Gun Machine

Tallow could feel himself actually grinning. The record was “Heart of Glass” by Blondie. He hadn’t heard it in years. He remembered when he first heard it, as a kid, and had giggled because Debbie Harry said “pain in the ass.”

He remembered that, and a lyric about being lost in illusion, and nowhere to hide.

Tallow was pretty sure he didn’t have that album on CD and resolved to buy the MP3 when he got home, as tribute to the record’s sacrifice. He replaced the ashtray on the table. He knew he’d use the damn thing as an ashtray, and it was too late to save the record now, but it didn’t sit right with him. You just don’t do that to a record. Then again, he thought, chances are that no one in the vicinity of the record that day owned a device to play it on. Tallow himself didn’t know anyone apart from himself who possessed a turntable for home use.

That said, Tallow had to tell himself, he didn’t actually know that many people.

His food arrived. He looked at the label he’d unearthed, smiled, and took a bite of his burger. It tasted a bit better than he’d expected.

After the first few bites, he reached down into the laptop bag propped next to his chair, flicked on the wi-fi pod—he knew the machine well enough to do it by touch—and pulled out the tablet device. He tapped the search string tobacco prayer into the web browser and, as he worked through his meal, got a shallow education in Native American tobacco use from a handful of horribly designed websites using color schemes that should have earned the sites’ creators a night in the cells. Crazy street guy was right about the use of tobacco, it turned out. Two of the web pages he looked at featured large flashing links to quit-smoking sites and help lines, declaiming that the casual and heavy use of tobacco was un–Native American.

Tallow washed the last of the burger out of his teeth with a mouthful of ale and, on the ground that he wasn’t Native American, casually lit his second cigarette. Somewhere in the middle of the meal, his body had decided that it was actually hungry, and now he was a sated and sedate mammal.

He let his head lean back, and he blew smoke at the sliver of moon in the evening sky and two pigeons swimming along the light breeze. He relaxed.

And then, as certain as if he were going to throw up: Oh God, I’m going to cry.

Tallow sat up straight, eyes wide, breathing gone jerky and ragged, chin creasing and mouth twisting, unable to feel his feet on the ground. He watched his right hand tremble around the cigarette, his head too distant from it to make his fingers obey him. He clenched his left hand into a fist, hard enough that after half a minute he could feel white blazing crescents in his palm from his fingernails. Tallow gathered it all and tried with every internal guard he could muster to push it all down into that awful gaping hollow sensation in his chest.

He was almost to the end of his cigarette before declaring victory. The more he pushed it down, the more he started to feel angry. Tallow had unclenched for maybe a minute. All he’d been trying to do was relax before reviewing the day so far. He was angry at everything and nothing, because he couldn’t find anyone to conveniently blame for the fact that he apparently didn’t get to relax for one minute before losing it. If he tried to live like a normal human for a minute, he’d end up bawling like…

…like a trauma victim.

“No,” said Tallow, and stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray, directly onto the gray putty covering the spindle hole.

“No what?” said Bat.

“Nothing. Thinking out loud. Thanks for coming.”

Bat and Scarly stood in front of his table. He hadn’t seen them coming, which made him angrier at himself for no rational reason. Scarly held a pint of stout, and Bat a long glass of ice water. A slice of something that was either a bad lime or a really bad lemon was stuck to the inside of the glass. Tallow waved at them to sit down.

“Is this your regular bar?” Scarly asked.

“I guess,” Tallow said. “Two or three times a week for the past few years. Why?”

“The bartender didn’t know you. I had to describe you to him, and he guessed that you were, well, you. The guy out back.”

“And?”

“I don’t know. Just seems weird that for a place you’ve been using two or three times a week for the past few years, the bartender didn’t know your name or say, you know, Oh yeah, that guy.”

“I keep to myself. Will you let me pay for those drinks?”

“You can pay for the next round. One pint is going to be less than a fucking Band-Aid on the gaping wound of the day I’ve had, Detective.”

“Okay. How about some food? Can I buy you some food? Bat?”

Bat winced. “My stomach is like this sort of bag of horror that I put food into and that then empties the food out largely unchanged three hours later. Me and food don’t get along. I don’t, as a rule, eat food.”

Scarly took a swig of beer and muttered something about eating only once a day, something about a warrior’s diet.