I hadn’t been thinking about killing Delwood. Not really. But you know how people sometimes have just had
enough.
That’s what I’d meant when I said it to him: “I could just
kill
you,” the two of us sitting in his old Nova in front of a cheap motel on Route 66—meaning it just figurative, even if that might seem at odds with me sliding his pistol into my purse right after I said it.
And even though I was indeedthinking hard about taking my half of the money and maybe a little more—
literal
now, literally
taking
it—I would not call it a double-cross. Just kind of a divorce and a divorce settlement, I guess. Even though we weren’t married. But that’s not the point.
Sometimes people are just too far apart in their wants—that’s what my mama told me. Sometimes things just don’t work out.
That
was the point.
* * * *
“Why don’t we take the day off,” I’d asked him earlier that morning up in Taos, a Saturday, the sun creeping up but everything still mostly quiet in the trailer park where we’d been renting on the biweekly. “We could go buy you a suit, and I could get a new dress. And then maybe we’d go out to dinner. To Joseph’s Table, maybe. Celebrate a little.”
He snorted. “Louise,” he said, the way he does. “What’s it gonna look like, the two of us, staying out here, paycheck to paycheck, economical to say the least”—he put a little emphasis on
economical,
always liking the sound of anything above three syllables—”and then suddenly going out all spiffed up to the nicest restaurant in town?” He looked at me for a while, and then shook his head.
“We don’t have to go to the nicest restaurant,” I said, trying to compromise, which is the mark of a good relationship. “We could just go down to the bar at the Taos Inn and splurge on some high-dollar bourbon and a couple of nice steaks.” I knew he liked steaks, and I could picture him smiling over it, chewing, both of us fat and happy. So to speak, I mean, the fat part being figurative again, of course.
“We told Hal we’d vacate the premises by this morning. We agreed.”
Hal was the man who ran the trailer park. A week or so before, Del had told him he’d finally gotten his degree and then this whole other story about how we’d be moving out to California, where Del’s sister lived, and how we were gonna buy a house over there.
“Sister?” I had wanted to say when I overheard it. “House?” But then I realized he was just laying the groundwork, planning ahead so our leaving wouldn’t look sudden or suspicious. Concocting a story—I imagine that’s the way he would have explained it, except he didn’t explain it to me, he just did it.
That’s the way he was sometimes: a planner, not a communicator.
Taciturn,
he called it. Somewhere in there, in his not explaining and my not asking, he had us agreeing. And now he had us leaving.
“Okay,” I told Del. “We’ll just go then. But how ‘bout we rent a fancy car? A convertible, maybe. A nice blue one.” And I could see it—us cruising through the Sangre de Cristos on a sunny afternoon, the top slid back and me sliding across the seat too, leaning over toward him, maybe kicking my heels up and out the window. My head would be laid on his shoulder and the wind would slip through my toes. Now
that
would be nice.
“No need to blow this windfall on some extravagance,” he said. “No need to call attention to ourselves unnecessarily. Our car works fine.”
He headed for it then—an old Nova. Little spots of rust ran underneath the doors and up inside the wheel well. A bad spring in the seat always bit into my behind. Lately, the rearview mirror had started to hang just a little loose—not so that Delwood couldn’t see in it, but enough that it rattled against the windshield whenever the road got rough.
I stood on the steps with my hip cocked and my arms crossed, so that when he turned and looked at me in that rearview mirror, he’d know I was serious. But he just climbed in the car, and sat there staring ahead. Nothing to look back at, I guess. He’d already packed the car while I slept. The trailer behind us was empty of the few things we owned.
“A new day for us,” he’d whispered an hour before when he woke me up, but already it seemed like same old, same old to me.
When I climbed in beside him, I slammed the passenger-side door extra hard and heard a bolt come loose somewhere inside it.
“It figures,” I said, listening to it rattle down. The spring had immediately dug extra hard into my left rump.
Del didn’t answer. Just put the car in gear and drove ahead.
* * * *
When I first met Del, he was robbing the 7-Eleven over in Eagle Nest, where I worked at that time. This was about a year ago. I’d just been sitting behind the counter, reading one of the
Cosmo
s off the shelf, when in comes this fellow in jeans and a white T-shirt and a ski mask, pointing a pistol.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said. “I’m not a bad man. I just need a little boost in my income.”
I laid the
Cosmo
facedown on the counter so that I wouldn’t lose my place. “You’re robbing me?” I said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I bit my lip and shook my head—no no no—just slightly.
“I’m only twenty-four,” I said.
He looked over toward the Doritos display—not looking at it, but just pointing his head in that direction the way some people look into space whenever they’re thinking. He had a moustache and a beard. I could see the stray hairs poking out around the bottom of the ski mask and near the hole where his mouth was.
“Excuse me?” he said finally, turning back to face me. His eyes were green.
“I’m not a ma’am.”
He held up his free hand, the one without the pistol, and made to run it through his hair—another sign of thinking—but with the ski mask, it just slid across the wool. “Either way, could you hurry it up a little. I’m on a schedule.”
Many reasons for him to be frustrated, I knew. Not the least of which was having to wear wool in New Mexico in the summer.
He glanced outside. The gas pumps were empty. Nothing but darkness on the other side of the road. This time of night, we didn’t get much traffic. I shrugged, opened the cash register.
“You know,” I said, as I bent down for a bag to put his money in. “You have picked the one solitary hour that I’m alone in the store, between the time that Pete has to head home for his mom’s curfew and the time that our night manager strolls in for his midnight to six.”
“I know. I’ve been watching you.” Then there was a little nervous catch in his voice. “Not in a bad way, I mean. Not
voyeuristically,”
he said, enunciating the word, and then the next one too. “Just
surveillance,
you know. I’m not a pervert.”
I kept loading the register into the bag. “You don’t think I’m worth watching?”
Again, with the ski mask, I can’t be sure, but he seemed to blush.
“No. I mean, yes,” he said. “You’re very pretty,” he said.
I nodded. “There’s not much money here we have access to, you know? A lot of it goes straight to the safe. That’s procedure.”
“I’m a fairly frugal man,” he said. “Sometimes I just need a little extra for . . . tuition.”
“Tuition?”
“And other academic expenses.”
“Academic expenses,” I repeated, not a question this time. I thought that he had a nice voice, and then I told him so. “You have a nice voice,” I said. “And pretty eyes.” I gave him my phone number, not writing it down because the security camera would have picked that up, but just told him to call, repeating the number twice so he would remember it. “And my name is Louise.”
“Thanks,” he said, “Louise.”
“Good luck with your education,” I called after him, but the door had already swung closed. I watched him run out toward the pumps and beyond, admired the way his body moved, the curve of his jeans, for as long as I could make him out against the darkness. I gave him a head start before I dialed 911.
