Читать книгу The Shooting - James Boice - Страница 10
ОглавлениеA screeching gaggle of children comes roving through the park—dozens of them, big red faces cleaved by open-mouthed grins, all their breaths bursting out in gobs of fog, and their short arms pumping and swinging, fists balled to bone in their mittens, as the gaggle careens in their winter coats, scarves flapping behind them. The herd of little boys and little girls—brown, white, tanned, pale, black, yellow—all strangers to one another, none knowing another’s name or who they are, knowing nothing about each other but that they too have been brought here and plopped down, and that they too saw the puppy scampering free off its leash through the playground where the children swing. Their nannies and mommies first laughing and following slowly, then, their calls unheeded, jogging and crying out, demanding the children return—but the puppy must be chased, the puppy is fast and little and they are gaining no ground, but they are not tiring, especially not the largest boy ambling after the rear, his nanny calling his name with dwindling amusement and increasing concern as the gaggle roves on into the distant trees in the horizon:—Lee! Lee Fisher! It’s time to go home.
A house on a mountain. The house is grand and new and still smells like sawdust and paint. It is cavernous, mostly empty except for expensive things he may not touch or sit on. His footsteps echo off its high naked walls. His voice calls out and comes back to him alone. And like the house, the mountain is grand and it is new—though he wonders at how a mountain could ever be called new. And the mountain smells too, but not like the house, and only when it rains—an almost imperceptible stink sitting on the wet wind that no one but he can smell, because every time it comes and he asks them, There, don’t you smell it? they always say no. It is his mother he asks, or the staff. To see anyone else on the mountain is a special occasion, and to see a stranger is nearly unheard of. But to be sure, he can look out his bedroom window and watch for anyone making their approach on the one road leading to the house. Which he does every morning. Maybe someone will come, and maybe it will be his father.
All fathers are myths and so is Lee Fisher’s. All fathers are myths and all mothers are actresses. Lee’s mother is an actress—a onetime actress who since she met Lee Fisher Sr. does little but stay alive and wait for her husband’s return. She assures little Lee his father is real and will return. He has a lot of money, a lot of responsibility: it is the family’s money, but people tried to take it and his father had to do certain things to keep it from them; he had to go away because of those things they made him do, and it is a lot of money, and God forgives, and he kept it safe, and one day it will be Lee’s. Your inheritance, she calls it. One day it will be up to you to keep it safe for your children too.
Lee is on the floor cross-legged playing with his soldiers. A gift, babu! From him! Five years old. His mother’s Elvis records play over and over on his bedroom’s record player. He has become deeply infatuated with Elvis Presley after seeing him on television. Violet and all the other staff have, to an individual, rounded a corner or exited a bedroom they have just finished cleaning or barged in through the service entrance of the home with crates of groceries to find the young master enthusiastically, if weirdly, shaking and convulsing for them—something approaching dancing—having waited sometimes hours to surprise them like this, alone in a dark hallway, breathless and giggling with swelling impatient anticipation. He knows many fascinating things about Elvis Presley and he will visit Elvis in Memphis, Tennessee—he has asked his mother if they could, she said yes (he had to wait to ask until she was off the phone with his father and did not have the meanness in her mouth anymore, the same meanness that is her mouth when she sits in a rocking chair at night alone in the dark staring out the window murmuring, He’s coming back, he’s coming back).
She sweeps into his room, glowing, singing. She looks young and dangerous, her white perfect teeth flashing from behind her lips that are covered in bright paint, her hair a different color and shorter now, wearing clothes he has never seen her wear, and her body sweet-smelling and fruit-smelling but strange and foreign.
—Babu, she sings. —There is someone downstairs for you!
He smells him before he sees him. He smells like the mountain. The house is now filled with the stink, dispelling the sweet scent and fruit scent of his mother. There it is, he thinks. The first time he sees him he is taking down one of their pictures from the wall—a framed photograph of his mother holding an infant Lee in New York City—and hanging a new one in its place: a scene of dusty war and Indians and white men killing the Indians in the war and fire and blood and cannons and guns and dead horses. Lee stands there halfway down the stairs watching him, scared of the new picture, hating it. His father wears jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, cigarettes in the breast pocket, his jaw grinding as he chews his tongue and straightens the new picture and stands back to admire first before turning to Lee and saying, —Well, howdy.
Lee does not answer, turns to look up at his mother on the stair above him. —Why does he say howdy?
His father says, —Just the way us cowboys talk, I reckon.
Lee silently mouths the words: Cowboys... reckon...
—Why did you take our picture down?
—Ah, well, because this is a better picture. Look at these guys. These are men. There were just twenty-three of them against four hundred Indians. They and their families faced imminent death against the enemy but did that stop them? Hell no. They kept fighting and they won. These guys are heroes. Don’t you like it?
Lee says, —No.
His mother hisses through her teeth, —Lee.
—He’s not a real cowboy.
—Lee Fisher.
His father silences her with a wave of the hand and comes over. He climbs up the stairs until he’s eye level with Lee. —Pardner, one thing about me? he says. —I’m as real as they get.
A party for him, to welcome him back. The house on the mountain is now stuffed with people. Among these intellectuals from the city with their jewelry and suits and hair and cigarettes and wine, Lee’s father looks very alone. He is polite but quiet, listening to them talking about President Nixon; he stands beside his wife in her pretty dress kissing men and women, so many she cannot keep up, talking as fast as she can, it has been so long since she has seen them, there is so much to tell about her life and to hear about theirs. At the bar Lee overhears a bald man say to another man as they pour more wine into their glasses, —Good God, when did he turn into a Klansman?
Lee’s mother is so proud of his father, Lee can tell, the way she clings to his arm. She says to him, —We need to take you shopping. Will somebody please take him shopping? Look at what he’s wearing now! Look at this! She tugs at the flannel shirt. —It’s filthy! It has sweat stains!
She and the people they stand with laugh, bending over with their drinks, Lee’s father smiling with his lips tight and watching them. —I like my shirt, he says, no one hearing but Lee.
—You have to try acupuncture, someone is now shouting, apropos of nothing.
—Oh, it’s amazing, the bald man from the bar says, joining them. —It’s Japanese.
—Chinese, Lee’s mother corrects him. She turns to Lee’s father. —You have to try it.
He shakes his head. —Not for me.
—How do you know? You haven’t tried it.
—Believe me, I know.
—Well, how do you relax then? the bald man says to him. —How do you clear your head and get centered?
—Masturbation, someone mutters.
—He hunts, someone else suggests. They all groan and roll their eyes.
—Never! Lee’s mother cries, her glass sloshing, Lee’s father catching her at the elbow to steady her. —I wouldn’t allow it.
Lee’s father shrugs and smiles blandly.
—So what’s with all the guns then? the bald man says. He turns to the man next to him. —Downstairs? In the basement? He has all these guns.
Lee’s mother is trying to silence him but he does not see her. Lee’s father says to him, serious, —When did you see my guns? Who let you down there?
She says, —Oh, I did, darling. They’re interesting. They’re dangerous. She turns to the bald man. —Weren’t they interesting and dangerous?
Maybe Lee alone is the only one who can see the darkness in his father’s face, how clearly furious he is with his mother though he is not looking at her. But the bald man, not answering Lee’s mother, is asking Lee’s father, —Well, if not animals, then what do you shoot? People?
—No, Lee’s father answers, trying to appear patient but, Lee can tell, bristling, —only targets. You know, for marksmanship.
One of the others, clearly oblivious, says, —So are you carrying one right now?
—Carrying what?
—You know, a heater! A Saturday night special!
The bald man says, —Can we see it?
Another one says, —Whip it out already!
Lee’s father smiles in silence and his mother looks at him, touches his face, searching for something in it, then stands up for him. —You’re being mean. Don’t make fun of him.
Somebody changes the record to the Beatles and they talk about that as Lee’s father breaks off from the circle and goes outside, Lee following, and stands on the back porch watching the stars and listening to the wolves out in the trees and their human counterparts inside.
—Did your mother bring anybody around here when I was gone? Any new friends? Any new uncles? They are in the basement, his father bent over the worktable, his guns splayed naked and incapacitated before him, rubbing their holes and tubes with oil that smells like bananas. —Were there ever people here like there were people here last night?
—No, Lee says.
