Shoot Me in My Horn

by Schuyler Dickson

I was sixteen years old when I robbed my first gas station. I had been sitting in my room Monday afternoon of spring break, holding my old stuffed animal, fantasizing about my wedding day. I was content to just sit there and wait until my boyfriend Jimmy got off work so we could ride around the back roads and drink some beer and mess around on top of this bridge that overlooks the Natchez Trace.
… The front door slammed. It was my mom and Ray, mom’s new boyfriend. It sounded like their voices had been scraped out of their throats and shot by a cannon through the walls. They were slamming things down on the counter in the kitchen, the jingle of keys and something plastic that sounded like a grocery bag with not much in it. I heard her say no, no, Trisha’s probably home and then I heard him dragging her by the hand and them tip-toeing graceful as elephants down the hall past my closed door. What was to come I’d heard before and didn’t much feel like hearing again.
… I set my stuffed bear back in the closet. I slammed my bedroom door. I could hear momma choking in the bedroom. On the counter-top next to the stove was a grocery bag filled with toilet paper and, right next to it, Ray’s keys.
… Old Ray thinks he’s really something: reigning five year champion at the dirt races in Memphis, manufacturer and goblin for the crystal m. He’s only five years older than me. He’s got a mullet and all these awful tats of big chested whores and rebel flags on his neck and arms. I got to know him real good a few years back when my ex-best friend Mary Lindsey dated him. She’d tell me how he used to like to squeeze her throat when they did it. Momma and him have been dating for six weeks or so. His mother stole our dog after he got out one day and momma went over there with Harvey’s shotgun, the only thing he left for me when he took off. She left the dog in the trailer and brought Ray to live with us.

… Ray’s got an old souped up Mustang with pipes on it loud enough to knock the cobwebs off a nun’s ass. It’s blue with a red racing stripe on the hood and a sticker on the back windshield that says “This vehicle protected by Smith and Wesson.” I smoked the tires in the driveway.
… I drove around for a while. It was four o’clock and Jimmy wouldn’t be off work for another hour and a half. It had been raining earlier so the streets were a little wet and it was still cloudy. Ray had a cd player and a bunch of Ted Nugent albums, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the thing working so I just listened to the radio. After a while, I had smoked all of Ray cigarettes and finished off half of a pint of peach schnapps that I found under the seat next to his nickel-plated .45 that he sometimes brought out at parties when he got lit up. The liquor had my head feeling a little clearer, like I had just taken a bath after not having one in a while.
… I cried a little. Something about driving outside of the city limits makes me cry. Not for any reason that I could point at. I can cruise along at about twenty miles per hour, taking in the forests and cow fields that smell like wet hay until I eventually start to feel like a part of something, even though I know the grass and the trees and the stray dogs I see don’t give a damn about me and I don’t really give a damn about them, but if I could just take a picture of the whole county at that one time just to have proof that you get born and you grow up and you turn old and then you die and they put you in the ground and all the nasty shit that happened to you just gets dissolved away with your skin and hair.

… I pulled up to a gas station in Farmhaven at 4:44. The gas station had two pumps on it and neon beer signs in the window that looked like they had to have been forty years old. I pulled Ray’s car right in front of the door and left it running.
… I had on a white tank top with my red bra that you could see under my shirt from a football field away. I checked my reflection in the glass of the door to make sure my hair was out of my face and my lipstick wasn’t going all over. I pushed the door open, and a cowbell tied to the rail went clank. The counter was just to the right of the door. Behind it was this young looking guy, kind of skinny, in a sleeveless white t-shirt and a camo Mississippi State hat. He was watching something on the TV above the counter.
… “That sign on the door,” I said, “about having to wear a shirt. That doesn’t apply to me, does it?” I stopped in the candy aisle to pick out some gum, trying to act as grown-up seeming as I could.
… “No shirt, no shoes, no service,” he said. He hadn’t even looked at me.
… I threw my act off and walked straight back to the cooler, grabbed a twelve pack, and toted it back up to the counter. He looked at the beer, looked at my chest, and then looked at me.
… “How old are you?”
… I bent over a little bit to let my tank-top drop. “Twenty-two.”
… He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms in front of his chest. “You got some ID on you?”
… “Why are you going to ask me how old I am if you’re going to check my license?” He stared at me. “I think I left it at home anyway.”
