Gutshot by Amelia Gray Page A

you are just covered in hair. And I’ve never done a load of laundry in my life. And you are still technically married to my dealer. And I refuse to eat vegetables. And you can’t sleep unless you’re sleeping on the floor. And I am addicted to heroin. And honest to God, you got big tits but you make a shitty muse. And we are in Beaumont.”
    I said these were minor setbacks on the road to glory.
    “And,” he added, “the Dunkin’ Donuts is on fire.”
    Indeed it was. Customers streamed from the doors, carrying wire baskets of bear claws, trucker hatfuls of sprinkled Munchkins. “Get out of here,” one of the patrons said. “The damn thing is going up.”
    Listen, I said. We’re going to have to make it work, we’ll forge a life on our own and the child will lead us.
    The wall of donuts had fueled a mighty grease fire. The cream-filled variety sizzled and popped. Each ignited those within proximity. Their baskets glowed and charred. The coffee machine melted. The smoke was blue and smelled like a dead bird. I popped the lid off Kyle’s coffee cup and puked into it. All I had wanted that morning was an old-fashioned and the absence of puke. I said that everything would be all right, that we were living in the best of all possible Dunkin’ Donuts parking lots.
    He pushed some dirt over the test with the toe of his boot. “Poor thing,” he said. Between his sensitive nose and sour stomach, we both knew the next nine months plus the eighteen to twenty-two years after that would wreak some manner of havoc. I put the coffee cup on the ground because the trash bin inside was consumed by flames.
    He took my hand and we got out of there before the cops showed up to the fire and started checking IDs. He stopped at the Kroger and came out with half a dozen roses, which he laid between us on the dash.
    “Let’s get back to the Rio Grande,” he said. I tipped my seat back and dug in to sleep while he took the tollway. The coast was speckled with cities with names that would suit the spines on a grandma’s bookshelf. Sugar Land. Blessing. Point Comfort. Victoria.
    We ended up at the Days Inn in Corpus. Kyle examined a road map in his underpants while I took the bucket to the ice machine. A crowd of tourists were standing in the laundry room. They were speaking languages.
    A young woman touched my ice bucket. “We are looking for where Selena was murdered,” she said.
    I said I didn’t know what she meant.
    “Fifteen years ago at this very Days Inn,” the woman said. “I am disappointed in you.” An older woman was leaned up against the ice machine. She had her face pressed into her hands and her hands were pressed into the ice machine.
    “They won’t tell us where,” the younger one said. “They changed the numbers on the doors so we won’t find out.” She pulled me close. “There are secrets at this Days Inn,” she said.
    I said that there were secrets at every Days Inn. The ice machine was broken and the women wailed for unrelated reasons.
    “Our angel,” one of them said. She was holding a gilt-framed photograph of Selena singing on stage. She did resemble an angel. I wanted to lie down on the laundry-room floor.
    In the room, Kyle was eating a waffle the shape of Texas and reading the syrup packet. I stood in the open doorway.
    “The first ingredient is corn syrup,” he said. He was a shadow in the back of the long room in his buttoned shirt and a clean pair of pants. He had his shaving kit out on the table. The blade was drying and his face was shorn and cold. He said, “The second ingredient is high-fructose corn syrup.”
    I told him he looked like he was preparing for a funeral.
    They say that hotel-room floors have E. coli but I lay down anyway. Kyle came and settled near me. When he pressed his cheek against my belly I could feel the machine motion of his jaw grinding tooth on tooth. I said These are the fables we will tell our child.

 
     
    Gutshot
     
    The man was gutshot. His blood