Shots Fired Page 16

  Do you have other children?

  Where do you live?

  When will I see you again?

  Why an Indian? Why an Indian child? Why me?

  But she said, “Don’t talk.”

  • • •

  IN MID-APRIL there were hints of spring, and several days of cloudless but pure sunshine that seemed to fill Jimmy up like red meat. He’d not realized how the endless gray days had beaten him down until the sun came out. He was sitting on a bench in a small park near their apartment building, reading a note from Sophie in the sun, when Lyle joined him wearing sunglasses.

  “That from her?” Lyle asked.

  “She wants to see me again,” Jimmy said, charmed by the way she’d written the note in English, not her language, the way she’d drawn out the block letters. He wondered who had helped her.

  Lyle shook his head, lit a cigarette, blew out the smoke in a long stream. “You’re doing this wrong, Jim. The point isn’t to get all monogamous. The point is to spread your love around, baby.” He said it with a flourish. “You understand what I’m saying?” Lyle asked.

  Jimmy grunted.

  “This town’s filled with French women who want to have little Jimmys, little children of nature. Why deny them?”

  He wasn’t sure how to answer, and knew Lyle wasn’t the type who wanted to hear what he was thinking, which was a combination of his carnal desire to see her again and a leaden realization that she could do him harm if he got too close.

  “Might as well go,” Lyle said. “Just don’t be shooting blanks. That’ll really piss her off.”

  “You think that’s why she wants to see me, then?” Jimmy said.

  “Why else?” Lyle said.

  • • •

  SOPHIE MET HIM at the Champs-Elysées Clemenceau station, wearing a scarf and large sunglasses and she seemed very happy to see him. The moment he touched her hand, to give it a little hello squeeze, he felt her cool electricity shoot through him and it made his toes curl in his boots.

  She told him they couldn’t go back to the apartment again, they were going to another place that was “not in such a nice neighborhood.”

  “It is Gabrielle’s,” Sophie said. “She gave me a key.”

  He asked why they didn’t go back to her husband’s apartment, and she answered by dismissing the question with a wave of her hand.

  They walked a long way and were soon virtually alone on the sidewalk. Jimmy noticed the decline in the appearance of the buildings from the area around the station, and the lack of people. He saw several hand-painted signs in French and Arabic.

  “Not so nice,” she said.

  They turned a corner and he saw four Middle Eastern men in their twenties on the sidewalk coming at them smoking cigarettes, chattering. One barked a laugh at something another said.

  Jimmy felt her clamp down on his hand, practically pull him across the street to the other sidewalk. He didn’t like being steered like that, as if he were running away.

  The men certainly noticed, and one of them said something that made the others laugh. Jimmy didn’t know the words, but could read the tone and body language. They thought he was a coward for avoiding them like that. So he stopped, fixed his stare on them as they cruised down the sidewalk across the street.

  “Jimmy, no,” Sophie whispered urgently.

  He shot a glance at her. She was scared, the skin pulled back on her face in a way that seemed to flatten it against her skull.

  The men were now adjacent to them, talking among themselves, staring back at him with fixed grins on their faces. All were unshaven, with shocks of dark hair, dark eyes. Jimmy heard the words “cowboys and Indians” clearly amid the Arabic. He felt a little tremble in the inside of his legs.

  In a moment, they were past. Sophie tugged hard on his arm, and he gave in when the men were far enough away to not make it look like a retreat. He wondered what he would have done if they had come at him. He was confident he would have lost. He was no fighter, and vowed to buy a knife or a gun, some kind of weapon.

  In Gabrielle’s apartment, Sophie said he was “brave and foolish,” which he took as a compliment.

  Then she stepped up to him and kissed him lightly for the first time, and took his hand and pressed it against her breasts. He liked that.

  Then, deliberately, she moved his hand down until it covered her belly.

  “I hope our baby is brave and foolish, too,” she said.

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “Oui. Merci beaucoup.”

