Over and Under (16 page)

The guns slung across our backs were our prized possessions, and we often took them along with us in the woods, when both our meager budgets and our parents allowed us the use of live ammunition. Tom and I had both received the guns the previous Christmas. Up to that point, I had spent that holiday season in a funk, depressed again about the low population inside the Gray house. Starting at about Thanksgiving, I imagined generations bumping into each other in the tiny front rooms all over Borden, the folks repeating themselves to be heard over the noise. Our house was so quiet on Christmas mornings that we could hear the high-pitched whining of my dad’s electronic flash recharging between photographs. Tom’s house was so crowded that two of his younger siblings had to eat Christmas dinner on an ironing board in the living room, because the dining room table, the kitchen table, and two card tables weren’t quite big enough for the whole clan. I always longed for that: a huge family with stupid traditions, family
recipes, black sheep, and crazy uncles. The feeling was especially strong during the holidays. But Mom’s family was a mystery, and my father was an only child, like me. Crowded, chaotic Christmas mornings were something I’d never have.

Adding to my gloom was the giant foil-wrapped Hershey Kiss I’d been unable to give Taffy for Christmas. Right before school let out, I’d lingered in Miller’s for thirty minutes until the store was completely empty except for me and Patsy. Then I snatched the kiss off the shelf, hurriedly picked a card, and rushed to the register, eager to complete the transaction before any of my friends could wander in and bust me. Patsy sensed my discomfort and took her time counting my quarters and dimes, but I was able to leave the store unseen. I imagined myself giving it to Taffy at school the next day, the look on her face as she accepted the gift, the resumption of the romance that had been interrupted by a misunderstanding over a shared sandwich with Theresa Gettelfinger.

But Taffy didn’t show up for school the next day, or the next day, and then we were on Christmas break. I’d been unable to muster the nerve necessary to deliver the present to her home. The kiss was hidden in my top dresser drawer, making me think about Taffy every time I got a pair of socks, all of which soon smelled vaguely of chocolate. My parents must have sensed my moodiness when they decided to get me the best Christmas present of my life.

When I came downstairs Christmas morning, the gun was leaning unwrapped against the fireplace, so casually that it took me a few minutes to notice it. It was, in its own way, fairly nondescript, all black metal without a piece of
wood on it. As soon as I spotted it, I grabbed it and read the Springfield Armory name and logo etched into the side, two crossed cannons in a circle. On the other side was
SPRINGFIELD ARMORY M6 SURVIVAL.
As Mom and Dad watched, I broke the weapon down, looking at every part from every angle, memorizing the curves and colors of each component, and especially the way everything fit together in a meaningful, logical way. It’s hard to explain how strongly I wanted to know immediately everything about that gun. A few years later, in a sweltering Indiana University dorm room, I would study a creased photograph of my first love with the same kind of devotion.

The gun was a Springfield M6 Scout. It was entirely made of metal, including the stock—the whole thing had a blocky, utilitarian look. It had two barrels, over and under, a .22 rifle barrel over a slightly larger .410 shotgun. I had seen double-barrel guns before, but always with two barrels of the same caliber. I associated the configuration with old-fashioned guns, museum pieces or heirlooms manufactured before pump-action or semiautomatic mechanisms, when it took two barrels to get two shots off quickly. My gun was clearly no antique, however, as indicated by the complete lack of wood or ornamentation in its manufacture. A knurled knob moved the firing pin on the hammer to one of two positions: the lower position for the shotgun, the top for the .22. The front sight was also selectable, a small “l” of metal that could be flipped up to a small “v” for the shotgun, or a tiny “o” peep sight for the rifle, both of which were labeled as such with tiny, almost microscopic numbers. While it was obviously not a Daisy BB gun, it wasn’t all that much bigger: thirty-two inches long and
just four and a half pounds, according to the “Your New M6 Scout” operator’s manual that I rapidly memorized. The strangest thing about the gun’s appearance was that it lacked a trigger. In its place was a kind of squeeze bar. A black nylon sling ran from the very back of the stock to the end of the barrel.

