SOMETIME AFTER SCHOOL STARTED in the fall of that year, I began to order things from mail-order catalogs. Montgomery Ward was my favorite, and my first order was a gift for my parents. Somewhere near the middle of the catalog I found the order sheet, which I ripped jaggedly out, and I began to fill it out in pencil in my pathetically childish hand. I carefully spelled out the letters of my name on the top line of the form, only to discover that I had failed to follow directions and should have noted “last name first” in the first blank. Laboriously I erased and, in the smudged space that resulted, began again. Name, address, telephone, name of item, item number, size, color, price, and so on. For the first time I felt in communication with an exterior geography, almost another world. That was the point of this exercise, far more than the gift that was its immediate object.
After the long night in Shiloh’s, after falling in love with my father’s midget, the city limits of Itta Bena began to seem a prison to me. I was not ready for my escape, but for the first time I could see beyond the walls. Would Ward’s even send me what I ordered? Would my money disappear into the ether? I was not sure. I was not at all confident my message would reach its destination, any more than are those scientists who send out signals to the stars in hopes of contacting extraterrestrial life. They are not surprised or disappointed on a daily basis at the silence of their stars, nor would I be.
My task was made more difficult, though not less thrilling, by the fact that I had hidden myself in the clothes closet of my room, among the must of rubber boots and malodorous shoes and wool clothing on hangers. I don’t know why the secrecy of this act was important to me. To have anyone suspect that I was so presumptuous as to believe I could actually make contact with the outside world—well, I had to hide, I couldn’t face anyone with such a presumption. There was no light in the closet, so along with my pencil and the catalog I took a flashlight, which with difficulty I managed to balance and to shine upon the page, and with cramped-up joy I copied out the proper item numbers and other information. It was hot in the closet and I sweated like the Missouri.
Later my mother said she had heard me giggling in there, and I am sure this is true, so much happiness did this secret deed, this first communication with the universe, give me. My mother’s use of the catalog was to inspire dreams of worlds she did not really believe existed and was resigned to know only in fantasy, but I saw real worlds toward which I might flee, if ever Itta Bena should nod and loosen its firm clutch on me. Montgomery Ward was an escape hatch, its opening as thin as a reed, but somehow I might squeeze through it and pop out the other end into rarer air. In the world beyond, Shiloh’s Store and what I had seen there would not exist, or would do so only as a distant memory, itself more dream than true.
Mother’s Day was near and Father’s Day not far behind, and so when I saw in the catalog two painted oversized coffee cups and saucers, one with an image of a mustachioed, derby-hatted gentleman riding an old-fashioned big-wheeled bicycle, and on the other a lady in a long dress and plumed picture-hat riding a similar vehicle, I had all the excuse I needed to make first contact with whatever planets revolved around Ward’s newly discovered sun. “Enclose check or money order,” I read aloud, inside the closet, holding steady the flashlight’s beam. “Do not send cash through the mail.” I would have to figure this one out. Discovering a solution to paying for the gifts would be a valuable lesson, which would come in handy later on, with subsequent purchases.
I remember standing at a window in the old post office that I was scarcely tall enough to see into, and purchasing from the postmaster Mr. Banyon that first money order, or as I would have almost been able to say at the time, my first ticket out. I had money of my own. I had never had any expenses, so whatever money came my way had always been stuffed into a drawer and had been piling up for some time. My mother paid me an allowance for certain small jobs around the house, and occasionally I ran errands for older people in the neighborhood—trips to the market for bread and milk, or to Mr. Beard’s Drug Store for a prescription—and sometimes I accepted a dime, a quarter, whatever was offered. We had a push mower that I used to mow our yard, for which task my father paid me more. Later I used the mower for the small yards of our neighbors, and then my father bought a power mower, with a bright yellow frame and a red Briggs & Stratton engine and a pull rope you had to rewrap each time, and my lawn-mowing business increased and made me rich.
