The Vocabulary of Guns
1
.
I’m holding my birthday present, a six-inch .357 Magnum Smith and Wesson Model 586. It’s blue, which means black in the vocabulary of guns. I could have had stainless, though my father jokingly said I couldn’t (‘too rich for an Ugnaught’) or even chrome, both significantly more expensive. I chose blue because of the stealth factor. A blue gun is harder to see at night. The gun is unloaded, but the box I keep it in contains a speedloader. You slide the speedloader into the open chambers, turn a little knob and release six rounds. It looks cool but it doesn’t work very well. I point the unloaded gun at a poster of Christie Brinkley, barely covered by a blue bathing suit. I shoot the supermodel six times, but I don’t see her, I see someone else. He’s a very light skinned black man. He has freckles and light green eyes. He’s my girlfriend’s stepfather and I want to kill him. I want to open him up, blow a hole in him the size of a ham. My fantasies are filled with this scenario: We’re in
2.
I’m waiting in the car to drive my father to work. He’s late every morning which means I’m late for school every morning. My first class is Algebra, which I am repeating. ‘Don’t sweat it,’ my father says. ‘You don’t need math.
3.
My father comes out of the house and gets in the car. It’s his car but I treat it as if it were mine. Since his DUI, it practically is. He buckles up; I drop the car into first gear and ease away from the curb. As always, my father checks to see that no one is coming behind us. He hates to drive and is frankly grateful that I take him to work, but I make him nervous. He knows I only buckle up when he’s in the car. I burned out the clutch, so he knows I drive the car hard. He can’t say too much though. He taught me everything I know. We wheel through the neighborhood, passing a series of one-story brick homes. Each of the three side streets on our left end at a mossy canal. Behind the houses on our right, our house included, is a small patch of woods, perhaps a square ½ mile. The October light catches the trees, many still green, others ablaze in yellow, orange and red. Half of this neighborhood was built by my stepmother’s real estate company. What was once a larger tract of woods was bulldozed to make way for acres of white flight. It’s a bleak and hopeless landscape of young families and retirees, housebound recluses and the morbidly obsess. There are cops and crooks and firemen and arsonists and us. We’re just like all of them, another twisted and greasy family, trying to make it one day at a time. I’ve cut many of the lawns in the neighborhood. Painted a few of the houses. Started and stopped after one-day digging a backyard pool. Delivered a ratty suburban newspaper no one except the old and the dead ever read. Stole the Times-Picayune from my neighbors and got caught. Made friends with the first black family, then alienated them. Ran my sprints down the streets. Caught the football. Shot off bottle rockets. Learned to drive. My father lights a cigarette, cracks the window. He’s quiet and sad. He looks thumped. His wife doesn’t love him anymore.
4.
I make a left on Bullard. This road is the story of our suburb. When we first moved out here, Bullard was an unpaved dumping ground for dead bodies and dead appliances. My father would test his growing collection of guns on a burned and rusty muscle car. We’d blaze into that thing like junior G-Men, opening holes in the doors and the fenders, cutting apart the hood and the seats. We were cautious, to some extent. My father and I would take turns, carefully standing behind the other when firing. My brother hates the noise, so he’d wear large ear protectors as he poked through the piles of trash with his single-shot .22. One time my father was unleashing a storm of lead into the rims and a ricochet bounced back, passing in a whirr between my brother and me. My brother looked up and then returned to killing the ants. My father sat down on a dead refrigerator and had a smoke. ‘Did you see that?’ he asked me after a while. ‘Jesus Christ, I’m gonna kill one of my kids one of these days.’ So we stopped shooting cars. As it is, now Bullard is a broad fast boulevard with dangerous curves. The wide neutral ground is planted optimistically with saplings that take thirty years to produce shade. New houses are going up and the trees are coming down. A man-made lake shimmers off the left like a blue watch face. There is almost no traffic but what there is hauls ass.
“Slow down,” says my father sharply. “Please,” he adds.
The Vocabulary of Guns
5.
We jump on the Interstate and ride about two miles before getting off at
“Hold on a moment,” says my father. “I’m going to grab that piece of lead.” He’s referring to a lead tire weight that’s lying on the side of the road. It’s a big one to be sure and my father is a covetous man but traffic is piled up behind me and he wants to hold up the world to grab a piece of free lead.
“Come on pop,” I say, annoyed. “We need to go.”
He gives me a look. You too? That’s what that look is. Then he chooses to exercise his parental authority and make me wait. He opens the car door and gets out. Horns begin to blow. Cars whip around us, cursing as my father quickly walks over and picks up the tire weight, then scoots back to the car. Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. I gun the car and he says, “Wait. Let me get in the car for Christ’s sake. Screw those people. Let ‘em wait. Let ‘em go around. I don’t give a damn.”
“Yeah, well you’re not driving. I am, and they’re mad at me, not your dumb ass jumping out of the car to pick up every piece of lead you see. As if we needed it. As if there weren’t a pile of lead at home waiting to be melted down. As if I weren’t late, again. I’m about to fail algebra. You know that right? Don’t be surprised when I come home with another D and have to take that son of a bitch again in the spring.”
We’re wheeling up the
“It’s not the lead, Gabriel,” he says. “It’s just something to take my mind off things. You know?” He opens the glove box to stash the lead. “Shit a mile,” he says. “I forgot to take the gun out of the car this morning. Well,” he says, looking at the Police .38 wrapped in a yellow oil cloth. “I can’t take the damn thing into wok with me. It’s against federal law to have a firearm in that building. You’ll have to keep it in the car. Hide it under the seat or something. Don’t go waving it around at your friends.”
“You know I would never do something like that.”
“I know,” he says.
The Vocabulary of Guns
6.
I drop my father off at work, a yellow-brick WPA building on spacious grounds adjacent to a golf course. He walks up the steps of the edifice, a soul-sucking prison of offices and desks manned by civil servants. If he were in the military my father would be a captain. If my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle. My father missed
7.
I like to drive fast. I think that I’m pretty good at it. I work that four speed transmission as I race down
8.
Wisner becomes
9.
He doesn’t go very far at first, just around the corner to a camera store on
“What’s goin’ on cat?”
I just look at him and smile.
“What’s goin’ on, man?” he says. “Ain’t you supposed to be in school?”
“Yes.”
“So what’s goin’ on?”
“Nothing. Just…I saw you driving and I wanted to tell you something.”
“What did you wanna tell me?” he says, still smiling, those scary green eyes shimmering like a devil.
“Just…that I know.”
He’s puzzled. “You know what?” he says.
“Oh,” I say, a quiver in my voice. “You know what I’m talking about, man. You, of all people, know EXACTLY what I am talking about. Yes you do.”
I look at him, my eyes brimming with tears. He looks at me too, but I’m not afraid. I hold his look as long as I want, then shake my head and walk away. I’ve got to get my butt to school. As I said, I’m failing algebra. Again.
The Vocabulary of Guns
10.
Hurricane season is over, except for me. Hurricane Gabriel has reached land, and right now, I am at the eye of the storm. I drive down
11.
“Hello Gabriel,” says Miss Lou, and she hands me a test.
Awesome. Remember we had a test today in algebra? No, me either. Looking at those pages of purple problems mimeographed on the dying office copy machine is enormously deflating. I’ve missed so much class these last few weeks I have almost no idea what is going on. Today I was going to ask Miss Lou for some extra help. Instead she has handed me razors, a pistol, just enough rope. ‘In three more years, Jack's grandmother will be six times as old as Jack was last year. If Jack's present age is added to his grandmother's present age, the total is 68. How old is each one now?’ I picture Jack and his grandmother having a toast as they celebrate their birthday. I see Donald Jones looking at me like he could cut my throat. Somewhere in the classroom, a clock audibly ticks. I look around. I’m the oldest dude here, a senior, captain on the football team, the quarterback, blonde, blue-eyed, mysterious, shy, failing his ass off. ‘Question: Josh, Sunny and Andy did a job in the ratio of 1: 3: 3 and earned a total of $364. What percentage would Andy get after dividing the money according to the ratio of the work done?’ I picture the three of them painting a house. Sunny mixes paint while the guys goof off. Josh spills the turpentine and sets himself on fire. Meanwhile, how did they arrive at the sum of $364? The clock ticks again. I’m sweating balls. I remove my letter jacket and hang it on my chair. I realize for the hundredth time in the last half hour what I have done. I have opened a can of worms no algebra will ever be able to close. She told me her secret. I knew and it was killing me. Now he knows I know. What next? Will it kill him or will he feel compelled to kill me? Tick-tock, the clocks don’t stop. Sweat in rivulets running down my arm. Water reaches its own level. The surface tension creates a stream, inside my bicep to my elbow, forearm, the drop falls and splashes to the floor. ‘Jane bought a pencil and received change for $3 in 20 coins, all nickels and quarters.’ Jingle, jingle, here comes Jane carrying three dollars in coins. I recall the gun in my hand. ‘John has 50 stamps, some worth 15¢ and some worth 20¢. If their value is $9.50, how many of each kind does John have?’ John is sending off his applications to college. John is waaaaay ahead of Gabriel. John is going to the college of his choice. Gabriel will be repeating algebra in summer school. ‘The cost of tickets for a play is $3.00 for adults and $2.00 for children. 350 tickets were sold and $950 was collected. How many tickets of each type were sold?’ I see the old black man, just a segment of my imagination but real somehow as well, real because he too is a consequence of knowing something, perhaps knowing too much. Because I know what happened to him and the ignoble way it happened, I am haunted by his occasional specter. He stood there, my conscience, stopping me from ruining my life. The pencil in my hand trembles. I have not answered a single problem. The desk under my forearm is wet with sweat. Tick-tock, tock-tick. ‘John drove for 3 hours at a rate of 50 miles per hour and for 2 hours at 60 miles per hour. What was his average speed for the whole journey?’ John’s a busy man. Where’s he going now? Is he leaving town? Is he done with this place? Is John free? If not, how long before John will be free? Tick, tick, tick, tick, like the sound of the 60 Minutes news program signaling to you that the weekend is dying, indeed, already dead. ‘A class of 25 students took a science test. 10 students had an average (arithmetic mean) score of 80. The other students had an average score of 60. What is the average score of the whole class?’ Christ, do I have a science test today too? No. I have a short story due for Miss Simpson, next period. Holy crap, what am I doing? Where has my head been? Up my ass, and deep too. Tick, tick, tick, sweat, sweat, sweat.
“Five minutes,” says Miss Lou.
I get up, put on my jacket and hand in my test. Totally blank, not even my name.
“How was it?’ she says.
“Piece of cake,” I say, heading for the door.
The Vocabulary of Guns
12.
I’m already at my locker in the Green Hall when the bell rings. Like a scene from a movie, as if the many extras were crouched behind doors and around corners, droves of students burst upon the scene, opening and closing lockers, dicking off with their combinations or keys, freshmen struggling through the melee carrying bags that would kill a Sherpa, musicians and their instruments fighting out of the cafeteria, one PE class crashing into the adjacent locker rooms, another emerging from the same, heads wet with showers and sweat. Conversations run the crescendo from whispers to shouts, punctuated by girlish squeals. Notebooks rustle, heavy textbooks fall to the floor with a thump, Hyatt, our wheelchair bound student wheels his motorized apparatus among the throng, slyly pinching a little ass when he can. We slap hands as he cruises past and I thank the gods that it is not me attached forever to that machine, that it wasn’t me that dove into the river that day (so the story goes) and hit something unseen, snapped his neck and now and forever more he’ll be a man doing wheelies. A tall, good-looking kid, Hyatt would be an asset on the football team, the big tight end we so badly need. His football days of course are gone and I wonder as I grab a new notebook if Hyatt will make it through the semester, much less graduate with our class. He appears to be loaded most of the time. That won’t get the job done at Ben Franklin. It is the only public school in the city in which one can literally fail out. That simple fact invades the smallest task, the most mundane assignment. None or almost none of us want to fail out of high school. This fear, this competitive edge brings a state of surreal conviviality to the campus. Preps and dicks and nerds and jocks and bitches and cheerleaders and Goths and Madonna’s and punkers and skaters and nobodies and queers and dykes and on and on all seem to regard one another as more or less an equal. The clans are generally at peace, as are the races. Speaking of, my black girlfriend has arrived. She slips up behind me, her smell an emissary of her flesh. Her hair is a nimbus of brown threads, her skin the color of milky coffee, her eyes intelligent and dark brown, her freakishly long arms and articulate fingernails, her bird-like breasts, her sweet and petite butt. Oh JW Jones, I love you.
“You made it,” she says, giving me a kiss.
“Yeah.”
And we kiss in the hall, an openly interracial kiss in front of the multitudes. I have my friends on all sides of me, black and white and wop. I am the leader of this band of faux warriors. I am loved. Algebra be damned, undone fiction assignment slumbering in forgetfulness, I am loved. I am Gabriel and I am the Champion of the World.
13.
A consequence of being good at something is the expectation that you will both continue to be good at that something while simultaneously humbling yourself. I find myself in that position now. I have a reputation as a vivid writer. My peers admire the single-effect paragraphs that we have been assigned so far in Creative Writing. The longer assignment, however, has stymied me. I suppose I have stories of my own. I once froze my tongue to a fence post. I once walked five miles in a
“Class, as you know, your first drafts of your short stories are due today. I assume that you all have them. I’d like to hear a few of them read aloud. Not everyone will have time to read theirs so I’ll take volunteers. Gabriel, of course yours will be quite interesting as always. Do you mind going first?”
I look at her and smile. Miss Simpson in her languid beauty hath put me on the spot. “Sure, I’ll go first. Can I have a minute to gather my notes?”
“Of course,” she says. “We’ll begin when you’re ready.”.