The gun was designed to be compact. It broke open in the middle to load, and in the same way it could be folded almost completely in half. In the buttstock was a waterproof storage compartment for storing ammunition: a single row of nineteen holes, fifteen for .22 shells, and four larger ones for .410 shotgun shells. I owned a Crossman pellet gun, and a BB gun, too, both designed to mimic the look of real guns as closely as possible. But here was the real thing, right in front of me, and it was all mine. I could scarcely believe my luck.

“You be careful with that,” my father said. “Like they taught you.”

Dad was referring to the gun-safety class Tom and I had taken side by side the summer before, the summer of ’78. At the time we were a little curious about why our fathers had enrolled us. We’d both been shooting our fathers’ guns for years, under their careful supervision, and a respect for firearms and an intimate knowledge of the damage they could cause was a part of our lives. Like Tom, I had already felt the exhilaration and the shame of a well-placed shot, killing my first rabbit with the Crossman pellet gun, gingerly examining the limp, bleeding carcass to confirm what I had done. (We were both so bothered by the experience that we independently asked clergymen for solace. Tom’s priest told him killing the rabbit wasn’t a
sin because the rabbit didn’t have a soul. Reverend Nichols told me it was okay because God gave man dominion over the animals.) We didn’t think some class had anything to teach us about the power of guns. Nonetheless, Tom and I weren’t going to argue with an opportunity to hold and shoot our fathers’ guns for a week.

For the class, I used my father’s lever-action .22 Marlin rifle, and Tom shot his dad’s old Remington. The class was held in the cinder-block “clubhouse” of the Georgetown Conservation Club, and was filled with city kids from New Albany and Jeffersonville, most of them wearing amberlensed shooting glasses and pristine Cabela’s vests. On the first day, when we stood to introduce ourselves one by one, the kids snickered at Tom and me, either at our presidential names or our hillbilly accents. We had to wait through three days of classroom training before we could show them up. We might talk funny up in the hills, they would learn, but we could shoot like Sergeant York.

The safety classes were excruciatingly thorough and repetitive—to this day I can recite the three fundamental rules for safe gun handling verbatim:
ALWAYS keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. ALWAYS keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot. ALWAYS keep the gun unloaded until ready to use.
We were motivated to study by our knowledge that a passing grade on the written test was required before we could go out on the range. The firing point was in sight and in earshot, just outside the windows of the classroom where we vowed repeatedly to Know Our Target and What Is Beyond. The occasional pop-pop-pop from outside was a tantalizing incentive to study hard.

All but two of our classmates passed the written test. One of those who failed was a chunky loudmouth from Clarksville who had told us all at every turn that he already knew everything about guns and didn’t need the class; he surprised us by crying in humiliation when the instructors announced his failure. The other washout was a nervous, skinny youngster from Georgetown. Throughout the course he had asked the instructors earnest and specific questions about the potential for self-inflicted wounds on the range. When they announced that he had failed the written test and would not be shooting, he let out a heartfelt sigh of relief.

The instructors then marched the rest of us out on the range where Tom and I immediately asserted our superiority. We were naturals. The rules the other kids had to think about individually with each shot—focus on the front sight, breathe, relax, aim, squeeze-the-trigger-don’t-jerk-it—came automatically to us. While the other kids were learning to their surprise how loud a real gunshot is, and how sharply a little .22 rifle can kick you in the shoulder, Tom and I actually thought about the wind direction and the inch of angle the bullet dropped on its way downrange to the paper bull’s-eye. I could actually see my bullet leave the barrel and the arc it traced as it flew downrange. When I told the instructors, they said it wasn’t possible, but Tom said he could see it, too. The instructors soon took a special interest in the two of us, as we punched holes in the centers of ever more distant targets while our classmates struggled to keep their rounds out of the dirt.

At the end of the week, the instructors pitted Tom and me against each other in a friendly shooting competition
as the other kids watched jealously. We shot targets at a variety of ranges from a standing, sitting, and prone position. Tom actually outshot me by a little, but I won the prize for best overall score in the class by virtue of my higher grade on the written test. I received as my reward a certificate that pronounced me to be an “Eagle of the Indiana Wilderness,” and a new box of .22 shells, both of which were displayed proudly on my dresser during the six months between the class and Christmas day, the day I discovered why dad had enrolled me in a gun safety class to begin with.