—Sure there were. Of course she brought them around. How many?
—None.
—You should know that your mother’s a reckless person, Lee. She is selfish. And irresponsible. And she lies. Most of the things that come out of her mouth are a lie. She can’t even help it. And it’s dangerous. And people get hurt. She lies to you, you know. Do you know why I came back? I came back to protect you from her. His father falls silent then as he puts down the oil rag and lifts from the table the rifle he has cleaned and puts it against his shoulder, peers down the sights at the wall as though the rifle lets him see through the wall into another realm. He looks up at Lee, one eye still squinted, tanned flesh crinkling at the corners of it. —Now tell me the truth.
The truth. There were nights, late—there were the sounds of tires on the gravel drive starting at the bottom of their hill and climbing, climbing louder and louder still until they were so loud beneath Lee’s bedroom window that he sat up in bed and turned to the window over his headboard and pulled the curtains aside to look down at a strange car, rattling idle with its headlights on, and there would be the doors opening on both sides and music spilling out—Bob Dylan, Gladys Knight—and on one side would emerge the bare white leg of his mother, its toes pointed out, no shoe on. And on the other side a man’s leg would emerge, trousers on and a beautiful slim brown shoe. Then there would be laughing, then shushing. The headlights would turn off. Then the sound of the doors closing. Then more laughing. Even though the lights were off and it was all night, Lee on his knees in his bed with face smooshed against the window could still see. And Lee would see the man, or some other man—skinny men, long-haired men, black men, even women sometimes who only looked like men; men who were men nothing like Lee’s father was a man—Lee would then see this man waiting at the front of the car for Lee’s mother, giggling and barefoot and stumbling against the car, drink in one hand, shoes in her other hand. Ssssssh, she would whisper, laughing, the man holding out his arm to put around her waist and walk with her inside and out of Lee’s view.
Lee’s father looks at Lee now with the rifle against his shoulder and the oil that smells like bananas. He looks like he can see through Lee’s eyes to see what Lee sees—the cars, the bare feet, the men. His father just nods, puts down the rifle, picks up another gun, a handgun, an old revolver like cowboys have. He sighs, pours oil onto the rag, rubs it inside the gun’s empty chamber. —She’s ashamed of me. Embarrassed. After all I’ve done for her. Well, don’t worry, you and I are going to spend more time together once she’s gone.
—Where is she going?
—Doesn’t matter.
—Why is she leaving?
—Because she has to.
—I don’t want her to.
—She has to. She has problems. One day you’ll understand. You’re not safe with her here. All I want is you to be safe. Don’t you want to be safe?
—Yes.
—I know it’s hard, it makes your daddy very sad too. Your daddy’s heart is broken, he’s been crying. He’d like nothing more for us to be a family out here. It’s all he ever wanted. But men like us know that sometimes the right thing is the hardest thing to do. Those men your momma brought around here ever teach you that? How to do what’s right even if it’s hard?
Lee says no.
—I didn’t think so. He looks at Lee again, grinning. —Hey, you like this gun? I’ve noticed you looking at it. Of course you have been, it’s beautiful. It’s a very special gun. If you’re a good boy, maybe one day soon I’ll teach you to shoot it. And then maybe one day maybe I’ll give it to you. Like your granddaddy gave it to me. And his dad gave it to him. This is your inheritance, son. Your real one, I mean. Your momma’s boyfriends ever teach you how to handle a firearm? How to protect yourself and your family?
Lee shakes his head no.
—Of course not. Well, don’t worry. Daddy’s home now.
They come up the driveway and they get out of the car wearing suits. He follows her through the house, out to the driveway where they wait. She is furious, weeping, the stomping of her heels and the jingling of her bracelets echoing, staff carrying her suitcases. —He’s the liar! she is saying. —He’s paranoid! Insane! She is dressed in a bright orange dress and her lips are painted red and her eyes blue and her hair is different again.
—Don’t go, Lee says.
—The lawyers say I don’t have a choice.
—It’s not fair.
—No, it’s not, of course it’s not, but it’s the way it is, so for now we just have to do what he says and not make it worse by antagonizing him, and we’ll, I don’t know, figure it out. She stops being furious and becomes sad; she bends down to him, hugs him, and cries. Then she stops being sad and becomes very happy, and it is like she was only pretending to be furious and then only pretending to be sad, or maybe it is like she is only pretending to be very happy.
—Hey, she says, —you know what? Maybe this will turn out to be okay. Maybe whether I like it or not, a boy does need his father and you haven’t had him. A father teaches a boy how to be a man. Momma can’t teach you that. You want to learn to be a man, don’t you?
—No! he cries.
She laughs at him, a high, loud song of a laugh: Oh, ha ha ha! —It will be good, she says, and kisses him again. —Anyway, at least this will give me the chance to work again and be me again. And then I’ll be happy, and Momma hasn’t been happy for some time, she should never have let him convince me to come here. I need a break. I’ll take a break and figure it out, and when I do you can come see me and even be with me. And everything will be good. I promise.
He passes the living room where his father sits reading the newspaper in the big chair he brought in. His things are everywhere; the house is filled with old, massive American things pregnant with the ghosts of a sacred other world: war uniforms and badges for heroism, tools and instruments, fifes, drums, tricornered hats, funny black shoes, black hats with buckles. There are Thomas Jefferson and George Mason and Patrick Henry, shelves lined with American poets of individualism. Only his father’s pictures hang on the walls now, scenes of war and homesteads, portraits of humble bearded generals praying before battle, of the proud, righteous, bullet-frayed underdog star-spangled banner in the dawn above water, of lone cowboys, of free frontier families singing hymns at the hearth, shotgun above it. His father calls to him, tells him to come here. He puts down the newspaper and stands over Lee. He puts his arm out and makes a muscle. —Feel that, he tells Lee, and Lee does. —Hang from it, he says, and Lee does.
They wrestle on the floor. He gives Lee sips of beer in a teeny, tiny mug, a micro version of his own, even says ALASKA on it like his does. He brings Lee down with him to the shooting range he has resurrected at the foot of the property near the trees—a pile of sand for a backstop and some tree stumps on which to set bottles and cans and watermelons and the pictures his mother left—string art, nude people at Woodstock, John Lennon, Martin Luther King Jr., hairy Vietnam War protestors—and blast them with noise so loud Lee must stuff his fingers into his ears as he watches from behind him. His father uses the gun. The special one. The one that will be Lee’s. Lee watches it twitch and spit in his father’s hand, a gorgeous miracle perfectly crafted as if all in one single piece, not an inch of waste, not a single flaw. You can trust it. And it trusts you. It is simple and honest: —Just like us, his father says. The gun, Lee understands, is who he is. He lies in bed at night dreaming of the gun and his mother. He carries a toy gun and pretends it’s the gun. Aims it at the trees and the bad guys his daddy says will come sneaking out of them. And it is who he is and who the Fisher men are and who his countrymen once were, and Lee, for a time, feels safe.
His mother calls from New York and she says she misses him and does he want to come see her, and he says yes and says when, and she says soon. She asks how he is and he says okay; she says she loves him and he says, —I love you too, and he says, —I miss you, and starts to cry, and she does too, and he begs her to come back but she says she cannot, and now she is crying harder, and she says but soon he will come see her in New York, soon he will.
His father digs in the ground and drags pieces of wood from his rusted pickup truck and saws them and hammers them and curses and spits brown juice from his lips and wipes his lips with the back of his hand and hammers more, curses more, Lee there with him in little Levi’s rolled up at the cuffs and a boy’s flannel shirt, with his own wood to saw, with his own dull children’s saw from his own children’s tool kit, toy gun stuffed down the side of the Levi’s to be like his father who carries the special gun in a holster on his hip as he works. They are building a garden. —So we can provide our own vegetables and things, his father says. There is a high mound of mulch packed in bags from the store in town. They are building fences for animals, little houses for them to live in. They are going to have pets: pigs, cows, chickens. —So we can provide our own meat.
Lee cries when he says that. His father says, —What the hell you crying about?
—I don’t want to kill them.
—Relax, we don’t even have them yet, we have to build their barn and fences first. Anyway, where do you think meat comes from? Meat is animals that someone has to kill, Lee. It’s nature. It’s life.
—Then I don’t like life.