By the time the package arrived at the post office—a yellow slip in our home mailbox addressed to me told me to pick it up—I had forgotten that I ordered the cups and saucers and felt a little frightened that somehow I might have done something wrong as I answered the summons of its message.
The gifts were a success, my parents loved them. The painted cups were more gay and fanciful in real life than in the catalog, everyone was impressed and pleased with my self-reliance and good sense and generosity. My mother was practically in tears. “You are the most thoughtful child. I’m sorry I said you were odd.” None of that is important. The importance of this event was that it opened a universe to me. There was intelligent life on the stars, and I had made first contact, received the first clear signals. A power of distances built inside me. Now on to the galaxies, wherever mail order dwelled.
Comic books offered a host of send-away possibilities. I joined Junior G-Men, I got the badge, the code, the secret decoder ring, the fingerprinting kit, the collapsible spyglass. I joined the Dick Tracy fan club and got similar items. I joined several fan clubs, in fact, including Little LuLu (which encouraged me to keep a diary), Pogo, and Joe Palooka. I ordered fake money, sea horses, itching powder, invisible ink, a squirt flower, a palm buzzer, a nose flute, jacks and a rubber ball, a book of paper dolls. For a while I stuck with “free” items, which I understood were not really free and that I didn’t want in any case—stamp collections, trading cards, Charles Atlas information, art lessons, and Mexican jumping beans. I sent back the stamps and jumping beans and did not follow through on the others. The whole point was to make contact.
At first it was. The world was out there. It knew my name, it knew my address. I went back to Ward’s catalog reinvigorated. The items became more expensive. More money was required, so I worked twice as hard. I ordered a magic set. It had a collapsible magic wand, a top hat made of collapsible paper, decks of regular cards, decks of trick cards, in which every card was the same, and a book that described dozens of card tricks, almost all of them too complicated or requiring too much manual dexterity to be of any help to me. It had “magic” water glasses that you could pour water into and then turn upside down and they seemed to be empty. There was a similar trick with newspaper and a milk bottle. The set had steel rings that supposedly you could make come apart and put back together, though I never figured out how. It had colored scarves and devices with long rubber bands that would make those scarves disappear from your hand by jerking them quickly behind your back. I could only do about three of the tricks in this elaborate set. I was not discouraged, not in the least.
I ordered a ventriloquist’s dummy. It was an amazing piece of work. I wonder whether such a thing can even be ordered so easily today, let alone priced so that a child in my circumstances might afford to buy it. The head and hands and feet were carved of wood. The dummy already had a name, printed on the box and on a tag around its neck, and coincidentally the name was the same as my own, Buddy. Buddy was painted with freckles and large stationary eyes and resembled Howdy Doody slightly, and eerily it resembled me a little as well. When you put your hand inside him, from the back, and got hold of the controls, the head and mouth moved with almost scary precision and reality. There was an instruction pamphlet describing ways to make the dummy move effectively and to create a comic impression of reality, and another pamphlet describing ventriloquism, which it insisted was an illusion, not a real “voice throwing,” though both concepts were somewhat over my head and I got little out of them. The dummy’s clothes, I was disappointed to see, were supposed to indicate a “hick” or “greenhorn,” which I already knew myself to be, and so this part of the illusion was the opposite of what I had had in mind.
Nevertheless, I loved Buddy and practiced endlessly at throwing my voice and not moving my lips, reading and rereading the puzzling instructions. The reason I finally gave up working with the dummy was that I discovered I had nothing to say. I would hold Buddy and speak in my strained falsetto, but the words that came out were not interesting. “Hello, Buddy,” I would say in my regular voice.
“Hello, Buddy,” the dummy would say in his falsetto.
“Is there an echo in here?” I would say.
“Is there an echo in here?” Buddy would say.
I wanted more. I wanted the words that would go beyond mere contact with this exterior world. I wanted words that came from so deep inside me that when I heard their sound, perceived their meaning, I would become possessed of a new self, somehow, one that might someday leave Itta Bena and exist, nay thrive, in another world. I poked through the box the dummy came in, looking for a pamphlet telling me what words to speak to produce the interior, spiritual results I so vaguely, and yet so passionately, hoped to effect. I found nothing. There was nothing. I would have to wait for those gifts of the spirit from which words would be formed.
