If I shot him, it wouldn’t really matter. There would be more people like him. Deer get shot all the time. Deer blood and deer guts all over the forest floor. Blood in the leaves, breathing slowing down. And then gone.
Brent would be forgotten too.
“Hey.”
I turned. There was someone standing in a little alcove in the sidewall of the theater.
He had been watching me. It was Teague. There was cement behind him and above him and he was in shadow so it was hard to see his eyes.
There was another guy on the cement above us, but I couldn’t really see him. I could only tell that he was big and white.
Teague was my height, and handsome. He wore a black parka but I could tell that he was skinny from his face and neck. He had curly brown hair cut pretty short.
He looked like he was about to laugh, but he didn’t laugh, and because I couldn’t really see his eyes, I was confused about what he was feeling. Maybe nothing.
“Here’s the shit,” said Teague, and he handed me a wrinkled paper bag. He didn’t stop looking at me while I took the bag.
The bag was heavy. I looked inside, and there was a black handgun at the bottom.
“Take it out,” he said.
“Nah, I’m cool,” I said. “Looks good.”
“You don’t want to check it out?” he said.
“Nah, we’re good,” I said. “Three fifty-seven, right?”
“It’s a Glock,” he said. There was a sound from above, like scraping.
“I thought you said a three fifty-seven?”
“Glock’s better,” he said.
“Right, cool,” I said.
“Three-hun,” he told me.
“Oh, right.” I took out a folded envelope from my back pocket and handed it to him. I had been saving for a car.
He counted the money and then put it in his back pocket.
“Nice doing business with you,” he said, and walked out. He met his friend at the end of the grass, and they turned the corner down the hall with the orange lights and were gone.
The bag just looked like a lunch bag, so I carried it casually. I rode my bike home, and the bag swung under my handlebars. I was humming a little bit. Some tune. I saw my hand on my handlebars, gripping the handgrip and the top of the bag. I stopped humming and heard the air all around me, and my bike whirring below.
And you know how you can’t see your face? The closest you can see is the tip of your nose, if you cross your eyes. But I wanted to look at myself right then, to see this guy coasting down the sidewalk with a gun, going somewhere.
Then the bag split and the gun clattered onto the cement. I skidded to a stop and turned around to get it. It was lying on the sidewalk in front of someone’s lawn. A black gun on the sidewalk. It wasn’t metal. It was plastic. It was a squirt gun, full of water. For a second I was sure of it, but no, it was a real gun. I picked it up. I didn’t know how to check if it was okay. There was a button on the side of the grip that I pressed and the clip popped out in my hand. It was heavy and full of bullets.
I popped the clip back in.
Then I pointed the gun at the house I was in front of. It was an Eichler house, low and boxy, with a garage door out front—like my house, but orange and white. I pulled the trigger, and the gun fired. There was a loud burst and then the house was there, but even more there because it had just been shot.
A neighbor’s dog barked, and I took off on my bike with the gun clutched to my chest.
Two weeks later was the Battle of the Bands. There were seven local bands from the various high schools, and I thought it was funny and fitting that it was in the gym at Cubberley.
I went to hear my friend Barry play. Barry was in a band called Headless Tom, I guess after Washington Irving and Mark Twain. Barry’s brother was in the band, with two other pothead Mormons.
Most of the kids there were the alternative crowd from my school and other schools, but there were some jocks there too.
I stood to the side and watched. The gun was heavy in my jacket pocket.
Barry’s band went on third.
Their first song was called “The Quick and the Dead,” because those are the last words in the Mormon Bible. It is a song about friends who have died.
Across the pit I saw Teague swaying like a stalk of wheat. He looked like he was laughing, but I knew that he wasn’t.
Then I saw Brent Baucher. He didn’t look like he was enjoying himself. It was not his kind of music. He needed his Too $hort, “So You Want to Be a Gangster.”
I saw Mr. Case in the corner, one of the chaperones. It was really late to drive back to Angels Camp.
The next song was a fast song called “Bricklayer.” Everyone got into it, even the jocks, and a small mosh pit formed. I got into it too. In the pit, bodies hit each other and there was sweat. It was tight and hot. I was behind Brent but he didn’t know. I jumped and our bodies collided. And again, in the hot, sweaty circle.
From the side, Mr. Case watched with his crossed eyes.
Jack-O’
I sit in the driver’s seat of my grandfather’s old DeVille. It is night out and cool. Me and Joe, we just sit.
We’re out in front of the Unified Palo Alto School District office, a dead one-story building where old people work. I think of all the boring English teachers I have ever had, and I think they were all born in this building.
We sit here because it’s dark, and there are no lights outside this building. We’re stopped for no reason except that the night is still going and we’re drunk, and who wants to go home, ever, and this spot is as good as any to just sit in the shadows and let life slow.
My window is cracked, just a bit, and the air plays on my forehead. I often think about driving off the side of freeway overpasses, just plunging Grandpa’s old blue boat through the cement guardrail. The sculpted posts crumbling about me and Grandpa’s blue machine: a great moment of metallic explosion and heavy ripping and jerking and then release: a soft, slow dive of arcing color through the windshield, into a hard second of impact, just before the black. What an adventure lies behind one quick turn of the steering wheel. A great screaming, and then, slip away.
Joe and I sit and stare at the wall of the building. The building is beige, but the shadows make it shadow-color. Joe smokes. His window is all the way down, and he breathes his smoke out the black gap.
There is not much to talk about with Joe because he’s such a moron. I don’t know what he thinks he is, or why he thinks he exists. I guess in some people’s lives, no one tells you what to be, and so you be nothing. In the olden days you were born into it, all decisions made, and you farmed until you died, or cleaned the royal toilets.
I guess they didn’t have toilets. Just stuck their asses out and shat in the moat. But someone had to wash out the hole.
“If you lived in the olden times, what would you do?” I ask Joe.
Joe has to think about it. He is large, and his weight spreads from his belly across the seat, like it was a plastic sack full of liquid, rolling in layers upon itself.
“Which olden times?” he asks, and it’s like a boar’s grunt, a deep thing, from the thick part of his throat.
“Like, King Arthur, with knights and horses.”
Fat-ass thinks. I can hear it, like rust-flaked gears groaning slowly into motion, even smell it, yellow smoke emanating from his skull.
“I’d be the king,” he says.
“You can’t be the king,” I say. “No one is king. That’s like winning the lottery.”
“If I went back, I’d be king. And I’d fuck every virgin in the kingdom.”
“You can’t be king, asshole. You can’t even be duke. The fact that you even said that shows you’re not royalty. You’re a peasant.”