Cold Night

TWENTY-FOUR

Cold night. The gun, the bottle. For Paine, this time, there was no third choice. No A.A. meetings, no sincere bullshit, no upbeat slogans about "learning to like yourself." No suicide-prevention hot line this time, no cool, calm voices coming out of the phone, trying to climb into the dark crawlspace in his head ("Where are you? What are you doing now? When did you start to feel like this?").

Tonight it was the gun, the bottle.

Hartman's.44 lay on the ground next to him. He sat with his back against the observatory, staring up into a sky that might as well be empty of stars. The telescope was blind, its dome sealed against the intrusion of starlight. Above, the stars of Hercules and Gemini dominated the sky, but Paine was as blind to their inevitable passage as the telescope.

Next to the.44 was the long, square bottle of Jim Beam he had bought in the bar. The bartender had given him an odd look, but the twenty-dollar bill Paine had given him made the odd look disappear. Paine had almost forgotten what a bar smelled like; the distinctive, hidden-alcohol smell. All those bottles side by side, snugly shelved up to the ceiling, enough to make a man drunk for a month or two-all the weight of that potential bender seeping through the bottle glass into the dry close air. The Jim Beam's white plastic twist cap was marred where his fingers had worried it open and closed. He had fought the idea of starting immediately, outside the bar, emptying the bourbon into his stomach and mind, not even waiting to get up north.

He stared at the bottle of bourbon. This is why we are called thinking beings, he thought. An animal would have used the gun or the bourbon by now, and thus made room on the planet for more, better animals. But not man. To the end he was an animal with a plan. He would argue with himself constantly, think about the things that had happened to him, try to feel sorry for himself and the others he had dragged through his life even as he had been dragged through it himself. Man, it seemed, always manufactured choices for himself.

The gun, the bottle.

The gun…

He remembered the first time he had picked up a gun. His father had been cleaning it in his study, and then the phone rang and he had gone to answer it in the hallway. Paine had come running in with his baseball glove to ask if he could go to the ball field with his friends. He saw the door to the study open, heard his father on the phone down the hall. He went into the study, saw the gun lying there, blue chrome steel, a handle like polished mahogany. It looked like a sophisticated toy. The cleaning materials were still laid out around it, but the gun was whole. He picked it up.

It was heavier than he thought it would be. He hefted it in his palm, then closed his hands around the stock, turning it toward the wall and aiming it like Elliot Ness rubbing out the Chicago mob-"Pow!" — then turning it to look down the barrel, his thumb slipping as he turned to see his father there in the doorway, as the gun slipped and he squeezed his grip to keep it from falling, his thumb tightening on the trigger.

The gun said click and his father hit him for the first and only time, his open palm across the back of Jack's head as he shouted, "My God!" as much at himself as at his son.

The bottle.

The bottle was harder to remember, because it had come on slowly. Beers in high school, gradually bourbon in the Army and then both after work with Bob Petty, searching harder as time went on for the place that made him numb, the place where all the bad places didn't go away but at least had a hard time making it clearly through his head…

The gun, the bottle.

Both.

Neither.

Rebecca Meyer's face pushed into his mind. He remembered the hours before sunrise, the dark outline of her sleeping profile. He thought of the swimming seas of her eyes that had trapped and pulled him down into their depths. He wanted to swim there now again.

He looked toward the house, saw the bright light in the window, thought of the empty sea of Rebecca that was left in there.

Emptiness settled into him again. He looked down at the bourbon, remembered the dry, oppressive odor of the bar.

The bottle.

The gun.

He picked up the.44, pressed the cold heaviness of the barrel against his temple. He felt his being flowing into his finger. He was drained, an empty thing, and only his finger was alive. He felt his finger on the trigger, felt himself, the trigger, pulling, pulling-

He brought the.44 down hard, smashing it into the bottle of Jim Beam. The bottle broke, sour bourbon splashing out of it and soaking into the thirsty ground. Paine trembled, his arm rigid, the hand holding the.44 jamming it into the broken bottle. He felt the sharp bright sting of a glass cut on his finger, felt the sensation of it blossom from his finger up through his hand and arm and into his head.

He saw her face again, heard her telling him what he knew in his heart and mind to be true.

"You're right, Rebecca, I can't."

His hand relaxed, letting the.44 go, letting it wash itself in a sea of spent bourbon.

He looked up and saw the stars.

He sat for a long time under the stars and said good-bye to her.

Then he got up and went to keep his promise.