—Life doesn’t care if you like it or not. Life is life. Anyway, it’s better we do it ourselves than some corporation doing it for us. You think the Founding Fathers went to Safeway? Hell no. They provided for themselves. They were men of the field and the plow. They were peaceful and happy. Much happier than people are now. They were happy because they were self-determining. Self-determination is the name of the game.
—What game?
—I don’t know what game, it’s a figure of speech, Lee. Though you could say it’s all one big goddamn game. A rigged one.
—Do you think children are in the new house?
—What new house?
—The one they’re building.
—Where are they building houses at?
—Down the mountain. I see it from my window. Lee has been watching for his mother from his bedroom window all summer, and there is a spot farther down the mountain where one by one the canopies of the trees went away and were replaced with the gray roof of a brand-new house, the first one to have ever been built anywhere near their mountain.
His father stops digging and looks at him like Lee has done something bad. —Shit, he finally says, shaking the sweat from his head like a wet dog and stomping the edge of his shovel into the earth with his steel-toed boot. —Didn’t know that land was for sale or I would’ve bought it just to keep anyone from building on it.
—Shit, Lee says.
—Watch your mouth. How close by is this house?
Lee shrugs. And then he says, —So do you?
—Do I what?
—Think there are children there?
—Well, yessir, I reckon children probably do live there. You’ll want to play with them sometime, I guess, huh? He says it with his face pained, like he’s getting a shot. Lee nods. —Okay, well, once we find out what kind of people they are and what they’re all about, maybe I’ll take you down there.
He keeps working, sweat steaming his glasses, which are secured to his face by a piece of thin rope he cut off the curtains inside and proudly rigged to go around the back of his head and tie to both ends of the glasses.
Lee asks him, —Where do you come from?
—Where do you think I come from?
—New York.
—Is that what she told you? No, New York is where I was born, but that’s not where I come from. Do you understand the difference? Just because you’re born somewhere doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean that’s who you are. You choose where you come from. No one else gets to decide that for you.
Lee stares at the wood he has sawed, the bright fresh teeth marks he has made in it, the thin curls of wood that have been shaved away and gather at the edge of the teeth marks. —Then where are you from?
His father dumps a shovelful of rocky dirt atop the mound he has made to the side of the garden site and wipes his face with the sleeve of his plaid shirt, drinks from one of the beers he has brought out in a blue plastic cooler. —The West. The frontier. That’s where I’m from. And that’s where I’ve been. And that’s where I am. And that’s where I’ll be. He shakes the empty can, drops it in the cooler, opens a fresh one before he has even finished swallowing. —You know what? We should build ourselves a little brewery up here too. Provide our own beer. George Washington used to do that, you know. All those guys did. He becomes excited, animated. He is almost yelling now. —Yessir, once we get all this up and running, we’ll have everything we’ll ever need, Lee. We’ll never leave. We’ll never have to!
His mother calls from New York and he is working on the farm and does not want to talk, but when she calls from New York he has to talk to her, so he goes inside and holds the phone up to his ear and listens to her talk and says yes when she asks if he is okay and if he misses her and if he loves her. She asks if he loves her even if she’s not an actress anymore, and he does not understand so he says yes, and she says, —Will you always love me no matter what? and he says yes and she says, —No matter what? and he says, —No matter what. And she says, —The attorneys have been talking and they say you can come visit me in New York any time, even next week, what do you think, do you want to come next week? And he says, —But I don’t want to, and she says, —You’ll love New York, I’ll take you to the Central Park Zoo and see the animals, and he says, —We’re building a farm, we’ll have our own animals. And when it is time to be done talking to her on the phone he can hear her start to cry as she hangs up.
They are working again on the farm and on the house for the animals. The mulch is laid, bright brown and sweet-smelling. A good deal of the fence is up, the barns are coming along. Lee says, —Can you take me to the new house now?
—Help me with this some.
—You promised.
—All right, don’t cry about it.
—You’ll take me?
—I can’t take you, son, I’m working. Violet will take you.
Lee goes inside, finds her standing at the window watching his father and shaking her head.
—Will you take me to the new house to see if any children live there?
—Of course, I’ll get the car keys.
—Can I go by myself?
—I don’t know, can you?
—May I go by myself?
—No, you absolutely may not. It’s too far.
—No, it ain’t, his father says from behind them. He has come inside to refill his cooler and he stands in the doorway. He is tanned and cheerful and sweating, beer can in one hand, the other in his back pocket, gun on his hip. —At least let the boy’s balls drop first before you go loppin’ ’em off, Violet.
—You said to me to keep him away from those woods at all costs. You said we don’t know who could be in there, there could be anyone in there. You said that—
—It doesn’t matter what I said, it’s what I’m saying now: a boy should be free to run in the woods, learn about nature and himself, see what he’s made of, free from women always criticizing him and trying to break his spirit. It builds character. Look at Huck Finn.
—Huck Finn is a fictional character, Mr. Fisher.
—Thoreau then. Ain’t nothing made up about Henry David Thoreau. Anyway, it’s not exactly the great untamed wilderness, there’s a damned paved road.
—A major highway.
—Major highway. Good God. It’s just a daggone road and there ain’t never hardly anyone on it but us. Ain’t that right, Lee?
—That’s right, says Lee.
—Mr. Fisher, Lee is a very sensitive boy. If something should bite him, or if he runs through poison ivy, or—
—My son ain’t gonna live his life afraid of the daggone world.
Violet is gripping the edges of the table she stands beside, her arms quivering and knuckles white. Lee’s father laughs at her.
—Thank God a man is finally around, right, Lee?
—Thank God, says Lee.
Violet says, —I’m only doing as instructed by Mrs. Fisher.
—Well, do you see Mrs. Fisher anywhere around here? And her picture in your gossip magazines doesn’t count.
Lee says, —So can I go?
—Of course you can, his father says.
Lee emerges from the woods with briars in his hair and pricklers on his shirt, mud caked on his butt from having lost his footing along a little gulch. Runs through the house’s backyard and up the porch, knocks. A woman answers the door.
—Do any children live here? he asks.
—Where on earth did you come from?
—Up there.
—All the way up there, you must be exhausted.
—No, he says. —So do they?
—I’m afraid not, no.
A car pulls into the driveway and it is Violet, she has come down after him. —Come on, Lee, she says from the open window.
Lee whines, —But he said I could.
—Hello, the lady calls to Violet, —I’m sorry, he just knocked on my door, I was going to—
—No, no, Violet interrupts her, smiling but not really smiling. —Come on, Lee.
Inside the car as they drive back up the mountain Violet says, —He changed his mind. Please don’t ask me to try to explain that man.
He wakes up and his right eye is sticky and he cannot move his jaw. To swallow saliva is to swallow a golf ball. He looks at himself in his bedroom mirror—an opaque red-gray sore stares back at him. Sobbing, he goes to his father’s bedroom; he’s asleep on his stomach, face buried in his pillow. The room smells of sweat and beer. It takes several shoves to wake him up. He grunts and groans, lifts his head.
—What? he says. He looks very sick.
—Look, Lee says.
—God Almighty.
—What’s happening to me?
His father sits up, peers in close, forehead furrowed in concern. —Does it hurt?
Lee feels like he should say no, so he says no.
—Good boy. Just a little irritation. Allergy or something. You can see out of it okay, can’t you?
Everything Lee sees with it is blurry. —I can see out of it okay.
—Well, if it doesn’t hurt and you can see out of it, let’s just keep an eye on it and see if it goes away, all right? Getting in to town to the doctor’s is such a pain in the ass, we’ll be there all day, and we have so much work to do today on the farm. And the medical establishment is a machine, it crushes people, I don’t want you entering into it if you don’t have to. Look, you can tough it out, right?
—I can tough it out.
—Good man. You’re a good tough little guy. Nothing gets to you, does it? A little minor irritation doesn’t get to you, does it?
—It doesn’t get to me.
He hugs Lee, kisses him. —Daddy loves you.
