The Early Stories (87 page)

“Aw, that's O.K., forget it,” Murray mumbled. But his eyes shone, looking up at the promising apparition of his grandfather. Ben was hurt, remembering how his own knack, as father, was to tease and cloud those same eyes. There was something too finely tooled, too little yielding in the boy that Ben itched to correct.

The two women had crowded to the doorway to intervene. Sally said, “He doesn't
have
to shoot the gun. I hate guns. Ben, why do you always inflict the gun on this child?”

“I don't,” he answered.

His mother called over Sally's shoulder, “Don't bother people on Thanksgiving, Murray. Let the man have a holiday.”

Little Murray looked up, startled, at the sound of his name pronounced scoldingly. He had been named for his grandfather. Two Murrays: one small and young, one big and old. Yet alike, Ben saw, in a style of expectation, in a tireless craving for—he used to wonder for what, but people had a word for it now—“action.”

“This man never takes a holiday,” Ben's father called back. “He's out of this world. You'd love him. Everybody in this room would love him.” And, irrepressibly, he was at the telephone, dialling with a touch of frenzy, the way he would scrub a friendly dog's belly with his knuckles. Hanging up, he announced with satisfaction, “Dutch says to bring the gun over this evening, when all the fuss has died down.”

After a supper of leftover turkey, the males went out into the night. Ben drove his father's car. The dark road carried them off their hill into a valley where sandstone farmhouses had been joined by ranch houses, aluminum trailers, a wanly lit Mobil station, a Pentecostal church built of cinder blocks, with a neon J
ESUS
L
IVES
. J
ESUS
S
AVES
must have become too much of a joke.

“The next driveway on the left,” his father said. The cold outdoor air had shortened his breath. No sign advertised a gun shop; the house was a ranch, but not a new one—one built in the early Fifties, when the commuters first began to come this far out from the city of Alton. In order of age, oldest to youngest, tallest to shortest, the Trupps marched up the flagstones to the unlit front door; Ben could feel his son's embarrassment
at his back, deepening his own. They had offered to let little Murray carry the gun, but he had shied from it. Ben held the .22 behind him, so as not to terrify whoever answered his father's ring at the door. It was a fat woman in a pink wrapper. Ben saw that there had been a mistake: this was no gun shop, his father had blundered once again.

Not so. The woman said, “Why, hello, Mr. Trupp,” giving the name that affectionate long German
u;
in Boston people rhymed it with “cup.” “Come in this way, I guess; he's down there expecting everybody. Is this your son, now? And who's
this
big boy?” Her pleasantries eased their way across the front hall, with its braided rug and enamelled plaque of the Lord's Prayer, to the cellar stairs.

As they clattered down, Ben's father said, “I shouldn't have done that, that was a headache for his missus, letting us in, I wasn't thinking. We should have gone to the side, but then Dutch has to disconnect the burglar alarm. Everybody in this county's crazy to steal his guns. When you get to be my age, Ben, it hurts like Jesus just to
try
to think. Just to
try
not to annoy the hell out of people.”

The cellar seemed bigger than the house. Cardboard cartons, old chairs and sofas, a refrigerator, stacked newspapers, shoot posters, and rifle racks lined an immense cement room. At the far end was a counter, and behind it a starkly lit workshop with a lathe. Little Murray's eyes widened; gun shops were new to him. In an alley of Ben's own boyhood there had been a mysterious made-over garage called “Repair & Ammo.” Sounds of pounding and grinding came out of it, the fury of metals. On dark winter afternoons, racing home with his sled, Ben would see blue sparks shudder in the window. But he had never gone in; so this was an adventure for him as well. There was that about being his father's son: one had adventures, one blundered into places, one
went
places, met strangers, suffered rebuffs, experienced breakdowns, exposed oneself in a way that Ben, as soon as he was able, foreclosed, hedging his life with such order and propriety that no misstep could occur. He had become a lawyer, taking profit from the losses of others, reducing disorderly lives to legal folders. Even in his style of dress he had retained the caution of the Fifties, while his partners blossomed into striped shirts and bell-bottomed slacks. Seeing his son's habitual tautness relax under the spell of this potent, acrid cellar, Ben realized that he had been much less a father than his own had been, a father's duty being to impart the taste of the world. Golf lessons in Brookline, sailing in Maine, skiing in New Hampshire—what was this but bought amusement compared with the improvised shifts and hazards of poverty? In this cave the metallic smell
of murder lurked, and behind the counter two men bent low over something that gleamed like a jewel.