When I understood that the answers were mysterious, far more mysterious than could be decoded by any pamphlet, and more personal than any one being could relate to another, I finally put Buddy aside. I did not put him away, though. He sat in a small chair in my room and looked at me through his perpetually open eyes, and neither of us spoke.
I went about the slow unfolding of my days. I thumbed through catalogs in all my spare time. I ordered a body-building set. It came in a huge flat box. In it were two squeeze devices to build up strength in the hands, and then a similar-looking but much larger squeeze thing that looked a little like hedge clippers, for building up something else, maybe the chest muscles. There was also an adjustable metal bar to fit inside a door frame for chin-ups, and then a series of exercise tools that consisted of steel springs with red plastic handles. These springs you stretched outward to both sides of your body by extending your arms. A longer one you could anchor your foot on one handle and the other handle in your hand and do “curls” for the biceps. After a certain number of repetitions you changed to the other foot and arm. Then you put them behind your back and pulled at them to strengthen other muscles. All these devices I never used, so far as I remember, so bizarre did they seem, except to try them out when they first arrived, and yet this did not matter. I was astoundingly attracted to them. I had them, and that seemed to be the point, ownership. Now they were mine, moon rocks a child of a later generation might have thought, talisman, magic charms, protection somehow against a reality from which as yet there was no final escape.
I see now that I was not merely making contact with the outside universe, as I had initially imagined, but that I was seeking power from those other-worlds, outside the Mississippi state line, as Superman had renewed his powers from by occasional returns to outpost Krypton. I was ordering out for protection, for power. I began with the cups and saucers, gifts to the enemy, I suppose. I joined clubs in which I became a member with identification as such, exclusive clubs in a way, since you had to cut out the coupon and send it off with your name to join. I tried devices of trickery, the itching powder, and then went to apparatuses promising actual physical strength. It was power I wanted, far more I suspect than mere confirmation of the larger world.
Power, of course, is what I possessed least of all, and connections with the outer darkness, as geographies beyond Itta Bena seemed to me, were tenuous indeed. More than anyone I was a product of my real world, tied to it in ways that were comfortable and familiar and through which, in fact, I was a success in life, if one was content with my kind of success. I was a Mississippian, an Itta Benan, forever thus would I be, there was no point in my denying it. My mother referred to me as “a nervous child,” “an odd child,” and so I was, for all the time that I was secretly plotting an escape through catalog contacts with extant societies from the planet Krypton, I was also digging my own burrow, or ground nest, or grave, in Itta Bena.
I was the poster boy for Itta Bena Elementary School. I was class clown—the skinny kid with wispy blond hair and a cowlick and freckles and jug ears and an overbite, small for my age, the child who brought frogs and crawfish and snakes and salamanders and bugs into the classroom, the child who pretended to dance the flamenco behind the piano-playing public school music teacher’s back as the rest of the class sang “Mañana,” the child forever in trouble for talking, giggling, poking, smoking cornsilk or rabbit tobacco or muscadine vines—my tongue was numb for weeks on end from all my illicit smoking. I was the one making wanted posters depicting the principal, and laughing too loud and too long after the joke was over.
Later on, in high school, I was voted Silliest Sophomore. I was obsessed with sex. It was all I could think about. I made every item of conversation into something sexual. I made up sexual stories about the models in the Sears and Roebuck catalog. These two were “doing it,” this guy was a sissy. I nearly busted a gut over the poem “The Owl and the Pussycat.” Oh what a beautiful pussy you are, what a beautiful pussy you are. Oh pussy oh pussy oh pussy my love. I like to died, as I would have said back then. I thought they were going to have to send me down to Whitfield, I was so tickled. Whitfield was the name of the state mental institution, a sort of snake pit at the time. I had no idea what most sexual words meant. I could not come close to defining the word pussy, and yet I used it at every opportunity. I listened carefully to its every utterance in rest rooms and in vacant lots, hoping to catch some clue to its meaning, and yet I could never quite nail down a definition. A boy named Vickers seemed worldly, so I asked him, in an offhand way, “Have you ever gotten any pussy, Vickers?” I was employing a popular usage of the term, so I was able to speak with rare confidence. Vickers had a flattop and large forearms, like Popeye. He was not given to fantasy or exaggeration, so I knew I could trust him.