His mother calls from New York and she sounds very sleepy, and he wants to tell her about his eye but before he can she says she just called to say good-bye, and he says, —Where are you going? and she says, —I am dying. He says, —What do you mean? Are you sick? What happened? and she says, —No, I mean I am going to die very soon, I am going to kill myself, because you won’t come to New York and see me, you don’t love me, no one loves me, they have taken everything from me and I do not want to live, so good-bye, I love you, and he yells, —No, stop! But the line goes click and he screams for his father, who comes, and he tells him, —She’s died, she’s dead, and his father just rolls his eyes and mutters, —Dead drunk, and leaves, not caring. For days Lee wonders if his mother is dead. Then one day she calls and says, —Hello, babu, and she sounds bright and happy, as if nothing ever happened, and asks if he misses her and if he loves her and if he will come see her in New York. He says yes but only because he does not want to say no, the truth is he does not want to be anywhere near her.
Things are already beginning to grow in the garden: little hard potatoes, tiny sprouts of greens. —Enough food to feed a city, his father says, standing proudly with his hands on his hips, gun in its holster, observing his dominion. Lee watches him lovingly water the poo-smelling dirt, pointing out to Lee where the tomatoes will soon be coming in, the broccoli, the carrots, the beans. —Fertile here, he says happily. —This land wants to grow food, it wants to feed us, don’t it?
It’s only Lee and his father in the house now, no staff, his father has fired them, Violet too, who raised Lee from infancy. —We don’t need things done for us anymore, his father explains to Lee. He leaves early in the morning with one of his rifles to hunt but returns later in the afternoon with frozen meat in grocery store packaging. They cook the potatoes and the greens and the meat outside over an open flame, and his father seems happy and says things are going even better than expected.
His father refuses to use the phone. Whenever it rings he cries out as though in great pain, —Go away! He does not bathe, spends his days digging and cutting and measuring and hoisting and planting and preparing the farm and his nights in his easy chair reading the newspapers, keeps red pens nearby to annotate them and argues with the lies they tell him. He carefully cuts out articles and gives them to Lee to read even though Lee is too young to understand. Lee holds the articles before his face pretending to read; his father watches Lee’s face, needing something from Lee that Lee cannot give. —Scary as hell, ain’t it? his father says. —It’s very bad. Very bad. It didn’t used to be like this, Lee.
Day after day he goes out to hunt but returns only with frozen meat.
The eye pulsates hot day and night. Lee puts a hand over it and it scalds, has its own heartbeat. He cannot feel his face; in the mirror his face is shiny and fat, but if he could not see it in the mirror he would believe it is not there. A rare sip of air sneaking down his strangled throat and into his lungs is a great pleasure. Wakes in the mornings with little silver bugs in his eye feeding off the thick pink-green discharge. He is sweaty, feverish. —Let me see, his father says, taking Lee’s chin in his and tilting up his grotesque little face toward his own. —Look at that! Getting better!
In the mornings before school, Lee traipses around the kitchen and living room in the darkness of dawn, bending down to pick up his father’s empty bottles with cigarettes in them and bring them to the trash. When his father appears on the stairs with his rifle and camouflage heading out to hunt, he makes fun of Lee. —Uh-oh, it’s the cops. Do you have a warrant officer?
One night Lee wakes up in bed smelling smoke. Calls out for his father but he does not answer. He goes through the smoke to his father’s room and sees his father in his bed, asleep. He calls to him but he does not wake up. Goes into the kitchen, it is on fire. His father left a burner on. Lee stamps out the flames with the lid of a pan, and when his father wakes up hours later—having slept too late to hunt—he asks Lee why it smells like smoke, but Lee shrugs and never tells him how he saved both their lives.
He and his father are at Safeway a day or two later for more meat. Lee’s eye is dripping slime. His father has given him a straw to stick between his lips so he can breathe. People are staring. His father is red-faced, muttering to Lee that they all need to mind their own damned business.
—Poor little boy, a woman says.
His father smiles falsely and says, —He’s okay, just a little infection, it’ll clear itself right up.
—I don’t know, she says, —it looks horrible.
—Looks worse than it is. He ain’t in pain, and he can see out of it just fine. Still grinning he turns, the smile vanishing. Lee keeps lagging behind. —Come on, now, Lee, walk. You have to get the blood circulating otherwise your system won’t fight off the infection. Christ, you must think you’re the first buckaroo ever to get himself a little pinkeye. Come on, we’re successful homesteaders, let’s start acting like it. If this were the range, we’d have put you in the stockade for being so damned difficult. We’ll get some sunlight today when we’re working on the farm, that’ll help. Sunlight is the best disinfectant—ain’t you ever heard that before?
They go straight to the meats and fill the basket with beef. Every trip to Safeway is mechanized, because his father hates Safeway and believes maybe, if he is mechanized, Safeway will somehow know that he hates it. In and out in ten minutes flat is the goal. No cart—a hand basket provides greater maneuverability for darting around the old ladies standing about clogging the aisles, nothing to do with their lives, he says, but peruse a daggone grocery store, picking things up and putting them down and fussing and fretting over every trivial little thing and getting in men’s daggone way. — These people are cattle, they’re sheep. They’re sheeple, is what they are, he says. The word sticks in Lee’s brain and never leaves. His father carries the gun on his hip. The sheeple glance at it, give him space and respect, think he must be a police officer, which he likes. At the checkout he is sweating. He smiles through his sweat at the teenage cashier.
—Howdy, li’l darlin’, he says. He seems to forget Lee is there. —My you’re pretty. Though you’d be a lot prettier if you smiled a little bit.
She acts like she has not heard him. She is looking at Lee, his eye. —Whoa, she says, —what happened?
Before Lee can answer his father says, —Just a lil’ bug bite, darlin’. Comes with working the land like we do. It’ll clear right on up on its own. Pay it no mind. Now the polite thing to do when someone pays you a compliment like I just did is say thank you and smile.
She smiles halfheartedly, mutters thanks. His father wipes the sweat off his forehead with his hand, takes the bags, handing the one with only bread in it to Lee to carry. In the parking lot, crossing to their car, his father is saying, —Come on, Lee, we gotta get home, we gotta work, there’s a lot to be done yet today. He’s way ahead of Lee, who’s trying to go fast and keep up. A pickup truck backs out of a space as Lee is passing by. The driver pulls up hard but hits him, the high bumper striking the side of Lee’s head, on the side of his bad eye. Driver jumps out, a young man, high school.
—I’m so sorry!
His father comes hustling back for Lee, smiling, waving the young man off. —He’s fine.
Lee is on the ground, dizzy, face in the pavement. —He almost killed me, he says as he climbs to his feet.
—Hell he did.
—I’m so sorry, the driver says again.
—Nothing to worry about, Lee’s father says to him.
—I hit him, is he okay?
—You missed him, it’s fine.
—He didn’t miss me, Lee cries.
—He missed you. You fell, you tripped over your own feet. Anyway you should have been paying better attention to your surroundings. His father turns to the high school boy. —Does it all the time. He’s as reckless as hell and one day he’s going to get himself killed. I’ve been telling him but he ain’t listened. Maybe now he will.
Lee is staring at his hellish mangled reflection in the silver bumper of the truck, an inch from his head at eye level.
—Doesn’t he need a doctor for that eye? the young man says.
His father snorts. —No, he’s fine. All right, Lee. Apologize to the man.
—He doesn’t have to apologize to me, the driver insists.
—Don’t tell my son what to do, please. He nudges Lee. —Lee. Apologize.
—You don’t have to, the driver says.
—I’m sorry, Lee says.
The young man sighs and throws up his hands, then turns to get back into his truck, looks at Lee once more. —You didn’t have to do that, he says, and closes the door.
They walk off and get into his father’s truck. It is quiet. His father keeps looking at him. After a long time, his father says, in a voice that sounds different, even more like a cowboy than usual, —Hey pardner, did I ever tell you about the time your daddy got himself bit by a rattler out in Oklahoma? Hoooo, doggy! You think you’re bad, you should have seen your daddy. His foot was as big as your entire body, God’s honest truth. They gave your daddy last rites. The carpenter was fixing him up the coffin. They were out there diggin’ the grave. Know what your daddy did? I’ll be damned if he didn’t get himself up off that plank they had him on, limp over to where they were diggin’ the grave, grab him a shovel, and pitch in! Dug twice as much as any healthy man there too! Put them all to shame, your daddy did. Sweated that poison right out. That’s where you get your toughness, son. You’re a tough son of a bitch, Lee. Tougher than any boy I know. I was the same way at your age. That’s the kinda people we are. You’re just like me. I see a lot of myself in you. It’s eerie sometimes, I have to say. Downright eerie how much I see myself in you.
