Do the Weird Crime, Serve the Weird Time

intervenes. But probably not with a.22, probably such cosmic allotments are determined by angels.

I don’t know about angels. I have never been sure about God. I’ve thought I should drag my butt down to church, so I would get a chance to meet people, talk with people. I think it has been ten years since anyone stepped into my house. I mean other than a plumber.

I wonder if Velma thought about God, when they shot her.

She knew she was going to be shot that’s the important part. She had been sitting at the swivel chair at her desk in the bedroom. She would have swiveled argon as they came up the stairs. They had clipped off her power. Things were dark. I bet she was getting up the steam to go downstairs and check her fuse box. Her wiring was bad, like every house on this block, they hadn’t figured on people having washing machines and dishwashers and satellite TV. She probably had already turned around, with that very resolved and determined face she had for everything, and was about to get up. She would have seen them head first. She would have known if she knew them.

If the FBI is right, she would have known that she didn’t know them. So she had to know she was going to die. People don’t show up in the dark to give you flowers.

She could have seen the cold barrel of the gun. The light from the street light would have let her see it. I have measured this. My own bedroom is just as far from the streetlight. I have tried to make it just like hers. I turnoff all the lights and then I try out different things with mirrors and stopwatches. I want to know how long she had to think about it. She couldn’t have time to think all the things I’ve thought about it. I’ve had weeks and weeks. I suspect that she had less than a minute, from when she saw them to the bullet entering her forehead.

She didn’t get up. She was sitting when the bullet struck. Maybe she was really defiant, refusing to get up for some hooligan that had disturbed her house. Maybe she was afraid. I’ve got to know what she thought. That way I’m prepared. I can’t imagine an event like that happening. How can you die and not be prepared? So I try out things.

I got the key to her house.

No one knows this. I did not tell the sheriff. Long ago she gave a key to my wife, so that my wife could carry in the mail and newspaper; when Velma had to go to Ohio that time and take care of her sister. My wife never gave the key back.

I remembered it a few days after the shooting. The FBI had come and gone and the sheriff was done with the place. There would be some months before the county would figure out who the house belonged to. So it just set there full of darkness and mystery.

One night I waited till two in the morning and then I went in. I took a little flashlight and made my way up the stairs. I went to her swivel chair and I sat down in it, swiveling around each time the hose settled, trying to imagine the killer coming up the stairs in the dark. I could see his head; it was almost like he was there, but I didn’t know what I would think. What would my last thoughts be, if I knew they would be my last thoughts. I wondered if she would have thought of her husband that had abandoned her forty years ago.

Just think of it. She was with that guy for six, seven months and that was what had shaped her whole life. It gave her the Ice Palace. It gave her a reputation as a woman that men run away from. It gave her every unhappy day. All the other six months, all the half years since had done so much less, except for the night of the Fourth. Perhaps it set her free.

I have been back in the house more often. At first I was very careful. I would late until early morning. Some mornings I couldn’t do it. I would fall asleep about midnight, and then when I opened my eyes, rosy-fingered dawn had taken the sky. I realized though, that no could see me enter from the back of her house, anyway. Just as no one had seen the killer enter. I would just wait until nightfall.

The house was hot, since there was no power and therefore no AC. I really thought a good deal about ice cream. Someone had emptied out the refrigerator. I guess that is lagniappe for the sheriff. Since the crime investigation is over I can touch things. I touch her desk, I lay in her bed. Sometimes I get down on all fours and touch the bloodstain on the carpet with my forehead. I listen. Thing are very quiet in the house, so you can hear anything. I heard a leaf from one of her big maples hit the roof. In a few months it will be autumn. Soon the house will belong to somebody. Maybe the county can claim it, but it will stop being empty. Stop being our house.

I wish she could tell me what she thought.

I tried to find out things from the sheriff about the investigation, but he either knew nothing, or told me nothing. I found out that he talked about me. There’s a bar in town called the Shamrock, and I went there the night in August when it had been over a hundred that day and I needed something cool. I hadn’t been in years, and the bartender told me that the sheriff said I was obsessed about the case. Implied I was in love with the widow MacPhearson.I laughed. He laughed. I ain’t never going in there again.

I’m not in love with her. I just want to know what she thought. I lived next to her for forty years. I don’t know what she thought.

We were both the same. We never took vacations. We we’re born here. We never left the city except briefly. We looked out at the same street. We knew the same people. We read Reader’s Digest and the TV Guide. We shopped at the Sac-n-Pac and the HEB. Watered our lawns on the same days. Everyday she would say to me, “Good Evening Mr. Clemens.” Most of the year, she would add, “Hot enough for you?” I would say “Good Evening Mrs. MacPhearson, can’t complain and it wouldn’t do any good if I did.” I never asked her what would happen if suddenly some were to kill her. Kill her with a real bullet and then bounce a dart off of her. I never asked what she would be thinking of. Suddenly it was dark, darker than it had been for forty years since her husband ran out on her, dark. She would be assessing whether or not to bother to try and fix the lights, and habit and “common sense” would say, “yes, go fix the lights.” Then she would hear the killer’s footsteps. Come at last, after all those years of waiting. She may have had time to straighten her hair. Time to formulate one last greeting. No, she would have been silent. Silent like I am every night as I sit in her chair. She would have turned to face them. She had forty years to prepare. Up till the last minute, she would have thought that it could have been him, coming back after all those years to thank her for keeping their dream alive after so many miserable lonely mornings. Thank you, honey. And she could have told him—what? Which of the many speeches prepared for over the years.

But it wasn’t him. Just some random person, like any of the faces that she saw in the Ice Palace everyday. Then she had a moment for her last thought on earth.

I pray every night when I sit here, that her last thought was of ice cream, thick and flowing from the spigot, flowing on into eternity.

SHRIMP ANARCHY

1? cup onion

1 cup celery

2 medium green peppers

4 cloves garlic

1 lb. cleaned raw shrimp

? cup margarine

2 cups tomato sauce

1 cup water

2 tsps. minced parsley

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. Cayenne pepper

2 bay leaves

3 cups rice (prepare separately)

Chop onion, celery, peppers, and garlic. Cook in margarine fat for about five minutes. Remove from heat; stir in tomato sauce, water and seasonings. Simmer about ten minutes. Add shrimp, cover and cook for ten to twenty minutes until shrimp are pink and tender. Serve over hot rice.

While shrimp are in preparation have your local troop perform the following actions:

I. Begin calling all local branches of the federal government and tell them that their department has come under fire in the national budget cutting process. Advise them that the only hope for their jobs is an immediate flight to Washington to testify before the Senate finance committee. The bureaucrats will then flee their offices. As