Ben's father went forward. “Dutch, this is my son, Ben, and my grandson, Murray. The kid's just like you are, a perfectionist, and this cheap gun we got Ben a zillion years ago let him down this afternoon.” To the other man in this lighted end of the cellar he said, “I know your face, mister, but I've forgotten your name.”

The other man blinked and said, “Reiner.” He wore a Day-Glo hunting cap and a dirty blue parka over a holiday-clean shirt and tie. He looked mild, perhaps because of his spectacles, which were rimless. He seemed to be a customer, and the piece of metal in the gunsmith's hand concerned him. It was a small slab with two holes bored in it; a shiny ring had been set into one of the holes, and Dutch's gray thumb moved back and forth across the infinitesimal edge where the ring was flush with the slab.

“About two-thousandths,” the gunsmith slowly announced, growling the
ou
's. It was hard to know whom he was speaking to. His eyelids looked swollen—leaden hoods set slantwise over the eyes, eclipsing them but for a glitter. His entire body appeared to have slumped away from its frame, from the restless ruminating jowl to the undershirted beer belly and bent knees. His shuffle seemed deliberately droll. His hands alone had firm shape—hands battered and nicked and so long in touch with greased machinery that they had blackened flatnesses like worn parts. The right middle finger had been shorn off at the first knuckle. “Two- or three-thousandths at the most.”

Ben's father's voice had regained its strength in the warmth of this basement. He acted as interlocutor, to make the drama clear. “You mean you can just tell with your thumb if it's a thousandth of an inch off?”

“Yahh. More or less.”

“That's incredible. That to me is a miracle.” He explained to his son and grandson, “Dutch was head machinist at Hager Steel for thirty years. He had hundreds of men under him. Hundreds.”

“A thousand,” Dutch growled. “Twelve hunnert during Korea.” His qualification slipped into place as if with much practice; Ben guessed his father came here often.

“Boy, I can't imagine it. I don't see how the hell you did it. I don't see how any man could do what you did; my imagination boggles. This kid here”—Murray, not Ben—“has what you have. Drive. Both of you have what it takes.”

Ben thought he should assert himself. In a few crisp phrases he explained to Dutch how the gun had failed to fire.

His father said to the man in spectacles, “It would have taken me all night to say what he just said. He lives in New England, they all talk sense up there. One thing I'm grateful the kid never inherited from me, and I bet he is too, is his old man's gift for baloney. I was always embarrassing the kid.”

Dutch slipped out the bolt of the .22 and, holding the screwdriver so the shortened finger lay along a groove of the handle, turned a tiny screw that Ben in all his years of owning the gun had never noticed. The bolt fell into several bright pieces, tinged with rust, on the counter. The gunsmith picked a bit of metal from within a little spring and held it up. “Firing pin. Sheared,” he said. His mouth when he talked showed the extra flexibility of the toothless.

“Do you have another? Can you replace it?” Ben disliked, as emphasized by this acoustical cellar, the high, hungry pitch of his own voice. He was prosecuting.

Dutch declined to answer. He lowered his remarkable lids to gaze at the metal under his hands; one hand closed tight around the strange little slab, with its gleaming ring.

Ben's father interceded, saying, “He can make it, Ben. This man here can make an entire gun from scratch. Just give him a lump of slag is all he needs.”

“Wonderful,” Ben said, to fill the silence.

Reiner unexpectedly laughed. “How about,” he said to the gunsmith, “that old Damascus double Jim Knauer loaded with triple FG and a smokeless powder? It's a wonder he has a face still.”

Dutch unclenched his fist and, after a pause, chuckled.

Ben recognized in these pauses something of courtroom tactics; at his side he felt little Murray growing agitated at the delay. “Shall we come back tomorrow?” Ben asked.

He was ignored. Reiner was going on, “What was the make on that? A twelve-gauge Parker?”

“English gun,” Dutch said. “A Westley Richards. He paid three hunnert for it, some dealer over in Royersford. Such foolishness, his first shot yet. Even split the stock.” His eyelids lifted. “Who wants a beer?”