“No,” he answered truthfully, “I have not.”
All right, I thought, so far so good. “What would you do if you did?” I said slyly.
He eyed me suspiciously. He said, “What do you think?”
I smiled and winked at him. “Right,” I said knowingly. “Right. Same here. Me too.” I could not bring myself to say, “But how, Vickers, how? Give me a hint, man, anything.”
In the halls of the school, beneath portraits of Lincoln and George Washington, I sang “We are the girls from Norf’lk, Norf’lk, we don’t drink and we don’t smoke, Norf’lk, Norf’lk,” though I had not the slightest idea what the joke was, or for that matter what Norfolk might be. I certainly never dreamed it was a town in Virginia. I did a little hootchy-kootchy dance beneath the great presidents’ portraits as I sang. I told sexual lies on almost everybody in school. I was famous for it. Eventually I’d get caught, always, some parent would hear what I had said and come after me, yank me out of the Saturday movie, or off the baseball field, or out of the rubber-gun wars, or off my bicycle as I was cycling behind the town tractor in the DDT spray, or off the piano bench where I sat hammering out “The Volga Boatman” next to my big-bottomed, gentle teacher Mrs. Wilson, and demand that I tell the truth. I expended enormous energy pretending to my accusers that I at least understood what I had been lying about. I encouraged a friend to let me tie him hand and foot with rope before school one morning, and then I left him alone behind the high school gym all day while the whole school worried about what had become of him. I set the alarm of Miss Alberta’s desk clock so that it would go off during class and scared the bejabbers out of her. Miss Alberta was the fifth grade teacher who first told us the meaning of Itta Bena. I sucked on the skin at the crook of my arm and then stuffed my nose deep into the wet crotchlike place I’d created there and inhaled the near-sexual scent of it deep into my lungs in morbid joy. I bit my nails, stripped my cuticles raw, picked my nose, gouged at my scalp with my fingernails until it bled, crossed my eyes, wiggled my ears, cracked my knuckles and toes and elbows and knees, threw my shoulders out of joint so that I looked deformed, and destroyed school books by unconsciously sucking my thumb and then rubbing my wet thumb on the crease in the opened book until the paper crumbled away to nothing. I did this thing with my Adam’s apple that is hard to describe: The Adam’s apple would jump wildly in my throat and people would look away. I could whistle an ear-splitting note through my gapped front teeth, I could belch on demand, execute loud armpit farts, and blow dove sounds through my coupled hands. I could fold back my eyelids and bend all my fingers at the first joint and throw both my thumbs out of joint. I lighted farts with a Zippo lighter I had won at a carnival, as boys my age crowded near to see the blue streak fly out of the seat of my pants. At the same carnival I paid a full dollar to enter a tent where a so-called flatulence artist plied his strange trade. I was astonished and impressed, even inspired, by his ability to blow out a series of candles from across the room. I wanted to be like him. Secretly I hoped his vocation might someday also be mine. It was my earliest dream of power, and perhaps metaphorically it has come true. I could hold my breath until I actually fainted and cracked my head against the desktop or tumbled onto the floor. Usually I did this to impress Milly, the girl who sat in front of me and with whom I was absurdly in love. Later, when I had more body hair, I took a meticulously sharpened Barlow knife and shaved my legs in class and then closed my eyes and put my hand on my ankle and pretended it was the stubbly shaven leg of the almost-grown-up and evermore beautiful Milly. I traveled to the stars and beyond. Oh love, oh romance, oh Milly!
