Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [78]
The next day Gary told his brother Frank and a few of his friends— Dan and two other pals, Charlie and Jim—about the rifle he had stolen. Frank wanted nothing to do with the matter; he didn’t even want to see the gun. But Gary’s other friends felt differently. One night, as the Oregon sky was turning from indigo to black, Gary met his friends at Johnson Creek’s swimming hole and showed them his gun. The small group made their way through the woods over to the tracks and then up the tracks to the Johnson Creek trolley station, which was located across the road and a few hundred feet down the way from our home. The station was a three-sided timber construction—a weather shelter, with an overhanging light. Gary lay on the tracks, with his friends behind him. He aimed at the station’s lamp through a side window in the building. He squeezed the trigger, and the lamp exploded. A woman came running out of the station as fast as she could. Gary kept shooting her way, laughing all the time.
For the next couple of weeks, Gary and his friends would meet at the swimming hole and Gary would fire his rifle at tin cans and paper targets. He got to be a good shot. But he soon tired of having to hide his treasure. One afternoon he sat by the swimming hole with Charlie and Jim, and he stared at his rifle. It felt spoiled to him, and he no longer wanted it. He asked his friends: “Listen, if I throw this gun here in the crick, do you guys have the guts to jump in there and dive for it?”
“You’re goddamn right,” said Charlie. “As soon as you throw it in.”
Gary could tell they thought he was kidding. He took the rifle barrel in his hand and swung the gun in a long arc over the creek. It hit the water about six feet from the bank, right past a big, sharp rock that jutted up out of the swimming hole. His two friends just stood there, staring at the place where the gun had disappeared. They were amazed that Gary had tossed away the rifle he loved so much. “Go on,” said Gary. “You can have the gun if you dive for it.” Jim jumped for the place where the gun had sunk, but he landed on his knee on the sharp rock. It gashed his leg open, and Charlie had to help him back to the bank. Gary laughed his head off. Thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. Nobody ever retrieved the Winchester. It still lies past the sharp rock, at the bottom of Johnson Creek’s swimming hole.
The friendship with Charlie and Jim didn’t last much longer. On Gary’s fourteenth birthday several weeks later, my mother and father allowed him a party at our home. The only two guests he invited were Charlie and Jim. For his present, his friends told him they were going to pay his way to a movie. When the three of them were halfway to the movie house, Charlie and Jim told Gary they were just kidding and were going to spend the money on themselves and not on him. They ran off and left him there, at the top of 45th Avenue, overlooking the tangle of brambles that he had climbed his way through a few months before. Gary walked back home. When he came in through the kitchen back door, my mother asked him what had happened. He said, “I don’t ever want another fucking birthday party as long as I live,” and then went up to his bedroom.
A couple days later, Gary and Charlie and Jim were at Jim’s parents’ house, playing around. They were out back, in an old trailer that the kids used as a play area, and they were wrestling. Gary had learned a few new moves at school and had a trick he wanted to show. He told Jim, “Get me in a full nelson and I’ll show you how quick I can get out of it.” As it turned out, the trick didn’t work, and Jim didn’t break the hold. Gary told him, “Okay, let go,” but Jim started to apply more