Dry Fire
Part Six
He found himself walking through the house once again over to the sliding glass door that lead out into the backyard. At first it seemed like the least worthy, least feasible, certainly least comfortable spot. Then his mind did its careful arithmetic. Would the realtor have to say anything about a shed in the backyard? A shed that could easily be torn down and replaced. If she did come back before or during the weekend she would never notice. He wouldn’t have her finding him weighing on his conscience. There would be precious little to ruin out there. Poor Manny though. He came on Friday mornings to mow the lawns. The guy always did a nice job, always showed up, never once tried to raise the rates as her list of please do’s kept growing around the place. It would be an awful shock.
He went back into the kitchen and started sifting through the junk drawer in hopes of finding a piece of paper and a pen. He managed both and was settling into things when it all came into focus. What could he possibly write? He barely knew the guy. “Gee sorry, this was the best option on hand. I left you a check for an extra hundred bucks.” “Hey Manny, between you and my cheating wife, I still had to choose you. Sorry. Please accept the enclosed check for a hundred dollars.” “Sorry Manny. Please call 911 and accept this small down payment on what I can only assume will be a routine of therapy sessions for you.”
Maybe he didn’t have to write it out and leave it in there with him. Maybe he could just tape the note to the outside of the shed door. “Manny, please don’t open the shed. Call 911 and tell them there’s been a suicide and leave. Thanks.” Even if he gets stupid and curious and opens the shed anyway, its on him then, right? Even if he feels some how involved and stays instead of leaves, the cops and/or emt’s will send him on his way once they realize he’s just the lawn guy. Yeah. It makes sense and it means she doesn’t have to be involved until someone on the scene figures it out and calls her to tell her the deed is already done.
He finds the tape in the junk drawer and uses a piece to get the note ready for the door. He has the piece of paper explaining it all for anyone who cares to know, he has the gun, and…he makes one last trip to the bathroom.
Its another hot day, summer in the land of fruits and nuts. The shed isn’t quite as hot as the garage but its small. Just enough room for him once he pushes the mower to one side and pulls a bag of mulch out of his way. They have proper patio chairs but he grabs one of the cheap plastic ones for guests instead. His long-term comfort is hardly the issue at hand and one of the cheap ones won’t be missed if she comes back and for some reason takes a casual look out at the backyard.
The note for Manny gets taped to the front of the door and he starts to close himself in before he realizes there is no light inside the shed. He leaves the door cracked open for the time being and presses and fans out the piece of paper he got from the doctor on top of a bag of manure next to him. The shed smells like old dry shit and two stroke oil. That seems fitting, all things told. He considers what the bullet might do on its way through to where it might go and he stands back up one last time. His wallet comes out and gets placed next to the piece of paper on top of the bag of dry shit, he puts his driver’s license on top of it and that’s that.
He closes the door and sits in the dark with the revolver in his hands and he takes a second to think it all through one last time. He’s careful to make sure he has a firm grip on the gun as he pushes it up under his chin, aiming it so that the bullet will go back and up through all the material that makes him…him.
Click.
It seems impossible. Unimaginable. This was it? After all of that. All that shit, he finally finds the best spot and gets it all set up. He can hardly see a thing but he shifts and looks down at the damn gun. Does this kind have a safety? Don’t some of them have safeties? He tries to turn the thing a few different ways and pushes at a little lever that drops the middle out to the side. He never even considered it. The old man didn’t even have the stupid thing loaded. All that time he always just assumed it was.
“Where the fuck do you even go to buy bullets?” He mutters and looks down, dejectedly at the useless hunk of metal in his hand.
This crap is going to interrupt those plans. He hears his voice whispering that new curse once again inside his head and he starts to laugh until it deforms rather quickly into an irate wail that slowly mutates into simple sobbing. The perfect intersection of impotent rage running head long into self-pity. He hasn’t cried, really cried, since he was a kid and fifty some odd years of let downs and mishaps, mistakes and willful missteps all come leeching out until he can’t even breath for all the snot clogging up the works.
He doesn’t so much toss the gun as he pitches it into a stack of plastic planters next to the mower. Fucking worthless thing. He should have sold it or let those movers take it with the rest of the old man’s junk. He stands up and shuffles for his wallet, carefully replacing his ID in its spot and the death sentence paper back in the bill fold he considers his most recent section.
He wipes at his snot covered face with his sleeve and replaces his wallet in his back pocket where it belongs. Fuck it. They’ll have to sell the house and split the cash along with the sheets and everything else. He’ll die down at country general covered in tubes and mired in debt but he’ll make sure the divorce goes through first so no one can go after her for his debts. He opens the shed door and blinks at the sudden wash of bright light. He’s careful to remove the note he wrote for Manny, best to chuck that in the kitchen trash. He closes the shed door and turns toward the house, barely able to see with the sudden change of light.
She had Manny put in the entirely decorative and nonsensical path of stones from the porch over to the always out of control bougainvillea thicket a few weeks before. Again, no extra charge even though he was out there half a damn day putting them in. He catches his foot on one of those stupid stones and goes down hard. He lands first on his left wrist which almost immediately relates the news that if he hasn’t had broken bones before in life, he certainly does now. Next comes the impact of his head right against the lip of concrete that marks the back porch from the perpetually brownish green grass of the lawn.
The grass is cool and the ground isn’t all that bad. There’s a breeze down here and a line of ants getting busy working its way to and from the bbq that he forgot to clean from last weekend. His left eye is like a busted headlight and he can feel a lot of wet and warm stuff going on over on that side of his head. It should hurt, shouldn’t it? He should be afraid, then again, he just got done with attempting just about the dumbest suicide imaginable using a gun with no bullets, so what the fuck does he know.
His mind, numb as it is, still does its arithmetic and he breathes a final sigh of relief. The fucking life insurance, he never considered it. They probably pay out on accidents. No one pays out on suicides. The last thing he does before the lights go out. The one last thing he does is reach down with the one hand that still works. It’s a process and it takes him a dear minute but he comes back with the crumpled note he wrote for the gardener. He stuffs it in his dry mouth and rolls it around trying to gather spit. As last meals go it just about fits with every single moment of the life he lived. We live in the age of paper work after all.