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“Neither suitable nor unsuitable, sir.”
His eyes were blue, and when he narrowed them, they seemed to grow brighter, as if his squint compressed the color in them. “How come you rode through all that dangerous habitat of schemin’ men and all that wasteland crawlin’ with snakes and beasts, and you with no dang gun?”
“I don’t like guns, Mr. Bullock.”
“You don’t need to like one to know you got to have it. I don’t like gettin’ a colonoscopy every five years, but I grit my teeth and drop my drawers and get it done just the same.”
“I’ve never had a colonoscopy, either.”
“Well, you’re not of an age to need one. That there’s a joyful experience you got to earn by livin’ to my age. Anyways, around this here safe house, everyone’s got to have themselves a firearm, not just to keep in a drawer, but to carry at all times. Once we get you settled in, I’ll fix you up with the very thing you need. You had yourself some breakfast yet?”
“More than some, sir. Just need a bed. I didn’t sleep last night.”
“Then bring yourself on in the house and meet Maybelle. She’s my missus. You’ll like her. Everybody does. She’s a peach. We haven’t enjoyed a bit of company since that astronaut had to hide out here while we worked up a convincin’ new identity for him. Maybelle’s starved for better company than me.”
Thirteen
Maybelle Bullock was a pretty lady of about fifty, trim and blond. She reminded me of that long-ago actress Donna Reed, the way Miss Reed had looked in It’s a Wonderful Life. When we entered from the back porch, Maybelle was standing at the kitchen sink, peeling fresh peaches, wearing a housedress of the kind that few women wore in recent years, with saddle shoes and white socks.
She didn’t at first favor me with a smile, but her handshake was firm and her manner welcoming. Her direct stare probed, as if the story of my life were written in my eyes in a few succinct lines that she could read.
To her husband, she said, “He’s not fully smooth and blue, but he sure is close to it.”
“I figured you’d see him that way,” said Deacon Bullock.
“Don’t you?”
“I’d be a fool to argue it.”
In the seventh volume of these memoirs (this is the eighth), I have written about the mysterious organization into which I had been welcomed by Edie Fischer, who will appear before much longer in this book, as well. Although I’d been told by her and others that I was remarkably smoothed out and blue for someone my age, I had not been able to get from them an explanation of that apparent compliment. I was a novice among them, and evidently the full truth of who they were and what they hoped to achieve would be revealed to me only in stages, as I earned the right to more knowledge of them.
Maybelle’s smile, when now it came, was as warm as any I had ever received, one of those that makes you feel like long-loved kin. She took my hand in both of hers, not to shake it again, but to squeeze it gently.
She said, “It’s purest pleasure bein’ a help whatsoever way we can.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I don’t want to be a bother.”
“You couldn’t be a bother if you tried.” Picking up the paring knife once more, she said, “I’m makin’ a peach pie to have with lunch, your favorite.”
I didn’t ask how she could know the variety of pie that I most enjoyed. She would tell me or she wouldn’t. Among these folks, a novice had to live by their rules, even if they chose not to share some of those rules with him.
“Peach pie. That’s kind of you, Mrs. Bullock.”
“Please, you call me Maybelle.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you. But I’m afraid I’ll probably sleep right through lunch, not having slept last night. What I need most now is a bed.”
“Then we’ll have us a late lunch or early dinner.”
Deacon Bullock said, “He don’t got a gun.”
His wife looked first astonished and then severely disapproving. “Why would a fine young man such as yourself not carry a gun?”
“I don’t like them.”
“Guns don’t feel nothin’ about you, one way or t’other. No fair reason for you to feel bad towards them.”
“I guess that’s one way to look at it.”
She picked up a pistol that had, until now, been lying on the counter on the other side of the basket of peaches. “Had this Colt since my weddin’ day.”
“How long have you been married, ma’am?”
She cast a loving look at her husband. “Be twenty-eight years come August nine. And only six bad days in all that wedded bliss.”
Deacon Bullock’s grin went flatline. “Only five bad days by my calculation, sugar.”
Picking up the paring knife to slice the peach that she had just peeled, his wife said, “Even if it was five by both counts, won’t all of them be the same five for each of us.”
Mr. Bullock appeared mildly stricken. “How many of your six you think don’t match my five?”
“I’d guess two.”
“What two days did I think we was good and you felt we wasn’t? That’s goin’ to trouble my sleep till I figure it out.”
Mrs. Bullock winked at me but spoke to her husband. “It’ll do you some good to reflect on it.”
Taking off his Stetson and fanning his face, her husband said, “Guess I got my assignment for the day.”
To me, his wife said, “From what I heard, whether you like guns or don’t, you got the skill and guts to use ’em.”
“Unfortunately, it’s been necessary.”
“So it will be again. What gun was it you most recently used?”
“A Glock with a fifteen-round magazine.”
“What caliber?” she asked.
“Forty-five ACP.”
“That be model twenty-one, Deke?”
“I suspect so,” her husband said.
“We got one for this young man?”
“More than one,” Mr. Bullock said.
“One will do,” I assured them.
