There's one I haven't read aloud before,
which is also another kind of a shooting story.
Thought it was in this book, here it is.
This is called "Dundun."
"I went out to the farmhouse where
Dundun lived to get some pharmaceutical opium from him,
but I was out of luck.
He greeted me as he was coming out into the front yard
to go to the pump, wearing new cowboy boots
and a leather vest, with his flannel shirt hanging out
over his jeans.
He was chewing on a piece of gum.
"McInnes isn't feeling too good today, I just shot him."
"You mean killed him?"
"I didn't mean to."
"Is he really dead?"
"No, he's sitting down."
"But he's alive?"
"Oh sure, he's alive.
He's sitting down now in the back room."
Dundun went over to the pump and started working the handle.
I went around the house and in through the back.
The room just through the back door smelled of dogs and babies.
Beatle stood in the opposite doorway.
She watched me come in.
Leaning against the wall was Blue, smoking a cigarette
and scratching her chin thoughtfully.
Jack Hotel was over at an old desk,
setting fire to a pipe, the bowl of which
was wrapped in tin foil.
When they saw it was only me, the three of them
resumed looking at McInnes, who sat on the couch all alone,
with his left hand resting gently on his belly.
"Dundun shot him?"
I asked.
"Somebody shot somebody," Hotel said.
Dundun came in behind me carrying
some water in a china cup and a bottle of beer
and said to McInnes, "Here."
"I don't want that," McInnes said.
"OK, well here then," Dundun offered him
the rest of his beer.
"No thanks."
I was worried.
"Aren't you taking him to the hospital or anything?"
"Good idea," Beatle said sarcastically.
"We started to," Hotel explained,
"But we ran into the corner of the shed out there."
I looked out the side window.
This was Tim Bishop's farm.
Tim Bishop's Plymouth I saw, which was a very nice old gray
and red sedan, had sideswiped the shed,
and replaced one of the corner posts
so that the post lay on the ground,
and the car now held up the shed's roof.
"The front windshield is in millions of bits," Hotel said.
"How did you end up way over there?"
"Everything was completely out of hand," Hotel said.
"Where's Tim anyway?"
"He's not here," Beatle said.
Hotel passed me the pipe.
It was hashish, but it was pretty well burned up already.
"How are you doing?"
Dundun asked McInnes.
"I can feel it right here.
It's just stuck inside the muscle."
Dundun said, "It's not bad, the cap didn't explode right,
I think."
"It misfired."
"It misfired a little bit, yeah."
Hotel asked me, "Would you take him
to the hospital in your car?"
"OK," I said.
"I'm coming too," Dundun said.
"Have you got any of the opium left?
I asked him.
"No," he said, "That was a birthday present,
I used it all up."
"When's your birthday?"
I asked him.
"Today."
"You shouldn't have used it all up before your birthday then,"
I told him angrily.
But I was happy about this chance
to be of use I wanted to be the one who saw it through and got
McInnes to the doctor without a wreck.
People would talk about it, and I hoped that I would be liked.
In the car were Dundun, McInnes, and myself.
This was Dundun's 21st birthday.
I'd met him in the Johnson County facility
during the only few days I'd ever
spent in jail, around the time of my 18th Thanksgiving.
I was the older of us by a month or two.
As for McInnes, he'd been around forever, and in fact, I
myself was married to one of his old girlfriends.
We took off as fast as I could go
without bouncing the shooting victim around too heavily.
Dundun said, "What about the brakes, you get them working?"
"The emergency brake does, that's enough."
"What about the radio?"
Dundun punched the button, and the radio
came on making an emission like a meat grinder.
He turned it off and then on, and now it
burbled like a machine that polishes stones all night.
"How about you?"
I asked McInnes, "Are you comfortable?"
"What do you think?"
McInnes said.
It was a long straight road through dry fields
as far as a person could see.
You'd think the sky didn't have any air in it,
and the earth was made of paper.
Rather than moving, we were just getting smaller and smaller.
What can be said about those fields?
There were blackbirds circling above their own shadows,
and beneath them, the cows stood around smelling one
another's butts.
Dundun spat his gum out the window while
digging in his shirt pocket for his Winstons.
He lit a Winston with a match.
That was all there was to say.
"We'll never get off this road," I said.
"What a lousy birthday," Dundun said.
McInnes was white and sick, holding himself tenderly.
I'd seen him like that once or twice, even when
he hadn't been shot.
He had a bad case of hepatitis that
often gave him a lot of pain.
"Do you promise not to tell them anything?"
Dundun was talking to McInnes.
"I don't think he hears you," I said, "Tell them it
was an accident, OK?"
McInnes said nothing for a long moment.
Finally he said, "OK."
"Promise?"
Duncan said.
But McInnes said nothing because he was dead.
Dundun looked at me with tears in his eyes, "What do you say?"
"What do you mean, what do I say?
Do you think I'm here because I know all about this stuff?"
"He's dead."
"All right, I know he's dead."
"Throw him out of the car."
"Damn right, throw him out of the car," I said,
"I'm not taking him anywhere now."
For a moment I fell asleep right while I was driving.
I had a dream in which I was trying
to tell someone something, and they kept interrupting,
a dream about frustration.
"I'm glad he's dead," I told Dundun,
"He's the one who started everybody calling me fuckhead."
Dundun said, "Don't let it get you down."
We whizzed along, down through the skeleton remnants of Iowa.
"I wouldn't mind working as a hitman," Dundun said.
Glaciers had crushed this region in the time before history.
There had been a drought for years, and a bronze fog of dust
stood over the plains.
The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, wilted corn
stalks were laid out on the ground like rows of underthings.
Most of the farmers didn't even plant anymore.
All the false visions had been erased.
It felt like the moment before the Savior comes.
And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time.
Dundun tortured Jack Hotel at the lake outside of Denver.
He did this to get information about a stolen item,
a stereo belonging to Dundun's girlfriend,
or perhaps to his sister.
Later, Dundun beat a man almost to death
with a tire iron right out on the street in Austin, Texas,
for which he'll also someday have to answer.
But now he is, I think, in the state prison in Colorado.
Will you believe me when I tell you there
was kindness in his heart?
His left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing.
It was only that certain important connections
had been burned through.
If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around
in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that."
[APPLAUSE]