Blake starts searching for the rifle beneath the bed. He saw it there when he was adjusting the I.V. stand, or was that Pomona? It might have been Pomona, four houses ago, forty years ago, back when Los Angeles was all starlight and manicured lawns, when he and Jeannie were newly married. But the rifle isn’t under the bed, only a memory of another bed, another time. He remembers keeping the gun nearby—for protection. Jeannie instantly hated the thing—always did—the rifle left over from the war and always loaded. It was a standard issue M16A1 with lightweight clip, built for battle. But now where was it? Not under the bed. Jeannie must have hidden it. She began doing that more and more as she fell ill, until even the toaster ended up beneath the sink with the coffee maker and other appliances.
But the rifle isn’t beneath the sink—Blake checks again to be sure—and anyway, Jeannie hasn’t been able to get out of bed for months, her condition worsening until all that was left was morphine and applesauce, given in doses far too small to ease her passing. How many times Blake secretly wished for Jeannie to hurry up and die, but he stayed with her until the end, finally telling the hospice nurse to get out and leave them alone, then six hours later, it was over.
Blake goes into the family room, to the couch. No, the rifle isn’t under the couch, just dozens of TV Guide magazines going back many years. He sits down to think. That’s when he notices the door to the attic pushed slightly askew, and remarkably, not by him: a clue perhaps, left for him to discover, one final gesture from the woman who always knew him better than he knew himself.
Finding the ladder is simple, and soon he is crawling through blown insulation, flashlight in hand. Looking around, Blake notices a wrapped bundle at the far end of the crawlspace. The size and shape are about right, but when did Jeannie put it there? Blake retrieves the bundle and carries it back down the ladder. He takes it to the couch. The rifle is wrapped in an old floral pattern blanket from the seventies: daisies against olive green; a picnic blanket.
Is this the same blanket? He lays the rifle on the couch, momentarily forgotten. He holds the blanket up to the light. Yes. It was 1972, and cold, even for Santa Rosa, just down the road from where Blake grew up—the vineyards long harvested and the canes cut—sitting in a field of next year’s vines with Jeannie who didn’t give a damn about Vietnam, only about him, and for the first time Blake felt a spark of something resembling courage. There on that blanket capable of absorbing all his pain, where finally he asked Jeannie to marry him without a ring, spilling her wine, dark red in the muted sunlight and staining the blanket that was kept, like the rifle, through nearly forty years of marriage.
Her answer had been ‘yes’ of course, and then it rained, and the blanket became an umbrella for both of them, running between vineyard rows toward Blake’s car parked over on Graton Road, the doors never locked, where they dove into the back seat and made love hidden by the downpour beneath a mantle of daisies smelling of wine, wetness and cheap perfume.
But somewhere the rifle always waited, in the back of the car or under the bed, biding its time. And now the time has arrived for Blake to finish what he started many years ago, before he and Jeannie met, when he was desperate and alone.
He checks the clip; chambers a shell; depresses the safety. He places the muzzle beneath his chin and prepares to pull the trigger. Not difficult to do. He’s killed with this weapon before. But nearby lies the blanket, a green field of flowers from a happier time, and on it the blood red stain from the wine that was spilled while proposing to Jeannie, who loved him in spite of all those men he murdered, and Blake can’t pull the trigger—can’t end his life this way.
He carries the blanket into the bedroom. He drapes it over the body of his dead wife and sits down, defeated. The blanket covers Jeannie completely, the white flowers flowing around the contours of her body, and suddenly Blake realizes that the woman he married is gone, and that life only matters to the living.
“Well, Jeannie” he says with conviction, “looks like you saved me again.”
©2009 Tyler Pierce