All eyes upon me as I open my notebook to a page of history notes. My longhand scrawl runs across the college ruled paper. I take a breath, a loooooong breath. Breathing is key to everything. Connect the breath to the action. Concentrate all movement into one action and then exhale. I exhale, and then stand. My notebook rests on the desk in front of me, and I refer to it from time to time as I speak, but what I say I am not actually reading but making up. The title of the story, I say, is Copper Pipes. Once upon a time my father was a broke-ass high school student living in
Miss Simpson smiles and says, “Did they give the Junkman his money back?”
“No,” I say, sitting back down. “They went and got drunk again.”
The Vocabulary of Guns
14.
Third period is Gonzales’ history class. The spry little pipe-smoking Argentinean is standing outside his classroom, one of the ‘temporary buildings’ that have been on the grounds since 1959. These low, one story buildings are connected, two together, four in total. Covered walkways give the illusion that one is on a military facility. On the hard, knobby earth between the main building and Gonzo’s class I performed my first drills for the football team. Then I was a skinny, squeaky kid sweating in his pads, getting blasted to the ground. The older players, the seniors, cats like Miguel Champ and D. Brown and Big Pat all seemed like grown men to me back then. They had beards, they smoked and drank, they had steady girlfriends or strings of women or both. They played with various degrees of ferocity and violence but whatever they did they made it look easy. Back then I wondered if I would ever attain their stature. Now I know I won’t. I’ve had it easy, as has my whole class. We’ve had three winning football seasons in a row. Previous to our arrival the team had never had a winning season. Not that we had much to do with it. Those older guys turned it around, made Ben Franklin, the New Orleans Saints of high school football respectable. Their heat had been created in a cauldron of losing that I and my brothers hadn’t felt. Well, until recently. We’re on a two-game losing streak and our record is 2-4 with three games to go. If we don’t win out, we will have descended to the old days and the old ways. I can see the looks on the faces of the brothers from the past. They still come around campus. Most of them are still screwing high school girls. They come to our games and watch as we suck. They laugh they way we will laugh when we leave. ‘Those guys aren’t tough,’ they’ll say and they’ll be right.
“Hello, Mr. Doucette,” says Gonzo, interrupting my thoughts. “Are you preparing your mind for this evening?”
“Something like that.”
Gonzo peers at me through his eyeglasses, his features obscured by pipe smoke. He himself is a graduate of this school. He appears wizened and timeless but he’s probably not even 30 years old. He coaches soccer and is adored by those guys, most of whom consider football the sport of half-wits. There’s something to that. It takes a certain disdain for one’s physical well-being to want to lay the wood. How can you explain how good it feels to not only deliver a solid hit but to also take that same hit? All you can say is, That’s football, and leave them to wonder what kind of Cro-Magnons still walk among us.
“I wanted to talk to you about that paper that you submitted last week,” says Gonzo. “You did a fine study of the history of your street in terms that were unrelated to the assignment.”
“I thought we were supposed to ‘divine the meaning of our street.’ That’s what I did. Pressburg is a city in
“Yes, yes, formerly known as
“And true.”
“And true. However, that was not my meaning. What I wanted was that you look closely at the street itself, at its history or its path. There’s something there that you have been missing.”
“On my street? It’s a corridor through suburban hell. I run from my house to Read Road three times a week. It’s just the sad story of declining property values and decaying dreams.”
Gonzo smiles. “Very poetic, Mr. Doucette. All the many times you’ve passed down its length and you think you’ve seen all that is there. You know all the secrets of
“I think so. At least the stretch near my house, out in the East.
Gonzo gestures with his pipe hand as he speaks like a priest bestowing incense on the unwashed. “You may have something in that,” he says. “Start at the Lakefront or wherever it commences and follow it a while. You may see something unusual. If nothing else, you’ll know your street from beginning to end.”
15.
I take Gonzo’s new assignment as a good excuse to ditch the rest of the morning and drive to the Lakefront. I can’t concentrate on school, on people, on anything. I catch a shiver; see Donald Jones’ face and wonder, What next? I thought I’d feel redeemed but all I feel is incomplete, like something is getting ready to happen. And the game is tonight. And my family is crazy. And I’m crazy. But I have a mission and I have a car. As I cross the blacktop and head for the street, I see TC shooting hoops. He’s got a nice touch when he’s on and he drains a trey over the head of a midget freshman. Then he spots me and hollers. “Where you goin’, man?”
“Taking a ride.”
“Hold on,” he says. “I’ll ride with you.”
That’s how it is. You just drop everything and do what you want. That’s a feeling that you think you’ll have forever, but you won’t. You think your freedom will simply grow boundlessly over time and space, but it doesn’t. You are young and you know Jack Shit. That kind of limitation makes the world your oyster. You age, you learn and knowledge traps you, poisons you, sends you diving for pearls. But that’s later. Now TC is catching up to me, strutting the way I strut and pulling on his letter jacket. “Hey,” he says. “Maybe you can teach me to drive a stick.”
“Maybe.”
“Where we headed?”
“
“You going all the way out to the East?” he says, stopping.
“Nah, just the Lakefront.”
“All right,” he says. “That’s perfect. It’s quiet out there, so I won’t hit anything.”
“Sure.”
We walk down the block past uptown homes until we reach the car. Climb in fire up the little Honda and go. TC opens the glove box to play with my father’s many lethal toys. “Whoa,” he says. “There’s a gun in here.”
“Yep.”
“I wanna look at it,” he says.
“Go ahead. It’s loaded, so please don’t shoot me.”
“Hell no, I’m not gonna shoot you. If you die then Chucky has to play quarterback tonight and he sucks. We should call him Sucky,” says TC, unwrapping the revolver.
I say nothing to that as I wheel us through the neighborhood and back onto
“Don’t you ever reload?” I ask.
“Nah,” says TC. “It’s like a movie.”
Indeed it is. It’s more like a movie now than it will ever be again. We are young. All our worst mistakes are still in front of us. We can blaze away at friend and foe alike as we trundle across town. There are no consequences for us, the young men, the future, the hope.
The Vocabulary of Guns
16.
We are reversing my route from this morning, cruising down
“Did you see the paper?” says TC.
“No.”
“The Times-Picayune picked us to lose to St. Bernard.”
“You’re shittin’ me.”
“Nope.”
“That’s bad. That’s real bad.”
“Yeah,” says TC. “Unless it’s not. My mother showed it to me and said we’d use it for extra motivation.”
“Like we need any extra motivation.”
“No shit,” says TC. “We suck.”
It’s not so much that we suck. Rather, I suck. Sadly, they’re stuck with me. My backup, Chuck has a big arm, bigger than mine, but we share the same problem. We’re like monkeys with machine guns, blazing away at shadows. I can overthrow every player on my team which for some reason I thought would be useful. I’m trapped in the past, remembering the guy I backed up for two years. Barry C. had a cannon-arm but more important, he had a stable of fleet receivers. D. Brown, Miguel Fields, Rob Turner, those cats could flat-out fly. Of course with the way I throw it would hardly matter. I never wanted to play quarterback. Like a messiah chosen against his will, Coach Chick plucked me from the gang of pimply new guys that first day three years ago and started chucking me the ball. Catch it, no problem. Throw it, big problem. Big, big problem.
The light changes and we go. I shift the little Honda fast, moving around the dawdlers, running the yellow light at Canal, taking silly risks, pushing the limits of the machine. We cross
“Picked to lose to a team that hasn’t won in two years,” says TC. “That sucks. That sucks ass.”
Should we be worried? I guess so. Our offense is primitive. We’re thin on defense. In fact, TC and I at a buck fifty a piece represent the inside linebackers in our three-four. Of course we both play offense as well. That’s the way it is at little Ben Franklin. Everybody plays all the time, or rather, the good players play all the time. TC is very good and thus has played a lot the last two years. I’ve collected splinters in my butt over that same period. That’s probably why I’m so lame now. Having had no experience, especially under the night lights, I usually throw to the wrong team or get chased out of bounds. It’s gotten to where Coach doesn’t even call passing plays anymore. I’m a menace to my team. But I don’t feel that way. No, there’s hope in me. I did something today that I have wanted to do since the night she told me, since the night that she got wasted drunk and told me. Since the night that she pushed my hands off her, forgetting who I was, and called me a name that wasn’t mine. And she cried. Her body shook violently and she curled to protect herself, turning her head away, turning her head to the window, closing her eyes, frowning, a look of grief and shame on her face that broke my heart in half. So if I have the strength to not waste that son-of-a-bitch then by god I have the strength to win a football game.
“We’re gonna win,” I say.
“I sure hope so,” says TC.
“No, we’re gonna win,” I say, clutching, shifting, hitting those gears, taking us fast down Wisner and up over the Interstate, down below us twin rivers of hot traffic whipping by, Tad Gormley Stadium where we will never play, rusty cross-bars shining in the sun, the dead grass field, the empty concrete seats, the park spread out before us momentarily like a sea of green summer days, and moving silently, ponderously, Bayou St. John. All of that in an instant and then we are descending at speed and I say it again, “We’re gonna win tonight. I know it. I feel it in my bones. We’re going to win.”
I’m right. We are going to win. And I think I know all there is to know. But I am wrong about that. There is more, much more to know. You’ll see.
The Vocabulary of Guns
17.
TC pulls the city map out of the glove box and guides me through the Lakefront to the starting
“What are you looking for?” says TC.
Modest one-story houses on large lots, each yard with a sickly tree struggling in the sandy soil. This place is reclaimed from
“I don’t know. Something unknown. Some essence. A reason for being.”
“Great,” says TC. “That’s real helpful. Look. There’s an old fart hosing down his driveway. The essence of mankind. Nothing to do on a Friday morning but hose down the driveway. The end.”
“Yeah, Gonzo will appreciate that.”
“Just write it up with those crazy descriptions,” says TC. “He won’t know what the hell you’re talking about. He’ll have to give you an A.”
“I’m supposed to be in search of truth. That’s what history is.”
“I thought history was written by the winners.”
“That too.”
We cruise down a block of Pressburg, yielding to a mail truck at Perlita and continue to
“Good,” says TC. “You could let me drive on that section.
“We’ll see.”
He’s a rich kid but he’s not a bastard. His parents earn their loot writing soap operas. He and his brothers have what we consider to be an ideal existence. A big house close to school and little adult supervision. The ample collection of random bottles of booze and wine, along with the big black housekeeper and the doddering grandmother complete the picture. The only thing missing are holes in his pool table. It’s for carom which none of us except TC play worth a damn. He’s a handsome braggart and something of a softy. He’ll sit in the hall outside his bedroom while we’re ogling the Playboy channel and cry into the telephone. He sings often and well, belting power romance ballads and ‘In the Air Tonight’ at top volume. I dictate my creative writing assignments to him over the phone and he types them up, something of an Igor to the mad doctor. He’s under strict orders not to drive until he’s eighteen. This is due to his older brothers and their evil ways. His parents fear further lawsuits. Moreover, TC can’t drive a stick shift, so our exercises in driving are jerking, jumping affairs. Nevertheless, I dogleg around the block and reach the second stretch of
“Easy, brother. Just take it easy. Ride the clutch until we’re moving. Don’t try to transition abruptly.”
If there’s one thing I was born to do is drive a car. My pop says I inherited this from my grandfather who drove trucks for the Allies in WW II. I’ve learned to feel the machine, to endow it with a certain sympathy. A car must be made love to as well as driven. TC tries again, gently this time, waiting for the feel, the roll of the clutch and the swing of the gears as they catch and they do, they catch, we’re moving, winding it out down Pressburg Street, past a watering sprinkler and a cat on a stoop and azalea bushes and oleander and crepe myrtle and TC shifts to second like Parnelli Jones, winds it out because the Honda has a tall second and then up to third and I look over and he’s grinning, TC is a happy man, he’s learning how to drive. He’s no different, none of us are. We all want to get the hell out of here and we can’t bear to leave. This then is our dilemma and driving a car will only aid and abet. We’ll be able to leave someday, run away, and we’ll always be able to return, perhaps in a new set of wheels or with California plates or Alaska or we’ll bring back dogs or women or both or tattoos or long hair or no hair or weird ways, always weird ways, but we’ll go away and we’ll return, usually behind the wheel, cruising back into town, lurched over, high on the gasoline, stretching our limbs and we’ll step back into our friends lives, even the ones we taught to drive, to flee and they’ll say, ‘Damn, look at you. Well, welcome home.’
The Vocabulary of Guns
18.
When I was twelve, my father took me to see Polanski’s ‘Tess,’ starring Nastassja Kinski. It affected him deeply. Afterwards, he took me to
The Vocabulary of Guns
20.
There is a curious sensation when you see something familiar in an unfamiliar place. If it’s a person, and you are surprising them, you can see the panoply of thoughts passing across their physiognomy. These thoughts run the gamut: ‘I know this person and am glad/unhappy to see them. Yet they are in a place I never see them so it can’t be them.’ The mind struggles to equalize two opposable thoughts, as if you woke up one morning to find your genitalia reversed. Can’t be. Must be a bad, bad dream. Perhaps when you were a kid you saw a school teacher in the grocery store or at the mall. Freed of their power over you, outside in the wide open world where they couldn’t touch you, you’d study them, spotting their humanity, reveling in their false fronts. Ah, you see, they have a limp. Ah, you see they sometimes dress just like your parents do at home. Sloppy. Ah, you see, they eat pickles, bacon and chocolate marshmallow pies.
We’ve reached the last bit of
“Okay, where to now?” says TC when we reach the stop sign. “That’s the last block of Pressburg ahead and I don’t see shit. Three parked cars and an old woman watering a dead tree.”
“Let’s head back to school. I’ve seen enough of this street for today. Forever.”
“You can write about how boring it is,” says TC. “Pretty, but dull as shit. Nothing going on out here. These people don’t have secrets. There’s nothing secret about this place at all.”
The Vocabulary of Guns
21.
