The Next(28)

The closet was locked as always. Were the rifles the only things he had  locked up in there? We'd never know unless we looked for ourselves. The  keys were draped on Grandfather's belt buckle, but he had to have a  spare key. Somewhere …

Since the bedroom had no lock, we entered. We saw an unadorned, beige  set of wooden drawers on the wall opposite the bed. The top drawer  contained eight pressed and folded white undershirts. The light  yellowing under the armpits indicated he'd not purchased new shirts in a  long time, and these lasted miraculously through the years by attentive  care and judicious use.         

     



 

The drawers underneath each contained meticulously folded or rolled up  sets of identical clothing: white generic underwear, black calf-high  socks, navy blue cardigans, and black knit sweaters.

No key.

We opened the plain wooden wardrobe bureau on the opposite wall next to  the door. Grandfather's daily uniform of short sleeve button-down shirts  with pockets and conservative khaki pants hung with obsessive neatness  on wire hangers. Ten of each in the exact same colors and styles spaced  exactly one inch from each other on the bar.

To the very right hung an old army green uniform. Though it was crisp  and scrubbed clean, the sleeves remained slightly blackened from mud,  and, for all we knew, worse. Curious golden metal emblems were pinned  above the jacket pocket, their detail shining. I pressed my fingers  against their shine as if the gold would somehow rub off onto my skin. I  ran my hand down the wool and imagined my grandfather as a young,  muscular, toned man filling it out proudly, before he cemented that  rigid facial expression he would wear for the rest of his life.

On the floor of the bureau was one pair of oxfords, one pair of loafers,  and one pair of rubber calf-high boots. We put our hands in the three  pairs of shoes and burrowed to the toes.

During Dad's state-mandated attempt to quit drinking after he'd parked  his twilight blue Firebird at the bottom of Mr. and Mrs. Morrow's  swimming pool next door after a sudden realization he'd been driving for  the last half mile on the neglected fire road above our houses, we  found two small silver flasks of whiskey buried in Dad's Oxfords.  Thinking we'd encountered perhaps the only time ever to pull one over on  Dad without repercussions, Paul and I replaced the whiskey in the  flasks with apple vinegar and re-hid them in the shoes.

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.