Taking Aim Read online

  “No hoarding here,” I murmur.

  In our town of Bemidji, Minnesota, a small city up near the headwaters of the Mississippi River, the ammunition truck comes on Wednesday. I know this, because I recently tried to buy some .22 shells, but the sporting goods store (a national chain) was out of stock. For certain calibers, the shelves were bare or nearly so.

  “Gotta get here on Wednesday when the truck comes,” the clerk told me.

  I waited for more explanation.

  “It’s the ammo hoarders,” he explained, lowering his voice. He gave a shrug of helplessness. “They think Obama’s gonna take away their guns, so they keep stocking up on ammo.”

  I laugh. The clerk doesn’t.

  “Wednesday,” he says flatly, “or Friday at the latest,” and turns away.

  Owen can only shake his head at the story, and we leave the gun section.

  On our way to the front, we pass by a display of toy guns. They include a replica .45-caliber water pistol; a soft dart–type toy machine gun with a curving, banana clip; a “zombie hunter” pellet gun; a “special forces/SWAT” paintball gun; and pink guns for little girls. All of them have the orange “this is a toy gun” muzzle marker, but they look easy to remove.

  Owen picks up a toy M16 assault air rifle with laser/tactical grip. Compared to hunting rifles and shotguns with their smooth curves, it’s an ugly, misshapen cousin. Its design is for war. For killing.

  “Isn’t this the kind school shooters like to use?” he asks.

  “Among others,” I reply.

  Owen shivers. “We’re sort of screwed,” he says softly as he puts the toy gun back in its place. “This country, I mean.”

  I pause. One part of me, my secret, pessimistic mind, agrees with him: there’s no answer to gun violence in America. That things have to get worse—way worse before they get better. That we have to hit bottom, and that “bottom” is not even close.

  But there’s another voice in me, the part that believes we have to be optimistic; the part that tries, even now, to be the good and cheerful parent. “At some point, we’ll get it right,” I say. “At some point, this country will figure it out. We always do, eventually.”

  He gives me a sidelong look, wry and knowing, that says he understands what I’m up to. But he doesn’t call me out on it.

  “Come on, Pops,” he says. “Let’s get out of here. I’ll buy you a coffee.”

  Chris Crutcher

  When I’m talking with students about the differences between now and when I went to high school, something I always mention is our lettermen’s club fund-raiser, during which we raised money for an entire year’s activities. We auctioned off a shotgun. And we presented it to the winner in school. These days, a kid walks down the hall with a shotgun, he or she gets a trip to juvie—minimum, and a psych evaluation.

  If the winner of that shotgun—and it was usually a guy—were to put it where it belonged, it would be in the gun rack of his unlocked pickup, and that pickup wouldn’t look a lot different from the six or seven other pickups in the lot except more than likely the guns in those racks would be deer rifles.

  Another difference between then and now is that the likelihood of that student bringing the gun back into the school for purposes of malice was almost zero. I’m not saying there were no shootings, but the kind of mayhem that occurred at Columbine or Virginia Tech or Aurora or Newtown was nearly impossible because nobody had the firepower to pull it off. In the Idaho gun culture where I grew up, it was pretty much unthinkable to allow citizens to own that kind of destructive force.

  It was unthinkable because it was stupid. And it still is.

  I learned a long time ago debating politics with my father that if you allow your opponent to start the conversation with a faulty basic premise, you’ve lost before it begins. That guns equal freedom is a faulty basic premise. The gun nuts—I call them “gnuts”; the g is silent—would have us believe that the framers of the Constitution wanted us to have as many guns as we desire with huge clips and cop-killer ammo to keep our government from becoming tyrannical. Not only did none of that paraphernalia exist when the Constitution was drafted, but our government, be it Democrat or Republican, is not in danger of becoming that. The NRA is tyrannical; the government is not. And besides, our government has drones. It has bunker-buster bombs. It has nuclear warheads. We’re not allowed to have any of those things, so in the war against supposed tyranny, it would be: government: 1, gnuts: 0.

  I tend to agree with Will Weaver’s son (whom I’m considering adopting) that we’ve gone way too zany in this argument to ever become rational again. The entire male gnut population gets an erection because Sarah Palin (claims to) shoot wolves from the air. Vladimir Putin goes all anti-American and sales of AK47s shoot through the roof (pun intended) because, I mean, what if Russia cuts us off? How can we protect our families without our AKs? Folks, if that nighttime murderer/hostage-taker, who statistically will never enter your house, does in fact enter your house, you’re as likely to take out members of your family as you are this Freddy Krueger–esque menace when you start firing at his shadow with a machine gun. I know, I know, it’s not technically a machine gun, but tell that to the parents of the Newtown kids, or the Aurora moviegoers.