So the thing I ordered next, after the body-building kit, makes a sort of sad sense I suppose. I won’t try to analyze it or make sense of it, except to say that in some ways the pistol was a mere extension of the body-building kit and of Buddy the ventriloquist’s dummy, who sat silent in a chair in my room and found that he, like his master, had nothing to say. The pistol was both an image of the rural world where I lived so successfully, and an attempt to jump clear of the same world, which seemed to hold me against my will.
In the local barbershop, in the back pages of an old magazine of some pulpy ilk that I was thumbing through while waiting for a haircut, True Stories, maybe, or maybe something slicker, Argosy or Field and Stream, I noticed a tiny ad. ARMY SURPLUS. It’s a wonder I could read the ad at all, so small was its print. ENFIELD .38 CAL. REVOLVERS. RAF SIDEARMS, BRITISH OFFICERS. DOUBLE AND SINGLE ACTION. SPECIFY EXCELLENT OR GOOD COND. $12.95 AND $14.95. NO C.O.D. MUST BE 21. I read the ad over and over.
There were two barbers, Shorty Grable, the good one, with one leg shorter than the other and a built-up shoe that caused him to rock when he walked, and Mr. Shepherd, the worst barber on earth, who was usually too drunk to finish a haircut properly and so just shaved your head quickly before he passed out. No adult with a brain in his head would allow Mr. Shepherd to touch him, and children feared him, prayed that he would pass out before he got to them in the queue. The ad distracted me from my fear that I would draw Mr. Shepherd. I stopped counting ahead to see how many were in front of me, whether I should leave now and wait until he had drunk more and went into the back room to lie down. Once he was down, Shorty Grable would be mine all mine. I looked at the ad. Fifteen dollars for the excellent. Okay, I would take excellent over good any day. The money was not a problem. I had paid fifteen dollars for Buddy, so fifteen dollars was nothing to me. Well, it was plenty, but not a problem, not when it came to mail order. Just fifteen dollars, for a real pistol? It was like a dream. I had never had a burning interest in firearms, so even I was surprised to see how energized I was by this magazine offer.
Guns were common in Itta Bena, of course, a rural community. People hunted, target practiced, kept them for protection. Mr. Burnside, who lived down on Lake Front Drive near my grandparents, shot and killed a man he thought was trying to break into his house. It was a mistake, a tragedy. It was Hambone Johnson, a Peeping Tom everybody knew and generally liked and tolerated. He was afflicted with narcolepsy and often fell asleep while practicing his peeping in windows and had waked Mr. Burnside with his snoring. In his distress and fear of intruders, Mr. Burnside shot five times straight down through the sash and sill of his window, and one of the bullets hit the sleeping Hambone. That was terrible, of course, but the only serious misuse of a firearm anyone could remember.
There were guns in our own house. My father kept a couple of shotguns in his closet, a .22 caliber pistol in his nightstand beside the bed. He had taught me to shoot them. He and my mother and I would go, some Sunday afternoons, and stand on the Bear Creek bridge near Berclair in the summer sun, and take pot shots at turtles or snakes or maybe just an empty beer can or two he’d throw into the water for targets. Safety was a big concern. He showed us proper loading, proper use of the safety, the safe way to hold a firearm when it was not in use. People who knew nothing about guns were the ones likely to accidentally hurt themselves or someone else, he said. Always assume a gun is loaded, he cautioned. It’s the unloaded gun that can kill you, he said a hundred times. I suppose I understand his ironic meaning now, but at the time this phrase was a mystery. He showed me proper cleaning, storage, how to take the guns apart to prevent accidents, how to store ammunition in separate places, under lock and key, for the same reason. I enjoyed the outings, but mainly because they were a friendly thing the family did together. I had no other particular interest in guns.
