Colonel Rutherford's Colt Read Online Free PDF

ya?” the bearded man asked. “If you’re not talking business, that is. Isn’t anywhere else to sit, and Mom’s been on her feet all day.”
    â€œSure thing, Doug. We’re done.” Rita scooched in her chair so they could slip past behind.
    Borchard heaved up to his feet. “I tried,” he said, projecting rueful menace, as if to convey that he was sorry things had reached this pass, but he wasn’t the one who would suffer. “I guess I’ll have to try harder.”
    â€œA little harder might be all it takes,” Rita told him.
    â€œWho’s that you talking to?” Doug asked as Borchard moved off toward the door. Mom was occupied in studying the burger page of Ye Royal Board.
    With Borchard gone, the tension caused by his presence removed, the whiskey kicked in full, and Rita felt a giddy buzz. “Just some character,” she said. “I call him ‘the major.’ ”
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    Room 322 at the Red Roof Inn had a worn gray shag carpet, dull red drapes, a table by the door with two chairs, and a blond dresser supporting a three-piece mirror in which a queen-sized bed was reflected. But Jimmy, lying on the bed in his shorts, the Colt resting on his chest, saw in his mind’s eye Susan Rutherford’s bedroom in Havana, where she lay, among silk pillows and lace curtains and dark Spanish furniture, in the arms of her lover, Luis Carrasquel. Luis was a problem—Jimmy had no sense of the character. He was coming to recognize that Luis was more of a mechanism, and he didn’t approve of characters who functioned only as mechanisms. However, in this instance he didn’t seem to have much of a choice. Every time he tried to flesh Luis out, it felt wrong, and he was beginning to think there might be another character who would fill the slot that he had presumed Luis would fill. It was Susan’s reaction to Luis, the colors it added to her perception of the world, that most mattered at this stage of things . . .
    From their first delicately allusive conversation at the Presidential Palace, through a cautious, painfully attenuated courtship, through all their anxious and clandestine meetings, to the period in which they now existed, grown bold in their affections thanks to Colonel Rutherford’s weekly trips to Guantanamo . . . Through every second of their affair, Susan had not experienced the slightest doubt that this lithe, clever, brown-skinned man was intended for her by God. His playfulness; his quickness of mind; his attentiveness at love; these qualities were in such opposition to her husband’s controlling personality, his clumsy, often brutish sexual habits, she sometimes believed Luis had been sent her less as a lover than as a remedy. She was happier than she had ever been, so absorbed in the moment that she failed to consider the possible consequences of her actions. At the outset she had assumed that she and Luis would be married, but as the affair developed she came to understand the difficulties that would attend divorcing a man who wielded so much influence. Luis was protected to a degree by his family connections, but if nothing else, the colonel could destroy his business and cause him to be disgraced. Then there was the effect upon her family. In the event of a divorce action, the colonel would assuredly call in those loans made to her father, and that would result in her family’s ruin. Thus it was at the moment of her great liberation, Susan recognized that her prison had only become more complex, more difficult to bear. Thanks to the intensity and sweetness of her lovemaking with Luis, her loathing for the colonel’s embrace grew more pronounced. She had never been responsive to him, merely submissive. However, since the beginning of her relationship with Luis, she had taken to resisting the colonel’s advances, and he in turn had taken to forcing her, both by