Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [9]
Many nights my brother and two sisters and I would listen from the stairs in our pajamas, not because we enjoyed it but because it was easier to bear when we weren’t hearing it alone in our beds.
But by morning, the sun shone through the trees and most of the thrown or broken dishes in the living room would be picked up, the kitchen smelling like bacon and eggs, grits and toast and coffee, the night before a bad dream already receding into the shadows where it belonged.
FOR MY tenth birthday, I got a Daisy BB gun. It had a real wooden stock and a long metal barrel, and Pop took me out to the porch and showed me how to load it. It was a warm September morning, the sun glinting off the pond through the trees, and I could smell pine needles and tree bark and Pop’s Old Spice as he put one arm around me and pulled the rifle stock into my shoulder, as he reminded me how to narrow one eye down between the metal sights at my target, how to hold my breath and squeeze the trigger, not pull it. I’d shot my first gun when I was five, a long-barreled .22 pistol that was hard to grip with both hands. Pop smiled and took the pistol from me and then I was grasping the feet of the rabbit he’d shot and Pop was skinning it with his KA-BAR knife from the Marines, the dead rabbit still warm but shitting pellets down my forearms. Four years later he taught me and Jeb how to aim and fire a .22 rifle, how you rest your cheek on the wooden stock and squint your eye and line the sights on your target, how you hold your breath before you squeeze the trigger, the empty soup can flying off the stump. He’d been an expert marksman in the Marines, taught us to never point an unloaded gun at anyone, that the man with the gun always walks ahead of those without, that a gun always stays unloaded in the house.
I pointed my new BB rifle at a spruce tree. I aimed and squeezed, the tick of the BB hitting the bark, a piece of it falling to the ground. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s it.”
Soon I was taking my gun off into the woods by myself. For a while I shot dusty beer cans off of rocks, leaves hanging still on a branch, thin dead branches that would crack with the shot. But I wanted to kill something. I wanted to aim my rifle at something that was alive and make it dead.
The woods were full of birds and squirrels, but they were always moving, the birds flitting from one tree to the next, the squirrels scampering up trunks into higher branches where they disappeared. But one afternoon, just past the boarded-up summer camps not far from our house, I saw a small blackbird perched on a limb. It was looking away from where I stood, and I raised my rifle, pushed the stock into my shoulder, aimed down the sights at the bird’s small black breast, held my breath, and squeezed. There was the soft recoil of the rifle’s spring, then the bird falling sideways off the branch to the ground. My heart was pulsing in both hands. I’d seen what I’d done with just one shot, and as I walked to the base of the tree, I felt like some lone hunter-warrior, a man who could do something that most could not. I looked down at the bird. There was no blood, and I couldn’t see where the BB had entered, but the bird lay on its back, its dead eyes open, its gray beak pointing up at me like an accusation. I felt queasy. Saliva gathered in my mouth, and I wanted to flee my own skin somehow, this boy who had killed so easily, who had enjoyed it.
SINCE IOWA City, my family had lived in the country, places where Jeb and I spent hours and hours happily outside. We raided a tackle box we found and took long sticks and tied to them fishing line, bobbers, hooks, and pea-sized lead we pinched onto the line with pliers. We dug up worms and fished off the dock, catching perch and kibbies and bass. One week we found a towering pine deep in the trees, then ran back to the garage full of our landlord’s tools. We stole his handsaw and hammer and a rusty can of nails, and we built a tree house out of scrap lumber we found under the other