Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [107]
By the middle of the night, still in a delirium, I’d come to curse the angels and the damn chime box. I threw it against the wall, breaking its cheap doors. I hated the angels, I told myself, because they wouldn’t let me die.
A day or two later I was better, and my father drove us under the winter sky back to our home in Portland. We sang our silly songs in our awful voices the whole way, right until we turned into the driveway.
DESPITE HIS VIOLENCE, my father was not much of a fan of guns. My brothers were allowed BB or pellet rifles, but the rules on how they handled these weapons were strict. Handguns were out of the question— though I now recall that after my father died and we were sorting through his possessions, we came across what I believe was a Luger, in a shoulder holster. Some of us thought we should keep the gun, along with his rare East Indian jade and ruby rings, but my mother said no. There were bad memories tied to these things, she claimed, and she would not let anybody in the family keep them. She had a friend of hers take the gun and sell it at a pawnshop.
At one point, though, my father decided it was okay for the family to own a rifle. (This was probably after Gary’s adventure with the stolen Winchester.) My brothers were reaching the age where boys went hunting, and my father thought they should learn how to handle a gun safely.
In the abandoned yard behind our house there was a thicket in which lived a couple of pheasants. In the early evenings, we would watch as one of the pheasants—the male, I think—would rise into the sky and fly off. A half hour or so later, he would return to his mate. We loved these birds and admired their beauty and their freedom of movement—and so, of course, my brothers decided to kill them, and my father agreed to supervise the shooting. He figured it would be a good test of their hunting skills to try to hit a moving target.
I remember these sessions pretty well. It was late spring, in the hours after school was out and before dinner. It was one of those few occasions all the males in my family, including Gary, gathered together for a common pleasure. My brothers would take turns shooting at the male pheasant as it made its flight upward and then back. Because the bird usually made this flight only once each evening, the shooting sprees were fairly limited ventures. Each brother—except for me, who was too young to handle a gun—only got to squeeze off a few shots each night.
During these times, my father sat on the back porch, watching his sons shooting, saying little, except to offer an occasional instruction or caution. The shooting sessions went on for a few days, without anybody scoring a hit on any of those poor dumb, lovely birds. Finally, my father lost his patience. “Jesus Christ, some shooters you guys are. You couldn’t even hit the broad side of a barn.”
Gary turned to my father and said: “I don’t see you doing any better. It’s pretty easy just to sit there and criticize, oh, great white hunter.”
My father got up off the porch and walked over to where we were standing. He took the rifle out of Gary’s hand. “Watch,” he said. A few minutes later, the pheasant was making his return sweep. In one move, my father lifted the rifle’s butt to his right shoulder, took a quick sight on the bird, and squeezed the trigger. The pheasant seemed to explode in a circular spray of red and dropped to the ground. My father lowered the rifle, turned, and walked off. He went inside the house and shut himself into his office.
Gaylen ran to the thicket to find the pheasant. It took a few minutes to locate it amid all the brush. After a bit, he came running back, holding the bird by the neck. He laid it on the ground before us. What had a few minutes before been the bird’s head was now an ugly mess of bloody pulp.
“Son of a bitch,” said Gary.