We hit a Mickey D’s drive-through on the way back to school and order a prodigious amount of food. TC gets two quarter pounders with cheese, large fries, large coke and an ice cream cone. He jams the cone down his throat before I’m even back into traffic and he’s killed one burger before I’m on the Interstate. Someday we’ll pay for all this sugar and fat but right now we thrive on it. We’re lean, maybe too lean. Our skin is relatively zit free. Our muscles are tireless, fed on gristle, pickles and hot apple pies. We belch noisily and plan tonight’s attack. TC thinks we need to pass the ball more often. I agree. Coach’s offense consists of running the same play we just ran but this time tell the line to block! You can’t blame him though. Every time I drop back to pass the chance that something bad will happen increases. I have no business playing quarterback. I’m a complete retard. TC should play quarterback. He’s got a lively arm and he understands passing routes. “Never happen,” says TC through a strawful of coke. Outside the car windows are the tops of houses and the neighborhoods of the city spread out north and south. Our view from the elevated Interstate encompasses the entire celestial bowl, towering clouds under a noon day sky. Ahead of us the few tall hotels, banks and office buildings of downtown beckon like a golden Oz. “Coach hated my brother so he thinks I’ll be just like him. He’s been thinking that same shit since my freshman year.” Well at least you played, I want to say. I’ve watched him and Maginnis and Big Mike, all classmates of mine playing for the last two years. I watched the starting quarterback, Barry C. make it look easy. He had playmakers around him but he was a playmaker too. I’m not a playmaker. I’m a thumper. I thump people and they stay thumped. My best moves at quarterback come when I drop my shoulder and blast an unsuspecting linebacker. I’m a kamikaze pilot when what is required is an admiral of the seas. Yet what admiral would ever step down if he were given an unearned advancement? Only the most courageous of men can refuse overwhelming responsibility, and I am not cut from that kind of cloth. So I sip my vanilla shake and munch my cheeseburger and shift gears all the while, steering and eating and operating the stick shift with one hand. What a day it’s been already and it’s only noon. There’s still a game to play. The game of our lives. The game that will define forever the 1984 Franklin Falcons. At
The Vocabulary of Guns
22.
The Oreo Trio is practicing for an imminent dance-off. Lil’
‘Unemployment at a record high. People coming, people going people born to die. Don’t ask me because I don’t know why, but it’s like that and that’s the way it is.’
I and my blackness observe the world. I try to walk black, talk black, sound black, be black. Perhaps I simply want an agenda. As an outsider, I long to belong to other outsiders. Maybe it’s just because of people like Dr. Dex. He’s the greatest friend a man could ever have. He listens. He sits there in your car when you’re cruising the streets of self-pity and he simply listens. You pick him up at his house across the river on a summer’s evening around 7 p.m. You’ve brought the tall boys and the ½ pint of Bacardi because that’s how you roll when you’re seventeen. You cross back over the
“Gabe,” says Lil’
I nod and smile, listening to the music. It’s a warm afternoon but it’ll be cool tonight. Do something. There’s so much to do. I’ve done something today but I’m not sure what the result will be. I’ve stood on the sidelines so long that I’m not sure how to even get started. Do something. Do something.
‘Wars goin on across the sea. Street soldiers killing the elderly. Whatever happened to unity? It’s like that and that’s the way it is.’
I’m moving, moving, moving to the beat, the way I’ve seen Lil’
“You heard me?” says Lil’
Dr. Dex says nothing, shrugs his shoulders. What does it matter? It’s dancing. Tonight, there’s football. And Dex says it. He says, “I’m gonna take a nap, get ready for the game.”
The game, the game, don’t even want to think about the game. But it’s coming, like a long awaited train, like the repeating dream. And though you know the outcome in your bones you don’t know the outcome in your brain, in your memory, and so you wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.
The Vocabulary of Guns
23.
I’m sitting on the wheelchair ramp outside the green hall trying to look cool when Coach O’Sheen catches sight of me and calls me to his office. Inside the cramped space are three desks, two filing cabinets, a tiny TV, books, notebooks, first aid gear and the biggest tub of Ben Gay made. Even sealed up, its wintergreen aroma penetrates the office, combining with the stink of jocks, moldy showers and feet. Coach Cortez is in the office grading some tests. He oughta coach football-the man played for the Saints long ago-but he’s strictly a PE teacher. “Bruce,” says Coach O’Sheen. “Can you give us a minute?” Coach Bruce’s tidy afro and hip facial hair depart, leaving me with the old Mick. He sits, I stand. Every time he calls me in here he’s got something hard to talk about. Booze, women, dope, rap music, he’s against it all. Nothing good has happened to this country since they killed Kennedy. O’ Sheen regards a sheet of paper on his desk, adjusting his granny glasses to read the print. “You were arrested last month for trespassing at school?”
“Yessir.”
“What the hell were you doing at school on a Saturday night?”
“We weren’t stealing anything.”
“We? Who the hell is ‘we’? It just says you were apprehended on the roof of the green hall. Who else was with you?”
Maginnis, TC and Dex, who all slipped away, pooled their money and bailed me out.
“I don’t wanna say. It wasn’t any of the football players.”
Coach looks at me, pissed enough to spit. “And you were carrying a knife? A switchblade? What the hell has gotten into you? I thought you were a good kid.”
I thought I was too. Then one day your whole head changes. It happens a lot when you’re young. You don’t have good judgment. Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. You don’t know shit from apple butter but you don’t understand that. Simply put, you can’t believe what people tell you when so much of the world is constructed of lies. Everyone is conflicted. Everyone says do as I say, not as I do. I think of my father who hates above all, the lie. Yet how many times have we confabbed a tale of beers undrunk, bottles concealed in car trunks, six packs in the woods, empties driven to
Instead I told the story of the white phosphorous. Like most of my tales, my father is the hero. In this case, he’s a young knucklehead like me, hanging with a few of his buddies. One night they ‘break’ into school through an open window and hit the chemistry lab. My father comes across a jar labeled ‘white phosphorous.’ Inside are several bland chunks of rock soaking in oil. My father has read somewhere that white phosphorous will ‘do something’ if it is put into water, so my pop reaches in the jar, removes an oily chunk, and they depart for Bayou Courtableau, several blocks away. My father holds the chunk in his right hand, all the while oil dripping behind him on the dusty unpaved street. When they reach the edge of the bayou, my father tosses the almost oil-free chunk of white phosphorous into the water. Indeed it ‘does something’. With the sound of a a cannonshot it blows itself a hundred feet out of the water, comes back down and blows up again. Stunned, my father and his buddies haul-ass as lights go on across town, dogs bark, people ask what the hell? All is laughter and good times. Only years later will my father realize how close he came to another life altogether. White phosphorous (he would learn) ignites immediately upon exposure to air. Had the oil dripped faster or he walked slower it would have caught fire somewhat short of the bayou. The phosphorous ignites. It clings to the flesh. The pain is searing. The hand itself is literally on fire. My father screams. His friends grab him and pull him to the mucky ditch. They plunge his hand into the water. Boom!
My friends got a kick out of that story. Ten minutes later, in mid-pee, a rent-a-cop was shining his light on me and my member. Busted. Trespassing. Public urination. Possession of a deadly weapon. Underage alcohol.
With that, he dismisses me.
The Vocabulary of Guns
24.
Before I became interested in girls and football, I spent a lot of time dreaming about our post-apocalyptic future. Sophomore year my geography teacher screened ‘The Road Warrior’ to kill some time. I’m certain we’ll be facing some similar type of ruin. The kind of saber-rattling going on in the 1980’s is stressful in the manner of a fatal disease that may take a lifetime to kill you or inversely may drop you tomorrow. The Bomb. It’s always there. The Big Bad Russians are coming for us all. What they don’t annihilate they’ll rape. Or eat. Or both. We learn in history class that the
Sure, it’s all the fantasy of an adolescent boy who is getting no ass. All those Heavy Metal fantasies fly far away once the reality of intercourse and its complications intrude. I stop dreaming about machine gun nests and wonder if I can slip a window and get a girl into the school afterhours, on a teacher’s desk. Nevertheless, it’s still out there, or rather, he’s still out there. Reagan. President Reagan. One look at him and you know he’s got no problem giving those Russians what for. That’s the problem of course. He’s exactly what the American public wanted. A kick-ass cowboy who’d whip some Iranian ass the first day of office. Of course, that hasn’t happened. We’re merely funding
The Vocabulary of Guns
25.
Standing next to the locker that she shares with me and Dr. Dex is the girl I love. Can this feeling be real? What does high school love feel like? It feels important, that’s for sure. That in itself is something that adults fail to recall when they deal with teen hormones. The clusterfuck that is all high schools, even cool ones like Ben Franklin contributes mightily to teen anxiety. Going together and breaking up are all on some level of public display. ‘Did you see who was holding hands with whom? Did you see so-and-so walking at lunch with such-and-such?’ Etc. The humiliation of losing your love in a landscape where you may see them quickly evolve into someone altogether different, more cosmopolitan, better looking, going all the way with their new love, to have to see such effrontery is too bitter for most young people to handle. Already half-crazy with libido and ego, they reach the tipping point and become 100%
“What time are you guys heading down there?” she says.
“Game's at seven. We’ll probably leave at 4:30.”
JW Jones smiles at me. Her café au lait skin. Her hair like a golden brown nimbus. Her perky boobs and eccentrically long arms and legs. Her smell, ah, her smell. To die for. To kill for. Forgotten in the reverie of love is everything I know and everything I’ve done. She kisses me and asks if I’ll have time to walk with her. Yes, yes, yes I’ll have time. After our meeting with the coaches. Okay, she says, between kisses. I’ll meet you on the steps of the cafeteria in a half hour. I have something I want to tell you.
And she’s gone, leaving behind a goofy me standing in the swirl of human traffic in the green hall, standing in the release, Friday, another day ended, another week ended, backs sag with enormous book bags filled with texts. Freshmen. Always the freshmen breaking under the strain. Cheerleaders pass in a gaggle of white skirts and well-formed calves. Lil’
The Vocabulary of Guns
26.
The coaches assemble the football team in the cafeteria. Coach Walleye, built like the lineman he used to be, is holding a copy of the Times-Picayune sports section in his hand. I know what he’s going to tell us, that we’ve been picked to lose to a 0-22 team. Still, I’m surprised by how he begins.
“Who wants to be famous?” he says.
Nobody says a word. Clearly this is some kind of trap. Coach repeats the question. Still no takers. He focuses in on certain players.
“Maginnis,” says the big coach. “You got a big mouth. I bet you wanna be famous.”
“No sir.”
“No? What about you TC? Don’t your parents write for the movies or sumthin’?”
“Yessir.”
“You wanna be like them, huh? Famous? Makin’ movies?”
“I don’t care about that crap,” says TC.
“You don’t huh? What about you Doucette? You like to walk around with your shirt off, showing your muscles. I bet you wanna be famous someday.”
I consider the question. Sure, I’d like to be famous. Why not? Beats anonymous. I look at coach and say, “Sure. I’d like to be remembered for doing something.”
Coach Walleye smiles, delighted that I have taken the bait. “Well I tell you what you have to do. It’s real, real simple. Just lose this game tonight. The team you’re playing hadn’t won a ball game in over two years. But they have been picked to beat you all. And lemme tell ya, in fifteen years of coaching here, I ain’t never seen dat paper call a game, either way, win or lose for this crappy little team. But they have now. They sho’ have. So Doucette, and all of youse, just remember that. Lose this game tonight and you’ll all be famous. Hell, I bet you make the USA Today. Whattya think, Coach Chick?”
Coach Chick looks like he wants to punch every one of us in the face. He’s a hard little Sicilian, hell on his hulking son who plays line. His fierce tanned and mustached face regards us like the human waste that we are. “I wouldn’t doubt it,” he says. “I wouldn’t doubt it at all. Not if we don’t play like we know how to play. The line has to block better, we need to tackle better on defense. And we have to be able to pass the ball. Ya hear me Doucette?”
“Yessir.”
“We need you to protect that football and make some good throws, ya hear me?”
“Yessir.”
“We ain’t gonna be able to just run all over this team. They’re stout in the middle but kinda rusty against the pass. If we can throw on them, we got a good chance of winning. A real good chance. Anyway, that’s all I got to say right now. Go ahead Coach.”
Coach O’ Sheen, dressed in a white guayabara and wearing a long silver rosary could be the priest sending us to certain death. He looks down at the ground as he talks, then abstractedly at the back of the room as if it extended a hundred feet. He tells us what he always tells us because it’s always true. Fundamentals. It all comes down to fundamentals. The team that blocks the best and tackles the best will want it the most and nine times out of ten they’ll win. It’s sound thinking. However we are the mathematical oddity. We’ve lost two games in a row despite being the better blocking and tackling team. We need more than fundamentals. We need playmakers. That’s me. I’m a playmaker. Tonight I will be. If I can stare down the devil I can take on the St. Bernard Eagles. Bring it, bring it, bring it on.
“All right,” says Coach O’ Sheen. “Any questions?”
There are no questions. Those who didn’t know the newspaper’s prognostication are stunned cows. They rest of us are hungry and ready to invade the BK Lounge across the street.
“Okay, gentlemen,” says Coach O’ Sheen. “The bus leaves at 4:30. Be dressed and have it loaded by 4:15. Captains, you see that that happens, okay?”
“Yessir,” say four voices, Dr. Dex, Maginnis, Big Mike and me.
The Vocabulary of Guns
27.
