incomprehension. Then he started forward, rolling his hands into fists. He hadn’t hit
anyone since a playground scuffle when he was in the third grade, but he meant to hit
someone now. He meant to hit The Motherfucker. The bugs still buzzed obliviously in
the grass, and the sun still hammered down—nothing in the essential world had
changed except for him. The uncaring listlessness was gone. He cared about at least one thing: beating Grunwald until he cried and bled and crawfished. And he thought
he could do it. Grunwald was twenty years older, and not well. And when The
Motherfucker was on the ground—hopefully with his newly broken nose in one of
those nasty puddles—Curtis would say, That was for my ragbag. Neighbor.
Grunwald took one compensatory step backward. Then he brought his hand out from
behind his back. In it was a large handgun. “Stop right there, neighbor, or I’ll put an extra hole in your head.”
Curtis almost didn’t stop. The gun seemed unreal. Death, out of that black eyehole?
Surely not possible. But—
“It’s a .45 AMT Hardballer,” Grunwald said, “loaded with soft-point ammo. I got it
the last time I was in Vegas. At a gun show. Just after Ginny left, that was. I thought I might shoot her, but I find I’ve lost all interest in Ginny. Basically, she’s just another anorexic Suncoast cunt with Styrofoam tits. You, however—you’re something
different. You’re malevolent, Johnson. You’re a fucking gay witch.”
Curtis stopped. He believed.
“But now you’re in my power, as they say.” The Motherfucker laughed, once more
choking it off so it sounded strangely like a sob. “I don’t even have to hit you dead on.
This is a powerful gun, or so I was told. Even a hit in the hand would render you dead, because it would tear your hand right off. And in the midsection? Your guts’d fly
forty feet. So do you want to try it? Do you feel lucky, punk?”
Curtis did not want to try it. He did not feel lucky. The truth was belated but obvious: he had been cozened out here by a complete barking lunatic.
“What do you want? I’ll give you what you want.” Curtis swallowed. There was an
insectile click in his throat. “Do you want me to call off the suit about Betsy?”
“Don’t call her Betsy,” The Motherfucker said. He had the gun—the Hardballer, what
a grotesque name—pointed at Curtis’s face, and now the hole looked very big indeed.
Curtis realized he would probably be dead before he heard the gun’s report, although
he might see flame—or the beginning of flame—spurt from the barrel. He also
realized that he was perilously close to pissing himself. “Call her ‘my ass-faced
ragbag bitch.’”
“My ass-faced ragbag bitch,” Curtis repeated at once, and didn’t feel the slightest
twinge of disloyalty to Betsy’s memory.
“Now say, ‘And how I loved to lick her smelly cunt,’” The Motherfucker further
instructed.
Curtis was silent. He was relieved to discover there were still limits. Besides, if he said that, The Motherfucker would only want him to say something else.
Grunwald did not seem particularly disappointed. He waggled the gun. “Just joking
about that one, anyway.”
Curtis was silent. Part of his mind was roaring with panic and confusion, but another
part seemed clearer than it had been since Betsy died. Maybe clearer than it had been
in years. That part was musing on the fact that he really could die out here.
He thought, What if I never get to eat another slice of bread?, and for a moment his mind united—the confused part and the clear part—in a desire to live so strong it was
terrible.
“What do you want, Grunwald?”
“For you to get into one of those Port-O-Sans. The one on the end.” He waggled the
gun again, this time to the left.
Curtis turned to look, feeling a small thread of hope. If Grunwald intended to lock
him up…that was good, right? Maybe now that he’d scared Curtis and blown off a
little steam, Grunwald intended to stash him and make his getaway. Or maybe he’ll go home and shoot himself, Curtis thought. Take that old .45 Hardballer cancer cure. A well-known folk remedy.