… “Sorry,” he said and turned back to the TV. He made a face that looked just like my father’s in a picture my mother keeps in her panty drawer. A cocky smile and raised eyebrow, as if to say, “Nice try, but I’ll always be better than you.”
… “C’mon,” I said, “I bet there’s some way you can sell this to me. I bet your boss would. Bet you haven’t seen a customer in six weeks.” I leaned my elbows against the counter. He kept watching TV. “Are you a queer or something?”
… “No.”
… “Then I bet we can work something out.”
… “I’ll tell you what. If you get back in your car, drive home and get some ID, then I’ll sell you some beer. Otherwise, I’m going to have to ask you to go.”
… He looked just like my father in the way he was moving his face. Tight lips, skinny nose, unshaven skinny face. Eyebrows that moved around so much that you wanted to get some safety pins and tack them in place like you would a bug collection. That’s when I got the gun from Ray’s car and walked back in and climbed up on the counter and touched the barrel of it to his sweaty little temples.

.… Let me tell you a little bit about Jimmy. To be honest, I never really knew him that good, nor did anybody. He caught on at the Nissan plant just as soon as it opened, just as soon as he graduated high school. On the B shift he’d stand in a line and open and close the driver side door to whatever car pulled up to him, just to make sure it was aligned right. Most of them were.
… He liked to try on personalities like some girls try on shoes. Once we were eating at a Red Lobster and the table next to us had an old man that passed out right on top of his plate of crab legs. The whole table, it must have been his family there, started panicking and looking around the whole room. Jimmy got straight up and walked over there and put his hand on the old man’s wrinkly neck and started looking at his watch. He told everybody he was a doctor and that the man would be all right, just all he needed was some Advil and Pedialite. They were thankful. He came back and rubbed his cheddar biscuit around on his plate and told me the guy was dead. The family sat there and ordered dessert.
… Looking back now, I’d have to say he had a mean streak in him. He was kind of smallish and liked to run his mouth a good bit that resulted in his getting beat—never in a fair fight, he’d claim—by county boys who thought all he needed was a lesson to make him act right. I’d say he was a bully in a kind of way, but not physically. He was a sweetheart to me most of the time. And I never caught him talking to other girls like all my other boyfriends.
… I waited for an hour, the two of us riding around with the headlights cutting through night and mosquitoes. Jimmy was quiet, which was not that odd for him. We had finished about three of the beers before I couldn’t hold it in any more. I fanned out the money from the cash register and acted like I was wiping my sweat with it.
… “Where’d you get that?” he asked. Jimmy’s hair was long and in his face, his bangs swooped to the side just like every other man that’s lived in this town for sixty years. Down the high school halls are graduation pictures that date back since they started the academy—the day following Brown v Board—and every single dude in the picture has the exact same haircut. You can hold your finger at a certain level and walk down the halls and have a line straight as connect the dots along these fellows’ bangs. His shirt was a v-neck with pit-stains yellow as Ray’s teeth. He didn’t much feel like fooling around.
… “I took it,” I said.
… “From who?”
… “A boy,” I said. “That boy’s going to remember me.”
…
… I got back home that night and Ray was sitting on the couch in the dark. In the flashing light of the muted TV, I could see his eyes were red. The red light spread and flashed on his tattoos that lay in a jerking grease over his muscles. He had his boots propped up on the coffee table.
… “Little slut come on home,” he said. “You touch my car again and I’ll break your jaw.”
… “Where’s mom?”
… “In the back, getting over it.”
… “Getting over what?”
… “Me.” I could tell he was proud of himself. He pulled his legs off the coffee table and set them on the floor. I was still standing at the door. My heart was beating fast and I felt all the beer starting to wear off.
… “That’s not what I heard,” I said. “I heard you’re hung like a toddler.”
… He stood up slowly and started tugging at the sleeves of his t-shirt. He started walking at me with his head hung down. I wanted to back up toward the refrigerator but I didn’t. He lifted his big hands and started touching my hair.
… “I bought you some toilet paper,” he said.
… “So?”
… “That’s what daddy’s do, buy their little girls presents.” I watched the big-tittied redhead on his arm dance around. I felt his hands shake on my ears. I wanted him to try something and have my mother walk in.