  Which sounded to Jimmy like “good-bye,” although they had sex again but it was different. She was clearly going through the motions, waiting for him to finish, her hands no longer grasping at him, pulling him in, but placed on his back because she had no place else to put them. He pretended not to notice. Afterward, while she sprawled back and he caught his breath, he shifted in the bed and lay his head on her belly. When he did, he felt her stomach muscles tighten.

  She said, “No,” and wriggled away.

  “I wanted to try and hear the baby,” he said.

  She shook her head with distaste. He wondered if he had offended her in some way.

  “I don’t like that,” she said, in explanation.

  He sat up, the moment over. “I have to ask you something,” he said. “Why me?”

  “It’s not about you. It’s about my husband.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She shook her head as if to say, Of course you don’t understand.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Non. It’s time for you to go.”

  As he dressed he said, “When do I get to see you again?”

  She clucked at him and shooed him out the door.

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT, Jimmy had a dream that he and his son were fishing on Rapid Creek on a bright sunny day in early fall, catching firm, colorful rainbow trout on grasshopper flies. His son was dark like him but had Sophie’s long limbs, delicate features, and full mouth. Jimmy had to put his rod down and untangle his son’s line from bushes and branches while his son chattered at him in French and Lakota but not English, and Jimmy could understand every word.

  “You’re a good boy,” Jimmy said, rubbing his son’s head.

  The boy said, “He tuwa Ina he?” (Who is my mother?)

  • • •

  “DON’T BE such a dumb fuck,” the cowboy said to Jimmy before taking a long pull of red wine from a bottle and handing it to Lyle. “You don’t want to see her again. Believe me, it’s for the best.”

  “Yeah,” Lyle said, accepting the bottle, “don’t be such a dumb fuck.”

  It was after midnight and the stock was fed and watered and all of the customers had cleared the area although a few stragglers still wandered through the rides and exhibits. Lyle, Jimmy, and a cowboy from Montana also named Lyle sat on hay bales in the dark as a mist began to fall. They were on their third bottle.

  “Believe me,” Lyle from Montana said, “I been over here going on seven years. I married into them, for Pete’s sake. I even speak pretty passable French. But I’ll never be inside. They don’t let you in. You’re either French or you ain’t. That’s what folks don’t understand.”

  Lyle said, “Listen to what the cowboy says, Jimmy.”

  “I mean, I sort of amuse ’em,” Lyle from Montana said, “Monique’s relatives, and all. But it ain’t like America, where you can choose to be an American and, by God, you’re an American. It don’t matter what you do here, you can never be French.”

  “I don’t want to be French,” Lyle said. “I just want to fuck their women.”

  Lyle was on a roll, said, “I don’t even think they like each other very much, is the goofy thing. They turn on each other like goddamned coyotes all the time. But I think the thing is they hate everybody e
lse even more.”

  Jimmy said, “I really felt something with her. I think she did, too. Especially that first time.”

  Lyle moaned and rolled his eyes. Lyle from Montana looked away.

  Lyle said, “She was fucking herself through you. Take it for what it’s worth.”

  Lyle from Montana said, “Hell, yes.”

  Jimmy didn’t want to discuss it further with either Lyle. And he certainly didn’t want to tell them about the dream he kept having.

  “Maybe you should go home,” Lyle said.

  “Maybe I should,” Jimmy said angrily.

  “I thought you were the smart one,” Lyle said. “Guess not.”

  “Boys,” the cowboy said, slapping the thighs of his Wranglers and standing up, “I think it’s time for me to hit the trail.”

  • • •

  SOPHIE AND GABRIELLE were at the next reception at the American embassy, this one for the states of Oklahoma and Texas, whose guests frustrated Jimmy and Lyle by bringing a few of their own Indians, Cherokees.

  “We ought to take those Cherokees downstairs and kick their asses,” Lyle said, glowering. “Look. Gabrielle is flirting with one of them, the way she keeps sashaying past him, fluttering her eyes. What a cow.”