He pulls out, drives home, telling Lee all about it, forgetting again about Lee, who sits with his face pressed against the glass of the window as the box he is locked inside zooms past the sunshine world outside.
The fences are up, the barn is raised, the troughs are in—but the food is dying. The little hard potatoes still grow, but the tomatoes never appear on their vines and nothing ever comes up through the places in the dirt where things were supposed to come up. And some of the greens turn yellow then brown, became brittle and now tumble away in that foul wind. Lee watches his father squatting to examine the dead leaves and wilted buds, picking up the dirt in his hands and watching it run through his fingers. He squints up at the sky, the sun, as though appealing to the gods. —Must be dry this year, he says. Lee starts to ask what they will do but he cuts him off: —I don’t know. Dammit, I don’t know what we’ll do, stop asking me what we’ll do, you’re always asking questions, so many goddamn questions, go find something to do, go fix us some supper.
—We don’t have any meat.
—Well, mash up some potatoes or something then.
—We don’t have any potatoes, we don’t have anything.
—Well then, dammit, order us a pizza I guess then, I don’t know. He kicks the dirt and walks away and Lee goes inside to order a pizza. Then he calls his mother in New York, but a man who answers says she is not home and he doesn’t know where she is or when she will be back. The man says she will call him but she never does.
Lee likes to go inside the new barn, which is still empty, and climb around, hide out. He likes the fresh smell of the wood, the way the light of midday comes in through the little windows and seems to bake the wood, seasoning it with the dust motes moving down through the light beams. Soon there will be pets here. He will name them and ride them and be nuzzled by them and talk to them. They will be his friends. There will be a pig. He will name it Porky. Soon the men will come with Porky and the cows and the chickens. He will name them all. —When? he keeps asking his father. —When are they coming?
—Soon, soon. Next week maybe. Depends on the guy.
—When is next week?
—I don’t know. Five days maybe. Five sleeps.
Five sleeps. In five sleeps Lee will have Porky. That was yesterday, he thinks now, in the barn. So four sleeps now. Four. He cannot bear to wait four sleeps.
A force shuts the door and the windows too and Lee is suddenly alone in hot blackness. He pushes against the door but it does not open. He pushes harder and the door seems to push back against him. He can see nothing. It is very hot, he cannot breathe, he is a pig, dying. —Help! he cries, pushing and pulling on the door, the door rattling and pushing back.
A voice on the other side mocks him with oinks and snorts and high whining echoes of his own crying. —Where that piggy at? That piggy in there? Knock, knock, little piggy! Little pig, little pig, let me in! Heeee! Heeee! You gon’ squeal, piggy! You gon’ squeal! Heeeeeee! Heeeeeeee! HEEEEEEEEE! HEEEEEEEE!
—Let me out! Lee begs.
—You ain’t never gettin’ out, little piggy!
Then there is relentless knocking, pounding from the outside, and Lee backs away against the wall to get away from it. It gets louder and louder, the banging now on the inside walls of his skull.
—Leave me alone!
—You ain’t never getting outta here, boy! You ain’t never getting out!
—Please!
—Pwea-he-he-hease! Heeeee! HEEEEEE!
The knocking grows more violent and the squeals and snorts more savage and deranged. Lee slides to the floor, shouting, —Go away! He reaches for his hip, pulls from the waistband of his Levi’s his cork gun. He points it at the door. —Go away! he cries. —I’m warning you!
—HEEEEEEEEEE!
He pulls the trigger. The pounding stops. The squealing and the torment stop. The death goes away. And he is alone and peaceful in the dark. When he tries the door again it opens. The sunlight floods in and he inhales it like oxygen itself. Lee steps outside, silent, face wet and even puffier than it already was, lower lip trembling. The trees in the distance sway in the breeze. The trees, the breeze, the distance itself, he understands, are terror. All is death.
Over in the garden stands his father, his back to Lee, still chuckling to himself as he twists a can of pesticide to the nozzle of the hose.
At last his mother calls and says she hears he has not been doing well at school. He says he hates school, he’s not good at it, he does not want school he wants the animals, and his eye hurts, and he’s hungry, and when she sounds very angry at what he is saying he feels angry too and tells her things are not good here anymore, why did she leave him here, he wants to come see her in New York, he wants to come now, but she says he can’t, that she’s not in New York anymore, now she is in Africa, for work, and he does not know where Africa is but he is not allowed to go there, the custody agreement she says, but as soon as she gets back to the States the custody agreement will allow it and things will be good again. He asks when that will be and she says she doesn’t know, it’s hard to say right now, but she says, —Will you try to do better in school? and he says he will and she says, —Will you think of being with me in New York every day and dream of being with me in New York every night? And he says he will, and he does. But months go by, and years, and she never gets back to the States, and he never stops dreaming of being with his mother in New York.
Lee listens to his father on the phone with the school, yelling about Lee. —Is your nurse a doctor? Did she go to medical school and become a doctor? Answer me: Is she a doctor?
He listens to his father on the phone with his mother, yelling about Lee. —He’s fine, it’s clearing up, he’s doing completely fine, he’s a good healthy boy, he’s just impatient about the livestock getting here, it’s all he’s been talking about, you know how he is when he gets his mind set on something, he needs to learn patience. Anyway, you left the damn country so you get zero say in this, thank you very much. He listens and says, —Go right ahead and call them then. I dare you. They can go right ahead and try coming up here onto my property. Go right ahead and try.
When he hangs up his face is red and he is shaking. He tells Lee to come here. He holds Lee’s face in his sweaty hands and looks at Lee’s eye and says they are crazy, it’s fine, it’s clearing up, says school is a machine. Then he takes Lee to town for more guns and ammunition to keep themselves safe.
His father has put on tight jeans and snakeskin boots, a cowboy hat and a bright red western shirt; has tobacco in the pouch of his lip, carries a cup to spit in; has the gun on his hip in its holster. The men in the store stare at him as he enters, looking him up and down. —Howdy, he grunts at them. They nod back. He asks the salesman to see one of these new semiautomatic polymer pistols from Austria. Lee stands on tiptoes to see over the counter as the bearded salesman, speaking in intimate quiet tones like a doctor, explains to Lee’s father about the lightweight body, the safety trigger, the brilliant engineering that avoids jams and minimizes kick, the unique grip required and the high level of accuracy that results from it.
—Get a load of this thing, Lee, it looks like a daggone space gun, don’t it? I think I’ll stick to my granddaddy’s gun, thank you very much. He gestures to it on his hip. —Tried and true. Battle-tested.
Says the salesman, —Cops and military have been switching over from those to these. This is what they’re all carrying nowadays. Much more reliable. Fires twice as many rounds without having to reload—He sees Lee’s eye and cuts himself off. He is large, his face emotionless, but it breaks into quiet horror. —Good Lord, he whispers.
Lee’s father glares at the salesman as though daring him to say another word about the eye. —Cops and military, huh? How much they going for?
—Three-fifty and tax.
—Gimme four of ’em.
—Four?
—Four. What caliber are they? You got hollow points for ’em?
—Nine millimeter, and yes, sir, we do.
—Okay, gimme a shitload of hollow points. Turns to Lee. —What about you, buckaroo? You want one? You do, don’t you? He turns back to the salesman. —Give me one more, for my son.
—Five, then?
—Excellent math. Hell, better yet? Make it ten.
The man has now forgotten all about the eye. A buoyancy has entered his hefty frame now as he says, —That’s my entire stock.
—Is that a problem?
—No, sir, not at all. He hurries into the back to fetch them. Comes out with the guns in their big bombproof-seeming cases stacked in his arms over his face, places them on the counter. Returns to the back for the bullets. —Hundred boxes is all I got. Hundred okay?
—I reckon that’ll do, says Lee’s father. —For now. He winks at Lee. Fills out the forms, pays. —You ever make a sale this big before?
—No, sir, no, I have not.
Lee’s father winks at Lee again and drums his knuckles happily on the glass countertop.
The man hands them their new weapons and ammunition and hurries around from behind the counter to get the door for them, grinning so broadly and strangely now that Lee thinks he will hug his father. —Y’all come back any time now, any time at all.
