The Gun Shop

 

Ben’s son, Murray, looked forward to their annual Thanksgiving trip to Pennsylvania mostly because of the gun. A Remington .22, it leaned unused in the Trupp farmhouse all year, until little Murray came and swabbed it out and begged to shoot it. The gun had been Ben’s. His parents had bought it for him the Christmas after they moved to the farm, when he was thirteen, his son’s age now. No, Murray was all of fourteen, his birthday was in September. At the party, Ben had tapped the child on the back of the head to settle him down, and his son had pointed the cake knife at his father’s chest and said, “Hit me again and I’ll kill you.”

Ben had been amazed. In bed that night, Sally told him, “It was his way of saying he’s too big to be hit any more. He’s right. He is.”

But the boy, as he and Ben walked with the gun across the brown field to the dump in the woods, didn’t seem big; solemn and beardless, he carried the freshly cleaned rifle under his arm, in imitation of hunters in magazine illustrations, and the barrel tip kept snagging on loops of matted orchard grass. Then, at the dump, with the targets of tin cans and bottles neatly aligned, the gun refused to fire, and Murray threw a childish tantrum. Tears filled his eyes as he tried to explain: “There was this little pin, Dad, that fell out when I cleaned it, but I put it back in, and now it’s not there!”

Ben, looking down into this small freckled face so earnestly stricken, couldn’t help smiling.

Murray, seeing his father’s smile, said, “Shit.” He hurled the gun toward an underbrush of saplings and threw himself onto the cold leaf mold of the forest floor. He writhed there and repeated the word as each fresh slant of injustice and of embarrassment struck him; but Ben couldn’t quite erase his tense expression of kindly mockery. The boy’s tantrums loomed impressively in the intimate scale of their Boston apartment, with his mother and two sisters and some fine-legged antiques as audience; but out here, among these mute oaks and hickories, his fury was rather comically dwarfed. Also, in retrieving and examining the .22, Ben had bent his face close into the dainty forgotten smell of gun oil and remembered the Christmas noon when his father had taken him out to the barn and shown him how to shoot the virgin gun; and this memory prolonged his smile.

That dainty scent. The dangerous slickness. The zigzag marks of burnishing on the bolt when it slid out, and the amazing whorl, a new kind of star, inside the barrel when it was pointed toward the sky. The snug, lethally smart clicks of reassembly. He had not known his father could handle a gun. He was forty-five when Ben was thirteen, and a schoolteacher; once he had been, briefly, a soldier. He had thrown an empty Pennzoil can into the snow of the barnyard and propped the .22 on the chicken-house windowsill and taken the first shot. The oil can had jumped. Ben remembered the way his father’s mouth, seen from the side, sucked back a bit of saliva that in his concentration had escaped. Ben remembered the less-than-deafening slap of the shot and the acrid whiff that floated from the bolt as the spent shell spun away. Now, pulling the dead trigger and sliding out the bolt to see why the old gun was broken, he remembered his father’s arms around him, guiding his hands on the newly varnished stock and pressing his head gently down to line up his eyes with the sights. “Squeeze, don’t get excited and jerk,” his father had said.

“Get up,” Ben said to his son. “Shape up. Don’t be such a baby. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work; I don’t know why. It worked the last time we used it.”

“Yeah, that was last Thanksgiving,” Murray said, surprisingly conversational, though still stretched on the cold ground. “I bet one of these idiot yokels around here messed it up.”

“Idiot yokels,” Ben repeated, hearing himself in that phrase. “My, aren’t we a young snob?”

Murray stood and brushed the sarcasm aside. “Can you fix it or not?”

Ben slipped a cartridge into the chamber, closed the bolt, and pulled the trigger. A limp click. “Not. I don’t understand guns. You’re the one who wants to use it all the time. Why don’t we just point our fingers and say, ‘bang’?”

“Dad, you’re quite the riot.”

