saw the girl. She was sitting alone on a picnic table, staring out at the river. She was in the same clothes she’d had on the night she was in the store, a pair of black jeans that ended just below her knees and a green plaid shirt. And her hair brown and dreaded. She had an overstuffed backpack on the table behind her. She suddenly dropped her head, looked down between her knees. It was such a narcoleptic motion that she might have been looking at nothing at all. He stood looking at her a minute, and then he shouted, “Beautiful day!” Loud and clear. But she didn’t move. He walked over to the girl and stood in front of her. Just stood there and stared.
“Beautiful day.”
She finally looked up at him from whatever blank and uncharted place she had been.
“You are not welcome in my store,” he declared.
She kept staring a moment. He stood with a thumb in each pocket now.
“Do I look like I’m welcome anywhere, mister?”
“Not much. No.”
The girl smiled, made a gun of her hand in assent.
“Where is your partner in crime?” Moller said, still in that loud voice.
And again the head dropped. As if every minute or so her lights went out, as if she were a Siberian town or an old car. It seemed like she should have a bit of stink on her, too, but there was only the fragrance of the grass freshly cut and the water, the Feather flowing steadily along, paying no attention at all to the stories it passed. The longer she hung her head without answering, the more affront he felt, the more in need of a witness.
“Who?” she said.
“The punk that stole my Corn Nuts, that’s who.”
“That was nobody. I don’t even know his name.” She looked at his shirt, examining it like it was for sale.
“So you make a habit of committing larceny with strangers?”
“I wouldn’t have thought so. But things seem to be heading in that direction . . .” She looked down. “Is that a gun you have there?”
He looked down at himself. “I was in Iraq.”
“Eye-rack, huh?” the girl said, saying it just like he had, just like all soldiers said it.
“I was a sharpshooter.”
The girl looked at him, not in re-assessment at all. “Did you kill anyone?”
Moller said nothing. He thought of Loanne’s fingers playing lightly along his neck. Her cowboy.
“Did you?”
The quack of a duck come up from the river bank.
“I’ll bet you did.”
“It wasn’t like that,” he said.
“Huh.”
“I don’t really want to talk about it.”
She looked away. “Suit yourself.”
“You don’t know what it was like.”
“You were a casualty of war,” was what Loanne said of him once. She’d said he was too sweet a man for it.
“No doubt.”
“Better than being a casualty of this place,” he said, flicking his cigarette out to the ground. “You owe me five dollars and twenty-three cents.”
The duck making a to-do of something or other, some inane complaint.
The girl reached into her pocket and pulled out a couple of bills and some change. They were folded up like a little napkin. She unfolded the money and said, “How about two and . . . wow, pennies . . . um, thirty-four cents? And I’ll get the rest to you tomorrow maybe.”
Moller looked down at the creased dollar bills and the coins. Their worthlessness and excuse and insult. Loanne’s fingers still on his head as she had said that thing.
“It’s people like you . . .”
“Like us, you mean,” the girl said. “You and me.”
She took his hand and put the money in it, closed it in benediction.
“We’re casualties. We don’t mean anything, either one of us.”
“Everything means everything,” he said.
◆
There was a horse on a spring, a little playground ride. A small boy watched them from his mount. His mother looking at her phone. The man and the raggedy ann. The boy was not sure what she was, exactly, the one with the messy hair. If she were a boy or a girl, or was even a real person, because she looked like a big doll to him, or maybe a small witch. The smell of tobacco came over, like his grandpa’s. He rocked his horse, thinking maybe one of them would see him on it. But the raggy person was looking down at the man’s gun, turning it over in her hands, and the man watched her look at it. A duck flew into the air, and she pointed the gun and fired.
Off it flew.
◆
“Holy shit that’s loud!”
She laughed, holding the gun all wobbly. A lady ran to her little boy.
“You do it! Sharpshoot something!”