JW and I take a walk to the levee. There at the river bend, it is broad and green, topped with a shell road. Enormous towers of steel carry electric current in either direction as far as the eye can see. From the crest, beyond the willows, Big Muddy plows into view, its vast chocolate surface boiling and swirling. River traffic is light. A single tug named Hercules pushes a barge of cargo containers upstream. JW and I sit on the river side, the afternoon sun glowing up our faces, making us more beautiful than normal. Joggers and equestrians pass above on the shell road. JW holds my hand as she talks. I simply listen and watch a pair of hawks circle in the sky, their sharp eyes on the lookout for a meal. I’m trying to recall how we’ve gotten on the topic of this past summer. Perhaps my mind is simply boiling with too many thoughts already so I’m unaware of where this conversation is leading until it is upon me like a boxer getting inside and working your body with blow after blow to the ribs. What she’s telling me literally takes my breath away. She tells me about a party at her aunt’s house where she stayed last summer. It was a big bash without adult supervision, a graduation party for her cousin’s girlfriend Patty. It should have been a real good time, says JW. She loved kicking it with Patty and Cousin Terry. Drink a little liquor, dance to the beats. Have a good time, ya’ll. But JW says she didn’t feel like partying. She was lonely. She’d been away from me all summer and though she hadn’t called me in weeks, she said I was still on her mind. So that night she didn’t party. She went downstairs to the rec room, put on an Earth Wind and Fire record, covered her mind with headphones and lay on the sofa in the near darkness, dreaming of me. All was peaceful, all was good. Then she sensed that she wasn’t alone. There were people down there with her. Some guys. They grabbed her. She fought back, she says. She got one of them in the nuts and hurt him. But he punched her in the face and she says after that, she just gave up. She said she just closed her eyes until it was over. They hurt me, she says. They hurt me bad. They even hurt my hiney. She cries and cries. She punches me in the chest. After awhile, I ask her how many. She says three, but one couldn’t go through with it and he left. The other two stayed.
There’s the river. It has moved at seven knots an hour for the last fifteen minutes. It has changed. There’s Hercules, chugging away upriver, hard at his labors. He’s changed too. There’s the thicket of willows. The wind has jostled their branches, stripped some of their leaves. The willows have changed. A horseman that clopped past is now a mile away. He and his horse have changed. There is a pair of people sitting on the levee. She’s a pretty young black girl. She has changed and been changed by others. There is a handsome young white boy witting next to her. He’s changed. He’s just been changed thoroughly. Like escaping from a burning building or surviving a plane crash. He’s changed. He’s different now. The world is just a ruthless place, he thinks. God or no god, the world is a place where people just take what they want whenever they want it. It’s a no good, dog eat dog, kick your ass kind of world. He’d read it in books and magazines, seen it in the movies and the TV. He’d gotten a dose of it earlier, childhood traumas, etc. Now it’s here, baby boy, looking you right in the face. Big old nasty reality. Put that alongside your books and movies and watch them crumble and burn.
The Vocabulary of Guns
28.
I have never liked to fight, probably because I have no training. None of my father’s stories involve brawls except for the time he and his buddies teamed up to give the town bully an ass-kicking. The martial arts are not cultivated in our home. And why should they be? There are many tough people in the world but none of them are bullet-proof. My father, once a pacifist now believes in peace through superior firepower. I am on the fence regarding this. On one hand it makes complete sense. On the other hand, the penitentiary is full of advocates of my father’s philosophy. As is the military, another place I never want to find myself. So for most of my life I have managed to avoid getting into fights. The last one I had was in 8th grade when I beat up a 7th grader before another 7th grader jumped in and pinned me. It was classic. Various members of the 7th grade had begun calling me fag, gay, etc. Not that I am, but gay bashing is gay bashing whether you are gay or not. The leader of this clique was a handsome blonde named Dana. His underling was Ricky and his muscle was Duke. Egged on by Dana, Ricky challenged me to a fight behind the school. For a few days I resisted. My father consoled me by giving me a copy of ‘A Farewell to Arms.’ My stepmother suggested I walk up to the kid and sucker punch him. My nervousness grew. For a fraction of an instant I imagined taking the Police .38 to school and opening up Dana, Ricky, Duke, all of them, my math teacher, the principal, half the bitchy chicks. But I was way ahead of my time in terms of school shootings and again, that route led straight to
I don’t feel that way right now. I don’t feel an overwhelming sense of rage. No, as I walk JW back to school, our course reversed and everything altered, I feel that I am in a state of shock. A streetcar moans past us, the clattering of its bell like a screaming chimpanzee. The electric wires that power the green trolley crackle. Cars whisk by. Ahead of us I see Dr. Dex and Lil
Why bother to explain that you were 350 miles away? No reason. Just say goodbye and then head back to the locker room where you will walk through the swinging doors and headlong into a large black kid. Chuck Webb, a junior, my backup on offense and defense. He’s strapped and taller than me by a couple of inches. He’s wearing his football pants, cleats and leg pads. I’m in jeans, oxford and penny loafers.
“Get out of my way Chuck,” I say.
“Fuck you, Doucette, you move.”
I look at Chuck’s brown face, his eyes occluded behind thick spectacles. I don’t see him. I see myself. I see myself that was not there to protect her when they beat her and took turns raping her. Coach Walleye’s favorite thing is telling you to play Switch. Put one thumb in your mouth and one up your ass. Then switch. One held her down while the other did whatever. Then they switched. I am on Chuck and on him good. In cleats he may as well be wearing roller skates and I drop him hard to the floor. Only his last second twist saves his head from bouncing off the cement. I have my hands under his ribs. I am going to pull his heart out by the roots and take a bite. I have pluck. Yessir I do. And as my fingers dig I can see JW’s eyes clenched shut, tears running down her face, itself a mask of pain and shame and fear. And I am going to kill you Chuck Webb, kill you deader than death itself. Hands grab me. I am pulled off Chuck and he is pulled off the floor. Our teammates hold us apart and offer conciliatory words. Coach Walleye appears at the door and looks at us with disgust. “Save that crap for the other guys you idiots.”
The Vocabulary of Guns
29.
She said she put a steak on her black eye. She even giggled involuntarily when she told me. I’ve wondered whether that was effective. Perhaps the beef enzymes allow the damaged flesh to recuperate more quickly. I imagine JW walking around the house with a piece of meat stuck to her face. I wonder how she explained that. She certainly told no one what happened down in the rec room. Why? She said she was frightened, that those guys had guns and knives and they’d kill her if she told. So she must have made something up about walking into a wall or something. She was also afraid she was pregnant but she wasn’t. Still, she waited an extra week to come home, time to allow the bruises to heal, for the black eye to become hazel again. I noticed nothing amiss in her face when I saw her. Her hair was poufy. That was different. She looked like a shorter version of her lovely mother, both of whom resembled her busty younger sister. But I saw no marks on her face, no swelling, no contusion, no pain. Already she had rigged up a mansion in the mind; a place no one ever visited that they didn’t emerge from haunted themselves.
Now I know. Now I know everything. The entire stupid line of action all makes sense. She stayed in
I think of the summer as the busload of football players, each silent in his pre-game meditation joins the traffic on the freeway. We have a long ride to St. Bernard Parish. We have time to think. I think I’ll do some math. We pass the Times-Picayune building, augerers of our imminent defeat. Screw you TP. We pass the Orleans Parish Prisoners painting another of their immense murals in the lee of an overpass. Bald eagles and jet planes and the admonition that freedom isn’t free. Meanwhile the unmanacled artists in their stripes paint their way to an early release. I begin estimating the day it happened. She returned to
The Vocabulary of Guns
30.
Who are we? Are we very different from what people think we are? Were they to describe us in the third person would we even recognize ourselves? And can we remember who we were so long ago when we changed daily like a crop, like an infant, like an ephemeral bug? What do I see when I look around the school bus? Who am I seeing? Are they even real, all of them, or are one or two ‘ghosts’ like the kind the Yaqui Indian Don Juan sees? Maybe. That pasty freshman who hasn’t played a down all year. What’s his name? Who knows? There are thirty-five kids on this team and I don’t know his name. He might not be real after all. He practices like he’s an invisible cloud of sentient dough. He might be of the ‘other’ place, the world within worlds that is all around us. I glance at Dr. Dex sitting next to me on the bench seat, softly singing to himself.
The Vocabulary of Guns
31.
The bus driver exits I-10 at
The Vocabulary of Guns
32.
The school bus crests the height of the bridge over the Intercoastal Waterway. Down below, a power plant emits cumulonimbus clouds of white steam. A deepwater oil tanker slumbers down the channel. A Coastguard cutter cruises, policing the wet highways against pirates and polluters. To the west, the sun sinks into the horizon, an orange crab consumed by the earth. The sky is shot with angry reds, majestic purples, calming, promising cobalt and green. Onboard the bus is the scrape of cleats on the hard floor, shoulder pads clicking, water bottles jogging together and the ever-prominent rumbling of the bus. There’s a radio but the driver will only put it on after the game and then only if we win. I look over these brothers and I am reminded that there’s a whole other world outside my morbid thoughts. There’s this game, for instance, and I’m not nervous, never am for some reason, I should be, after all I kind of suck. But not anymore. That’s the Gabe of the past. I am a guided missile, number one with a bullet. I can’t fantasize about killing faraway rapists or even a local child molester. I got to get my head in the game. I have to visualize, the way the pros describe. You must see what you are going to do before you do it. And then you will do it the way it is to be done. Visualize. Breathe. Concentrate all thought into a single action. See it happen. I close my eyes, feeling the bus descend the bridge to ramble along the alluvial plain. Outside are a hundred familiar sights, for this is where I learned to drive. Shell roads and half-ass marinas, seafood stands and a lonely rathole bar. A gun shop. A few scattered houses. A shuttered snowball stand. All of that is passing but in my mind I see a football player flying towards me across the gridiron. He has the ball in his hand. Only I stand between him and the endzone. He’s enormous, a blue-clad leviathan. I feel tall and strong. I lower my head and shoulders and take him on with extreme prejudice. The imagined sensation of the collision jerks through my system like a remembered electric shock. I open my eyes and look around the bus. Quiet young men on their way to the game. Their faces are pale, even the black guys look grey. Serious. We are all very serious. We know what is at stake. We have the best chance of our lives so far to be famous and nobody wants to be famous. Not this week at least. The bus turns onto
The Vocabulary of Guns
33.
Sometimes you simply have to believe that the outcome you desire will transpire. You may lose the coin-toss to start the game, calling heads when you know it will be tails. You’ll watch your opponents leap about as if they already had a ten touchdown lead and you’ll know that this show is a long way from being over. You’ll watch Maginnis kick off to the St. Bernard Eagles, watch the return man take the ball out to the forty yard line giving his offense excellent starting field position. You’ll jog out with the defense. You’ll hear Coach Chick telling you to watch number forty-five, an offensive lineman who’s been converted to fullback. He’s large and hard to bring down and you find this out right away. The Eagle quarterback calls a handoff to the fullback and after he caroms through the defense for fifteen yards it takes you and TC and Dr. Dex to bring him down. Indeed, you’re in on every tackle as the Eagles move quickly down the field and you’re lying there on the ground when Big 45 knocks you over and trundles into the endzone. You watch the extra-point zip through the crossbars, see the Eagles cheer and congratulate themselves, hear the crowd rock and roll, hear Maginnis ask TC, ‘What just happened?’ hear TC answer, ‘They kicked our ass, that’s what happened,’ and then you jog from the field as the kick return team heads out. And Coach Chick, the incredulous Sicilian will look at you and say, ‘Jesus Christ. You guys let ‘em score that easy it’ll be a hundred to nuthin’ by halftime.’ You’ll say nothing because you know you’ll win. That is your only thought. You aren’t thinking about your sweetheart in the band bleachers, playing Let’s Groove Tonight on the flute. You certainly aren’t thinking terrible thoughts about her and her summer vacation. No, you are watching Lil Roy take the kickoff at his ten, and he’s about to be pummeled but he makes a man miss and then he’s in open space, fast and running scared but he takes the ball all the way out to the fifty yard line. And Coach O’Sheen grabs your facemask and says, ‘Run the dive to the two side.’ You jog out to the huddle. Your linemen bend over as you address the backs standing behind them. ‘I-right,’ you say. ‘Two dive on the color on the color, huddle break.’ The offense claps in unison and it sounds loud and proud and again you believe you will prevail, even if the defense is jumping in and out of the gaps like dogs on speed and they’re barking out, ‘It’s a run! It’s a run!’ which it is because it’s always a run to start the game and it’s always a dive to the two side (the right side) because Coach O’Sheen hates the right guard (Big Mike) and wants to teach him a lesson in this, his final year. So you call the count and Maginnis snaps you the ball and you pivot and hand to Dr. Dex and then get out of the way, watching as the defense blasts the good doctor. Gain of one. And Lil Roy comes in with the play, which is this: ‘Coach said to run it again. Tell the line to block this time.’ And you’ll call the play again but you’ll leave out that last part because you’ve been hearing Coach say that for three years and frankly he can go fuck himself. You call the play and the huddle breaks and the linemen take their places and of course Maginnis asks you what the count is again, he only does that three times a game and this is number one. ‘One,’ you tell him and then you call the cadence and Maginnis snaps the ball and you hand to Dr. Dex again and he’s lucky to get out of the backfield. Pop! And so you know it will be another run, third and ten, Coach will call a run and then punt. So you’re surprised when TC comes in with the play and it’s a pass. They trust you or they’re desperate, who knows, but they want you to throw the ball. ‘Slot right, deep in shotgun, on the color on the color, huddle break.’ The linemen take their footing. You stand in the shotgun with a back on either side of you like personal bodyguards. And you say: ‘Get down white’ and Maginnis snaps it into your hands. You set up, ball at your ear hole. You see TC coming across the middle, wide open. You throw it, not to where he is but where he’s going and he catches it in stride, breaks a tackle, then another and he’s gained nearly thirty yards. And Lil Roy comes in with the next play. ‘Coach said run the same play. This time look for the deep man.’ And you call the play. Dr. Dex is the deep man. He’s fast and still you’ve been overthrowing him all season. You call for the snap. You set up. And then you throw. You throw the prettiest pass of your high school career. The ball will leave your hand with a purpose and fly with a mission and land in the hands of the streaking good doctor. He’ll shuffle his feet and just get them in the back of the endzone. The referee will raise his hands. Touchdown. The second (and final) touchdown pass of your sorry career makes the score 7-6. Maginnis shanks the extra point. Eagles lead by one. And now the film speeds up, faster than you thought imaginable. You trade touchdowns with the bad guys. You throw a two-point conversion and a thirty yard pass. You get pummeled when Maginnis snaps the ball over your head. Coach takes you off the defense as it becomes clear that the bad guys are targeting you. At halftime, you watch the crowd do the wave, delighted that they lead. Convertibles circle the gridiron, the Homecoming Maids waving and flirting with your team. Your Coach will circulate amongst his players, bucking them up, the cutman encouraging the challenger to take it to the Champ. You’ll gather with the players for a halftime pep talk. Maginnis will start to say something about how he remembered a time sophomore year when Miguel Champ did something and Big Mike will say, ‘Maginnis, shut the fuck up and play football.’ And he will. He’ll make the biggest play of the game. From the sideline you’ll watch as the Eagles drive down to the Falcon five yard line. The second half clock has wound down, down, down to under three minutes in the fourth quarter. The score remains the same, Eagles 15, Falcons 14.
