Bullet Park Read Online Free

or half-acre lots. All the houses were white. His own place was at the western edge of the town. He had three acres. At the edge of his property was a sign that said: “No dumping. $50 fine. Violators will be prosecuted.” Below the sign were a gutted automobile, three defunct television sets and a soiled mattress. The night population of Bullet Park was sparse but its most inscrutable and mysterious members were the scavengers’ opposite—the dumpers. Four or fivetimes a year Nailles would find on his property a collection of broken refrigerators, television sets, maimed and unidentifiable automobiles and always a few mattresses, rent, stained, human and obscene. The mattresses were ubiquitous. The town clerk had explained to him that the cost and inconvenience of legitimate dumping outweighed the scrap value of the rubbish. It was cheaper and easier to drive up to Bullet Park from the city and dump your waste than to have some professional haul it away. No violator had ever been caught and prosecuted. The problem for Nailles was merely emotional—Nellie would call the clerk and a truck would haul the stuff away in the morning—but his anger at seeing his land disfigured and his sadness and unease at the human allusions of this intimate and domestic rubbish disturbed him.
    Nailles’s house (white) was one of those rectilinear Dutch Colonials with a pair of columns at the door and an interior layout so seldom varied that one could, standing in the hallway with its curved staircase, correctly guess the disposition of every stick of furniture and almost every utility from the double bed in the northeast master’s room through the bar in the pantry to the washing machine in the laundry basement. Nailles was met in the hall by an old red setter named Tessie whom he had trained and hunted with for twelve years. Tessie was getting deaf and now, whenever the screen door slammed, she would mistake this for the report of a gun and trot out onto the lawn, ready to retrieve a bird or a rabbit.Tessie’s muzzle, her pubic hair and her footpads had turned white and it was difficult for her to climb stairs. In the evening, when he went to bed, Nailles would give her a boost. She sometimes cried out in pain. The cries were piteous and senile and the only such cries (or the first such cries) the house had heard since Nailles had bought the place. Nailles spoke to the old bitch with a familiarity that could seem foolish. He wished her good morning and asked her how she had slept. When he tapped the barometer and looked out at the sky he asked her opinion on the weather. He invited her to have a piece of toast, talked with her about the editorials in the
Times
and urged her, like some headmaster, to have a good day when he left for the train. When he returned in the evening he gave her some crackers or peanuts while he mixed the cocktails and often lighted a wood fire as much for her pleasure as anything else. He had decided that should a time come when she would have to be killed he would take her out behind the rose garden and shoot her himself. As she had grown old she had developed two common frailties. She was afraid of heights and thunderstorms. When the first peal of thunder sounded she would seek out Nailles and stay at his side until the violence had definitely gone into the next county. Nailles still hunted with her in the autumn.
    Nellie was frying bacon in the kitchen and he kissed her and embraced her passionately. Nailles loved Nellie. If he had a manifest destiny it was to love Nellie. Should Nellie die he might immolate himself on her pyre, althoughthe thought that Nellie might die had never occurred to him. He thought her immortal. The intenseness of his monogamy, the absoluteness of his belief in the holiness of matrimony, was thought by a surprising number of people to be morbid, aberrant and devious. In the course of events many other women were made available to Nailles but when some ardent divorcée, widow or