… “I’m not a little girl.” I felt his hand get to my throat. All the power I was feeling earlier had gone. I was that tattoo between my eyes and his, captive, close as his skin. At once the hope my mother would walk in turned to dread. I deserved not to swallow. I deserved for my life to end, for a picture of me to be sketched in fading colors on the shell of a man who had decided that I wasn’t fit for life, that all the family interventions and syphilitic boyfriends could be foregone in this one second where all he had to do was squeeze and whisper and let me go on to my home in the ground. I closed my eyes. He let go and kissed my forehead.
… “Don’t you ever steal my car again,” he said.
…
… The next morning I woke up and found my mother in the kitchen drinking coffee, holding the cup in two hands. She eyeballed me for a second and then turned around and starting fumbling around in the refrigerator. She pulled out the milk carton and slipped a Ziploc bag out of her robe pocket and dumped some pills out on the counter. I went and stretched out on the couch. I turned on the TV and laid there looking at the ceiling.
… “You see Ray bought you some toilet paper.”
… “It looks like he stole it out of a library.”
… “Oh hush. He’s takin’ care of you.” She scooped a handful of pills off the counter and threw them in her mouth and sucked some milk from the carton.
… “You been eating those all morning?”
… She was stumbling around a little bit. She put her arms on the counter and started humming something.
… “God!” She turned around. I saw her face and saw that her neck was bruised and her eyes had these huge bags under them, and the robe she was wearing came apart to show her chest and her stomach. “I’m in love.”
… “With what?”
… “Hey, did I tell you we were going out of town this week?”
… “No.”
… “This afternoon. Ray, they’ve got some kind of dirt race in a couple of days. And we were talking. We were talking about how we would go on to the dog races in West Memphis. You know. Memphis but in Arkansas. Before Ray drove his car.” She poured her coffee into the milk jug. “He’s taking care of us.”
… “Momma, what was daddy like?”
… She laughed. “Like the devil.” She pulled her robe closed. Gave me a sympathetic look. “Baby, you’re good. Good like me.”
…
… That afternoon Jimmy raided his father’s basement arsenal. We spread our tools out on the picnic table in my back yard. The yard is fenced in so nobody could really see us. We set up a target made out of a Styrofoam cooler with one of Ray’s shirts fitted over it and a foam basketball for a head. We went to studying the guns and knives like we had our bodies, seeing how each oiled piece fit perfectly into another, how the bullets sat one on top of the other until you squeezed the trigger and sent the thing to plow and bury its head straight into whatever it wanted. I liked the shotgun the best because you didn’t really have to aim. Jimmy liked these little throwing things that looked like metal playing cards that were sharp as razors. He’d pinch it between his fingers and flick his wrist right over his shoulder. His release was beautiful. It spun in its arc, straight and shining, tumbling over itself until it cut through the fabric and made the most beautiful sound when it lodged on the back side of the cooler, shooting cloth and the white bits across the yard. I could tell he practiced by himself a lot.
… After practice we went inside and changed into our church clothes. Jimmy put on his blazer and khakis with a Tabasco tie. I had the pink dress with a blue belt around the waist and flowers stitched on the shoulders. I had a matching pink hat. Jimmy was standing in the hallway, staring at a mirror, trying for the sixth time to do his tie.
… “What do you think, heels or flats?” I had one on each foot. He pulled the tie up and tried to slide it into the knot. It looked like a rat’s nest. He cussed and stared at my feet.
… “What the hell do I care?”
… “No, which looks better?”
… “Best wear the white ones, just in case we have to run.”
… “We’re taking a car, aren’t we?” He undid the knot and pulled the two sides of the tie to either side of his narrow shoulders. I took a deep breath. “I can tell you right now I’m not running anywhere. These are my best clothes and if you end up getting them muddy then mom’s going to wring my neck.”
…
… We decided that since Jimmy hadn’t done it yet, he’d go first. We had this old looking revolver that was supposed to be from World War Two. We left all the other guns and things in a sports bag under my bed.
… Pulling out of the driveway in Jimmy’s truck, we had our first argument as a couple. I thought that since he was going to be the one having all the fun, then I should at least get to be the getaway driver. He said no, that he didn’t like anybody else driving his truck and that I couldn’t drive so well anyway. I sulked in the passenger seat for a while.
… We decided we would take the Natchez Trace. It’s an old road. Owned by the feds. It’s got all these nice rest stops with historical signs that are tucked away behind fields and fields of old growth forests. If you go down the cutoffs long enough, you almost always find a gas station with one person working behind the counter and no cops anywhere in sight. We drove south for forty minutes before we turned off.