The Vocabulary of Guns
34.
The party is at TC’s house. There’s a keg but his older brother John William has tapped about half of it before we arrive. No worries. There’s booze galore. Football players and cheerleaders are sipping from a trash can of Long Island Ice tea in the kitchen. Maginnis is in the swimming pool with a bottle of Bacardi 151 in his hand. JW and I sit poolside, sharing a rum and coke. Big Mike is teaching a gaggle of chicks how to play Mexican, a very involved drinking game. John William, former
“You shake the dice,” says Big Mike, “and then you check what you got without showing anybody. You can lie about what you got or you can tell the truth and the other person has to pass it. Doubles go in reverse. Boxcars everybody drinks. Snake eyes only you drink-”
“Fuck this noise,” says John William, burping and rubbing his gut. “I got a drinking game. Put all the beer on the table. Start drinking. Last person alive wins.”
That suggestion is met with laughter and approval. As sloppy as John William is, I love seeing him at these parties. He’s a reminder of what we don’t want for ourselves. He’s stuck in high school, his glory days even though the football team was lousy. The chicks came easy and the grades did too. Your friends were your friends to the end. They drank with you and hung out. You all had the same goals, just getting a buzz and hanging out at the Fly. A life of good time fuck offs. A timeless time. But that’s no good and we know it. You can’t be having a middle age crises when you’re twenty-one. You can’t be looking back in golden nostalgia for the good times of five years ago. That’s death. That’s cancer of the mind and tuberculosis of the soul. So we study John William and we watch his movements, graceful for a big man, his handsome features going to drink, the neck, the face, the gut. We hear him lumber from his bedroom to the bathroom like Piltdown Man on the loose and we laugh, at him, not with him, but inside there’s a sick feeling that maybe, just maybe it will be us one day soon. Already the good times are going like a fleet of buses emptying out of a vast acreage. They’ve been leaving since freshman year and we couldn’t wait to be gone. Now, in this year, the best of our early lives is the realization that we are only a short distance now from the Future, from our New Selves, and all the cultivation of our private empires, our personalities finely hued for the high school world will be completely useless. At least that’s what should happen. And should it not, we’ll wind up as John Williams, all of us, lurching from one set of good time mammaries to the other, sucking at the tit of time.
JW nuzzles my ear. She’s been drinking steady since we arrived an hour ago. She’s light and tipsy and whispers all the bad thoughts of the day away. Gone are images of shooting holes in people and forcing cars off the road. Gone are my stepmother and her heartbreaking ways. Gone is algebra, creative writing, dead junkmen and the Coach’s troubled mien. Here and now is the love, the tender love of my life and she wants me now. It’s time to ease out of the party and find a little corner where we can be alone. This is the length and width of her whispers and I’m green but game. Not to mention sore. Even copious amounts of alcohol can’t ease the ache I feel from my feet to my face. It hurts less badly than if we’d lost but it still hurts. JW holds me up like an arthritic old man as we walk through the large house, seeking a nook. Downstairs is filled with ancient stuffed furniture, spinets and credenzas and half tables. On the walls are TC’s frowning ancestors, watching your every lecherous move with clear, Indian-killing eyes. We go upstairs. Here the way is more treacherous for the bedrooms are watched with eagle eyes by TC’s grandmother. A doddering but sharp old lady, she roams the hall like a halogen Attila, ready to snuff out coitus with ruthless fury. No sooner do we make it to TC’s bedroom but she’s over our shoulder, smelling of lavender and age, telling us to keep the door open. Across the hall is a shut door. Grandma steps over and tries the knob. Locked. She starts knocking and continues until Dr. Dex emerges with two girls, lipstick smeared, eyeglasses fogged up, clothes a mess and totally busted, they scurry away with Grandma’s warnings in their ears that this isn’t a body house. Our search continues. John William’s room is a dump as well as a temple to late 70’s
The Vocabulary of Guns
35.
Let’s take our lover home. Let’s put her in a bucket seat and belt her in and fire up the motor and drop it in gear and go home. But let’s go to our own home, somewhere between here and nowhere, an apartment of the mind. With a view of a park and a museum. And trees. And a streetcar. And a neighborhood bar where they’ll let us drink and play the jukebox. We’ll dance unfettered by racial glances or muttered oaths. We’ll be one and we’ll be in love and we’ll be purer than ever. We’ll return to our apartment, to its attic-like upper room and we’ll make love, JW and I, and the soft rains will drape our window sills. Her cries will be cries of love and joy and happy surprises. My laughter will be baleful and kind. Perhaps dogs, perhaps cats, perhaps both. She’ll take my name and I’ll teach her to drive. We’ll go to work and college perhaps. Football will continue to exist as a murky fiction, an obsolete sport played by a few caretakers of the game. We’ll travel and make homes wherever we go. We’ll write to no one and have only strangers for friends. We’ll take new names at parties and carry multiple passports. We’ll be internationally famous yet will remain largely anonymous. Religions will come and go, great political systems will crumble, indeed the Iron Curtain will return to its figurative past. No matter. Our love will endure like a metaphysical bust, a sculpture to love so pure as to be impossible. The sculptor will show us embracing, but cracking and breaking simultaneously. The female, collapsing at the knees will in turn be destroying her protective mate. He too shatters in the femora, collapsing under the strain.
But instead I have to take her back to her crib on
“I wish you would have killed him,” she says. “I wish you would have crashed into him and killed him in his fucking car. That car. I hate that car. I wish you would have shot him, but I don’t want you to go to jail. There are bad men in jail.”
There certainly are, and I don’t want to go there either. But you gotta do something, right? You can’t just let this kind of thing go unanswered. Somewhere in the darkness, two guys are laughing and slapping dap, bragging about how they fucked that bitch up, how they taught that little cocktease a lesson. Hell yeah. Hit that ass hard, homeboy. Like driving a nail into an oak tree. Whap! And laughter. And drinking. And bragging. And adding JW Jones to their list of bitches that they hit. Yeah, somewhere in the Texas darkness those cats are chilling or even sleeping easy posturpedic dreams, unmaliced by night terrors, no cold sweats, no invisible hands grabbing their genitalia, ripping them wide open from eyeball to asshole, no screams in the darkness, no terror in the night, no walking talking waking nightmare, no none of that, right? Right? Right, you motherfuckers? Well, I’m coming for you. I’m Gabriel the Righteous Angel and I’m coming and I’m bringing some friends. Samuel Colt. Smith and Wesson. Frederic Remington. W.B. Sharpe.
The lights bring us home to JW’s island in the storm. I pull up front and she says, “Stay. I’ll walk myself. If he’s up and he sees you he might shoot you.”
“I wish he’d try. I’ll put six in his ass so fast he won’t know what happened.”
JW looks at me, then drops her head. “I wish that were true,” she says.
For a moment there’s nothing. She’s about to leave and I won’t see her again until Monday morning. Goodnight my sweet love. God how I love you. How I love you. I love you. Love you. You.
“What were their names?”
“What?” she says.
I don’t know why I’m asking this but it’s coming out of me like another person from another time. An ancestral time. When you reached for the flintlocks or the matching matchlocks and you took cap and ball and powder and seconds and met under a tree or in a field and there was justice. Or you took the shotgun your mother gave you for Xmas and you walked downtown and waited until the Vidrine brothers crested the hill, three of them in their sedan and you opened up on them, didn’t you Uncle Felix and therefore avenged yourself for the whipping they gave you last week.
“What are their names? The two guys. What are their names?”
“Why?”
“I wanna know.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Something. Maybe. I don’t know. Just tell me, please. Do you know their names?”
She shakes her head and begins to cry. She cries as she speaks their names. Eric Head and Jamaal Charles. I repeat their names and I want to spit and vomit. Eric is white, she says. Jamaal is black with a Jheri curl. They’re big, she says. Bigger than you. And they had guns. They said they’d shoot me…..I don’t care. Goodnight sweet angel. Rest in peace. I’m on it. I’m on it. And Jamaal and Eric, I’m coming. I’m coming for you. Soon. Real, real soon.
The Vocabulary of Guns
36.
I drive home through the darkness and the streetlights, through the present and the past. Where is the future? There isn’t one. Only the memory of taking this route home all summer. Taking the route home with the music flaring and the car under my hand moving like an extension of my fingers, a wand, a set of nunchuks, a pool cue. Seatbeltless then and seatbeltless now I drive with the abandon of a suicide, as ignorant of death as a GI Joe. One night last summer I wore my sunglasses the entire evening, claiming I had burned my retinas in a welding accident. My friends believed that ludicrousness and even defended me against mockery. How many times did someone sing, ‘I wear my sunglasses at night,’ to me? Dozens. Dozens of Cory Heart cover singers in the world. But we love that song. It’s catchy and what we understand of the lyrics makes sense. ‘While she’s deceiving me, she cuts my security. Has she got control of me? I turn to her and say…’ Then we lose it, lose the message, lose the lyrics but it doesn’t matter, the clash of guitars and the cymbals and the steady pumping beat of the keyboard that is stolen from the Eurythmics, it’s everywhere now, the synth beat, even Van Halen is using it, the Gods of Rock using a computer to baptize the beat. And I can’t deny that I like it. The sunglasses at night that hide you from the world, like a secret blind man, walking amongst us unknown, espying our secret whistles, gestures, glances and utterances. And the beat. The synth beat I like too. On the radio now and taking me across the city to my home in the east, the synth beat is the perfect sound, manufactured loneliness, the abandonment and terror of the machine, able only to produce these eerie major and minor chords, like a captured songbird forced to sing jailhouse rock.
And I’m home now and my father is awake, still up at 1 a.m. He’s in the garage, futzing around with his reloading equipment, half waiting up for me.
“How was the game, Ugnaught? Did you win? You did? Very good. That’s very good. Say, do you have the gun? I think I forgot to take it out of the car this morning. You do? Excellent. You didn’t shoot anyone with it did you? Let me see. A quick swab of the barrel would reveal whether you are telling the truth. And we have ways of making you talk. No, of course I trust you. I just get nervous. I wouldn’t want one of your knucklehead friends to pull it out and accidentally shoot you. Or themselves. I’ll have to be more careful in the future. Did you notice it was in there? This morning? You kept the car locked I’m sure. Good, good. Do you want a beer? Would you mind getting me one, then?”
I move through the quiet house to the kitchen. The light from the refrigerator reveals the immaculate floors, sink, counter tops. The dishwasher is grunting along, exhaling clouds of bleachy steam. I fetch a beer, return to the garage and hand it over to my pop.
“Thank you son,” he says. “Do you still want to go hunting tomorrow? You don’t have to if you don’t want. You do? That’s good. I’d like to get out in the woods for a while. Not being able to drive myself anywhere is the fucking pits. Don’t let it happen to you, you hear me? Take a cab or stay home. This DWI is a pain the ass. I feel trapped, and the funny thing is, I never went anywhere anyway. Now that I can’t I feel caged in. Makes me want to shoot something. Or someone,” he says, his gaze drifting over his bookcases. He studies the many paper spines. Most he ignores. Some he hasn’t read. A few are worn as old dogs. His Yeats. His Ulysses. A Beckett. A Keats. The Sound and the Fury. Those old friends are handy but what’s closer are the gun magazines, each with a political view that borders on survivalist anarchist. My father laughs to read these coots who think it would take nothing less than a .44 Magnum to stop a determined assailant. My father laughs, but as he laughs he handles one of his many high-powered pistols. Like the one in my room. My birthday present for my 17th birthday. My .357 Magnum. And it’s just sitting there in the drawer, dying to go shoot something. Or someone. When can I go? When can I leave? Christmas? Thanksgiving? Halloween? Tomorrow? Tomorrow. Tomorrow night. I have the car and I’m supposed to work wrestling at the Superdome. Not gonna happen. I’ve got a different agenda now. A drive to
“You okay, Ugnaught?” says my father. “You must be exhausted. You’ve been up since, what six? You should get some sleep. I know how you feel. A lot on your mind. Well, you’re young. These things will pass. Hell, someday you’ll look back on the things that were worrying you when you were seventeen and you’ll laugh. I know I do. Love sick. Walking around all dopey over a girl. I remember one I had the hots for. Beatrice Fontenot. A pretty girl. No, let me correct that. A beautiful girl. Dark hair, dark eyes, nice smooth skin. Pretty and quiet, but there was something else there, too. I don’t know what. Anyway, she was striking. Well, and I’m sure I told you this before; I spent an entire summer thinking about her. But I didn’t do anything, call her or write. I said to myself, I’ll show her. She’ll miss me. Because she liked me, you see? At least I thought so. Well here it comes, the first day of class senior year, and I’ve been waiting the whole summer to see her, and to show her what’s she’s been missing. Boy I was sure I had played it so cool. And she sees me and she says, ‘Benny, why how have you been? How was your summer?’ I said fine, how was yours? She said, ‘Grand. Look, I got engaged.’ And she showed me her ring. Boy, I skulked off like a scalded dog after that. So you see what I mean? It all works out. You look back on these things and you laugh. They’re not so serious after all.”
