“Gun Crazy” was first published in the February 13, 1940, issue of the Saturday Evening Post. It has seldom been reprinted, even though it served as the basis for the famous noir cult film of the same title, for which Kantor wrote the screenplay. Released in 1949, it was directed by Joseph H. Lewis. The film, an excellent though more violent expansion of the short story, features a clean-cut gun nut, Bart (Nelly in the story), played by John Dall, who meets a good-looking sharpshooter, Laurie Starr (Antoinette McReady in the story), played by Peggy Cummins, and their subsequent spree of bank robberies and shootings.
I first met Nelson Tare when he was around five or six years old, and I was around the same. I had watched his family moving into the creek house on a cold, snowless morning in early winter.
Two lumber wagons went by, with iron beds and old kitchen chairs and mattresses tied all over them. They rumbled down the hill past Mr. Boston’s barn and stopped in front of the creek house. I could see men and girls working, carrying the stuff inside.
In midafternoon I was outdoors again, and I coasted to the corner in my little wagon to see whether the moving-in activities were still going on.
Then Nelson Tare appeared. He had climbed the hill by himself; probably he was looking for guns, although I couldn’t know that at the time. He was a gaunt little child with bright blue beads for eyes, and a sharp-pointed nose.
He said, “Hello, kid. Want to pway?”
Nelson was only about a month younger than I, it turned out, but he still talked a lot of baby talk. I think kids are apt to do that more when their parents don’t talk to them much.
I told him that I did want to play, and asked him what he wanted to do.
He asked, “Have you got any guns?” What he actually said was, “Dot any duns?” and for a while I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then, when I understood, I coasted back to the house in my wagon, with Nelson walking beside me. We went into the living room.
I had three guns: a popgun with the pop gone, and a glass pistol that used to have candy inside — but now the candy was all eaten up — and a cap gun and holster.
The cap gun was the best. It was nickel-plated, and the holster was made of black patent leather. It was the shape and possibly half the size of an ordinary .32-caliber revolver.
Nelson Tare’s eyes pushed out a little when he saw it. He made a grab, and belted it on before I had time to protest and tell him that I wanted to play with the cap gun and he could play with the glass pistol or the broken pop rifle. He went swaggering around with the gun on, and it kind of scared me the way he did it — all of a sudden he’d snatch the revolver out of its holster and aim it at me.
I took the glass pistol and tried to imitate him. But the glass pistol couldn’t click, and at least the hammer of the cap gun would come down with a resounding click. Nelson, or Nelly, as I came to know him, fairly shot the daylights out of me. I began to protest, and he kept on advancing and kind of wrangling and threatening me, until he had me backed up in a corner.
He hadn’t taken off his little red coat with its yellow horn buttons, and he was perspiring inside it. I still recollect how he smelled when he got close enough to wool me around; I had never smelled a smell like that before. I remember his face, too, when he came close — the tiny, expressionless turquoise eyes, the receding chin and baby mouth still marked with the tag ends of his dinner; and in between them, that inhuman nose whittled out to a point.
I tried to push him away as he kept battling me and shooting me, and I guess I began to cry.
Nelson said that it wasn’t a real gun.
“It might go off!”
He said that it couldn’t go off; that it wasn’t “weal.”
“‘Course it isn’t real!” I cried. “I guess there isn’t any boy in the world got a real gun!”
Well, he said that he had one, and when I was still disbelieving he said that he would go home and fetch it. His coat had come unbuttoned in our scufflings, and I remember how he looked as I watched through the window and saw him flapping down the last length of concrete sidewalk past the big maple tree.
My mother came from upstairs while I waited at the window. She said that she had heard voices. “Did you have company?” she asked.
“It was a new boy.”
“What new boy?”
“He moved into the creek house down there.”
My mother said doubtfully, “Oh, yes. I heard there was a ditcher’s family moving in down there.”
Well, I wanted to know what a ditcher was, and while Mother was explaining to me about drainage ditches out on the prairie and how the tile was laid in them, here came Nelly hustling up the road as fast as he could leg it. He had something big and heavy that he had to carry in both hands. When he got into the yard we could see that he did have a revolver, and it looked like a real one.
Mother exclaimed, and went to open the door for him. He ducked inside, bareheaded and cold, with his dirty, thin, straw-colored hair sticking every which way, and the old red coat still dangling loose.
“I dot my dun,” he said.
It was a large revolver — probably about a .44. It had a yellow handle, but the metal parts were a mass of rust. The cylinder and hammer were rusted tight and couldn’t be moved.
“Why, little boy,” Mother exclaimed in horror, “where on earth did you get this?”
He said that he got it at home.
Mother lured it out of his hands, but only after she had praised it extravagantly. She got him to put the revolver on the library table, and then she took us both out to the kitchen, where we had milk and molasses cookies.
My father came home from his newspaper office before Nelly had gone. We showed Father the gun, and he lighted the lamp on the library table and examined the revolver thoroughly.
“My goodness, Ethel,” he said to my mother, “it’s got cartridges in it!”
“Cartridges?”
“Yes, it sure has. They’re here in the cylinder, all rusted in tight. Good thing the rest of it is just as rusty.”
He put on his coat again and said that he’d take Nelson home. It was growing dark and was almost suppertime, and he was afraid the boy might be lost there in the new surroundings of Elm City. Nelson wanted his gun, but my father said no and put it in his own overcoat pocket. I was allowed to go along with them.
When we got to the creek house, Father rapped on the door and Nelly’s mother opened it. She was a scrawny, pale-faced woman, very round-shouldered, in a calico dress. Nelly’s father wasn’t there; he had gone to take one of the teams back. There were several girls — Nelly’s sisters — strung out all the way from little kids to a big, bony creature as tall as her mother.
Father brought out the gun and said that it wasn’t wise to let little kids go carrying things like that around.
“You little devil!” said Nelly’s mother to Nelly, and she laughed when she said it. “What on earth were you doing with that?”
The girls crowded close and looked. “Why, it’s Jay’s gun!” said the eldest one.
Father wanted to know who Jay was. They laughed a lot while they were telling him, although they were remarkably close-lipped about it at the same time. All that Father could get out of them was the fact that they used to live in Oklahoma, and Jay was somebody who used to stay at their house. He had left that gun there once, and they still kept it — as a kind of memorial for Jay, it would seem.
“I swear Nelly must have taken it out of the bureau drawer,” said Mrs. Tare, still smiling. “You little devil, you got to behave yourself, you got to!” And she gave him a kind of spat with her hand, but not as if she were mad. They all seemed to think it was cute, for him to sneak off with that gun.
Father said goodbye and we went home. It was dark now, and all the way up the hill and past Mr. Boston’s farmyard, I kept wondering about this new little boy and the rusty revolver. I kept breathing hard, trying to breathe that strange oily smell out of my nose. It was the odor of their house and of themselves — the same odor I had noticed when Nelly tussled with me.