… Jimmy’s target was a run of the mill bait shop situated across the street from an old plantation that had been turned into a museum. The shop had two old gas pumps. The signs on the front of the building advertised plate lunches. I could smell the cooking grease when Jimmy opened the car door. I watched him slip the gun in his front pocket. He shut the door and tugged on the knot of his tie. I watched him march across the gravel and yank the gun out as soon as swung open the door to the bait shop. The windows of the truck were a little dirty. The way he opened his mouth made it look like he was yelling. The door closed and I couldn’t see him any more. I turned up the air conditioner. It seemed as soon as Jimmy walked in he was walking out. There were bills sticking out of his pockets. A single got caught up in the wind and blew away while he opened the driver side door. He eased away from the gas station as calm as if he was waking up.
… “Jimmy,” I said, “that was fast.”
… “Yeah, guy only had twenty dollars in the register, most of it in ones.”
… “You’re not supposed to do it that fast. It’s supposed to be fun.”
… He looked at me like he was bored. “Let’s do something else.”
… “Oh, no, not yet. I still get my turn. I didn’t get dressed up like this for nothing.”
… “That guy didn’t even look scared when I pulled that gun on him. It looked like he’d been robbed more than somebody’d bought stuff from him.”
… “Did he say anything to you?”
… “What?”
… “I said, did he say anything to you?”
… “No. I told him this here’s a holdup and to give me all his money, and he said, when he was done, ‘Is that all I can do for you?’”
…
… We got back on the Trace and rode for ten miles. “How did it feel?” I asked. Jimmy had the wheel grabbed tight. His eyes met the road and nothing else. It was as if I wasn’t even in the car. It was warmer than usual. We had the windows down and the air seemed to roll in like a blanket on top of a bed.
… “It felt like I was a clown.” The Trace bent past a reservoir. From the road you could see men fishing in metal boats. We took a right off the pavement on to gravel. We saw a sign that said there was an Indian mound nearby. “You think this’ll do?”
… “A clown?”
… “I bet there’s something down this road.”

.. Above us the tree line broke to sky, cloudless, half-mooned. We drove down that road for a mile until we saw Emerald Mound, a mountain of grass that took up half the windshield. As we got closer I could tell there were three levels to it. The first level was rounded and about ten feet high. A set of stairs right off the road went straight up to the second level, which sat right on top of the first like a wedding cake. The third level was the furthest from us. It only took up about a fourth of the back part of the mound, but it was as tall as the first two levels combined.
… “That’s a hell of a place for God to put a mountain,” I said.
… “That’s where Indians buried people. Most of that is bones, not dirt like you would think. Probably arrowheads and necklaces and all sorts of stuff you could sell to some weirdo on the internet for a whole bunch of money.”
… “I believe that’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
… There was a place that looked like a service station right across the road from the mound. But it didn’t have any gas pumps, and signs in the windows and on the roof advertised beer and snack food and crawfish with live music on Fridays. Jimmy pulled into a spot right in front of the door. The building was concrete and only had one small window that was barricaded with metal bars. Jimmy slid the gun over the middle console. He rested his head back against the headrest and told me not to take too long. I felt like he was about to break up with me.
… “But I don’t have any pockets. Where am I supposed to hide this thing?” It felt heavy in my hand, much heavier than any of the pistols we had practiced with.
… “What the hell you need to hide it for? You’re holding that bitch up, not playing show and tell.” He shook his head at me and then decided I wasn’t even worth looking at. “Hopefully they got a bunch of money so we can eat lobster tonight.”
… I opened the car door, stepped out, and looked at the mound. It was as if I could still see the chief in his hut at the highest point, looking over all his people, all the kids running around half naked with sticks and all the women churning butter in their teepees. All of them leading their terrible lives until somebody decided to take pity on them and lay them to sleep in the womb of the grave they lived on.
… My shoes were getting dusty from the gravel. I kept the pistol down along my side as I pushed open the door.
… The counter was right in front of the door. The place was crammed with rows of shelves, the ones up close with candy bars and jerky but they were out of sync with the rest of the place, which was stocked from bottom to top with Indian wares: headdresses and dreamcatchers and bright red and yellow scarves with pumpkins and squash and women painted on them. There were arrowheads lined up in rows in the glass case of the counter.
… “What can I do for you?” I jumped. Not five feet from me the attendant stood. His head was bald, and on one part there was a lump. It was on the right side. I would say it looked like a horn except it wasn’t made out of hair or bone. It was his skin. His eyes were blue and nice.