“Don’t you wish you had called Beatrice that summer?”
My father says nothing for a full minute. Then he picks up his beer and toasts life, destiny, the Sisyphean task that is this world and he says, “Sure. Sure I wish I had called her. She was a very, very pretty girl.”
The Vocabulary of Guns
37.
What do you think of now before you fall asleep? Worries, hopes, fears, insults, shopping lists, unpaid bills, uncalled family, unthanked gifts, unwatered plants, unclipped nails. It wasn’t always this way. When I was a child I daydreamt as a child. My night thoughts before sleep were often adventures of the Heavy Metal persuasion. Spaceships and buxom blondes. Or I was a Boy and I had my Dog, together we roamed the landscape of destruction. With my .30-30
The Vocabulary of Guns
38.
Your father says your name and nudges you awake. He asks you if you still want to go hunting and the answer is no. Everything that hurt last night hurts more this morning. In addition there are new pains. Your right ankle crackles like fried grits. Your ribcage feels soft. Your left knee wobbles on a floating base. Your fingers, hands, toes and feet. Your ass and lower back. Your face. No, no, no, way in hell are you going to drive to
“Sure,” you say to your father.
“You do?” he says hopefully and you remember that he can’t drive himself. Like the child you once were he is entirely reliant upon you.
“Yeah,” you say. “I’ll go.”
“Good. The coffee is ready.”
Ah, coffee. The first of your adult tastes. Wine and beer were not so far behind. You take your coffee like your father takes his, lots of sugar, lots of half and half. You stand in the kitchen, processing your mind-body connection while your father stands out on the patio and smokes. He always seems faraway when he’s out there. It’s the woods in front of him that give the illusion of living at the edge of a jungle, where a man could just chuck his cigarette and head into the bush with nothing but the clothes on his back. Your father looks up at the sky, then down at the ground. Where is his mind? Lost like Ulysses or home with his Penelope? Hard to say. All is illusion. Dreams of antiquity die still-born in the reality of today. Is he composing his last stab at greatness? Is he recalling old times? Does he have anyone or anything to guide him through his increasing middle age? Where are his gods, or did he ever have any? Beckett, Joyce, Yeats, Faulkner, all have let him down. He’s typed his way into the suburbs. No one except his stranger family knows his name, knows his genius, knows who or what he wanted to be. Should he drop dead on the patio tomorrow, only his sons and wife would read his magnum opus, his manuscripts sealed in a suitcase bespangled with stickers from Purdue. What writer dreams of posthumous fame? Who does not crave recognition within this mortal coil? The clash, the pull between anonymous and recognition is as subtle as good versus evil. You never know when you’ll be capable of achieving one or the other. You simply balance the two.
Coffee done, you load the car. Your Mossberg .12 gauge pump. Your father’s fine Remington automatic. Two boxes of number six shot. Hunting vests, gloves, hats, bags. Beware yon sleeping squirrel, rabbit and perhaps wild boar. The so-so white hunters are preparing themselves. The car loaded, your father emerges from the house, gets in the passenger seat and buckles up.
“Let’s see,” he says. “I have my smokes, my lighter, my gloves, my glasses. Okay, let’s go.”
You drop the four-banger into gear and ease down the street. Steam rises from the storm drains. The mantis-like streetlamps exude their eerie orange glow.
“Bladerunner,” says your father and it’s true, it’s a Bladerunner world. Dystopic, lonely, a world without trust, love, future or hope. A world of poisonous gas and dead landscapes. A world of men who dream of androids and androids who dream of men. A world inseparable from this one. A world in which life imitates art imitating life. Or so it seems. Drive these streets; merge onto
The Vocabulary of Guns
39.
I remove my shotgun from its sheepskin-lined case and load it. My father stands off to the side relieving himself.
“Ah,” he says, zipping his pants. “The greatest of small pleasures. Well, let’s see. I’ve got my gun, my knife, my smokes, my lighter, my glasses, my compass and my ass. And some TP in case I get lucky and can take a shit. Okay, what else? Do you have everything you need? Do you have buckshot in case you encounter any of the mystical boars that allegedly haunt these woods?”
I tell my father that I’m carrying a rifled slug, though how I’d get it into the chamber and then into the boar before he gored me is anyone’s guess. My father nods, his eyes trained on the lightening sky to the east. His goal is to be amongst the hard woods, what we call the
“Well,” he says. “I guess I better take this along. I’m afraid if I leave it in the car some mutts will come along and break in and steal it. I sure don’t feel like carrying the heavy s.o.b. though.”
“I’ll take it.”
“You will? You’ll do that for your old pa? Well isn’t he the sensitive Ugnaught. That’s very kind of you son. There will be a reward for your courtesy: one Coke. Warm, no ice. In a cracked glass. With a hair in it. And a bug. Half a bug.”
“Yuck.”
“Anyway, be careful. It’s loaded of course. Don’t accidentally shoot yourself if you start blazing away at imaginary Hell’s Angels.”
I slip the gun into my hunting vest, recalling the feeling I had yesterday when I confronted JW’s stepfather. ‘I wish you had killed him,’ she said. Jeez, there are so many people that need killing. I wonder if I’ll ever get to them all. My father locks the car, checks the hatchback and then we take our guns and cross the empty highway, down a ditch, over a busted wire fence and into the woods. These are real woods, not the scruffy patch of hackberries behind our house. Immediately we are standing amongst old pines. The landscape is littered with years of needles, a dreamlike carpet of silence. In the darkness, aided by probing flashlight and years of experience, we separate, tacitly agreeing to meet as always at the cancerous burl at nine o’clock. Until then we are alone with our thoughts. I move through the pines slowly, feeling their creeping grandness rise above me. This is the land of the giants, and I am but a puny mite walking among them. As the woods slowly brighten around me, I pass bushes covered with pine needles, flowering plants drowned by the endless detritus of the trees. Hardwoods appear, oak and maple and sycamore. Here I move more slowly, still-hunting, listening to the woods. As my father says, the key to most things in life is listening. For him this has become more difficult with age. Years of gun play have given him tinnitus, that annoying hum in the ears. It’s compounded when he’s at the office, the drone of fluorescent lights, copy machines, the deadly hum of a building eating up the watts. It lessens somewhat at home. He says classical music helps a little. He says nine beers helps more. Mostly it pains him in small acute moments. A TV commercial pierces his head like a spear; a song on the radio causes him to turn the knob with disgust, indeed turn it off altogether, muttering that there hasn’t been anything good in art since 1962.
I listen for the stir of critters, but I do so halfheartedly. Moving through the trees like a ninety year old man, I hardly care about squirrel meat, running rabbits or mystic boar. I want to sit and rest this battered body. Meanwhile, the woods are changing, growing in depth and height, the world of dark hues replaced with spots of vivid color. A maple flames up in a shaft of red and orange. A magnolia’s hunter green emerges amidst a few scattered blooms, their dense lemony scent permeating the very forest floor. A single shrub-like tree is losing its orange blossoms like a woman dropping a million earrings and amulets. And the noises of the woods increase incrementally. Where before was only your soft tread of boots meeting needles, then the crackle and crunch of leaves, now is the flitting of small birds, the caw of a distant crow, the crash of a fallen limb. I step over a mossy log, peering ahead of my foot for snakes. Nada and I’m over the log, stumbling on weak knees from the rigors of last night’s game. Football players emerge from the shadows of the woods and tackle me hard. Again I see Big 45 arriving like a mammoth, blasting into me with extreme prejudice. Then it fades and I’m standing at the edge of the woods, marshland before me, a view of yellow grasses and mucky black ponds. A mile in the distance is an island of scrubby oaks and other hardwoods, what my father refers to as the squirrels’ Gilligan’s
The Vocabulary of Guns
40.
My father is waiting for me, standing next to a tree, smoking a butt, pondering the sky. Peaceful. This is where he deserves to be. The hardwoods of the mind. His hand rests on the burl, a large cancerous knob protruding from an oak tree. What if I could make all his problems disappear? If I could transport him to a place where his wife loved him and the typewriter hummed each day, spinning memories into golden words, clouds of thought condensing into pools of prose. I’ve read two of my father’s manuscripts, one with his knowledge, the other not. His dissertation is actually an American Gothic novel, part William Faulkner, part Flannery O’Connor, part Ralph Ellison. He tells the story of You but you is He and He is many things. Memories, dreams, reflections, He moves through space and time as a white man, a black man, a rented suit, a loaf of bread, a dust mote in the eye of a dog. His other book was his last shot, the one he wrote strictly for bucks. It’s a roman a clef about his own existence, fantasies, stories that his bachelor coworkers tell. His old Vega is the comic relief, a car that always seemed perched on the edge of disaster. I read his descriptions of sex, read his detachment, his ennui, and the disco world he and my stepmother briefly lived in. Good times. ‘Thanks for the Good Times’, a title he lifted from a misunderstood song. I wonder if he ever sent the manuscript off, if he even tried to get that masochistic bloodletting to the public. They missed the hero losing the girl. They missed the end that is no end. They missed the rain leaking into the Vega as the hero headed for Pass Christian,
I ask my father if he had any luck. He smiles and nods at his hunting vest resting on the ground. I bend over and lift it. Heavy. Too heavy for squirrel.
“Whoa. What did you shoot, a dog?”
My father laughs as I open the bag and discover a raccoon. He’s a big old male, twenty or twenty-five pounds.
“Poor guy,” I say. “I like coons. I like their faces. And their feet.”
“Yeah, me too,” says my father, flicking his butt to the ground and stamping it out. “I wouldn’t have shot it if I knew what it was. I heard it thrashing around up in a tree and thought I had bagged the mother of all fox squirrels. I shot it without seeing it, something I rarely if ever do. Oh well. What the hell else could it have been? A monkey?”
“I’ve never eaten coon.”
“Me either. We were poor but not that poor. Blacks ate it. I guess they liked it. I don’t know. They probably had to.”
“What do you think it tastes like?”
“Gamey, I’m sure. Like squirrel, maybe tougher.”
“How do you cook it?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Stew it I suppose. I could ask Uncle Tommy. No, he’s a middle class coonass. They look down on eating things like that. I could ask my friend Johnny Wartell. He and his brother Jimmy ate everything. Their parents even caught them roasting a buzzard one time. Tore the hell out of them for that. Shit, I don’t have any idea where Johnny is or if he’s even alive. I could ask Ruby.”
Miss Ruby is our housekeeper, sweet as chess pie and totally unreliable. We’re her Friday and Friday is the end of a long, long week for the Miss Ruby’s of the world.
“You’re gonna ask an old black woman how to cook a coon?”
“Sure, why not? You think she’ll be offended? She won’t care. She knows where I’m coming from. She knows I ain’t no redneck. Hell, I like her. She’s a hoot. I just wish she wouldn’t no-show so much. It about drives your mother crazy.”
“Well, just let me know when you’re gonna ask her for her Coon Recipe so I can not be around.”
My father smiles, glances at the sky. “I think the hunt is over,” he says. “Too windy. How’d you do, by the way? I heard the shotgun once.”
I tell him how I bagged the unluckiest squirrel in the world. He asks to see the pistol and I hand him the Police .38. He aims at a pine tree about forty feet away. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Four shot in a cluster the size of your fist. Chips fly, the air vibrates with the tinny pops. The pine tree has an exposed white navel. My father asks me if I want to shoot the last two, he can’t leave them in there, it hurts his mind. Sure, I say and take the gun from him. Through a shaft of sunlight I see Eric Head running away from me. I take aim, drawing in my breath, holding it for a long moment, concentrating all though into one action. Then I pull the trigger. A chunk of tree bark spins into the woods as Eric falls, grasping at his spine. I turn my gaze to another figure. Jamaal can run. He’s not trying to hide. He’s almost out of range. If he escapes this forest he will spread his contagion, his plague of rape. Last. Chance. To. Do. It. Bang! Another chip of bark flies and it’s done, a headshot on a moving target from fifty yards away.
“Took you long enough,” says my father, reaching down to retrieve his coon.
The Vocabulary of Guns
41.
The ritual following our hunts is to head to the roadhouse for many beers. Exactly how many is our secret. Today my father will have a pitcher by himself, drinking it like the old farts do with a cup of ice floating on the top to keep the beer cool. Meanwhile I sip a Coke and look out the backdoor at the end of the world. That’s how it appears, for the marsh is on fire in several places, huge towers of smoke that billow into the atmosphere like the product of a nuclear bomb. My father’s regular joke is that the rednecks have tamed the atom’s wrath but like the Russians they have not mastered ballistics. Their response is to pile on the pig uranium as well as old tires and car batteries and then launch it into the ozone. These cleansing fires then are the result of The Bomb. It’s funny and not funny too. Not a week goes by that the news isn’t bringing more talk of ICBM’s, nuclear subs, anti-war protests in
“How are you doing, Ugnaught?” says my father. “You look worried. Are you down in the dumps about something. Girl trouble? I know what you mean. Things with your mother aren’t any better. I’m not a jealous person, you know that. But frankly it pisses me off that she keeps attracting these older, father-figure types to confide in. I mean, I don’t expect to have some kind of gooey, tell-me everything relationship, but hell, I am her husband. She can talk to me. But she doesn’t want to. She talks to her shrink. She talked to Emmanuel when she had the real estate company. Now it’s Glen. Ah hell, I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess I’m saying this. I love her. I know that’s probably hard for you to believe, but I do. For all her craziness, I love her very much. And I don’t want to lose her.”
