Read Thanksgiving for Free Online Page B

favourite authors incidentally – said that if there’s a gun hanging on the wall in Act One, then it must go off in Act Three. We wouldn’t want to disappoint Mr Chekhov, so this baby’s going to have to be fired, no?’
    ‘You’ll never get away with it. The police will find out that I flew down here and rented a car. They know we were both married to Lucy. You’ll be the obvious suspect.’
    Darryl Bob Allen smiled.
    ‘“Suspect”, maybe. But that’s all I’ll be. It’s your gun, after all. And I’m not going to make any stupid mistakes like trying to sell off the car to make some extra cash. No, this is going to be the perfect crime. When the gun is discovered next to your body and the rental car, out in the desert a long, long way from here, they’re going to say it was a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Suicide while of unsound mind. Wife just died tragically. Guy was shocked, depressed.’
    He extended his arm, the gun pointed straight at my forehead.
    ‘It’s time to move on, Tone. Change is always painful, but that’s how we grow. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.’
    He laughed and lowered his arm.
    ‘Mock execution, like they did with Dostoyevsky. Another of my favourite authors. The piece about him in the encyclopaedia is kind of snotty, but I guess there were some things even those guys didn’t get. Anyway, the shock effect sure worked for Fyodor Mikhailovitch. Who knows, maybe you’ll write a masterpiece too, make yourself a fortune. You could call it I Loved Lucy . “Honey, I’m home!” But listen, I want a piece of the movie action, okay?’
    I started to weep uncontrollably, shaking all over.
    ‘Speaking of movies,’ Allen went on, ‘there’s another reel you might be even more interested in. This one was a video right from the start, not like that one I got switched from a different format. Because this one I made later, right at the end of that memorable period I was talking about before. The one when I was still sleeping with Luce for months after she’d given me the big speech she’d conned out of some book on how to dump your partner, all about how it would be better for everyone if we separated.’
    He plucked a black plastic box down off the shelf, laying the gun in its place.
    ‘I’m kind of proud of this, tell you the truth. Setting it up was bitch central. You know those surveillance cameras they have in stores and offices, real small, about the size of a pack of smokes? Well, they had them at the building where I had that janitorial job I mentioned. Now I knew that the building would be shut down over the Thanksgiving weekend, so I stayed late the night before, disconnected one and took it home. I was still hanging on there by the skin of my teeth, see, because although I’d got the job I hadn’t had a cheque yet, so I couldn’t pay the deposit on an apartment. Luce offered to lend me the money, but I told her a man has his pride. And she couldn’t very well insist, it being the great American family holiday and all.
    ‘On Thursday, she and the kids were out buying the turkey. Luce didn’t usually bother that much about Thanksgiving, but she wanted to make this one special, because right afterwards she was going to have to break it to Claire and Frank that their daddy wasn’t going to be living with them no more. While they were out, I clamped the camera to a lamp stand and set it way back in the closet, on my side. We had a his-and-hers arrangement, know what I mean? Maybe it was the same with you. I guess it would have been. Luce was pretty conservative when it came to those kind of things. So I guess your pants were hanging where mine used to.’
    He drank more whiskey, waving the tape around as though unaware he was holding it.
    ‘Then I snagged the video player from the living room, plugged everything in on an extension cord from my workshop down in the basement, stuck a blank tape in the player and pulled my clothes along the rack