  I recently lost the friendship of a fellow author when he took issue with some (one of many) unkind thing I said on my Facebook page about Ted Nugent, the gnut has-been rocker who keeps himself in the public eye with his astonishing insensitivity. My author friend was trying to make a case that Ted is really a bleeding-heart softie who quietly finds ways to feed hungry children at the same time he leads the charge to save the planet. I have no idea if those things are true, and I don’t care because I can find plenty of children-savers who don’t publicly taunt the parents and loved ones of victims of senseless gun violence. When enough of my Facebook followers had messaged me to “dump that ignorant a-hole” from my Facebook conversation, I deleted it because I didn’t want people thinking he was an ignorant a-hole. He abruptly accused me of censorship. File that under “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.” Had the conversation gone on, I would have said I don’t care what Ted Nugent does privately, because he’s a public figure who arouses legions of lazy thinkers into believing they can look smart and tough uttering sound bites from the NRA, delivered to us through Fox Entertainment.

  I have another close friend, who is still a close friend, who frequently takes a boat into international waters. He owns an AR15 because he wants to be able to stand with it on the bow of his boat to deter pirates, should any decide they want what he has. Though I would eagerly bet a million dollars that he will never have occasion to hoist that lethal apparatus to ward off hungry bad guys, to some degree his thinking makes sense. Just ask Captain Phillips. But here’s my question for that friend: If you knew that giving up that weapon, and the right to own that weapon, would bring back the five- and six-year-olds in Newtown, or the moviegoers in Aurora, or the college students at Virginia Tech, or the hundreds and hundreds of poverty-stricken kids who fall on our city streets each year, would you make that sacrifice?

  See, I don’t want my friend’s gun. I don’t want my ex-friend-author’s guns. Hell, I don’t even want Ted Nugent’s guns. I know the first two are safe owners and there probably isn’t a safer gun owner in the world than Ted Nugent. Ted knows if any bad thing happened with a gun that could be traced back to him, the entire Fox Entertainment staff would desert him like a pack of lemmings.

  I don’t want their guns. I want their votes.

  It will take at least a generation—maybe two—from the day we start, for the United States to get sane about guns again. Conventional wisdom changes slowly, and conventional wisdom will have to come around to the conclusion that the magnitude of your firepower has nothing to do with the magnitude of your penis.

  I get it about hunting, though I don’t hunt. I get it about protection, though I’ve never believed I needed a gun to protect myself and have never been in a situation
where I did. Even the most outrageous antigun liberals haven’t focused on hunting rifles or that handgun kept at the ready in a high-crime-area convenience store, or secured safely away from children in a home. At this point, we’re asking for background checks for crying out loud; an exercise, by the way, that wouldn’t have filtered out most of our famous school or workplace shooters because they didn’t have a background until they created it with their first mass murder.

  I marvel at the gnuts who say, “This isn’t about guns, it’s about mental health.” I was in the mental health business in one way or another for thirty years, and one certainty is that politicians who spew the same drivel as the gnuts would be far less likely to vote for the cost of the legislation it would take to bring our mental health system to a point at which it could be helpful with this issue than they would be to provide sane gun legislation. Plus, sane mental health legislation and gun legislation are not mutually exclusive. To address this particular issue, they belong hand in hand. Meantime, though we don’t know who the next shooter will be, we know what he’ll use.

  Folks, guns have one purpose. They put holes in things, and what is in those things leaks out. So often, that thing is life.

  ROACH

  Walter Dean Myers

  I wake up in a state of sheer panic. My hands are shaking, as I struggle to catch my breath. I can feel the wetness of my pillow and I want to move but all I can manage is to clench my jaw tighter. My eyes are wide open and it seems I can see everything in the room at the same time. It is all in black and dark grays and spinning crazily around me. I try to locate myself and finally see my dresser against the wall where it should be. Closing my eyes, I turn my head so I can face the mirror. I slide my elbow slowly along the sheet, trying to sense if the skin on my arm is still smooth. I raise my shoulders and look at the image in the mirror. My face, dark brown, the whites of my eyes reflecting the morning light, my mouth slightly open, everything is as it should be. If I had really changed, I would have seen it.

  My legs are stiff and slightly sore as I move them over the side of the bed and turn toward the mirror. It is still me, Gregory Walls, wide-eyed and staring from the bed.

  I glance down at my hands and flex my fingers. They are all right, too.

  A knock on the door. It would be my mother; Gertie would have come right in.

  “You okay?” she asks. “I heard you calling out.”

  “I’m okay,” I say, breathing through my open mouth, trying to remember myself calling out.

  “You want something to eat?”

  “No,” I lie.

  I look at the clock. A quarter to seven.

  I hear my mother’s heavy footsteps as she moves away from the door. Instantly my mind is filled with the same image that had awakened me. I am scurrying across the linoleum floor, wondering how I have become so small, when I catch a glimpse of myself in one of the empty soda bottles that my sister has lined up for recycling day. For a second I am frozen. In the reflection of the empty bottle my image is somewhat distorted, but there is no question that I am a roach. It is the second time I have had the dream, although the thought seems somehow to have slipped into my waking hours, and occasionally I catch myself looking away from mirrors, afraid of what I might see.