My father lights a smoke, then winces as the bartender turns on the TV, its sharp crackle splitting the air. The place is a rundown joint about a mile before the last bridge on Highway 90. There’s not much cooking at ten in the morning. Two old timers sitting next to each other at the bar, sipping their beer, not a word passing between them. The jukebox is quiet. The moth-eaten pool table collects silence and dust. The bartender changes the channels on the television with a pair of pliers. She finds cartoons, Tom and Jerry. The pair has teamed up to create an ice rink in the kitchen. They flood the floor, then rip the Freon cables from the back of the refrigerator and drop them into the water. Ta dah! Instantly, a world frozen in, the final manifestation of Ice 9. Together the cat and mouse skate across the kitchen floor, rigging up colored lights through the use of condiments. Jerry acquires a bow tie, as does Tom. For once their war has halted. We have peace between traditional enemies, brought together for grace, beauty and art. The appearance of the black mammy maid and the bulldog end the détente, sadly. Dog chases cat who chases mouse as the maid climbs on a table and screams.
“Who’s playing today?” says the bartender to no one in particular.
“Saints play tomorrow,” says my father.
“No shit Sherlock,” says the bartender, a blonde of uncertain age. She has an Eve menthol cigarette permanently glued to her lip. “College on Saturday, Saints on Sunday. That’s how it is.”
My father regards the bartender with amusement, then looks at me. “Are you working tomorrow?”
“Yeah and tonight too.”
“What’s tonight? A dog show? A tractor pull?”
“Wrestling.”
“Ah, wrestling. Will Andre the Giant be there?”
“Hell I don’t know. It’ll be one mutt knocking the shit out of another mutt, then they’ll switch. The crowd doesn’t care. They root for whoever is getting his ass kicked.”
My father smiles and says I sound like him. He asks me how they get the wrestling ring moved and the football field installed in time for the game. I explain what I know which is very little. My job at the Superdome consists in ferrying vast quantities of ice to the concession stands as well as extra cups, popcorn, canned Coke, whatever. As a proud and minimally paid member of the warehouse crew I see almost nothing of the events. My world is the bowels and secret elevators, the corridors of the powerless. My father asks me who the Saints are playing.
“The Rams.”
“Are they any good?”
“Same as the Saints. 3-3.”
“Do you think they’ll win?”
Any Saints fan would answer that with a ‘We’ll see.’ After the heartbreak of last year, this year’s version has produced something less than awe. Bum Phillips has assembled the craggiest team we’ve ever seen in these parts. Kenny Stabler and Richard Todd takes turns handing off to Earl Campbell and throwing interceptions. Each week we watch Rickey Jackson walk back to the Saints locker room. When they win, he looks pissed. When they lose he looks homicidal. Plus he’s the biggest man on the team. He wears his helmet back on his head, ready to sprint across your throat. He’s a man among men but the Saints are a poor lot. Last year I was on my knees praying for victories. When they lost to the Cowboys on a safety, my father shot up about a dozen of his books. Even my stepmother could be heard urging Rickey to kill Joe Montana. The ardor has cooled. My stepmother has new interests. My father tinkers with his guns when the Saints play, only casually interested and only when Hokie Gajan carries the ball. It’s been up to me to carry on the family mania and after seeing a few games up close, I’m about done with them too. Not the bartender however. She announces to the bar that she’s got fifty bucks on the Saints.
“They better not lose,” she says. “I’ll be one pissed-off bitch. Last week they lost to the Bears, I kicked my boyfriend out of the trailer. I told him he’s bad luck to my Saints. Plus he drank half my goddamn beer.”
“I guess you’ll be taking the car,” says my father, pouring another beer. “Oh well, stranded again. I’m sure your mother will be off doing something or another. However, if we see her when we go back, let us decide now how many beers I’ve had. Six will scare her and she won’t believe one. Let’s say…three. If asked, I have had three beers. Okay?”
“Sure.”
“They need to stop that Dickerson,” says the bartender to one of the old men.
“Who is Dickerson?” my father says to me but the bartender hears and she says, “Dickerson? You don’t know who Eric Dickerson is? He’s a badass is what he is. He plays running back for the Rams. Every time the Saints play them he gives us problems. He’s big and fast. I wish he played for the Saints. All our running back are turkeys. Earl fuckin’
“Well nowadays,” says the old man. “I can’t tell one from the other. Seems like it’s just our nigras fightin’ their nigras.”
“You got that right,” says the other old coot.
The bartender says nothing, but her sneer deepens somewhat in defense of black Saints football players. She changes the channel, finds a talk show for women. Two ladies in pantsuits are explaining how they each lost over thirty pounds while eating as much as they wanted. “That’s what I need,” says the bartender, rubbing her belly.
“What time are you leaving?” my father says.
“I have to be at the Dome at four this afternoon and then back again at seven tomorrow morning.”
“Damn, those are some long hours,” says my father. “Oh well, you’re young. Just be careful you don’t fall asleep and crash the car.”
“I’ll be staying at Maginnis’ house. It’s not far from downtown.”
My father nods at my lies. I have no intention of working the game tomorrow. I have something else to do, something that will involve a gun and ammunition. Something that will involve a conversation with JW’s cousin and then hopefully a surprise attack. I see their faces, looking down the barrel of a gun. I see their heads explode like melons. I see it all and it’s beautiful. Like the smoking clouds of nuclears, I see a better world of tomorrow, cleansed of the unclean.
The Vocabulary of Guns
42.
My father’s hero is a gunsmith in
He gets the chance to try out this philosophy on the ride back home. We stop at the Times Saver on
The Vocabulary of Guns
43.
My younger brother is watching ‘Abbott and Costello Join the Foreign Legion’ when we get home. Bud and Lou are learning to shoot their rifles. Coconuts tumble from trees, camels start and tear off, hats pop into the air. Such behavior would get a real Legionnaire flogged and starved. Instead the two laugh it off and go to lunch. While my father makes a drink, I unload the car of squirrels and coons and hunting gear. My brother comes outside to help but refuses to carry anything except a vest. My shotgun remains in the car waiting for a second trip. Then I’m cleaning squirrel and coon while my father interrogates my brother as to our mother’s location. He says she said she was going to play golf. ‘Natch,’ says my father and he heads out to the patio to brood. That leaves me and my brother and a wide open Saturday. He asks me if I want to go for a bike ride, though we only have one bike between us, his, as I have given up childish things. I should be beat-ass tired but I’m not, especially with the adrenaline rush of what my father just did at the 7-11. I tell Yves about it as I pedal us down the street, him riding on the handlebars.
“Do you think pop would have shot him?” says Yves.
“Pop says never pull a rod unless you plan on using it. More than likely he would have shot their car.”
“He sure has lots of practice doing that.”
Indeed. We turn onto
The Vocabulary of Guns
44.
My brother and I ride his bike through Tomorrow. What will the world be like for him in a few years? More built up or more torn down? Ravaged by Man and Nature or cultured and cultivated like orchids and pearls? Hard to know. We pass man-made
The Vocabulary of Guns
45.
How are we able to abandon living things? How do we turn our backs on things with eyes, knowing that their gaze is upon us? How do we cut those ties? How do we live with ourselves afterwards? What elixirs get us through our days? What narcosis gets us through our nights? It’s in all of us, the ability to leave. Perhaps less common is the ability to carry on. Each of us is a combination of one that leaves and one that remains. It dominates our soul. It is what we are and therefore decides our every action, as if we were puppet masters of ourselves. My father, for example feels his own father’s abandonment. His strongest memories are those where he must go to his father’s house and ask for money. He bitterly resented these tasks, the more so because my grandfather would have one of his girlfriends answer the door. Inevitably these transactions were colored in humiliation and cutting remarks. So my father feels very solid in his gun-filled fortress. Perhaps his wife is jerking him around. No matter. As long as she doesn’t leave. And she won’t. She bears the guilt of the abandoner, the one who gave something away. A high school ‘situation.’ A semester away from school. A ‘vacation’ to
We had biked a few streets over from our house on Pressburg, deep into the neighborhood of
The Vocabulary of Guns
46.
As we head back home down
It’s a crappy shack-like structure composed of scrap wood. A few pentacles have been spray painted onto the outside. Nearby is under a swing tree, whose rope dangles forlornly, torn off some ten feet above the ground. No more swingers, no more bad boys, no more devil worshippers. My brother sticks his head into the clubhouse. The walls are covered with the names of rock bands and it turns out the devil worshippers like the same music that I do. AC/DC. Led Zeppelin. Blue Oyster Cult. These are my people, wherever they are or whoever they were. A few empty beer bottles indicate they favor the High Life. A lovingly crafted marijuana leaf is etched into the doorframe. I’m not a pothead but maybe I am. Maybe I’m a heroin addict and an acid eater and a dope fiend and a cokehead and a weedhead and a gashuffer and a painthuffer and the Marlboro Man. Who knows anymore? Who knows anything? If the devil worshipper’s clubhouse which we heard about for years can really exist then anything is possible. And I can do this. I can do this right. Get my birthday Magnum and get on the road.
“You could have taken Elsa here,” says my brother.
“What are you talking about?”
“Elsa, from school. I know you liked her.”
“I didn’t like her. She was just my friend.”
“Then why did put the ‘I (heart) Elsa’ on your windowsill?”
“What were you doing in my room?”
“I wasn’t in your room. I saw it from outside.”
Busted, I say nothing. Elsa was my eight grade love, though she was way too mature for me. She dated older guys, one of whom stole her away from her house. For a week or so she was a runaway, both of them were. When the police finally found them they were wrapped around the inside of what was left of his car. Drag racing on
“I saw you and Channing rape her,” my brother says.
“What?”
I turn and look at him. Behind us is the clubhouse. The swing tree looms above us like a vegetable cave. Green leaves here and there but mainly grays and browns mixed with yellow and flaming reds.
“I saw you and Channing pull her into the woods behind our house,” he says.
“We were joking. We didn’t do anything to her. We were playing around.”
He says nothing, instead swiping at the air with his little knife. He’s bored. The devil worshippers and their beaten down clubhouse bore him. I recall the time my only friend Channing and I were playing around with Elsa. She was flirting and calling us barbarians as we lashed each other with our fighting sticks. How did we come to each have her by the upper arm? How did we come to be perp-walking her through the woods? She was laughing, wasn’t she? She was. She was also saying, ‘You are joking, right guys? This is a joke, right?’ and you said, ‘Maybe’ didn’t you? Yes, you did. And your only friend Channing laughed and said, ‘Yeah, maybe. Maybe not.’ And he laughed because he wanted to; he wanted to, he wanted you to want to, too. All you had to do was say, ‘Yes.’ Not even out loud. Just inside, say, Yes. Because you loved her, you wanted her, you (hearted) Elsa and if she didn’t (heart) you back, oh well. You could have said yes. But you didn’t. You said no.
“Come one, let’s get back home,” I say, and start heading back the way we came, leaving my brother and the devil worshipper’s to catch up as best as they can.
The Vocabulary of Guns
47.
My father decides he needs a lot more beer if he’s going to spend another Saturday alone. He dragoons me into running him to the store. Quasimodo’s, he says. For old times sake. Quasi’s is a small grocery store in a strip mall that we’ve been visiting for years. It exists as an oasis for men like my father who need peace and quiet when they drink. Nearly every night during the week my father used to take Yves and me to the store. He’d give us each a dollar while he purchased himself a few tall cans of beer. Then we’d sit in the car for an hour, casing out Quasi’s joint. The proprietor, a slug-like man composed of jowls and a greasy head, soon came to ignore us squatting in his parking lot in my father’s old Vega, my brother learning to read from the storefront advertising. Home Freezer. Okra. Zataran’s Crab Boil. McKenzie’s Pastry and Cakes. Boudin. Pabst. Charcoal briquettes. But often my brother was lost in the backseat while my father conversed and I attempted to keep up. He’d cover all the bases in a single evening, poetry, film, politics, literature, astronomy. It seemed my father knew something about everything and had a lot to say about it all. Between my fantasies about the apocalypse and my father’s fantasies that he was the reincarnation of William butler Yeats my brother was fortunate if he could get in a word about anything. Until the telescope. During the time we were getting a telescope he and I shared an interest and would talk about nothing else, even in the car at Quasimodo’s. The telescope had been ordered from a catalogue full of exotic as well as household gifts. Our mother had sold so much car insurance that year that she won anything she wanted from the catalogue. In her generosity, she let my brother and I choose. After poring over it for days, we decided on the telescope. It looked professional with its three fine legs and its array of lenses and knobs. The accompanying blurb claimed we’d be able to see other galaxies, other life forms, the deepest secrets of Red Giants and White Dwarfs. We informed out parents of our choice and sat back to dream. My brother was six. I was 13. The idea of a telescope seemed romantic, like a medieval scholar on the cusp of the Renaissance. I imagined us lugging the delicate instrument onto the roof. From there we’d catch comets in action, see the phases of the moon, admire the lunar deserts, the lunar oceans, the lunar marshes. My brother imagined even grander plans. We’d mount a BB gun onto the telescope and shoot things very far away. We’d rig up a wagon and take it with us on bike rides. We’d attach it to the hood of the car and look into the future as we drove. All of this telescope talk must have been making my father feel like an outsider. He didn’t care about looking through a tube. He preferred to read about black holes and their ilk, imagining a universe that expanded and contracted. Perhaps he was afraid if he looked into the heavens he’d discern that all celestial bodies were simply moving away from each other, bound and determined by forces they’d never understand to flee to the very limits of their possibilities. In any case, one day he pulled me aside and said he’d spoke with my mother and they agreed that we shouldn’t get the telescope after all. Why? Well, there were a number of reasons; primarily my father didn’t think the telescope would work worth a damn. Big promises, small results. Too much ambient light in the suburbs and he sure as hell wasn’t driving us somewhere at night to look through a telescope. And besides that, we needed a new weed eater. I was wearing out the old one with my lawn business. So it was decided, a new weed eater instead of the telescope. The last thing my father said was, Back me up on this with Yves, okay? Okay. That evening we drove to Quasimodo’s. As usual my brother and I loaded up on sugar while my father bought two beers. We sat in the crappy red Vega and stared at the shimmering fluorescents of Quasi’s grocery store. My brother began his monologue from the backseat. He wanted to know if the telescope could be used to see behind the sun. He wanted to know if it could be used to study ants. He wanted to know if the telescope could be mounted onto a plane and then flown really high to allow us to see even farther into space. My father interrupted him. Yves, he said. Your brother and I have talked about this and he agrees with me, we need a new weed eater. Those damn telescopes never work worth a crap anyway. Maybe when you’re older we’ll get another telescope. But until then, no more talk about the telescope, okay?
