The Vocabulary of Guns

58.

I saw him pass in a dark green car. He was staring through the glass straight ahead. A man whom I did not know was driving. They passed us quickly and were gone. ‘That’s our neighbor,’ I said. My uncle was driving. He said, ‘What’s that son?’ and turned down the radio. I said, ‘That’s our neighbor in that car that just passed us. He was sitting in the passenger seat. I’m sure it was him.’ ‘Well I’ll be darned,’ said my uncle and my aunt in the backseat said, ‘Gabriel has good eyes.’ We were on the Interstate heading to Washington, Louisiana, close to where I am now just outside Baton Rouge. I loved my trips to Washington, my father’s hometown. Our feelings for the place were in inverse proportion to each other’s. For me it was a living, breathing Huckleberry Finn, minus the river. For my pop it was nine layers of hell. Consequently I was often sent off to Washington without my parents. This was fine. My aunt and uncle were both a bit older. Their own children were all gone, married, married to nut cases, married to computer nerds. They treated me like a young prodigy, complimenting me on my brains, listening to my point of view. I had the run of about half the town, a sleepy place straight out of Faulkner. Dusty gravel streets, derelict mansions, a great house on a hill owned by a man with one arm who mowed his own lawn. My grandmother’s shack, replete with outhouse. The severe red brick school building that housed grades 1-12, now populated only by black folks. The trestle and the railroad tracks. The abandoned public tennis courts, a sanctuary of weeds. And Doucette Street, named for an ancestor from the steamboat era, a captain of some repute. I biked those streets each summer vacation and spring break, scooting around town on my cousin’s girl bike, looking for trouble with my BB gun, daring myself to ride down Deadman’s Hill. There were dead men aplenty in Washington, though I knew little about the true crimes. Instead as a child I felt the spirit kingdom, knew their creepy touch on my lower back, talked out loud to them and was answered. And my father had spooked me plenty already. One that got under my skin was the story of his friend Mr. T-Dan, or rather Mr. T-Dan’s father. This boyhood friend lived in our neighborhood in New Orleans East. Time and dimension had brought my father and his old buddy a million miles away from Washington and a ½ mile from each other’s barbeque pits. They had us over and vice versa. And one evening, alone, my father told me that Mr. T-Dan’s father, dead for twenty-five years, had committed suicide. The kicker was that T-Dan was told something different, something about an accident cleaning a shotgun, whatnot. Yet it was rumored, no, asseverated that the father had done it deliberately, had gone out of the way to do it. How did anyone know? There were no witnesses. My father had no answers and so one day I went to find them myself. Mr. T-Dan’s old house was across the railroad tracks in a field of desolation. A thin line of windbreak trees impaled the sky. It must have been Thanksgiving or Christmas. Not cold but lonely, a cloud-muddled day bereft of hope. I rode the old embarrassing blue bike out to Mr. T-Dan’s shack. I was 13. The windows were boarded p except for a small one in the kitchen. The door was missing, revealing a living room. Inside one could see a few sticks of furniture, a small round table, a rickety chair. The house was raised against flooding but the steps had rotted away. I peered inside the dusty room, looking for clues. Off to the left was a bedroom. To the right was the kitchen. These were poor people, Mr. T-Dan and his father. The mother had gone crazy or left with another man or both. Sad and blue, I walked back to the bike parked in the dusty driveway. Music began to play from the shack, good Cajun music with fiddles and accordions and singing in Francais. I looked back and saw a thin man of small stature standing in the doorway. He didn’t seem to see me; he just looked at the sky, taking in the miles of firmament, the endless weaving waves of grey brains. He was wearing beige slacks and a beige workman shirt, hard black shoes, all neat and clean though a bit worn. His grey hair was slicked back hard and his face, like two compressed prunes regarded the world with a sad final wave. He sat down at the table and laid a shotgun across it. It was a Stevens Crack Barrel, a single shot like mine. He opened it and inserted a shell into the chamber; a plastic black shell that I knew was a ten gauge, a big bore, a hard kicking gun. He took the gun off the table and placed the stock on the floor. He stuck the barrel in his mouth and reached for the trigger. Too far. The trigger was too far for his short arms. He tried a few angles and positions but it was clear God had not built this man to shoot himself in the mouth with a shotgun. He placed the gun on the table, hawked and spat out the open door and then disappeared into the kitchen. I heard the sound of a drawer opening, wood on wood, then it closed with a squeak. The man returned to the table and sat down. Now he was holding a fork. He repeated the procedure, gun butt on the floor, barrel in his mouth. He reached for the trigger with the fork and using the tines, fired the gun. The sound was enormous and the man disappeared head over heels in one almost comic flourish. Smoke hung in the air as well as the sound of the gun which seemed to echo preternaturally. At last I walked over and peered inside. I have no stomach for blood and was steeling myself for a mess of flesh but of course there was nothing. The chair had fallen over backwards, that was it. The good Cajun music had stopped playing. All was at rest. As I turned to go back to the bike I looked down and saw the fork on the ground. I picked it up. One of the tines, rusty now from twenty-five years of sleeping outside, was bent back from that long ago explosion. I thought to fix it, then changed my mind. I thought to take it and changed my mind about that too. Keeping a secret about Mr. T-Dan was hard enough. Holding on to the fork of suicide would have been unbearable. Instead I laid it on the floor inside the house. Another day, another time and perhaps someone else would know the secret. And speaking of secrets. My neighbor, you remember, the one I said I saw riding past us that day long ago? He must have been full of secrets himself. A series of burglaries in our neighborhood were traced to him and one day a few months after I saw him he was led from his house in handcuffs, hustled off to jail in front of shocked neighbors and his stunned wife. Everyone was surprised except my father and me. Neither of us had liked the man. He’d been cross with me one time and that settled it for my pop. ‘Be nice to other people’s kids,’ he said. ‘Hell, be nice to your own.’