Shootout at Joe's

I'll surprise him," she said. She aimed the shiny barrel of the revolver at me. "We'll surprise him together."

I didn't feel much like talking, but I did nod my head.

"What time will Joe be here?" the woman asked.

"Pretty soon." I took a deep breath and looked into the barrel of the revolver. "You aren't planning to shoot him, are you?" I asked.

She pretended not to hear me. "How soon?" she asked.

"Well . . ." Far away, the 10:15 train from Parkerdale blew its whistle. "Well, pretty soon, I guess."

"I'll wait for him. Who's that slob over there?"

"That's Lester."

"Lester!" she called.

Lester turned his head then and looked at the woman. She waved the revolver at him, grinning and chewing, but his face didn't change. It looked the same as always, long and droopy like a bloodhound's face, but more gloomy.

"Lester," she said. "You just stay right on that stool. If you get up for any reason, I'll shoot you dead."

His head nodded, then turned forward again as he took a drink from his coffee mug.

"What's your name?" the woman asked me.

"Wes."

"Wes," she said after me. She pointed the tip of the gun toward Lester. "Wes," she said, "you keep Lester's coffee cup full. And don't do anything to make me shoot you. If some more customers come in, just serve them like everything is normal. This revolver has six loads, and I can take down a man with each. I don't want to. I only want Joe Lowry. But if you drive me to it, I'll make this place wall-to-wall corpses. Understand?" She blinked at me.

"Sure, I understand." I filled Lester's mug with coffee, then came back to the woman. "Can I ask you something?"

"Fire away."

"Why do you want to kill Joe? He's always been a good man. He's never hurt anybody."

She stopped chewing and squinted at me. "He ruined my life. That's enough reason to kill a man, I think. Don't you?"

"Nothing's a good enough reason to kill Joe."

"Think so?"

"What did he do to you?"

"He ran off with Martha Dipswarth."

"Martha? That's his wife---was."

"Dead?"

I nodded.

"Good." Her jaw chomped, and she beamed. "That makes me glad. Joe made a mistake not marrying me. I'm still alive and kicking. We'd be happily married to this day, if he'd had the sense to stick with me. But he never did have much sense. Do you know what his great dream in life was? To go out west and open up a cafe. Martha thought that was a glorious idea. I said, 'Well, you marry him, then. Go on out west and waste your life if you want. If Joe's such a romantic fool as to throw his life away like that, I don't want him. There are plenty more fish in the sea.' That's what I said. That was more than 30 years ago."

"If you said that . . ." I stopped.

"What?"

"Nothing. Never mind."

She looked at me as she took a drink of coffee. "What were you going to say?"

"Just . . . well, if you said that they ought to get married, it doesn't seem very fair of you to blame them."

She put down the cup and glanced over at Lester. He still sat there, but he was staring at the revolver. "When I said that about the sea being full of fish, I figured it'd only be a matter of time before I'd land a good one for myself. Well, it didn't work out that way."

She had a funny look in her eyes then, as if she were looking back at all those years. "I kept on waiting," she went on. "I was just sure that the right man was around the next corner. It finally dawned on me, Wes, that there wasn't ever going to be another man. Joe was it, and I'd lost him. That's when I decided to gun him down."

"That's . . ."

"What?"

"Crazy."

"It's justice."

"Maybe the two of you could get together now," I told her. "You know, there hasn't been another woman since Martha died. Maybe . . ."

"Nope. Too late for that. Too late for babies, too late for---"

All at once, Lester flung himself away from the counter and made a crazy dash for the door. The old woman turned quickly on her stool and squeezed off a shot.