  Jimmy was wearing his beaded jacket, drinking a beer (he and Lyle had decided beer was an okay drink image-wise, as long as they didn’t pour it in a glass), trying not to stare at Sophie. She refused to acknowledge him, and he was hurt and angry.

  “Leave it be,” Lyle said. “You had your fun. Move on.”

  “I can’t just move on.”

  “The hell you can’t.”

  “I can’t,” Jimmy said, putting the beer aside and striding toward her.

  As he approached her, she turned her head to him, her eyes warning him off behind a frozen smile.

  “Sophie . . .”

  “Hello,” she said, reaching out to shake his hand, her eyes telling him to leave. “Nice to meet you,” she said in English. Her casual dismissal enraged him, and he squeezed sharply on her hand, but she didn’t react.

  “Please meet my husband,” she said through gritted teeth, but still with the smile. “Marcel. Marcel?”

  A compact, stocky, dark man turned from another guest. Jimmy let go of her hand, but not fast enough that Marcel didn’t see the hard exchange. The next second told Jimmy everything.

  Marcel’s eyes flashed from Jimmy’s hand to Jimmy’s face and clothes, then to Sophie, to her stomach, then back to Jimmy—where they hardened into cold black stones.

  He knew everything except who it had been, Jimmy thought. And now he knew that.

  Although conversations continued, champagne was drunk, and Ambassador Bob Westgate tapped the microphone to introduce his new guests, for Jimmy the world had suddenly shrunk and become superfluous and the only people in it were Sophie, Marcel, and his son, imprisoned inside her.

  Sophie looked scared, as she had when they engaged the Middle Eastern men. She put her hand on Marcel’s arm. He shook it off violently, and she recoiled.

  So this was about him, Jimmy realized. A way to spite him or get his attention. It was never about Jimmy, or Jimmy and Sophie. And maybe not about the baby, either.

  Marcel took a step toward Jimmy, closing the space between them. He was four inches shorter than Jimmy, but his aura of malevolence more than made up for the difference. In a guttural voice, he ripped off a stream of words in French that reminded Jimmy of canvas tearing. Jimmy didn’t know the words, but he knew he’d been threatened.

  Jimmy growled back, in Lakota, “Micinksi, tapi tonikja je?” (Son, how is your liver?)

  Which made Marcel flinch, step back, and glare at Jimmy with unmistakable surprise.

  And Sophie turned her attention from Marcel to Jimmy to Marcel to Jimmy. She didn’t step between them, but stayed at Marcel’s side. Making her choice.

  Marcel eventually worked up a kind of superior, heavy-lidded smirk, grasped Sophie’s arm, and led her out of the room. Jimmy watched, his heart thumping so hard he wouldn’t have been surprised if his breastplate rattled, hoping Sophie would look back over her shoulder at him. When she did he saw in her eyes not reassurance but a look that shocked and scared him: pity, disgust.

  “Wow,” Lyle said, suddenly next to him, “I think I know who he is now. He’s some kind of famous politician or gangster. I’ve seen him on TV. And I think he said you’re a dead man. Man, she played you, didn’t she?”

  “I don’t understand,” Jimmy said.

  “You never will. They live in their own little world, these people. I’ve tried to tell you that, dude.”

  • • •

  FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, Jimmy didn’t leave their apartment except to go to the Wild West Show with Lyle and two cowboys who picked them up. Through the window, he watched leaves pop from buds on branches like green popcorn, felt the city turn from skeletal to lush, full, and shadowed. The bite vanished from the air and was replaced by sultry warmth and Parisian light that seemed more like set design than nature.

  He used Lyle’s computer to find out more about Marcel Duxín, and although he couldn’t read the language, what he found justified his self-imposed exile. Marcel had been involved in some kind of sex and public works kickback scandal in 1999. Newspaper photos showed him in a coat, tie, and handcuffs, being led from a building with the same smirk he’d turned on Jimmy. A trial, another scandal involving the judge and some high-administration officials (she’d said he “worked with the government”), his release. Another investigation in 2003, another arrest, same result. Something about Marcel Duxín, either what he did or who he knew, made him untouchable, like Al Capone. Jimmy couldn’t understand, but he really didn’t need to. As Lyle said, it was something very French.

