He braced the butt of the shotgun on the floor and placed the other end in his mouth. He kicked off his right sandal and stuck his big toe in the trigger guard.
He pressed down with his toe.
Nothing.
He pressed again. Still nothing. The damn thing wouldn’t budge. He took the barrel out of his mouth and looked down. The safety was still on. He reached for it but the gun was too long, and he couldn’t get to it with his toe still in the trigger. He tried to pull the toe out, but it had swollen and was stuck.
Jethro sulked on the end of the bed, hanging his head pitifully, his big toe turning purple. He grabbed the bottle of Dickel again. “Exquisite,” he sighed. “Even in suicide I have become a buffoon.”
The motel room door crashed open. Five tropical shirts stood in the doorway.
“Where’s our briefcase!”
Jethro screamed. He jumped up and ran for the bathroom.
“Get him!” yelled Ivan.
It was difficult for Jethro to run, dragging the shotgun. The sixteen-gauge swung out and hit the bottom of the dresser, knocking off the safety.
Jethro took another step for the bathroom.
Bang.
Another step.
Bang.
Jethro hobbled as fast as he could, the shotgun firing with each step, spraying a tight pattern of lead pellets at everything within six inches of the floor.
The detective parked behind the Orbit Motel and trotted quickly toward an upstairs room but slowed when he noticed five sets of bloody footprints coming down the steps.
A paramedic was inside, trying to get Jethro’s toe out of the shotgun with Vaseline.
“Ah, yes, you drive the ambulance,” said Jethro. “Like the courageous young men of the Parisian countryside during the Great War…”
“Jethro, straighten your leg out some more,” said the paramedic. “I can’t get leverage.”
“Did you check to see if it was still loaded?” asked the detective.
“Of course.”
Bang.
“Jethro?… Jethro?…”
The detective pulled out his notebook. “This is going in your file.”
20
Spider came back to the Sapphire Room after storming out that night. He always came back.
Preston promised not to do the one-armed gag anymore. He always lied.
The Sapphire Room was the Devil’s Island of lounge acts. The gang wanted out. They all had the same agent, and they complained every chance. On a Saturday night in September, they got the phone call. Their agent had come through with an ambitious schedule of engagements cutting clear across the country from the desert southwest to the northeast industrial corridor. The itinerary came over the fax at the Gold Dust Motel.
“These places look worse than the Sapphire Room!” said Spider. They called their agent.
He advised patience. This was résumé-building time. They needed to get some polish from the road, put together recommendations and audition tapes. And if all went well… the agent told them what he had in mind next.
“Shit,” said Preston. “What are we waiting for?”
They hit the highway in Spider’s brown DeVille with bad suspension, pulling a U-Haul, dragging the trailer chain and making sparks. It was tight quarters. Spider, Andy, Saul, Preston, Frankie and Bad Company, shoulder to shoulder in blue tuxedos. They were surprised to discover they actually liked the road. It got in their blood: the gas stations and the greasy spoons and the greasier motels with The Paper Strip of Total Confidence across the toilet seat. They worked the circuit of small hotel bars in second-shelf cities bypassed by the big acts. No interstate travel. Just two lanes across America. The big, open sky and rolling plateaus and tumbleweeds across Arizona and New Mexico, putting in a lot of car time. Preston kept them going with hypnosis stories.
“There was this guy in Switzerland back in the eighteen hundreds who used to hypnotize his wife into becoming completely rigid. And he would set up two chairs and lay her on her back, head on one chair, feet on the other, nothing underneath…”
“I’ve seen that one,” said Andy.
“It gets better,” said Preston. “This guy put concrete blocks on her stomach and invited people from the audience to smash them with sledgehammers.”
“I know what’s coming,” said Spider. “She came out of the trance at the crucial moment?”
“Worse,” said Preston. “One of the volunteers from the audience — he misses the block completely. Kills her.”
“That’s fucked up,” said Spider, lighting a cigarette.
“Still a fun story,” said Preston.