Ben's father said, “Jesus, I'm so full of turkey a beer might do me in.”

Reiner looked amused. “They say liquor is good for bad circulation.”

“I'd be happy to sip one but I can't take an oath to finish it. The first rule of hospitality is, Don't look a gift horse in the face.” But an edge was going off his wit. After the effort of forming these sentences, the old man
sat down, in an easy chair with exploded arms. Against the yellowish pallor of his face, his nose looked livid as a bruise.

“Sure,” Ben said. “If they're being offered. Thank you.”

“Son, how about you?” Dutch asked the boy. Murray's eyes widened, realizing nobody was going to answer for him.

“He's in training for his ski team,” Ben said at last.

Dutch's eyes stayed on the boy. “Then you should have good legs. How about now going over and fetching four cans from that icebox over there?” He pointed with a loose fist.

“Refrigerator,” Ben said to his son, acting as translator. As a child he had lived with a real icebox, zinc-lined oak, that digested a fresh block three times a week.

Dutch turned his back and fished through a shelf of grimy cigar boxes for a cylinder of metal that, when he held it beside the fragment of firing pin, satisfied him. He shuffled into the little room behind the counter, which brimmed with light and machinery.

As little Murray passed around the cold cans of Old Reading, his grandfather explained to the man in the Day-Glo hunting cap, “This boy is what you'd have to call an ardent athlete. He sails, he golfs, last winter he won blue medals at—what do they call 'em, Murray?”

“Slaloms. I flubbed the downhill, though.”

“Hear that? He knows the language. If he was fortunate enough to live down here with you fine gentlemen, he'd learn gun language too. He'd be a crack shot in no time.”

“Where we live in this city,” the boy volunteered, “my mother won't even let me get a BB gun. She hates guns.”

“The kid means the city of Boston. His father's on a first-name basis with the mayor.” Ben heard the strained intake of breath between his father's sentences and tried not to hear the words. He and his son were tumbled together in a long, pained monologue. “Anything competitive, this kid loves. He doesn't get that from me. He doesn't get it from his old man, either. Ben always had this tactful way of keeping his thoughts to himself. You never knew what was going on inside his head. My biggest regret is I couldn't teach him the pleasure of working with your hands. He grew up watching me scrambling along by my wits and now he's doing the same damn thing. He should have had Dutch for a father. Dutch would have reached him.”

To deafen himself Ben walked around the counter and into the workshop. Dutch was turning the little cylinder on a lathe. He wore no goggles,
and seemed to be taking no measurements. Into the mirror-smooth blur of the spinning metal the man delicately pressed a tipped, hinged cone. Curls of steel fell steadily to the scarred lathe table. Tan sparks flew outward to the radius perhaps of a peony. The cylinder was becoming two cylinders, a narrow one emerging from the shoulders of another. Ben had once worked wood, in high-school shop, but this man could shape metal: he could descend into the hard heart of things and exert his will. Dutch switched off the lathe, with a sad grunt pushed himself away, and shuffled, splay-footed and swag-bellied, toward some other of his tools. Ben, not wanting to seem to spy, returned to the larger room.

Reiner had undertaken a monologue of his own. “… you know your average bullet comes out of the barrel rotating; that's why a rifle is called that, for the rifling inside, that makes it spin. Now, what the North Vietnamese discovered, if you put enough velocity into a bullet beyond a critical factor, it tumbles, end over end like that. The Geneva Convention says you can't use a soft bullet that mushrooms inside the body like the dumdum, but hit a man with a bullet tumbling like that, it'll tear his arm right off.”

The boy was listening warily, watching the bespectacled man's soft white hands demonstrate tumbling. Ben's father sat in the exploded armchair, staring dully ahead, sucking back spittle, struggling silently for breath.

“Of course, now,” the lecture went on, “what they found was best over there for the jungle was a plain shotgun. You take an ordinary twenty-gauge, maybe mounted with a short barrel, you don't have visibility more than fifty feet anyway, a man doesn't have a chance at that distance. The spread of shot is maybe three feet around.” With his arms Reiner placed the circle on himself, centered on his heart. “It'll tear a man to pieces like that. If he's not that close yet, then the shot pattern is wider and even a miss is going to hurt him plenty.”