“Oh.”
That’s all he said, my little brother. Just that one word, one syllable. He got it. He understood. No telescope. No. Telescope. No. No. No. So he didn’t say another word. In fact he didn’t make another sound. I know he was trying as hard as possible not to cry and I know it worked. But he didn’t want to practice reading and he didn’t want to talk about school and I found that I didn’t either. And my father, for the first time that I could remember didn’t have anything to say. He finished a beer and crushed it up the way tough guys do. He always made fun of those guys. He didn’t ask for his second beer. He threw the can on the floor at my feet, started the Vega and pulled away from Quasi’s and headed home. At a stoplight we pulled alongside a heavy muscle car, rumbling and throbbing, Black Sabbath emanating from inside. When the light changed my father popped the clutch on the Vega and jumped ten yards on the muscle car before it even knew what was happening. In a moment it blew past us. My father turned down
He said, We’re getting that fucking telescope.
And she said, Why are you yelling? You know I don’t like that.
I’m not yelling, he said. I’m just upset. Do you know what he said?
What who said, she said.
Yves. What Yves said. That little shit. He said, Oh. That’s it, just ‘oh.’ Christ, it breaks my heart.
So we got the telescope and it didn’t work all that well but it was beautiful and symbolic and sat in the living room like a spinet or a harpsichord that no one knew how to play. A sign that my father was a good man who wanted no part of disappointing his kids.
Yes, it’s like old times now. We tool to the store. Except now I’m driving and my brother stays behind. There’s something on TV and anyway he’s hot. Bring me something, he says and my father assures him he will. We tool down Read Road to the corner of Morrison. Quasi’s isn’t half so exciting by daylight. My father gets out of the car and heads inside. Sad. He’s a sad man. He walks deliberately, his gaze forward, obscuring his drunkenness by an act of pure will. None know the devils that live in each of us. We all imagine that we are in private hells. I see my father disappear into Quasimodo’s. He’s a good man, beset with good intentions. His path is paved. All that is required now is the steady plodding pace to continue until one day he no longer knows the language of literature, the argot of agriculture, the parlance of mystery, only the vocabulary of guns to keep him safe at night.
The Vocabulary of Guns
48.
Everybody’s got one. What? A sad story. Everybody’s got one and this is mine. That’s how it goes, right? You know what I’m saying. People have to spill the beans. They can’t keep things locked up inside. It’s what the Greeks were talking about when they created Pandora. The poor dear releases untold sorrows into the world. How prophetic that hope is retained but is locked back up. Hope is all we have. Hope that it will get better, I suppose. More likely we only hope that we can stop thinking about our story long enough to live our lives. It’s hard. It dominates every move we make. Our story becomes indistinguishable from ourselves. All we are is what has happened to us and what we’ve done. Where is there room for hope in that penumbra? No where. You’ll hear stories and wonder how it came to be that way. A man may tell you that he fooled around on his wife two or three days after their wedding. It was only one time, he’ll say, as if once weren’t so much more than enough. I only shot him in the head one time, you tell the judge. I didn’t know it would kill the man. I only had sex with her one time, you tell your wife. I didn’t know it would kill your soul. And now that story is also her story and to some extent your story for having heard it, for having listened. You may wonder to yourself how the wife felt about it all. Her husband’s part of the story would be difficult to forget. The embodiment of the incident would literally lie on top of her at night. It must have been difficult, if not impossible to not have the story follow you in dreams. To not wonder. And you, the listener, you and I may both wonder how that story might morph over time like a steady growing tumor, enlarging on its own schedule independent of its host. The story might shift, become another story. The man might tell you something else. He might say, ‘Well, I’ve told you practically everything about us. I may as well tell it all.’ He might pause and sip his beer. He may look down at his feet wondering how they got into this kitchen at this time of the day. How he came to be home or even have a home or a son, two sons, in that home. And one son in front of him now to talk to, to tell his story to. He might say, ‘We swapped partners with another couple!’ He’ll say it as if it were torn from his mind with forceps. Snap, and it’s out there. His face wears both of the masks, tragedy and comedy and it’s a perfect moment. It is Life, capital L, and it is the next layer of the story. How A leads to B. How a deed unredeemable would manifest itself into this next revelation. How his wife mooned over a fireman. How he felt nothing horny about the fireman’s wife. How his wife got the crabs. How he was unable to perform. More chapters, more verse. The story flows over the floor and you, dear listener and me, one of two sons might listen and hear and see the poor storyteller thrash about his kitchen, swig deeply from his beer bottle, laugh, cry, say your name, say your name again and again, then say, ‘Dear God. How did this happen? How did I get this way?’ He’ll say it but he’ll already know. He’ll have to. He’ll see it twisted in the wind like sheets of infidelity, sheets of yesteryear, sheets in the bed of a woman so forgotten he might not even remember her name, just that she was Indian. And he’ll be done. Done with the telling. He’ll leave the kitchen and walk out onto his back patio to have a smoke. You’ll watch him leave, smoke, stare into the woods behind the house. He’s free for a moment, just a nanosecond, but free for a moment nonetheless. Free to have hope. Hope that he’ll forget. He never will, of course, just like I the son will never forget and perhaps you the listener will also not forget. It has become Story, the one we’re all living, all that’s been done to us and all that we have done.
The Vocabulary of Guns
49.
“Go get your gun,” my father says and like the dutiful son I am, I comply. I fetch the .357 Magnum from my underwear drawer and return to the kitchen. My father’s .357, fraternal twin to mine with its stainless steel finish and blonde grips, rests on the countertop, ready for blasting. Next to it is an attractively-bound collection of Yeats, a gift from my mother that my father never reads. He emerges from the garage with a copy of ‘The Magus’, ‘Moby Dick’ and ‘The Last Tycoon.’ Each is hardbound and nearly unread.
“I tried to read all three of those fuckers,” my father said. “Then I kept them around to impress people, I suppose. I’ve read plenty of books. Or rather, I’ve read a few books many, many times. So what? So fucking what? And as for this thing.” He picks up the Yeats, frowning. It’s a thoughtful gift. My father pretends he is the reincarnation of the Irish bard, what with all the theosophies and séances those people were into. It’s true he was born nine months to the day that Yeats died. Who knows what the laws of reincarnation really are? Is there a time delay? A vacation from your past life? A chance to rest, or do you immediately become another soul struggling for life, at mercy of every carriage wreck and kicking mule? “Do you want to shoot any of your books?” my father says. “Normally I’m against that kind of Nazi shit as you know. Despite the Hitler Youth Knife in the glove box which we both know is a joke. But anyway, if you want a target, something to shoot at, grab a few books.”
I return to my bedroom and contemplate my bookcase, a tall narrow thing stuffed tight, mostly with MAD paperbacks and science fiction. All these dream worlds and fart jokes. All this kiddie crap. Even the good stuff, the Dune trilogy, the Foundation Series, the Riverworld Series, it’s all crap. Fantasies to fill the mind, occluding the brain from the real craziness going down every day. Gabe. Her cry fills my mind. How many other cries are floating through the skies? How many other assaults on justice and piece of mind are occurring even now? For whom will this be the most terrible Saturday night of their lives? Someone is putting on makeup, jeans, planning what they’ll say and do. Some predators somewhere are sharpening their claws, unstretching their mongrel limbs. Somewhere bad shit is happening and there’s nothing I or you or any of us can do about it except wait to find out. My gaze wanders over a row of Harlan Ellison. That phony. That joker. Complaining about all the pussy he gets. Dreaming up fantasies about gangland
“I’ll go first,” my father says. “Not because I’m impolite. I just don’t want you to get in trouble if someone hears us. But I don’t think they will. People will probably think it’s firecrackers.” He gazes at the afternoon blue sky above us. If we weren’t filled with acid and bile it would be a lovely day. But we are weak and evil and mean and we are taking it out on our masters, our heroes, our pleasures and challenges, our friends, our books. My father places Yeats against the logs, sets his beer on a stump, makes sure I’m out of danger and then takes aim at the book. Bang, and it jumps. Bang, and he kills When You Are Old. Bang, and he plugs No Second Troy. Bang, and down goes Men Improve with Years, Bang, the death of The Magi, Bang, a shot to the heart of He Mourns the Change that Has Come Upon Him and His Beloved and He Longs for the End of the World. The air smells of cordite. The woods echo with the death of poetry. My father sips his beer and walks over to look at his work. A nice spacing of shots, despite Mr. Yeats moving as he died. Bits of paper lay about in the leaves, the dying words of my father’s reincarnated ghost.
My turn. I place ‘The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World’ in front of ‘Shatterday.’ I step back and take aim. I’m killing them all, all the enemies of me and mine. I’m gunning down all you untried and uncharged monsters, you rapists and murderers and fiends. Bang and I blast you. Bang and you fall. Bang and the Beast flies through the air. Bang and Shatterday splits at the seams. Bang and Eric grabs his chest. Bang and Jamaal grabs his eye.
“Nice shooting,” says my father, pleased that he’s managed to hand down to me one useful talent.
The Vocabulary of Guns
50.
My father takes our pistols to the garage to clean them. He sends me to the car to fetch the Police .38 as well. He wants to be certain I don’t accidentally take it to work, much less drive to
My father sits in a single shaft of sunlight surrounded by cigarette smoke. It is as if the man himself were afire, a slow smolder, painless but forever, consuming gradually all his best parts, leaving behind only desiccated grey flesh and memories of what was done and not done.
“That’s it,” he says.
The story is finished. He’s fielding no questions. He waves off any further conversation. Like a priest at confessional I am left to move on to my own business. I can take a shower and cleanse myself of the day’s funk, the smell of cigarettes, the grit of the road, the moist aromas of the woods. How to cleanse the mind of unsafe thinking, unsafe thoughts is another matter altogether.
The Vocabulary of Guns
51.
Phones suck. You can hide behind the cord. You can hide your face and what you’re feeling. You can close your eyes and lie. You can call home and hope the answering machine picks up. You can put another barrier between yourself and the truth. You can call the Truth and if you leave a message, then you’ve done your part. Truth must find you out. The onus is upon Truth. But if there is no answering machine or the callee gets to the phone before you can hang up after four or five rings, well then you may be forced to speak, to communicate, tell where you are and what you are up to. You may be required to answer a few questions, perhaps some higher brain function-stuff. Why? Why? Why don’t you want your husband to join you at the Holiday Inn bar? You may object to your husband’s drinking but he’ll tell you that he’s only had three beers even if you both know it’s three times that. You might say that you and your business partner are talking shop, tell him that he’d just be bored. He might say something pathetic like, ‘I miss you.’ Despicable. When have they ever missed each other before? When have they ever had that giddy courtship, that new found love? Never. Well maybe for five minutes after they got married. So screw you and who you miss, she says. Drink your beer, clean your guns, go shoot an old car. Feed the kids. I’ll be home later. Goodbye.
I hear my father hang up the phone as I finish packing an overnight bag. On my bed is JW’s letter, the only one she sent me last summer. I tear off the return address and then return that perfumed monster back to my desk. Months after I received it I can still smell the fragrance. I’ll be haunted by that scent for the rest of my life. ‘Raffinee,’ I’ll whisper in my sleep. I’ll ask salesgirls to let me sample a spray and when they ask me if it’s for my girlfriend I’ll say No, I’m just remembering someone. That’s sweet they’ll say put of course they won’t know the Truth. No, the Truth is out there in the world tonight and I’m not avoiding its call. My bag is packed. My shotgun is wrapped in a towel and sleeping in the car. I have the address, a place to start. I catch myself looking at myself in the mirror. Not bad. I could be uglier. I could smile more. I smile. Sick. There’s no happiness there. Just the grim look of the young staring into the infinity of fate.
I have a few bucks but my father asks me if I need any money and without waiting for an answer, he hands me a twenty. Be careful, he says, looking abstractedly away. I love him. For a moment I am so engulfed in love for my father that I can’t move. He’s a beaten and frail man. He doesn’t have a cruel sinew in his soul. He only wants peace. Live and let live. He’s a good Cajun who plays as hard as he works. He doesn’t do either very hard at all. Why does life have to be so difficult? Shoot a gun, read a poem, go see Raiders of the lost
“Okay, pop. I’ll see you tomorrow. Go Saints.”
“Go Saints,” says my father wearily. “I love you Gabriel. You’re my good boy.”
“I love you too pop.”
He touches my arm, grips my bicep, then lets me go as if I were taking the train to the Front. Well, I guess I am.
“Goodbye pop.”
“Goodbye Gabriel. I’ll see you soon.”
Yes pop. I sure hope I’ll be seeing you soon too. I pick up my bag and walk out the front door.
The Vocabulary of Guns
52.
You leave the East and all that you are back there and you begin the journey West to new lands, new ideas, new experiences. You are not fleeing. There’s no one after you, no posse comitias, no angry father, no jolted wife. You are simply leaving because you have to leave home forever if you hope to come back again. You have to blow the dust of that place off your boots or sneakers in my case and get behind the wheel of a car and drive across
No comments:
Post a Comment