… “The register,” I said. I had practiced this in my head and was relieved that I didn’t stutter. What I forgot was to point the gun at him. I raised it up to eye-level. My fingers curled around the grip and I could see the pink fingernail polish was starting to chip. He leaned closer to me, put his elbows down on the counter right next to the cash register.
… “Sweety,” he said, “you’re gonna have to pull the hammer back on that thing to make it shoot.” He smiled at me. It looked like he whitened his top two middle teeth and left the rest to sit in the back and rot. I put my thumb on the hammer and tried to pull it back but I couldn’t. The metal wore a blister through my thumb, I was trying so hard to move it. “Here,” he said, sticking out his hand. “Give it here.” He leaned a little bit further over the counter and took the gun from me. I was amazed at how long his arms were. Something about him made me feel comfortable, but the sight of him holding that thing in his hands made my ears start ringing. He pushed the hammer back easily and held it back out to me. “That a nice one there. Old.”
… “Thanks. Now. If you could…” I let it rest back by my side. “If you could give me your money. Please.”
… “I believe you’re going to have to shoot me in my horn.” He pointed to the top of his bald head. He showed his teeth again. “Doctors won’t operate on it. Said it might have burrowed its way to my testicles.” He leaned his little bump right against the barrel of the gun.
… When I think about it, it’s all just a couple of muscles. He closed his eyes and licked his lips. A sneeze could’ve taken the thinking out of it. Or a finger cramp. If I wanted to, I could knock that little button off his skull and fish the growth out with my teeth. I could crawl into the hole there, live in his brain and watch his thoughts like home movies. I would come to know him better than a bride knows her groom. Take our bodies out of it, have our feelings become the only thing we are. We would dream the same dreams at night. We wouldn’t be two parts any more but more like two rocks side by side at the bottom of a river, the same thing happening to us at the same time. We’d be alone together, and when his body would stop working, we could go on to the other side with our skin touching.
… He opened his blue eyes and followed the trail of the gun to my fingers, past my wrist to my arm, my shoulder, my chin, my lips, and then my eyes. I was a child. I wanted back into the womb. He smiled at me as if he knew me. “Come on back whenever,” he said. “I’ll always be here.”
… I turned around and walked out.
…
… “How much did you get?” Jimmy asked. The engine was on and Jimmy mashed the gas pedal to rev the engine up. “What the hell did you do in there, braid each other’s hair?”
… “Nothing.”
… “What do you mean nothing. He didn’t have anything in the register?”
… “He wouldn’t give me anything.” I felt cold even though it was hot outside. Jimmy’s eyes got real small. I didn’t want him looking at me, so I stared out the window at the mound. “He wanted me to shoot him in his horn.”
… “Do what?”
… “I want to go home. I’m tired of this.”
… “He wanted you to shoot him?” Jimmy leaned his head back against the head rest and stared at the door of the building. The wind picked up and kicked some dust from the gravel up above the hood of the truck. He shook his head and stuck his hand out towards me. I couldn’t tell if we wanted to hold my hand or take something from me. “The gun.” I gave it to him and pulled the hem of my dress down to my knees. My eyes started burning, but I didn’t want to cry.
… Jimmy loosened his tie. “We have to move west,” he said. “This is our land, not the injuns’.” He adopted a Texas drawl and a deeper voice. “Savages, that’s all they are.”
… “I want to go home and get in bed.”
… “There won’t be no home once the red man organizes.”
… “Shut—” Jimmy swung the door to the truck open and crouched down low to the gravel. Doubled over, he put his index finger to his lips and looked at me. The gun was low and still cocked. Jimmy got to the door and pretended to bring his imaginary hat down over his eyes. He loosened his tie and pulled it out from under his collar and up to his mouth and nose where he tightened it. Jimmy kicked open the door and, one right after another, fired five shots into the attendant. The door closed and Jimmy disappeared again. The last shot I heard echoed around the concrete of the building and off the curved walls of the mound. A few minutes later Jimmy walked out. His hands were red. He opened the driver side door and sat down behind the wheel. He was breathing heavy. His face was pale and his lips were moving but he wasn’t saying anything.
… …“Here,” he said, and he threw the attendant’s horn in my lap.

####

Schuyler Dickson grew up in Mississippi. He lives in Chicago where he’s working on his MFA at Northwestern. You can find his work in Thuglit and Bartleby Snopes.