Colonel Rutherford's Colt by Lucius Shepard

call.”
    â€œAll right.”
    She moved out into the aisle, then leaned across the table and kissed him, her tongue flirting briefly with his.
    The kiss brought everything inside him back to even. “That a promise?” he asked.
    â€œNot hardly, lover. That’s a gift subscription.”
    Â 
    * * *
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    By one o’clock the crowds had grown heavy, thick with teenage shoplifters and once-through gawkers. Jimmy propped his SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY sign against a display case, turned his chair sideways to the aisle, and sat holding the Colt in his lap. The buzz and mutter of the show seemed to be etching a pattern of static in his head, but the oil-smooth patina of the gun soothed him, and he fell to thinking about Colonel Hawes Rutherford, a big cold man, wide shoulders racked beneath his dress uniform, dark beard trimmed neat as a pencil sketch, standing beside the breakfast table, staring down at his wife’s breasts, nestled in the lacy shells of a peignoir. The sight caused him frustration—he had not been with Susan for several weeks—and also inspired a feeling of disdain toward this display of female softness, the very same that provoked his arousal. He was happiest when focused upon affairs of duty, whether negotiating with the sublimely corrupt officialdom of the country or directing the movements of materiel. He perceived himself to be a soldier in the service of, first, order and then the United States, and it sometimes galled him that the rigor of his mental life should be diluted by an addiction to the feminine, with all its cryptic delicacy and attendant confusions. This inborn condescension aside, there was no doubt the colonel loved his wife, even respected her in some pale fashion. Women, he felt, were due respect for the exact reasons they deserved protection. That they were weak and sought to prevail in life spoke to an admirable persistence. As for love, the colonel had written a treaty with his brain, ceding a certain portion of his mental life to the nourishing of a smallish flame notable for its steadiness. Each day prior to returning home—or if he was away—before retiring, he would think those thoughts he deemed essential to the maintenance of the flame, including appreciations of Susan’s beauty and sense of style, her effectiveness at state functions, her efficiency in overseeing the servants, her fidelity. For the duration of the exercise he would faithfully put from mind those elements of her personality he found wanting. He excused his proprietary attitude toward Susan and the abuses that arose from it by countenancing them necessary in order to make the flower of her womanhood bloom, and on those rare occasions when he was confronted by the realization that he had misused her, he forgave himself—in his view, when it fell to an older man to instruct a young woman, the acts of instruction themselves were bound to stimulate certain primitive albeit godly desires, and he was nothing if not a natural man. So it was that he managed to sustain the self-image of an honorable, kindly, and loving husband, a far cry from the unfeeling, humorless monster Susan perceived him to be.
    As he stood that morning gazing down at his wife’s charms, his faith in this self-image caused him to dismiss all doubts relating to the fact that he knew Susan would likely not wish to hear what he intended to tell her. “My dear,” he said. “I’ll be leaving tomorrow for Guantanamo.”
    Susan, who was reading a letter from her mother, did not lift her eyes from the paper and murmured an acknowledgement.
    â€œI would hope,” the colonel went on, “to be received by you this evening.”
    It appeared to him that Susan flinched an instant before she whispered her assent, yet she offered no objection or excuse as she had done in the past. Feeling that he was making good progress with her, the colonel picked up his hat, bid her good day, and