They drive off, passing a hospital, Lee peering out at it through his good eye. They go home, go directly to the range to shoot the brand-new space guns. The space guns are supposed to hit the bull’s-eye without your even aiming them, they are supposed to fire without your even feeling it or hearing it—isn’t that what the salesman said? But neither turns out to be true, and Lee’s father cannot hit anything with the first one he shoots, says it feels like a daggone block in his hand; he does not like how it smells or even how deep black it is, too industrial and inhuman. Tries a second one and it’s no better. Lee has his empty one, pointing it downrange.
—What do you think, buckaroo? We don’t like this, do we? It don’t feel like a gun. It feels like a toy. We miss our gun, don’t we?
Lee nods. His father puts the space guns back into their big, heavy safe-like carrying cases and unholsters the special gun. Glances down at Lee. He is a big shadow between Lee and the sun. The shadow says, —Wanna learn to shoot it today, son?
The day the pets come in, Lee stands at a safe distance from the fence beholding these large, smelly things that are not as cute or as nice as they should be. Flies crawl all over the cows’ eyeballs as they stare at Lee. The chickens shit as they walk and make angry squawks. The pigs are scary and mean and filthy and stinky. He will not ride these terrible things, he will not nuzzle them or talk to them or even go near them. He watches the animals feeding and groveling in the mud, stepping over each other, and wishes the man who brought them would come take them back. His father leans on the fence, one boot up on the lowest slat, happily observing his stock. —Yessir, he keeps saying. —Yessir. You’re happy now, ain’t you, now that your animals are here. He laughs and ruffles Lee’s head and says, —Yessir, yessir. You’re happy.
In the morning all the pigs are lying on the ground, their bellies and throats open and their flesh white and fly-covered, guts hardening in the dirt. He wakes his father up and his father looks out the window and says, —Shit, shit, shit, shit. He runs outside, climbs over his fence, and squats at the first pig, wanting to touch something with his hand but not knowing what. —Shit! he yells. Someone has let the cows out and they stand in the pigpen with blood on their hooves. —Where are the chickens? his father says. The coop is open and they are nowhere to be seen, it is like they were never here. Through his diseased eye Lee watches his father run around looking for them. —What the fuck? he says. —What the fuck? He is covered in sweat, reeks of yesterday’s whiskey. Lee begins to cry. —Stop crying, his father shouts.
The man who sold them the animals comes from town in a pickup truck just like Lee’s father’s but bigger, newer, and made not by Chevrolet but Toyota. He gets out and walks through the gravel dust settling around him.
—He was born and raised here, Lee’s father tells Lee, voice somber with respect. —His family’s been grazing livestock ‘round these parts since 1850. He’s one of us.
The man wears a cowboy hat like Lee’s father, a flannel shirt, boots, jeans—just like Lee and Lee’s father. A new plastic European space gun is holstered on his hip. He shakes Lee’s father’s hand, shakes Lee’s. Looks in silent amusement at the dead animals, at Lee’s father who around this man is very talkative and moves around a lot. The man says nothing, just nods and grunts as Lee’s father explains how last night they were fine.
—Think it’s wolves? his father says.
The man says, —That ain’t animals. That’s a knife did that. That’s slaughtering.
—Slaughtering? his father says, looking around as though whoever it was might still be seen.
—Probably oughta call the police.
His father shakes his head at the idea. When the man leaves, Lee’s father’s face is red and he does not look at Lee or at anything. —I know who it was, he says. Lee says, —Who? but his father won’t say, and he takes the gun out of its holster, stomps off fifty feet out toward the trees, and points it and, screaming, fires once and fires again and keeps firing until it’s empty. Comes back, gestures over his shoulder.
—Pick ’em up.
—Huh?
—The bullets. It ain’t good for the land for them to be out there, they’ll poison our soil. Go out there and fetch ’em and bring ’em back. All of ’em. And don’t come back until you do.
—Why?
Warm pain splatters across the back of his head and his hat falls off.
—We obey our daddies where we come from.
His father goes back inside and shuts the door, and Lee wanders toward the trees, crying, face hurting. He goes as slowly as he can. When he gets too close, when he cannot bear to go any farther, he turns and runs off to the guest house on the far side of the property, one of four, his hiding place. When he returns to the house four hours later, stopping at the gun range to dig six crushed bullets from the sand mound there, his father is in his chair in front of the TV, watching Happy Days. He does not look at Lee and he is drunk, and Lee thinks he looks like a little boy. Lee drops the bullets on the coffee table but his father does not look at them or acknowledge him.
Over the ensuing week the garden stops growing altogether. Soon it is just wood and dirt, and soon fall comes and chills it, then winter comes and finally kills it off completely. They buy their groceries from Safeway, overpriced and infused with chemicals and hormones, in cartons and plastic packaging, meat killed by other men, crops grown on other men’s land. The bullets his father fired into the trees remain out there.
His father disappears with no explanation. Lee wanders around the arsenal in the basement, picking up guns, feeling his father in them; he puts the special gun in a holster on his hip and admires himself in the mirror, wanders around the house like that. Steps outside and feels the breeze blowing over his skin, watches the green tops of the trees. He finds himself walking down the long driveway to the street, stands there for a moment, then continues. At the hospital they know who he is, the nurse takes him by the hand without asking him any questions, as though she has been waiting for him. People waiting in chairs holding wads of bandages to bleeding bodies call out in protest but she ignores them, leads him back through a winding hallway. On the way Lee looks over a doorway and his own name is there: THE LEE FISHER WING. They give him medicine and a man wearing a tie drives him home. It is night and he is in bed when he hears his father come home. He listens to him going through drawers in the kitchen, pulling things out, putting things away. Glasses clink. He is talking to someone. Lee thinks he hears another voice, a man’s. He holds his breath and listens very intently but does not hear the other voice again. Lee gets out of bed, stands against his closed door, listening, his heart beating very hard, lungs burning from holding his breath. Then it is quiet. Lee slips out of his bedroom, goes down the long hall, squats at the top of the stairs. A dim orange light Lee has never seen emanates from down there. His father’s long shadow is cast upon the wall. Lee hears the other voice again.
His father appears at the foot of the stairs, looking up at him as though suspecting he would find him there. —What are you doing, Lee?
—Nothing.
—Go to bed.
—Who’s here?
—No one.
—I heard someone.
—No one’s here.
—I heard a man.
—There’s no man. Go to bed.
Lee does as he is told. In the morning his face is almost back to its normal size and he sucks in gob after gob of air. Two days after that, as he keeps taking the medicine in secret, hiding it from his father under his mattress, the infection clears.
—Look at that, his father says. —Just like I told you it would.
Lee finds him in his bedroom pulling everything from the closets. A pile of clothing rises in the center of the room, all his cowboy hats and fringe vests and leather chaps and boots and dungarees and Levi’s. He tosses another armload of clothing atop the mound and mops a swath of sweat from his face with his palm. He is not a cowboy anymore. Now he is a soldier.
Soldiers train. They join with others to form armies. They drill on the new course built where the farm was by a former drill sergeant who was responsible for the training courses on Parris Island, where they trained US Marines for battle in Vietnam.
Soldiers go to church. They bring along their son, to be a good example to him. They manage their son’s activities and diet. As virtue is measured in indirect proportion to hair length, they shave their head, they shave their son’s head.
Strange new men are around now, each with a rank. They wear camouflage. They shoot. After days of wearing camouflage and shooting, they sit around bonfires drinking beer in the shadows.
—These are the most dangerous times in our history, the man called the General says. —Nothing less than the future of our country, the lives of our people, nothing less than our very freedom is at stake. Never in any time since our Founding Fathers waged war for this great free nation have our fundamental rights been under attack like they are now, at this very moment. We are living in crucial times, men. Our families, our beloved nation, the futures of our children and grandchildren are depending on you. Only you stand between freedom and tyranny. Wicked elements are at work in America today. Jackbooted government thugs are kicking down our doors as we speak. They will seize our homes, our arms, make off with our women, our children. All governments are bent toward tyranny. Ours is no exception. The ones you must be most wary of are the ones who come to you under the guise of democracy. Do not be fooled—they want to take our country from us.
Lee feels despair and hatred for these people, the ones who want to take his home and his country from him.