“Can I show Tom?” I asked, when I finally regained the power of speech that Christmas morning.

“Sure,” said my father. “Go on.” He grinned in a way that told me the surprise wasn’t quite over.

“Bundle up,” my mother said.

I found my coat, hat, and gloves in record time, shoved my box of shells in my pocket, and then walked as quickly as I could (the safety rules prohibited running with a weapon) up my driveway and down Cabin Hill Road. About halfway down the road, I saw Tom coming my way, with an identical gun in his hands. We found out later that his father had found them both at a gun show at the fairgrounds in Louisville, and quickly identified them as ideal first guns for us both. Our fathers had carefully coordinated the gifts, after agreeing on the gun safety class and evaluating our maturity and readiness for gun ownership.

Tom and I spent the rest of Christmas morning blasting away icicles that hung from tree branches—they exploded with a satisfying noise and sparkle. When we paused to reload or talk, we heard all around us the distant, jubilant
firing of other men and boys with their Christmas-morning guns.

Yes, these were real guns, and we were shooting real ammunition, unsupervised, at will, all over the countryside. We were not inside any city limits, and there were no laws that prevented two kids like us from shooting icicles, Dr Pepper cans, or any other inanimate object for as long as our ammunition held out. Out in the country you heard people shooting all year long, the blast of shotguns and the high-pitched crack of powerful rifles. It was not any more surprising to find empty red and yellow plastic shotgun shells on a path in the woods than it was to find acorns. At thirteen, my age that Christmas morning, I was far from the first of my classmates to own a real gun. Every boy I knew had a hunting license before he had a driver’s license, and most had killed their first deer before their first kiss.

The M6 was not designed for marksmanship. In our hands, however, after shooting thousands of rounds through spring and summer, Tom and I became dead-eyed experts. We knew exactly what the little gun was capable of doing, and within those limits, we could command the weapon perfectly. We designed ever more challenging targets and scenarios for ourselves. When the Coke can on the fence post became too easy, we switched to a small tuna can, which we soon after hung on a string from a tree limb, learning to shoot it dead center as it swung in the breeze. By the time school let out, we were shooting the string.

For our everyday shooting, we bought boxes of shells at Miller’s, whenever we had a few dollars from a birthday or a mowed lawn. The ammo secured in the buttstock’s
storage compartment, however, was sacred, to be saved for an “emergency,” that situation Tom and I fantasized about in which we’d need the little gun to save our lives. Most often these fantasies involved invading communist hordes swarming across Clark County. While Tom and I certainly had nothing resembling formal military training, countless shots in every corner of the valley, an intimate knowledge of the landscape, and our vivid imaginations taught us well the value of high ground and interlocking fields of fire. I like to think we might have given an invading horde a pretty good fight.

For the .22 shells in the storage compartment, we chose the Winchester .22LR. That decision was made easy because that was pretty much the best .22 round we could buy in Borden, although we had heard about a .22 center-fire round that was more accurate. That was far too exotic to be found on the shelf at Miller’s. In addition, we practiced constantly with the inexpensive rimfire rounds, and thought it wise to have a familiar rifle round at the ready when the Commies finally came over the hill.

The decision as to what shotgun shells to store in the buttstock was more complicated. A wide variety of things can be fired from a shotgun, one of the reasons it is the most practical of guns. The options we studied included shrieking noisemakers, flechette rounds that shot tiny steel darts, and flamethrower rounds that shot pure fire about twenty feet. After an exhaustive evaluation of our options, Tom and I finally picked up three flare rounds at a gun show at the Holiday Inn in New Albany. That we paid four dollars for each was an indication of how badly we wanted the flares. This gave us one to store in each of our
guns, and a third to shoot, to try it out and see what it looked like. On a cool spring night, after flipping a coin to see who would get the honor, I shot the third flare round from my M6 into the sky. It exploded above our heads with a pop and a blinding red starburst that burned intensely for seven seconds, just as the box advertised. Ever since, we had each kept three regular rounds of .410 birdshot stored in our guns, along with the flare round, a compact, portable fireworks display that forever tempted us.