But this ad! How it intrigued me! I read it over and over and over. I considered my financial resources: what I had on hand, how many allowances I would have to wait for, how many yards to mow, how long this industry and husbandry would take. Not long at all! I was almost there! A pistol, a “revolver,” of my very own. It would be my secret. Double action, or single action—I didn’t know what this meant. This troubled me some. Double was probably better than single. Well, on the other hand, I wasn’t sure. Maybe single was better. “RAF,” I read. Raf. It was a strange word. I pronounced it many times. Raf raf raf raf raf. If I said it enough times I was sure I would intuitively begin to know what it meant, or so I thought. It meant nothing, no matter how many times I formed it on my lips and tongue. It made me think of a barking dog. It could have been a code of some kind. The R could stand for rifle, possibly. That made no sense. It was very frustrating. British, though, that was good. That was like another country, I was pretty sure, close to England. The post office box where I should send my order, along with a check or money order, was in Arizona. Outside myself somewhere, as if in another world, my name seemed to float about me.
Buddy, a voice seemed to say. It’s your turn. It was the drunken Mr. Shepherd. I had drawn Mr. Shepherd and not Shorty Grable. I was trapped. I could have just bolted, run out the door. I had seen other children do this, without shame. Probably their home lives were different from mine. Probably their violent fathers had promised to beat the shit out of them if they came home with their head shaved. They weren’t paying any seventy-five cents for one of Mr. Shepherd’s buzz cuts, so don’t plan to come home with one. In my home the emphasis was on not hurting anyone’s feelings, no matter how much humiliation you yourself were required to endure.
“Poor Mr. Shepherd,” my mother would say. “I don’t know how he can keep up his home if people won’t even let him cut their hair. It’s his livelihood, for heaven’s sake!”
“Well, sure,” my father would add without the slightest trace of irony, “but he’s got to realize that if he would exercise a little more willpower over that ‘problem’ of his, he wouldn’t be worrying about scaring kids off.” He would use his fingers in the air as quotations marks around the word problem, and make a sound like “chick, chick” with his cheek and tongue, to indicate the quotation marks, as if “drinking problem” were too shocking a phrase to say in front of a child.
My mother would agree that my wise father was right, of course, “sad but true,” she would say.
I did not run away, as good sense bade me do, but one bold movement was still left in me. Without trying to disguise or hide my actions at all, I sat where I was for another few seconds and ripped the page from the magazine I had been reading and folded it carefully and placed it in the pocket of my shirt. Mr. Shepherd was sweating dangerously, and on his face was plastered an idiotic smile behind eyes as shattered-seeming as busted glass, so much pain did they reveal. I walked slow as a gut-shot bear in the direction of the waiting barber chair.
Mr. Shepherd picked up a grapefruit-sized river stone, smooth as glass, that sat on the ledge behind him beside the combs and bottles of hair tonic and bay rum and talcum-filled brushes. He said, “See this?” He was holding the stone out in my general direction. “Know what this is for? We use this to rub old men’s nuts with. Ain’t that right, Shorty Grable? We take old men who want their nuts rubbed back in the back room and you know what we do with this here river rock?”
I said, “Rub their nuts?”
He said, “You’re goddamn right we rub their nuts. This here river rock is a nut-rubbing motherfucker.”
I looked at Shorty Grable to see whether he would save me, but he didn’t look away from the head of hair in front of him. A wild horse couldn’t have made him look in any direction but straight ahead. There were a lot of people in the barbershop, mostly older kids, high school. None of them looked up either. All were occupied with something of enormous importance. Lazy Bones Wooten was the shoeshine boy, a black man more than sixty years old. He was as drunk as Mr. Shepherd. He was sitting in the enormous shoeshine chair and when Mr. Shepherd’s voice reached its final decibels he woke up suddenly from his drunken slumber and sang two lines of “Danny Boy” and fell asleep again.
I sat in the chair and Mr. Shepherd cut my hair. He was careful and slow and did not pass out. When he was finished, he removed the cloth from around my neck and snapped it in the air and dusted my neck and face with a talcum-filled brush.
He said, “You ain’t got no nuts. Don’t be asking to have your little nuts rubbed. Old men got long nuts. You ain’t got no nuts. Not none that needs rubbing.”