They walked back to the house. Ben lugged the disgraced gun while Murray ran ahead. Ben noticed in the dead grass the rusty serrate shapes of strawberry leaves, precise as fossils. When they had moved here, the land had been farmed out—“mined,” in the local phrase—and the one undiscouraged crop consisted of the wild strawberries running from ditch to ridge on all the sunny slopes. At his son’s age, Ben had no fondness for the strawberry leaves and the rural isolation they ornamented; it surprised him, gazing down, that their silhouettes fit so exactly a shape in his mind. The leaves were still here, and his parents were still in the square sandstone farmhouse. His mother looked up from her preparations for the feast and said, “I didn’t hear the shots.”

“There weren’t any, that’s why.”

Something pleased or amused in Ben’s voice tripped Murray’s temper again; he went into the living room and kicked a chair leg and swore. “Goddamn thing broke.”

“That’s no reason to break a chair,” Ben shouted after him. “That’s not our furniture, you know.”

Sally was helping in the kitchen, mashing the potatoes in an old striped bowl. “Hey,” she said to her husband. “Gently.”

“Well, hell,” he said to her, “why are we letting the kid terrorize everybody?”

In a murderous mood, he followed the boy into the living room. The two girls, in company with their grandfather, were watching the Macy’s parade on television. Murray, hearing his father approach, had hid behind the chair he had kicked. A sister glanced in his direction and pronounced, “Spoiled.” The other sniffed in agreement. One girl was older than Murray, one younger; all of his life he would be pinched between them. Their grandfather was sitting in a rocker, wearing the knit wool cap that made him feel less cold. Obligingly he had taken the chair with the worst angle on the television screen, watching in fuzzy foreshortening a flicker of bloated animals, drum majorettes, and giant cakes bearing candles that were really girls waving.

“He’s not spoiled,” Ben’s father told the girls. “He’s like his daddy, a perfectionist.”

Ben’s father since that Christmas of the gun had become an old man, but a wonderfully strange old man, with a long yellow-white face, a blue nose, and the erect carriage of a child who is straining to see. His circulation was poor, he had been hospitalized, he lived from pill to pill, he had uncharacteristic quiet spells that Ben guessed were seizures of pain; yet his hopefulness still dominated any room he was in. He looked up at Ben in the doorway. “Can you figure it out?”

Ben said, “Murray says some pin fell out while he was cleaning it.”

“It did, Dad,” the child insisted.

Ben’s father stood, prim and pale and tall. He was wearing a threadbare overcoat, in readiness for adventure. “I know just the man,” he said. He called into the kitchen, “Mother, I’ll give Dutch a ring. The kid’s being frustrated.”

“Aw, that’s O.K., forget it,” Murray mumbled. But his eyes shone, looking up at the promising apparition of his grandfather. Ben was hurt, remembering how his own knack, as father, was to tease and cloud those same eyes. There was something too finely tooled, too little yielding in the boy that Ben itched to correct.

The two women had crowded to the doorway to intervene. Sally said, “He doesn’t have to shoot the gun. I hate guns. Ben, why do you always inflict the gun on this child?”

“I don’t,” he answered.

His mother called over Sally’s shoulder, “Don’t bother people on Thanksgiving, Murray. Let the man have a holiday.”

Little Murray looked up, startled, at the sound of his name pronounced scoldingly. He had been named for his grandfather. Two Murrays: one small and young, one big and old. Yet alike, Ben saw, in a style of expectation, in a tireless craving for—he used to wonder for what, but people had a word for it now—“action.”

“This man never takes a holiday,” Ben’s father called back. “He’s out of this world. You’d love him. Everybody in this room would love him.” And, irrepressibly, he was at the telephone, dialling with a touch of frenzy, the way he would scrub a friendly dog’s belly with his knuckles. Hanging up, he announced with satisfaction, “Dutch says to bring the gun over this evening, when all the fuss has died down.”

