Free Colonel Rutherford's Colt by Lucius Shepard Page B

of leaving; then: “Is everything all right? I mean with the gun?”
    â€œI told ya, it’s a done deal.” Rita pointed to the purse. “I was you, I’d strip the packaging off the things you took before I went back to your car. Just in case.”
    The Firebird returned, pulled into the Safeway lot, stopped near the cart, its sunstruck body quivering like an overheated dog. The driver stuck his tongue out at them and waggled it around, while his passenger laughed to see such wit. Rita envied the boys. So full of dope and glory, the endless low-grade buzz of high school like a horizonless world they believed they could escape. Ms. Snow turned her back on the car and fiddled with the strap of her purse.
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    Twilight hung a dusty curtain over the town, the light gray like coffin lace wrapped around some old bride’s bones. Jimmy followed the expressway up into the Cascades, humps of fir and granite, the shape of country hams setting on their sliced sides. A milky green river meandered the valley on his right. South and east, away from the mountains, the pale sky stretched on forever. He drove slowly, the radio tuned to crackly 80s rock and roll. An eighteen-wheeler passed him on the upgrade, taking so long to manage it, he had time to check the tread on its tires, read all the fine print on its rear doors. Cars whipped by as if coming from a universe where minutes had a quicker value.
    He thought about the story, about what Rita had advised him after coming back from her nap. Make Susan stronger, she’d said. I can’t give a damn about her ’less she shows some spirit. That seemed right, but he didn’t want to make her too strong. Hell, he figured she’d had to be plenty strong as it was to survive being the prisoner in the colonel’s one-person jail. He imagined her at the writing table in her bedroom, translating a poem Luis had written for her, armed with a Spanish-English dictionary. The lines she had just finished translating had caused her to fall into a daydream:
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 . . . when I contemplate the idol of your sex, / a little cat asleep in a silk basket, nested / in the absolute acceptance of its self-embrace . . .
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    She was thinking about making love with Luis that morning, about the intensity of her physical reactions, considering clinically the specifics of those reactions. A few months previous, she would not have been able to entertain those thoughts—she had not known such thoughts existed. They were unladylike, occasionally causing her to flush, but she exulted in them, indulged in them, until those same reactions began to manifest anew. She recalled his face above hers in the yellow light of the early sun, mahogany carved in a mask of passionate exertion, his hair a black lava flow, and she recalled, too, how each movement of his body illuminated her with heat and pleasure. But she could not sustain memory against the depression that enclosed her as securely as the gates of the estate. Why, she asked herself, could she not move? When she focused her mental glass upon Luis, when she considered the virtues of the relationship, not merely the lovemaking but the world he offered, a world of mutual caring and adventurous interests, Havana at night and the beaches on the Isle of Pines, there seemed nothing she could refuse him. Yet when she turned her gaze the least bit to left or right, her vision of a life with him was shredded on the iron fences of restraint and restriction. Were those fences so unbreachable? Surely her father, were he to learn of her suffering, would not wish her to stay? He would find some way to avoid utter ruin. And Luis . . . She knew he would survive her husband’s retribution. His spirit would never permit him to fail. Why, then, could she not move? Despairing of thought, recognizing it for another kind of prison, she rested her head on her arms, and remained that way for a