The Next (20 page)

As it turned out there were repercussions. He blamed Mom.

That evening after a particularly wall-rattling argument, Dad tightly triple-knotted Mom’s long hair around the radiator pipes in the bedroom. It was a cold winter, and she had no scissors within arm’s reach. Dad calmly closed the door and shooed us downstairs to play in our room. But no Trucker-Ten-To-Rubber-Duckie di-cast metal hotrod could engage us. Above us we could hear Mom’s screams, tearing her hair out lock by lock before her scalp scalded any more. To drown out the sounds we read our favorite passages from
Valley of Adventure
to each other for the twentieth time as loudly and as deliberately as we could. If we couldn’t help Mom, we at least could give her the gift of pretending we weren’t aware of her torture.

Inadvertently Paul and I had initiated the final act of a battle we’d never known could ever end, for when Mom’s hair grew back she would balance the terror of that night by forcing us to witness an epic act of justice.

However, no such secret could be found in Grandfather’s loafers.

Then Paul noticed the nightstand next to the bed. He jabbed me with his elbow. We opened the small drawer under the lip of the top. Beneath the white handkerchief, we found a handgun, black and gleaming, square-barreled and riveted with minimal stylization.

Paul picked it up and examined it, felt the cool metal, felt the weightiness, felt the power, and then handed it to me. Although we were energetic game-playing kids, we’d been raised in an environment too explosive to behave recklessly. We did not point it at each other. We did not wrap our fingers around the trigger and tempt fate by only slightly pressing against it. We simply examined it, wide-eyed and cautious, engaging our imaginations.

We imagined what it’d be like to wake up in the middle of the night and sense the presence of an intruder, then reach into the drawer and whip it into the face of the night. Although our education with rifles thus far had been stimulating, the immediacy of a handgun elicited an entirely different kind of excitement. Rifles were for hunting, requiring planning, forethought, relaxation, measured muscular bracing, and patience. Handguns were for defense, and they implied urgency, danger, and, of course, the death of humans. We felt its acute potential for harm, fear, and empowerment. We felt its strength.

Thum. Thum. Thum.

How had we not heard the crunching of the gravel cease and the screen door open? Had Grandfather snuck in on purpose? Had he suspected and anticipated all along that the minute he turned his back, we’d try to sneak into his bedroom or closet?

We had no place and no time to hide. We were fucking dead meat and about to be pounded tender.

Paul looked at me with that same look of helplessness he’d given me when we were stuck in the tree above Jessie and the Blonde Boy, expecting my cue to act. But I had nothing to cue him to do. I tossed the gun back into the drawer and closed it. The plunk of the metal on wood and the scraping of the wood drawer reverberated around the room and down the hall.

Grandfather entered.

He assessed the two boys frozen in terror next to his bed, white and bloodless as corpses. My jaw was too locked to say anything, aside from having nothing to say. Paul was trembling. He began to sniffle tears back.

Grandfather’s face was very controlled, and frighteningly
not
angry. Not overtly. His left eyebrow was raised, but that was it. No reddening of his cheeks indicated outrage. No clenching of the fists betrayed his wanting to pound the shit out of us, as we’d expect. He was Trailer Park Spock merely taking an interest in something he found fascinating.

With surreal relaxation, Grandfather approached the nightstand and pulled the drawer open. He withdrew the gun and held it in his right open palm at our eye level. He was handing it to us. He was daring one of us to reach for it.

Neither one of us twitched.

After a full minute of breathless stillness, Grandfather switched the safety off with his left hand. To our amazement, he performed this small action as a demonstration. He was teaching. He wanted us to learn how to operate the thing. He handed the gun to me.

Paul’s stopped his sniffling as he watched me accept the gun.

Wordlessly, Grandfather indicated that I should operate the safety as well. I placed my fingers on the small metal switch and clicked it. Then clicked it again. Grandfather motioned I should palm the gun with my finger on the trigger. I complied. Then he used his right middle finger to push the barrel toward of my brother’s leg.