Later my mother said she thought it was one of the best haircuts I’d ever had. She was surprised to learn that Mr. Shepherd had been my barber. She said, “He must be getting some of that willpower your daddy was talking about, after all.”
I said I thought she was probably right about that.
THE GUN ARRIVED BY rail. Even more puzzling than the summons to the post office when my first mail-order items arrived, I had no clue why a notice from the Southern Railroad had come to the house in my name. What on earth could have been waiting for me at the depot? The depot was right in the middle of Itta Bena, in the shadow of the water tower, a long gray building with an unflushed toilet and the most elementary of graffiti on its walls: Pussy is good. I like thick dick. And a picture of a single disembodied breast with the word titty above it. Nothing on earth that I could attach emotionally to myself could be waiting for me in this depot. Even when I had been assured that a package awaited me, and when I had signed for it and held the heavy-paper envelope in my hand and felt the considerable heft of its contents, I still had no idea. I had not yet celebrated my thirteenth birthday.
I opened the package at home, and fortunately no one was around to see. Inside all the packing and confetti, I finally saw the gun barrel and knew what I had. The revolver was packed in grease. My hands were black with the heavy grease before I realized it, so I went to the bathroom and scraped off what I could and wiped away more with toilet paper and washed away the rest with Lava soap, which my father used after work sometimes. More carefully now I finished unpacking the gun. I found a stash of clean rags among my father’s painting supplies and began to clean the grease away. I cleaned the barrel, the trigger guard, everything. I found a small-diameter dowel rod in my father’s things and rammed a soft rag through the barrel to clean the inside. I looked down the barrel and saw the well-defined rifling inside.
The pistol was a heavy black revolver, .38 caliber, with a six-inch barrel, and with black plastic hand-grips on the gun butt. On the end of the butt was a black metal ring, for attaching a lanyard of some kind I supposed. When I had finished cleaning the gun, it still felt oily to the touch, but the grease did not now blacken my fingers. I held it, I weighed it in my palm. I spun the cylinder. I sighted along the barrel. I said, “Doosh,” the sound kids made back then to indicate shooting. I said, “Ptchoooooee,” another such sound, with a sort of whistling at the end, to indicate a ricochet.
I hid all the materials the gun had come packed in. I washed out the sink, to be sure I had left no trace of grease. I hid the pistol in one of the rubber boots in my closet. It was safe there for now. I needed bullets. I didn’t have anything in mind to do with them, I just needed them. I wanted to load the gun. Bullets were simple to get. Anybody could buy them, no signature, no waiting period, no age limit, nothing. I went to the Western Auto Store and waited around until Mr. Martin was in the back of the store. There were car batteries and wheelbarrows and high-powered rifles and Kelvinator refrigerators. You could get anything in Western Auto. Mr. Martin would sell me bullets, probably, there was no law against it, but he would also probably mention it to my parents. I was waiting around for the high school kid who worked there in the summer.
The kid finally saw me and said, “Can I help you?” He meant, “Are you about to steal something?” He had real white hair.
I said, “Daddy sent me for some bullets.”
He said, “Okay.”
“Thirty-eights.”
“Okay.”
That was it. That’s how easy it was. The bullets came in a yellow pasteboard box with the word Federals printed on the outside. This was the Western Auto brand. I left and the white-haired boy was no wiser.
I hid the bullets in the other boot, the one the pistol was not in, and couldn’t do anything with my prizes for a long time, several days. On the weekend, when I had done my chores and mowed my lawns, I rode my big Goodyear bicycle, with balloon tires and a basket and reflectors and a tinny horn, out to the Bear Creek bridge and blazed away at things in the water, animate and inanimate. The turtles were safe that day. I was not a good shot, so I hit nothing I aimed at, but I loved the heft of the gun in my hand, the shock that jolted through my arm when I pulled the trigger, the ringing in my ears after the report. When I was done, I allowed the cylinder to swing free from the frame and I dumped the empty casings from the cylinder. I held the warm spent shells in my palm and lifted them to my nose and breathed in the beauty of cordite.