After a supper of leftover turkey, the males went out into the night. Ben drove his father’s car. The dark road carried them off their hill into a valley where sandstone farmhouses had been joined by ranch houses, aluminum trailers, a wanly lit Mobil station, a Pentecostal church built of cinder blocks, with a neon JESUS LIVES. JESUS SAVES must have become too much of a joke.

“The next driveway on the left,” his father said. The cold outdoor air had shortened his breath. No sign advertised a gun shop; the house was a ranch, but not a new one—one built in the early Fifties, when the commuters first began to come this far out from the city of Alton. In order of age, oldest to youngest, tallest to shortest, the Trupps marched up the flagstones to the unlit front door; Ben could feel his son’s embarrassment at his back, deepening his own. They had offered to let little Murray carry the gun, but he had shied from it. Ben held the .22 behind him, so as not to terrify whoever answered his father’s ring at the door. It was a fat woman in a pink wrapper. Ben saw that there had been a mistake: this was no gun shop, his father had blundered once again.

Not so. The woman said, “Why, hello, Mr. Trupp,” giving the name that affectionate long German u; in Boston people rhymed it with “cup.” “Come in this way, I guess; he’s down there expecting everybody. Is this your son, now? And who’s this big boy?” Her pleasantries eased their way across the front hall, with its braided rug and enamelled plaque of the Lord’s Prayer, to the cellar stairs.

As they clattered down, Ben’s father said, “I shouldn’t have done that, that was a headache for his missus, letting us in, I wasn’t thinking. We should have gone to the side, but then Dutch has to disconnect the burglar alarm. Everybody in this county’s crazy to steal his guns. When you get to be my age, Ben, it hurts like Jesus just to try to think. Just to try not to annoy the hell out of people.”

The cellar seemed bigger than the house. Cardboard cartons, old chairs and sofas, a refrigerator, stacked newspapers, shoot posters, and rifle racks lined an immense cement room. At the far end was a counter, and behind it a starkly lit workshop with a lathe. Little Murray’s eyes widened; gun shops were new to him. In an alley of Ben’s own boyhood there had been a mysterious made-over garage called “Repair & Ammo.” Sounds of pounding and grinding came out of it, the fury of metals. On dark winter afternoons, racing home with his sled, Ben would see blue sparks shudder in the window. But he had never gone in; so this was an adventure for him as well. There was that about being his father’s son: one had adventures, one blundered into places, one went places, met strangers, suffered rebuffs, experienced breakdowns, exposed oneself in a way that Ben, as soon as he was able, foreclosed, hedging his life with such order and propriety that no misstep could occur. He had become a lawyer, taking profit from the losses of others, reducing disorderly lives to legal folders. Even in his style of dress he had retained the caution of the Fifties, while his partners blossomed into striped shirts and bell-bottomed slacks. Seeing his son’s habitual tautness relax under the spell of this potent, acrid cellar, Ben realized that he had been much less a father than his own had been, a father’s duty being to impart the taste of the world. Golf lessons in Brookline, sailing in Maine, skiing in New Hampshire—what was this but bought amusement compared with the improvised shifts and hazards of poverty? In this cave the metallic smell of murder lurked, and behind the counter two men bent low over something that gleamed like a jewel.

Ben’s father went forward. “Dutch, this is my son, Ben, and my grandson, Murray. The kid’s just like you are, a perfectionist, and this cheap gun we got Ben a zillion years ago let him down this afternoon.” To the other man in this lighted end of the cellar he said, “I know your face, mister, but I’ve forgotten your name.”

The other man blinked and said, “Reiner.” He wore a Day-Glo hunting cap and a dirty blue parka over a holiday-clean shirt and tie. He looked mild, perhaps because of his spectacles, which were rimless. He seemed to be a customer, and the piece of metal in the gunsmith’s hand concerned him. It was a small slab with two holes bored in it; a shiny ring had been set into one of the holes, and Dutch’s gray thumb moved back and forth across the infinitesimal edge where the ring was flush with the slab.