Paul’s eyes grew wide with realization.

Grandfather’s eyes narrowed as he indicated I should squeeze the trigger.

I wanted to drop the gun and bolt out the door, but I was paralyzed. My forehead broke out in sweat. Did Grandfather really want me to maim my brother? No fucking way was this punishment proportionate to the crime! No fucking way!

I looked at Paul’s pants, watching the fabric around his crotch darken with piss and spread downward toward his knee. He was shaking.

I could not and would not squeeze the trigger, so the old man’s wrapped his finger around my trigger finger. He squeezed.

The gun fired.

I heard a sharp but soft explosion, muffled as if through a pillow or capped with a silencer. Paul yelped as it hit his thigh, and he instinctively covered the point of impact with his hand.

I withdrew my hand, leaving the gun dangling around Grandfather’s forefinger as I grabbed Paul by the scruff to keep his head from collapsing on to the corner of the nightstand.

As he fell, he lifted his hand off his thigh to brace himself against the wall. To my surprise, there was no blood seeping into the area of the jeans around the bullet hole. Even more astonishing, there was no bullet hole.

Grandfather crossed his arms and observed the violence of his wards’ stricken reactions with detached, clinical objectivity.

We looked up at Grandfather in utter confusion. Grandfather proceeded to release the butt of the gun and unload its dark grey ammunition into his palm, displaying the pellets to us. They were not bullets. The curious muffled sound I’d heard as the gun fired was the triggered spring-loaded compression of air and not the explosive sound that ignited gunpowder of real bullets would have made.

Although the wallop of the pellet through his jeans against his thigh still smarted, the initial shock had become comprehension. We both met Grandfather’s eyes. His face remained neutral. He seemed no more or less satisfied than before. Yet, with this one cruel retribution, Grandfather had exposed us to more than the lesson of refraining from rifling through another person’s belongings.

He’d given us our first taste of firing at a human...and hitting one.

In the following weeks, we’d be forced to shoot and kill squirrels, cats, raccoons, dogs, and deer. Our initial resistance to these needless deaths gradually gave way to uneasy acquiescence, which in turn gave way to a determination to improve our skill and technique with the Winchesters—if only to more rapidly earn Grandfather’s approval and end the afternoon’s bloodshed with more efficiency and speed.

Both Paul and I got damn good at it. We quickly learned to aim for the heart or head of the animal in order to kill it outright rather than watch it limp painfully away into the brush. If that happened, Grandfather would force us to follow and finish the kill, thereby doubling the horror as we butted the muzzle of the rifle against the pained, bloody, frightened, maimed creature and pulled the trigger a second time.

Paul cried each and every time he shot the head off anything, but his skill and proficiency increased in spite of the tears. So did mine. We got better and better at not flinching as we fired rounds, anticipating the ear-ringing pop with less and less horror.

We became swift and efficient at lifting the bolt handle up and back four inches, popping the spent rounds, chambering the new rounds, and then sliding the bolt back to locked position, until we could quite capably cock and reload the four bullets in the magazine blindfolded. We learned to breathe rhythmically and steadily until the pull of the trigger became smooth, controlled, and well-timed. We learned to relax our shoulders to absorb the recoil of the stock of the rifle after firing, and the end-of-day bruises gradually reduced. Eventually we even learned to zero our scopes by adjusting the vertical turrets to compensate for the drop of the bullets at a hundred yards, subtly calibrating for cold barrels versus warm barrels.

Most importantly, however, we learned not to look into the eyes of the target, thereby making the kill less heart wrenching and more systematic.

But as horrifying as our daily schooling felt, none of the downed wildlife had the same impact as firing that pellet into Paul’s leg next to the nightstand in Grandfather’ bedroom.