EVENTUALLY I TRIED TO kill my father, of course. I loaded the revolver with the blunt copper-jacketed shells, and I lay outside in the dark of night beneath fig trees, the sticky milk of their fruit and leaves brushing against my neck and causing me to itch mightily. I had sneaked from the house and lain in wait beneath this heavy cover specifically for this melodramatic purpose. This was premeditation. They were inside, I was outside. I watched them through the kitchen window, as if on a black-and-white TV screen. They moved, they spoke without sound. I imagined that my father was drinking, though actually I could not see well enough to know for sure. I imagined that my mother was unhappy, though I have no evidence, not a single detail from my hidden vantage point to suggest the truth of such an interpretation. I looked into the window and saw a drama I had already begun to play upon the stage of my mind.
Maybe I shouldn’t say I tried to kill him “of course,” as if my father somehow deserved such violence, for not once did I ever imagine this to be true. I understood in a rudimentary way at least that the lives my parents lived, the tears they wept, were lives and tears they had chosen. I only mean that my ambush was a natural development in a narrative of power and escape that had long ago begun and now played out to its final scene.
I didn’t succeed in my attempt. Maybe I should add “of course” to this sentence as well. This good result will seem to some to have been a result only of luck, or to what some others refer to as the grace of God, which I suppose is pretty much the same thing as the first. I aimed through the window, I pulled the trigger, the gun didn’t fire. As simple as that. It had fired every other time I pulled the trigger, when pointed in the direction of the fearless turtles and snakes, but not this time. I don’t know why. I have no explanation, I won’t try to invent one that takes physics into account.
I never tried again to fire the Enfield revolver, so if a physical explanation were required it could have been anything, the firing pin, the particular bullet in the chamber, the cylinder, which did turn out to be unstable, to rattle this way and that and could have thrown the firing pin off line, really I don’t know. The next morning I rode again on my fine Goodyear bicycle to Bear Creek and leaned the bike against the bridge railing and tossed the pistol off the bridge, quickly, before I had a chance to change my mind. I watched it hit the water. I watched the solid splash it made. I watched it sink. I watched the crease that it made on the surface of the brown water close behind and swallow it up forever.
I’ll never believe mere anger and Freud led me to that desperate night when I might have killed the man I loved most in the world. I’ll not believe that mere luck or mere God saved me from the consequences of my attempt. Something in me had caused that pistol not to fire. This is not mysticism that I mean, it is electrical or chemical or atomic or something as yet unnamed, but I believe in it, know it to be true.
Some instinct deeper than animal and specific to one person on this earth, this Buddy Nordan whose blockhead image was sitting inscrutable in a chair in their shared room, reached from my heart and into the chamber where pin and primer seemed destined to meet and stopped the ignition of the nitrol and saved my young ass from a million billion trillion prisons, not just the one at Parchman but the imprisoned heart, the home-shackled fate, the never-executed great escape.
I wanted out of Itta Bena. This fact was primary, it lay zero at the bone, deeper than anger, deeper than Freud. Though I loved Itta Bena and belonged there in deference to its nurture when my other-father died and left me and no other inn would take me and my mother in, I had by this time turned my back, I had reverted from my roots, I had cast my line through mail-order catalogs and comic books and old barbershop magazines, out into space to Krypton and Arizona, in hopes of snagging a way out, a map with the route marked, a set of clear instructions. A bullet in my father’s chest, or even a bullet that missed his body and only cracked a window, punctured the hot-water heater, busted up the plaster on the wall, would have kept me there in Itta Bena, in the cramped spaces of my limited imagination, forever. I could not have survived killing anyone, because my imagination could not have then continued the search for the crease, the hatch, through which to make my escape.
This is what my heart knew, or something more powerful than a human heart, I can’t say what, that caused a misfire of the Enfield that night. I don’t mean to say I understand more than I do, only this. If Bear Creek still flows with muddy waters through the swamp and into Blue Lake at Berclair, then that black pistol still lies where I dropped it, snakes encircle its barrel, weave themselves through the trigger guard.