Moller looked about. It was a large, flat place. Except for some trees far off, little to take a bead on. There was nothing on the river now. The duck flown off to some invisible bend. The boy in the mother’s arm, her hand to her ear. He took the gun from her.
“You tell me.”
She looked around, pointed to a trash can with a paper cup sitting on the rim. The can at the edge of the playground. He gave it a squint. Thought a moment about the snake. Both its totemic power he now carried, and the fact that he had missed it with his first shot.
“Maybe we should be on our way,” the girl said when the siren whooped.
She skipped off the table, her kit already on her shoulder. She ambled across the park and was a long way off when she looked behind at him as the car came flashing over the lawn.
◆
“I guess I should of shot you when I had the chance,” his mother said through the glass.
He said nothing back. He was waiting for Loanne.
She sat across from him straightbacked, her elbows at her side and not on the table, the telephone held to her ear as if she had just been taught how to use it, some instrument ridiculous and vain. For a lady too delicate to yell. In the orange t-shirt she wore, it was almost unclear who was free and who in chains.
“There was a toddler out there.”
The guard behind Moller was very tall, very big and bored. He stood with his arms crossed and his feet apart as if he should be on a label for something. Tires, maybe, or a cleaning product.
“A toddler.”
“We didn’t see that.”
“We who?”
He sat there and said nothing more.
“That hippie woman?”
He peered over her, as if Loanne might appear there any moment, out of the mist. He had called her first. She said she would be there right away, but an hour and a half later she had still not shown, and he asked to call again, and she didn’t pick up that second time. Finally, he called his mother. It was his third phone call and the last he was allowed.
She was there in eight minutes. She had had to close the store.
“No, not her.”
“Well, then who were you shooting a handgun in a public park with a playground in it with then?”
“Just this person. This person I was talking to. It’s not important.”
She was sixteen years older than he, two years older than Loanne. They could have been sister and brother. That is who the guard could have taken her to be. The two of them looking at each other holding those telephones like each was looking in a mirror. She regarded him. His wandering affinities.
“It is hopeless,” she said.
She turned away before he could reply that it was not.
“You never saw,” he said. “You never saw what I can do.” He set his face, and would not acknowledge what she’d said, or the cut of it.
“Do what?” She looked at him. “Who would even want to do that? What you can do?”
Like sparring tortoises or beetles. That was as close to what they were as anything.
“Are you going to post bail?”
What he had not told her was that it wasn’t him who’d shot the gun. He had not told the woman who’d arrested him, either. Had just kneeled, put his hands on the back of his head, the gun on the ground right there beside him. She had not even said a word to him yet.
“Who would want to do that, either?”
He turned to put the phone back on the hook, but she shouted and knocked on the glass, and he turned back to look at her.
“You think I hate you,” she said.
And what he thought was it didn’t matter. Whether she did or didn’t, he just didn’t want to spend the night there. He didn’t even care if he never got his gun back, really, if he could just get out of there and find Loanne and get a job selling cars.
“I am good for it.”
The guard behind him looking straight ahead. A minute left, that was how familiar he was with it. Not more than a minute and a quarter. Not the time they were allowed but the time they would take, because it varied from visitor to visitor. An hour given, usually, but not all of them took it. It was sometimes not enough but often more than necessary, by a long shot, to sit across from each other and relive through a glass what they lived every other day every other place, and their connection or estrangement merely caught there and set on a table like a museum piece to be studied or gawked at, and that was why pride or resignation often cut it short. The mother and son not hating or loving each other but merely each other’s all-consuming adversity and equilibrium. And the guard behind the son in his almost sphinxlike pose, but in his own head merely trying to remember whether it was brats or Polish, and a salad which he would have his daughter sitting at the table for an hour if he had to to finish because that was the promise he had made to her mother. Who had once given him a pencil set for his drawing. Had once been so much more than his beloved. Rather an explanation, a gate, a guide, and now merely a chapter and creditor, which was how he could guess so exactly how much time any two people needed.