“About two-thousandths,” the gunsmith slowly announced, growling the ou’s. It was hard to know whom he was speaking to. His eyelids looked swollen—leaden hoods set slantwise over the eyes, eclipsing them but for a glitter. His entire body appeared to have slumped away from its frame, from the restless ruminating jowl to the undershirted beer belly and bent knees. His shuffle seemed deliberately droll. His hands alone had firm shape—hands battered and nicked and so long in touch with greased machinery that they had blackened flatnesses like worn parts. The right middle finger had been shorn off at the first knuckle. “Two- or three-thousandths at the most.”

Ben’s father’s voice had regained its strength in the warmth of this basement. He acted as interlocutor, to make the drama clear. “You mean you can just tell with your thumb if it’s a thousandth of an inch off?”

“Yahh. More or less.”

“That’s incredible. That to me is a miracle.” He explained to his son and grandson, “Dutch was head machinist at Hager Steel for thirty years. He had hundreds of men under him. Hundreds.”

“A thousand,” Dutch growled. “Twelve hunnert during Korea.” His qualification slipped into place as if with much practice; Ben guessed his father came here often.

“Boy, I can’t imagine it. I don’t see how the hell you did it. I don’t see how any man could do what you did; my imagination boggles. This kid here”—Murray, not Ben—“has what you have. Drive. Both of you have what it takes.”

Ben thought he should assert himself. In a few crisp phrases he explained to Dutch how the gun had failed to fire.

His father said to the man in spectacles, “It would have taken me all night to say what he just said. He lives in New England, they all talk sense up there. One thing I’m grateful the kid never inherited from me, and I bet he is too, is his old man’s gift for baloney. I was always embarrassing the kid.”

Dutch slipped out the bolt of the .22 and, holding the screwdriver so the shortened finger lay along a groove of the handle, turned a tiny screw that Ben in all his years of owning the gun had never noticed. The bolt fell into several bright pieces, tinged with rust, on the counter. The gunsmith picked a bit of metal from within a little spring and held it up. “Firing pin. Sheared,” he said. His mouth when he talked showed the extra flexibility of the toothless.

“Do you have another? Can you replace it?” Ben disliked, as emphasized by this acoustical cellar, the high, hungry pitch of his own voice. He was prosecuting.

Dutch declined to answer. He lowered his remarkable lids to gaze at the metal under his hands; one hand closed tight around the strange little slab, with its gleaming ring.

Ben’s father interceded, saying, “He can make it, Ben. This man here can make an entire gun from scratch. Just give him a lump of slag is all he needs.”

“Wonderful,” Ben said, to fill the silence.

Reiner unexpectedly laughed. “How about,” he said to the gunsmith, “that old Damascus double Jim Knauer loaded with triple FG and a smokeless powder? It’s a wonder he has a face still.”

Dutch unclenched his fist and, after a pause, chuckled.

Ben recognized in these pauses something of courtroom tactics; at his side he felt little Murray growing agitated at the delay. “Shall we come back tomorrow?” Ben asked.

He was ignored. Reiner was going on, “What was the make on that? A twelve-gauge Parker?”

“English gun,” Dutch said. “A Westley Richards. He paid three hunnert for it, some dealer over in Royersford. Such foolishness, his first shot yet. Even split the stock.” His eyelids lifted. “Who wants a beer?”

Ben’s father said, “Jesus, I’m so full of turkey a beer might do me in.”

Reiner looked amused. “They say liquor is good for bad circulation.”

“I’d be happy to sip one but I can’t take an oath to finish it. The first rule of hospitality is, Don’t look a gift horse in the face.” But an edge was going off his wit. After the effort of forming these sentences, the old man sat down, in an easy chair with exploded arms. Against the yellowish pallor of his face, his nose looked livid as a bruise.

“Sure,” Ben said. “If they’re being offered. Thank you.”

“Son, how about you?” Dutch asked the boy. Murray’s eyes widened, realizing nobody was going to answer for him.

“He’s in training for his ski team,” Ben said at last.

Dutch’s eyes stayed on the boy. “Then you should have good legs. How about now going over and fetching four cans from that icebox over there?” He pointed with a loose fist.