The pulling of the trigger that day brought on a dread of some terrible eventuality. What if the bullet had been real? What if I had maimed my brother? What would Paul’s collapse have been like if a bullet had penetrated his jeans, broken through his skin, and shattered his femur as it traveled through his leg and out the other side? What kind of wasteland would my life turn into if I had to wake up every morning and watch my brother hobble for the rest of his life knowing I’d voluntarily and needlessly shot a bullet into him?

After a day of silent killing in the Placerville woods, we would return more accomplished hunters than the day before. We would pass Palmer’s trailer in silence every evening, and I grew to enjoy his smile of inexplicable reassurance to me after Grandfather had passed by. We would proceed with the rigorous nightly routine of cleaning every speck of mud from our boots and drying them on the front porch. We would pull out the bed from the couch as Grandfather closed every curtain except the one facing Graves’ living room window and sit wordlessly at the kitchen counter to watch Grandfather cook beans and hot dogs in the pot. When Graves passed through his kitchen and paused to look at the three of us eating, Grandfather would ignore him. And every evening before bed Grandfather locked the front door, locked the rifles in that closet, and turned out the lights. We never questioned the routine.

But one afternoon, as I captured a young doe in the crosshairs of my scope, lying on my belly with my elbows dug into the soil for stabilization, a question occurred. It was so glaringly inexplicable, I was astounded it’d never occurred to me before. Why wouldn’t we be having venison for dinner that night? Why would we be fed beans and hotdogs yet again instead of cooking a slab of…of...anything else?

I did not pull the trigger.

Grandfather looked at me quizzically.

For the first time since we’d arrived, I spoke to Grandfather:

“Why kill it if we’re not going to eat it?”

The silence following was astronomically worse than killing one thousand deer needlessly.

Paul refused to look my direction or at my Grandfather, staring with fear into the green. Grandfather did not answer me, nor did he acknowledge I’d said anything at all. Was he angry or could he care less? Had he heard me at all?

The doe certainly heard my words. It lifted its neck alertly and spotted the three humans in the woods only twenty feet from it. In panic, she bolted into the green, dislodging a wet log in her haste. Two large black rats with long pointy pink tails scurried from their exposed hole where the log had been.

With the same quick reflexes we’d witnessed when Graves suddenly found himself at rifle point, Grandfather snatched the rifle from me in the blink of an eye, put the scope to his eye, and squeezed the trigger twice. The rats were blown to the ground instantly, headless.

Grandfather gestured to Paul to retrieve the rats.

As we marched back to the trailer, Paul held the rats by the tails at arm’s distance from his body, disgusted. Palmer sat on his porch smearing an icy Bud against the back of his neck. When Grandfather passed, Palmer looked at me and covered his mouth. It was a small gesture that betrayed his amusement. I did not understand. They were dead rats. What was funny about that?

It was not until after Grandfather skinned the rats and began cutting them into hot dog size chunks did I realize why Palmer had covered his mouth. Grandfather knew exactly how to punish us for the crime of asking a very sensible question in a very defiant way. I knew the irritation Grandfather never displayed when he first caught us sneaking in his bedroom would surface one day. The resentment he never displayed when he was first saddled with these two nitwit grandchildren had to claw its way out of hibernation one way or another.

With his hands full of bloodied rat chunks, we followed Grandfather into the trailer and across the living room floor to the kitchen…

Thum thum thum…

Palmer returned slowly across the hollow floor.

Click…a glass tumbler placed on the wooden nightstand.

Squish…his old body settling into an old mattress.

Scrape…the receiver dragging across the nightstand toward his ear.

“Eh…so…you wanna know ’bout Graves?”

Did I want to? I don’t know. Did I need to? Hmm hmm.

“I don’t understand…” I began hesitantly, for aside from a gut feeling there was a lot to unearth, I was not clear exactly what I did not understand, “…I’m confused how two neighbors could live next to each other—literally see into each other’s trailers—and never speak to each other.”