—There is no gray area, the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States has no fine print. Shall not infringe. Yet every day powerful moneyed people are infringing with impunity on our rights. A regulation here, an ordinance there. They call it gun control but they are disarming us. Eradicating our freedoms. They are termites. Termites do not stop when they have had one bite, they do not stop after two bites, they do not stop after they’ve had their fill, no, they go until the whole house topples in on itself. They want to tell us what to do and how to be, and they want to take away our means of liberty, make us reliant on them, the government. In which case we are no longer citizens but subjects.
Lee looks at his father, who is listening very closely to the General, a trim, tall man with a long gray beard, eyes deep with brave acts of war and unblinking against the spitting rain. He sits on a log, the rest of the soldiers at his feet. Across his lap is a military-issue fully automatic M16 carbine rifle. The other soldiers nod and shake their heads in indignation and mutter vows to uphold their duty and defend what is sacred. The General looks at Lee.
—I fear for your generation, little private. I pray to God your fellow boys and girls see what you see, which is the truth, and have what you have in you, which is fight, but I have to admit I feel very grim when I think about it. Your generation’s parents are not doing their part. They are failing you. With the exception of Lieutenant Fisher, your generation’s parents are not instilling the right values in you. Your generation is not going to appreciate their freedom the way mine does. Because mine died for it. And killed for it. I look at boys your age and I am not convinced they have been raised the way Lieutenant Fisher has raised you. I can’t say I am convinced they are willing to die and kill for freedom and liberty, and that saddens me. It frightens me. It is not their fault—it is our fault. We have to do more, don’t we?
The others nod solemnly.
—Lieutenant Fisher has done his part. Let’s take an example from him, bringing his boy out here like this today.
Lee’s father’s face burns with pride, he looks near tears.
—Yes, this will all one day end if we don’t do something about it. But not this day.
—Hoo-ah! the soldiers all bark in unison.
—You are doing sacred work. You are heroes. True patriots. If General Washington himself were here he would be real proud of you. Real proud. This is what I watched so many men die for, he would say. Unappreciated thankless work—but sacred work. The most sacred. The only payment is one more hour of freedom. Remember that when they mock you, when they taunt you and talk down to you. Later when catastrophe strikes they will not be laughing. They’ll be begging men like you to save them. Maybe you will. Maybe you won’t. The choice will be yours. The power will be yours. As it is now. They don’t know that. So let them laugh. Let them laugh all the way to the grave.
NRA material and memorabilia are scattered around the house: pamphlets, fund-raising letters, publications from the executive vice president. That Christmas they decorate the tree in ornaments bearing the NRA logo on the front and the text of the Second Amendment on the back. Lee’s father takes him to the convention in Cincinnati. There is something exciting trembling beneath the gaudy maroon carpet of the hotel conference rooms. His father says a coup is under way. Lee doesn’t know what that means.
—It means the organization is run by pussy-ass sycophants who want to acquiesce every chance they get to the tyrannical, gun-hating, freedom-hating, anti-American bureaucrats of the United States government. But the good guys are here, the good guys are kicking them out and taking it over. That man there? He points to a squat bald man whose face quivers with intensity as he spits into a walkie-talkie. —That’s Harlon Carter. A great man. When he was sixteen he shot a man to death in self-defense. He’s a true Second Amendment warrior. He’s our hero, he’s going to lead the revolution. At least he better or I’m getting my money back.
Lee does not know what that means either, but he likes his father explaining things to him and he is looking forward to seeing a war.
—He’s coordinating right now. It’s going to be a sneak attack. I’m the guy behind Harlon, I’m the money, the strategist. The sycophants have no idea what me and Harlon are about to pull. They want to keep it a benign little squirrel-shooting club and stay out of politics and cooperate. They want to move the NRA from Washington, DC, to fucking Colorado and let them just go ahead and trample our rights. So me and Harlon are gonna take it. We’re gonna take the NRA. And save the country. Tonight. Come on, I’ll introduce you.
His father brings Lee up to the bald man, Harlon Carter, who is talking to someone else. They stand there for a moment, waiting for Harlon Carter to finish, but before Harlon can turn to them his father says, —Know what? Let’s not hog all his attention. I’ll introduce you later. Come on.
—Why are you sweating, Dad?
—I’m not sweating.
—Yes, you are.
—I don’t know why. I gave a lot of money, is all. I funded the whole damned thing. I bought those fucking walkie-talkies. And he waves me off. He waves me off.
—He didn’t wave you off.
—Don’t tell me he didn’t wave me off. He waved me off. Come on.
They wander around looking at the display tables. Lee collects stickers and pins and pamphlets and books. He is drawn to the table with the guns—army guns and cop guns and big guns and little guns and so many guns. Everyone has a handgun on their hip or a rifle slung across their back. The General is there, the soldiers from the house. Lee stands there as his father shakes their hands, pretends to pass on sensitive information obtained from being an insider with Harlon Carter.
—How is Carter, Lieutenant? the General says.
—Harlon’s good, General, Lee’s father says. —He’s feeling strong, he’s feeling good. We’re in prime position and everything’s on schedule, Harlon tells me we’re in great shape, outstanding shape.
The General and the soldiers nod, glowing from the proximity to power.
—What’s he like? the General says. —Good guy?
—Great guy, Lee’s father says. —Great guy.
The convention consists mostly of people talking and clapping and sitting and eating, with their guns. For some speakers his father leans over and whispers to Lee, —This guy’s a hero, and he claps hard, even whistles, and Lee does the same, clapping hard and whistling for the hero. For other speakers his father says, —This guy’s a sack of shit, and he and Lee boo. Most of the conventioneers are somber men with white hair and clothes that Lee imagines being found in an attic of an abandoned farmhouse. The few women resemble the men. It is boring. Lee wants to go in the pool. He saw some boys his age in there earlier; he wants to meet them, play with them. He asks his father if he may. —Later, his father says, —I want you to experience this, this is important.
At midnight they are still there, in their folding chairs in that conference room, cheering for heroes and booing sacks of shit. God, how he would love to go running on the deck of the pool and take off from the edge and fly in the air above the blue water, pulling his knees to his chest, and splash. How he would love to race those boys from end to end. He is trying to keep his eyes open. —Wake up, his father says, nudging him, —you’re missing it.
Lee looks at what he is missing and he is missing more speeches and they are the same speeches, and he is missing men in orange hats standing around the edge of the crowd with walkie-talkies, and he is missing other men, these in suits, walking quickly from group to group and talking and nodding and pointing at the men in orange hats and talking.
—Can I have a Coke? Lee says.
—No, the machines are all empty. The bad guys did it on purpose to try and weaken us with dehydration.
Lee is crying.
—What the hell’s the matter?
—I’m tired.
—Christ Almighty.
Lee knows he is disappointed in him, even disgusted, but he must sleep, his face burns with exhaustion. Gets up, walks out past all the energetic men in orange hats and frazzled, confused men in suits, carrying all his stickers and pins he has collected—his favorite sticker bears an image of a skeleton clutching a wood-and-iron rifle and the words You can have my gun... when you pry it from my cold dead hands. It is proud and manly and heroic. He passes the pool. There are no kids playing in it now, it is dark and empty and the water is still and the door to it is locked. Goes to the penthouse, there are two suites; he and his father have both, each his own. Lee falls instantly, embryonically asleep, shoes still on.
His father is nudging his back. —Lee, Lee. Wake up. Ice clinks in his father’s glass. Now it is he who is weeping. —Wake up, Lee. We did it. Me and Harlon, we did it. We won. We saved the country. We took it, it’s ours. No compromise! Never any compromise! Things will be good now, Lee. And know what Harlon said? He said Daddy was essential, that he played a vital role in our success. That’s what he said, Lee: Essential. Vital.
He listens to his father on the phone with the General. —Where is everybody? We said oh-six-hundred hours and it’s damn near eight. He listens, says, —General, this is the third time we’re rescheduling this muster. It’s like herding cats. I understand people have prior commitments but we’ve got to commit to this. This needs to be the prior commitment.
When he hangs up, his face is red and tight, but he looks more sad than angry. He scoffs to Lee, —General! He’s not a real general. Never fought in a war. Never served a single day in the military. He’s a daggone junior high school math teacher.
And soon the army men stop coming to the mountain and Lee and his father are not soldiers anymore.