“Refrigerator,” Ben said to his son, acting as translator. As a child he had lived with a real icebox, zinc-lined oak, that digested a fresh block three times a week.

Dutch turned his back and fished through a shelf of grimy cigar boxes for a cylinder of metal that, when he held it beside the fragment of firing pin, satisfied him. He shuffled into the little room behind the counter, which brimmed with light and machinery.

As little Murray passed around the cold cans of Old Reading, his grandfather explained to the man in the Day-Glo hunting cap, “This boy is what you’d have to call an ardent athlete. He sails, he golfs, last winter he won blue medals at—what do they call ’em, Murray?”

“Slaloms. I flubbed the downhill, though.”

“Hear that? He knows the language. If he was fortunate enough to live down here with you fine gentlemen, he’d learn gun language too. He’d be a crack shot in no time.”

“Where we live in this city,” the boy volunteered, “my mother won’t even let me get a BB gun. She hates guns.”

“The kid means the city of Boston. His father’s on a first-name basis with the mayor.” Ben heard the strained intake of breath between his father’s sentences and tried not to hear the words. He and his son were tumbled together in a long, pained monologue. “Anything competitive, this kid loves. He doesn’t get that from me. He doesn’t get it from his old man, either. Ben always had this tactful way of keeping his thoughts to himself. You never knew what was going on inside his head. My biggest regret is I couldn’t teach him the pleasure of working with your hands. He grew up watching me scrambling along by my wits and now he’s doing the same damn thing. He should have had Dutch for a father. Dutch would have reached him.”

To deafen himself Ben walked around the counter and into the workshop. Dutch was turning the little cylinder on a lathe. He wore no goggles, and seemed to be taking no measurements. Into the mirror-smooth blur of the spinning metal the man delicately pressed a tipped, hinged cone. Curls of steel fell steadily to the scarred lathe table. Tan sparks flew outward to the radius perhaps of a peony. The cylinder was becoming two cylinders, a narrow one emerging from the shoulders of another. Ben had once worked wood, in high-school shop, but this man could shape metal: he could descend into the hard heart of things and exert his will. Dutch switched off the lathe, with a sad grunt pushed himself away, and shuffled, splay-footed and swag-bellied, toward some other of his tools. Ben, not wanting to seem to spy, returned to the larger room.

Reiner had undertaken a monologue of his own. “… you know your average bullet comes out of the barrel rotating; that’s why a rifle is called that, for the rifling inside, that makes it spin. Now, what the North Vietnamese discovered, if you put enough velocity into a bullet beyond a critical factor, it tumbles, end over end like that. The Geneva Convention says you can’t use a soft bullet that mushrooms inside the body like the dumdum, but hit a man with a bullet tumbling like that, it’ll tear his arm right off.”

The boy was listening warily, watching the bespectacled man’s soft white hands demonstrate tumbling. Ben’s father sat in the exploded armchair, staring dully ahead, sucking back spittle, struggling silently for breath.

“Of course, now,” the lecture went on, “what they found was best over there for the jungle was a plain shotgun. You take an ordinary twenty-gauge, maybe mounted with a short barrel, you don’t have visibility more than fifty feet anyway, a man doesn’t have a chance at that distance. The spread of shot is maybe three feet around.” With his arms Reiner placed the circle on himself, centered on his heart. “It’ll tear a man to pieces like that. If he’s not that close yet, then the shot pattern is wider and even a miss is going to hurt him plenty.”

“Death is part of life,” Ben’s father said, as if reciting a lesson learned long ago.

Ben asked Reiner, “Were you in Vietnam?”

The man took off his hunting cap and displayed a bald head. “You got me in the wrong rumpus. Navy gunner, World War Two. With those forty-millimeter Bofors you could put a two-pound shell thirty thousand feet straight up in the air.”

Dutch emerged from his workshop holding a bit of metal in one hand and a crumpled beer can in the other. He put the cylindrical bit down amid the scattered parts of the bolt, fumbled at them, and they all came together.

