been?”
She shook her head again.
“Want to go? How far’s Henton? We can drive over to Henton to see a moving picture. You gals come on over to the hotel with us and we’ll take you to Henton.”
“Tonight?”
“Or don’t Sacred Heart girls go to the moving pictures either?” asked Tommy.
“In the snow?”
“We drove in, didn’t we? How far’s Henton?”
“She’s got a boyfriend,” Anna said, nodding in Beverly’s direction.
Tommy looked to the right and the left. “Where? I don’t see him.”
Anna lowered her voice. “They’re going to get married.”
“Well, they’re not getting married tonight, are they?” said Frank.
“I’d think she’d want to be with a cowboy before she was married,” Tommy said. “Once anyway. Find out what she was missing.”
“Jesus Christ,” Wesley said. “She’s sitting right there.”
“You better watch your mouth there, brother. These are Sacred Heart girls.”
“Watch my mouth? Did you hear what he said?”
Anna wagged her finger in Tommy’s direction. “If her boyfriend heard you talk....”She shook her head gravely.
“Am I supposed to be scared?” asked Tommy.
Anna’s voice shifted and became like a little girl’s. “He’s coming to pick us up.”
“In a car?” asked Frank. “Or a wagon?”
Without taking her eyes from the window, Beverly spoke up. “He’s got a truck.”
In a falsetto, Tommy said, “A truck. He’s got a truck.”
“As soon as she graduates,” Anna volunteered. “That’s when they’re getting married.”
Tommy reached into his coat pocket. “We got to do something about this boyfriend.”
Frank leaned toward Beverly. “You’re awful young to be an old married woman.”
Tommy dropped the pistol on the tabletop and gave it a spin. The gun rumbled on the wood like far-off thunder. As it slowed, Anna and the boys watched to see where the barrel would finally point. It stopped—aimed just to the left of Tommy—and Wesley saw it clearly.
It was a .38 revolver, nickel plated, but the plating had worn off in so many places the gun was as black as it was silver. The black checkered grip was partially broken off and exposed the steel and the screw of the handle.
Wesley had seen it before. It was Tommy’s pistol—he had won it in a poker game from a classmate—and a sorry one at that. The cylinder wobbled and didn’t always line up the cartridge just right, and the action was so balky that the hammer might not fall with sufficient force to fire the gun. Frank had warned Tommy about the gun, telling him that it might blow up in his hand someday or send lead spraying out that loose cylinder.
All of them except Lester had handguns, and occasionally they brought them on a hunting trip so they could do a little target shooting with them or practice drawing and shooting from the hip. But they did not carry them into town, and they did not bring them into cafes.
Tommy picked up the pistol and held it loosely by his ear. “Now where’s this boyfriend?”
“How long you been carrying that?” asked Frank.
“Right along.”
Wesley twisted around in his chair, trying to get a better look at the gun. He wanted to see the end of the cylinder, to see if there were nothing there but black empty chambers or if there were the dark glinting nubs of bullets.
Anna said, “You better not let Mrs. Spitzer see you with that.”
Tommy sighted the gun out the window. “Do I wait for him to come in or should I drop him as soon as he drives up?”
“I don’t believe that will be necessary,” Frank said. There was a pitch of nervousness in his brother’s voice that Wesley hadn’t heard before.
Wesley didn’t want to look away from Tommy but he stole a glance at Beverly. She was sitting as still as ever, her hands on her lap, her eyes fixed on the street. She reminded Wesley of an old woman in Bentrock, Mrs. Gamble, who spent so many long hours in her porch swing—just sitting, not reading or sewing or shelling peas or counting rosary beads—that sitting came to seem an act of great endurance.
Tommy swung the pistol away from the window, and, just as he had earlier with an imaginary rifle, sighted in on the buffalo. “What do you bet I can take out one of those glass eyes?”
“You fire that thing in here,” said Frank, “and we’ll never get waited on.”
At that moment Lester returned to the table. He had seen Tommy waving the gun about. “Yeah, shoot up the place. That’d be real fucking smart.”
“Come on,” said Wesley. “These girls.”
Then, as though neither gun nor girls were there, as though he were simply speaking to his three hungry friends, as in fact he was, Lester said, “I ordered you all fried ham sandwiches and tomato soup. If that ain’t what you want, you go tell her. She’s back there making pies. The other lady didn’t come in today because of the weather. That’s how come she didn’t take our order right away. She’s doing it all herself.”
Frank had slid even closer to Anna, and, hunched over in his chair, he was talking softly to her, low and steady, and while he spoke he flicked his finger up and down on the hem of her dress. The motion looked idle, playful, unconscious, but each time he moved his finger her dress rode a fraction of an inch higher on her brown leg and then fell again. “Maybe you could show us your school,” he said. “Or where do you like to go? I’d like to see. Or we can go back to the hotel.... Keep us company. Tell us what it’s like in this part of North Dakota....” He nodded in Beverly’s direction. “She doesn’t have to come. If she’s worried about her boyfriend getting jealous. I understand. I don’t have a girlfriend myself right now, but I know how it is....”
Something moved outside. Wesley turned his head and saw the truck, suddenly there in front of the Buffalo Cafe, the smoke of the exhaust whipping away in the wind. The truck’s side window was frosted over, and Wesley couldn’t see the driver.
Beverly saw the truck too, and she jumped from her chair with amazing speed. She grabbed her friend’s arm and tried to pull her from her chair. “Let’s go!” Beverly said.
But her friend didn’t get up fast enough, and as Beverly went past, Tommy reached for her. He caught her by the coat, pulling it halfway off one arm. She tried to twist away from him, and her own grasp on her friend gave way just as Tommy released her.
Whatever the cause—her own momentum, or a wet