For ninth grade he has to go to a special school for the stupid, because his father homeschooled him for seventh and eighth grade and he did not learn anything. After the special school for the stupid, his mother wants him to go to an elite boarding school in New Hampshire where, she says, people go on to Harvard and become senators and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and Academy Award winners, but his father says Abraham Lincoln went to school in a one-room cabin in the woods of Illinois and went on to teach himself how to become a lawyer and then a great president; those people at those schools think they’re better than everybody and above everything even though they haven’t earned their station, and he won’t raise Lee to be like that, he won’t have Lee thinking that way about himself, he will continue to be self-taught at home. His mother says the authorities won’t allow that because what Lee’s father seems to consider homeschooling they consider neglect. They fight about it through the lawyers. As compromise, Lee has to go to the local public high school. His father says it is an ultra-liberal hellhole, the machine of machines. —Just don’t let them brainwash you, he says. —Don’t let them corrupt you.
The school is terrifying. These strange people all seem so much bigger than he is and live in a chaos of unwritten social codes and arbitrary rules. How is he to know not to wear his Remington hat inside? Where was it stated that he would be laughed at for his clothes, which are mostly military-issue camouflage? Why is it considered any of their business that he prefers eating lunch alone in the back stairwell reading military histories instead of braying in the cafeteria with the other sheeple? Everyone appalls him with their frivolity and inane cheerfulness—what the hell are they always so daggone happy about when the country, the world, is how it is?
His first year there he does not say a word to anyone except in class when they make him. Joey Whitestone is the only one who is friendly to him but he does not like Joey Whitestone being friendly to him. He tells Joey Whitestone to leave him alone but Joey Whitestone does not leave him alone, so Lee Fisher tells him if he does not leave him alone he will blow his head off—and now Joey Whitestone knows to leave him alone and the rest of them know too.
It feels good to drive them off, to control people in such a way. You have no control when you let people change you. Blast them with coldness and it solves the problem, keeps them from hurting you. All people will hurt you. You must guard against them. When he gets home and is alone in his bedroom, he lies on the bed sobbing. He is so lonely but does not know what to do about it, he wants people but he hates everybody.
In English class where they are taking a test on To Kill a Mockingbird, Joey Whitestone passes him a note: I stole my uncle’s smokes, we’re meeting at the railroad tracks after school, want to come? Yeah, right—it’s a trick, Lee can see that, payback for what he said. Who knows what they have planned for him when he shows up? Humiliation. In some form or another, humiliation. He knows how to handle this: he raises his hand for the teacher, waving the note in the air. Joey serves ten days’ suspension, the school administration tells Lee he did the right thing. It feels good. Right. He wants that feeling all the time. He will be a police officer, he decides, when he is eighteen and may leave. He will go to New York and be a police officer. With his mother. His mother is not there anymore and has not been for a long time but that does not matter, he does not need her, he needs no one. He will be in New York, alone. Far away from here.
The principal recognizes him as one of his own kind, not just another moron student. Here is a boy with responsibility and virtue and values, a boy I do not have to worry about. —If only I had a school full of Lee Fishers, the principal tells him, in his office, splitting a Coke, excused from that period of algebra class.
Lee takes it upon himself from then on to collect intelligence on all illicit activity perpetrated by students on school grounds during school hours—drinking in the bathroom, weed in the parking lot, cigarettes in the woods, sexual activity in the stairwells, unauthorized absences, cheating on tests—and deliver the evidence to the principal so that justice may be served and Lee may feel love. The other students start calling him McGruff the Crime Dog. They taunt him, threaten him, but most important, they stay away from him.
Someone writes on the mirror of the boys’ bathroom: LEE FISHER IS A CHOAD. Lee sees it when he is in there washing his hands, sees his reflection looking back at himself through the insult, his hair close cropped with electric shears, done himself like a self-sufficient soldier. Does his face not reveal that he is unmoved, his eyes that he is unshaken? Is this not the reflection of a good guy being persecuted for his soundness of character, mocked for his having done the right thing?
Joey returns from suspension, does not look at Lee, does not invite him anywhere ever again, is always surrounded by friends, is always laughing or making them laugh, does not seem to have the problem with life that Lee has. Lee’s problem with life is everything, everything to do with life and living. Lee sees Joey blowing smoke from a joint down Tamra Riley’s throat in the parking lot one day after school. She is the prettiest girl who ever lived—Lee has been in love with her since the first time he saw her. He hates Joey even more than ever, for how he has taken advantage of Tamra Riley. He waits until they leave, goes and picks up the joint, and writes down the date and time and types up a report on the incident and delivers it to the principal. Tamra is suspended and her parents remove her from the school as an emergency measure to rescue her transcript for college applications, and Joey, having received his second infraction while still on probation, is expelled.
The day after their suspensions are handed down, Lee steals one of his father’s Glocks and brings it to school in his backpack. Loaded. Not to hurt anyone—he would never do that—for self-defense. It’s only smart—not everyone will like what he has done, not everyone appreciates those who do what’s right. Walking around with the Glock having the ability to kill any bad guys who threaten him, or more so having the ability, the option, of killing anyone at all whenever he feels like it but choosing not to, allowing them to live, makes him feel much better about himself. I am good, he thinks. He finds he feels warmer toward people, is more forgiving, even feels affection toward them. He is more polite on crowded stairwells, gallantly allowing others to go ahead of him. A cop, he thinks. A cop in New York.
One of Joey Whitestone’s friends, a big dumb moron named Bobby Pool—football, wrestling—stares Lee down in the hallway. He is surrounded by other gang rape mutants like himself. Normally Lee would stare at the ground and seethe as he pretends to ignore them, but today, knowing his gun is there, Lee meets Bobby Pool’s gaze. He says to Bobby Pool without breaking his stride, —What the fuck are you looking at? And Bobby Pool just looks away. Doesn’t say shit. None of his friends says shit. No one says a goddamn thing to Lee Fisher.
—What the hell crawled up your ass? his father says when he gets home that day.
They are in the kitchen, pulling slices of pizza from the delivery box and slapping them onto their plates, which ordinarily they would carry off to their respective wings of the house, where they would remain for the night, ignoring each other. His father never notices anything about him, hardly ever talks to him anymore; he never talks to anyone and rarely leaves the house. Mostly he sits in his chair drinking and watching cable news. He has grown very fat and Lee is not far behind. They have not spoken to each other in days, and his now taking an interest in Lee is like one of those cable news people suddenly stopping midsentence, squinting out at you from the screen, and saying your name, saying hello to you. Lee says he’s fine.
—The hell you are, you look like your dog just died. Lee looks away, but his father is peering closer at him. Puts his hand on Lee’s shoulder and squeezes. It feels both good and repellent. —Whatever it is, his father says, —Let’s take your mind off of it.
Down at the firing range, his father loads up the special gun, hands it to Lee. The firing range is the only part of the property his father still maintains nowadays, the rest of it is long overgrown with tall brown grass and weeds, including the farm they tried to live off of, the training course they once drilled on with the soldiers. Lee takes the gun, aims it at the targets, fires. Misses. Fires again, misses. Not even a nick.
—You’re missing to the right, his father says.
Lee says, —As fucking usual.
—Hey, easy, it’s all right, don’t get down on yourself. You’re doing good. You’re a hell of a marksman. Here, try tightening up that right hand, kind of push against the gun with it, kind of brace against it on that side.
Lee does, fires, hits just on the edge of the bull’s-eye.
—Beautiful! his father says.
Lee fires again, hitting the same spot, the exact same spot.
—Outstanding! his father says, slapping him on the back. —That’s it! You and that gun were made for each other. His father suddenly looks at him, alarmed. —Oh no, Lee.
—What is it?
—Oh God. Don’t move.
—Why?
—There’s something on your face.
Lee’s worried. —What is it?
—Good Lord, it’s all over it, don’t move. He wipes his hand over Lee’s face and flings something away.
—Did you get it? Lee cries. —What was it?
—Nothing, just a smile. Been so long since I saw it, I didn’t recognize it. Puts his arm around his son’s shoulders and says, —Listen, something I wanted to talk to you about. That gun? It’s yours now.
—Really?
—It’s always been yours, I’ve just been holding it for you. Take care of it. Protect it. And remember: you’re just keeping it for your son. It’s already his, just like it was already yours.