“Does it fit?” Ben asked.

Dutch’s clownish loose lips smiled. “You ask a lot of questions.” He slipped the bolt back into the .22 and turned back to the workshop. The four others held silent, but for Ben’s father’s breathing. In time the flat spank of a rifle shot resounded, amplified by cement walls.

“That’s miraculous to me,” Ben’s father said. “A mechanical skill like that.”

“Thank you very much,” Ben said, too quickly, when the gunsmith lay the mended and tested .22 on the counter. “How much do we owe you?”

Rather than answer, Dutch asked little Murray, “Didja ever see a machine like this before?” It was a device, operated by hand pressure, that assembled and crimped shotgun shells. He let the boy pull the handle. The shells marched in a circle, receiving each their allotment of powder and shot. “It can’t explode,” Dutch reassured Ben.

Reiner explained, “You see what this here is”—holding out the mysterious little slab with its bright ring—“is by putting in this bushing Dutch just made for me I can reduce the proportion of powder to shot, when I go into finer grains this deer season.”

Murray backed off from the machine. “That’s neat. Thanks a lot.”

Dutch contemplated Ben. His verdict came: “I guess two dollars.”

Ben protested, “That’s not enough.”

His father rescued him from the silence. “Pay the man what he asks; all the moola in the world won’t buy God-given expertise like that.”

Ben paid, and was in such a hurry to lead his party home he touched the side door before Dutch could switch off the burglar alarm. Bells shrilled, Ben jumped. Everybody laughed, even—though he had hated, from his schoolteaching days, what he called “cruel humor”—Ben’s father.

In the dark of the car, the old man sighed. “He’s what you’d have to call a genius and a gentleman. Did you see the way your dad looked at him? Pure adoration, man to man.”

Ben asked him, “How do you feel?”

“Better. I didn’t like Murray having to listen to all that blood and guts from Reiner.”

“Boy,” Murray said, “he sure is crazy about guns.”

“He’s lonely. He just likes getting out of the house and hanging around the shop. Must give Dutch a real pain in the old bazoo.” Perhaps this sounded harsh, or applicable to himself, for he amended it. “Actually, he’s harmless. He says he was in Navy artillery, but you know where he spent most of the war? Cruising around the Caribbean having a sunbath. He’s like me. I was in the first one, and my big accomplishment was surviving the Spanish flu in camp. We were going to board in Hoboken the day of the Armistice.”

“I never knew you were a soldier, Grandpa.”

“Kill or be killed, that’s my motto.”

He sounded so faraway and fragile, saying this, Ben told him, “I hope we didn’t wear you out.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Ben’s father said, adding, as if reading a motto on the wall, “We aim to serve.”

In bed, Ben tried to describe to Sally their adventure, the gun shop. “The whole place smelled of death. I think the kid was a little frightened.”

Sally said, “Of course. He’s only fourteen. You’re awfully hard on him, you know.”

“I know. My father was nice to me, and what did it get him? Chest pains. A pain in the old bazoo.” Asleep, he dreamed he was a boy with a gun. A small bird, smaller than a dot in a puzzle, sat in the peach tree by the meadow fence. Ben aligned the sights and with a learned slowness squeezed. The dot fell like a stone. He went to it and found a wren’s brown body, neatly deprived of a head. There was not much blood, just headless feathers. He awoke, and realized it was real. It had happened just that way, the first summer he had had the gun. He had been horrified.

After breakfast he and his son went out across the dead strawberry leaves to the dump again. There, the dream continued. Though Ben steadied his trembling, middle-aged hands against a hickory trunk and aimed so carefully his open eye burned, the cans and bottles ignored his shots. The bullets passed right through them. Whereas, when little Murray took the gun, the boy’s freckled face gathered the muteness of the trees into his murderous concentration. The cans jumped, the bottles burst. “You’re killing me!” Ben cried. In his relief and pride, he had to laugh.