  Also very French, Jimmy thought, was how much more prominence Marcel’s scandals got in the newspaper than the disturbances, riots, and rising crime in the suburbs of Paris. Those things were relegated to back pages.

  He found himself thinking about Sophie.

  Lyle said, “Are you gonna go home?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “What’s keeping you? That Sophie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything else?”

  “The baby.”

  Lyle struck his forehead with the heel of his hand.

  Jimmy said, “It’s different, Lyle. I thought we were making Indian babies for French women who loved and wanted them, showed them off. I don’t trust this guy Marcel not to do something bad to that baby. Or to Sophie.”

  Lyle was exasperated, said, “This isn’t your business. This isn’t even your country.”

  “It’s my responsibility.”

  “Idiot. It’s her baby. It’s their baby, I hate to tell you. You boned her, is all.”

  “I keep having these dreams, Lyle.”

  Lyle’s face was dark with anger, his eyes bulged. He wanted to say more, but turned, grabbed a jacket from the back of the couch, said, “I’m going out. I gotta get me some air.” Slammed the door before Jimmy could point out Lyle had taken Jimmy’s jacket by mistake.

  Lyle wasn’t back in time to catch a ride to the Wild West Show with the cowboys. Jimmy expected to see him there, and looked for him all the way to showtime.

  After the 9:30 performance, Jimmy was brushing down the horses in the corrals with a currycomb when three police officers came backstage. He saw them talking to Buffalo Bill, then one of the haughty Nez Perce. He saw the Nez Perce point at him, and lead the police his way.

  “They’re looking for James Two Bulls,” the Nez Perce said, shaking his head. “They say they found your bloody jacket by the river with your Disney ID badge in the pocket. They think you got into something with some Arab guys. You want to set them straight?”

  Jimmy thought, Marcel.

  • • •


  LYLE’S BLOATED BODY kissed the milk chocolate surface of the Seine River two days later. The police who escorted Jimmy to the morgue to identify his cousin didn’t speak English. The only thing Jimmy could understand was they thought Lyle had wandered into the wrong neighborhood.

  Which is what he told Lyle’s mother when he called her.

  Afterward, he called the airline to make a reservation home. Due to a general strike, there was no availability for a week, and even that was subject to last-minute change.

  He told no one he was leaving. Or that he’d booked reservations for two.

  Then he stole letterhead stationery and sent two tickets to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show with backstage passes to Monsieur and Madame Duxín courtesy of the Walt Disney Company.

  • • •

  HE TRIED not to look at them, tried not to stare. They sat in the front row in the dark, wearing straw cowboy hats with green bands that read Wyoming. Marcel seemed to be enjoying himself immensely, cheering when he was supposed to, calling for more and more wine from the waitresses. Sophie looked wary, and despite his face paint, Jimmy was sure she recognized him during the mystical ceremony act. The test would be if she turned to her husband and pointed him out. She didn’t.

  Jimmy watched from the shadows of the stock entrance as Annie Oakley did her trick-shooting. The audience loved her. When it came time to select an audience member to fire at targets, she selected Marcel. Jimmy had arranged it with her. Spotlights found Marcel, and the rest of the crowd cheered him on. Buffalo Bill helped him into the sandy arena, joked in French about “not shooting any of the performers in his Wild West Show,” and Marcel hammed it up in the limelight, clowning with exaggerated gestures and pretending to reach into his jacket for his own gun instead of taking the rifle filled with blanks. He blew a kiss to Sophie, who responded with a frozen, cadaverous grin.

  “Have you ever fired a gun before?” Annie asked over the speakers.

  “Oui,” Marcel said, winking at her, “many times!”

  “Ooooh,” Annie said, pretending to be impressed.

  Marcel gave her a kiss on the cheek, and acted as if he were going to squeeze her buttocks. The crowd howled. Sophie looked mortified.