  There is moisture in the cold air. Not enough for it to be raining, but enough so that the tires of the trucks that pass in the street below are hissing. A garbage truck stops and announces its presence as workers bang the metal cans against it. From beyond the door drifts the scent of bacon and I imagine my mother standing in front of the stove. Gertie will already be at the kitchen table, her elbows on either side of her plate, waiting for her breakfast. I imagine her thinking about me. Sometimes it’s as if she has secrets buried deep within her brain, visions that she keeps to herself. Over the summer, when she lost her baby she wept for weeks, but then, suddenly, got over it. Now she stays home and keeps the house in order. She does a good job at it. Sometimes I think she cares for me the way she would have cared for a baby.

  When I first told Gertie that I felt that my body was changing, she asked me how it was changing. A natural question, but one I couldn’t answer. She opened my shirt to take a closer look. We are close, my sister and I. We have always looked after each other.

  “You’re okay,” she said, buttoning my shirt. “You’re just tired.”

  Tired, yes.

  Gertie had brought my breakfast to the bed as I knew she would. Mama didn’t want to deal with me anymore. That was her way. When things went badly in one direction, she would simply go in another—our things in shopping bags and suitcases and boxes as we moved to a different apartment. Sometimes she would find a different man, sometimes a different job, but it was always the same. Us wandering through the city trying to find a place that seemed right.

  I am standing in front of the mirror again. Staring, looking for changes. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the door crack and Gertie looking at me. I smile at her as she comes into the room, her arms behind her back.

  “I’m going to school today,” I say.

  “You had that meeting yesterday?” she asks. “I know Mama went with you yesterday. What did they say?”

  “A lot of stuff about what I need to be doing with my life,” I say. “Same old, same old.”

  “You going to be all right?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  No, I think. Can’t you see I’m changing?

  She smiles and leaves my room.

  There is a roach crawling on the wall. It is going straight up at first, then stops and veers sharply right for a few inches, and then straight up again. Where is it going? What signals it to change directions? I pick up a shoe and know I can end its life with one jump and a swing of the shoe. Instead I watch it crawl to the ceiling and then disappear over the wooden molding.

  Down the stairs. I am so nervous. The hallway smells of urine and garbage. There are radios playing behind the closed doors and a variety of cooking smells. A door opens on the second floor and closes quickly as I pass.

  On the street. It is spring warm, with a few raindrops that hit my face and hands. I stuff my hands quickly into my pockets.

  The corner of 145th Street. There is a huddle of gray-and-black-clad figures on the corner, all wearing hoodies or do-rags; some have backpacks. They collect themselves on the corner as they do every day, huddling together, hoods covering their heads, their faces, reducing them to a horde of gray shadows. I stop and stare as one figure, moving in small, quick steps between the others, looks like a roach standing on its back legs. I am breathing heavily again. Cold sweat drips down my side and I remember the therapist talking about “anxiety” attacks.

  “They happen when you imagine that something dreadful will happen even though it’s not logical,” the school psychologist said. She comes to our school twice a month. “You have to ask yourself if it’s at all reasonable to imagine what is in your mind.”

  I tell myself that the very thought of these people being roaches is nonsense. It was a stupid thought, I say, but one that I know will come back again. I stop on the corner of Fred Douglass Boulevard and look back. What am I looking for?

  Drifting across the street, I move toward Bradhurst ahead of some of them.

  “Greg, where you going?” Tyrone startles me.

  “School,” I say. “Guess I got to put some time in.”

  “I hear that,” Tyrone comes back. “You want to go to Brooklyn?”

  I wonder if kids in Brooklyn say they are going to Harlem when they mean they’re going to get high.

  “I ain’t got no money, Ty,” I say.

  “I can lay a buzz on you,” he answers. His eyes are already glassy as he scans the nabe. “What’s today, Tuesday? Got to get nice to face a Tuesday, G-Man.”

  “Yeah.” We are walking up the hill. Tyrone is talking about colleges he would like to go to. Which ones have the sweetest honeys. Fantasy.

  He and I have been homeboys since back in the day. We used to
make plans about what we were going to be and how we were going to conquer the world. Back in the day.

  We go around to the windows of the boys’ bathroom, and Ty hands his backpack through a window to avoid security.

  In school, through the metal detectors, past the cop on the desk, down the hall to the boys’ bathroom. Ty gets his backpack, and fishes out some weed. Four dollars a joint and it all went in two minutes.

  The first bell rings and there is a scramble to get out to classes.

  “Gimme a minute,” Ty says, grabbing me by the arm and taking his gear out of his backpack. “I got to get a little taste.”

  I know he has been using for a while. Still, the slim needle is upsetting and I look away. He hands me his backpack and goes into a stall. I go to the window and look out at the bodega across the street. Two old men hang out in front of the store. I know they were trying to sell lucys—loose cigarettes—to customers before the regular customers went into the bodega to buy them. I think about Ty in the bathroom and wonder what I would do if he nodded out. I start toward the door of the stall, stop, then walk to the sink, put our backpacks on the floor, and start washing my hands.

  Suddenly the door to the bathroom opens and the sound of a whistle echoes off the tile walls.

  “Yo, man, you didn’t hear the first bell ring?” Mr. Sanders, short, fat, brown, and loudmouthed. “What you doing standing in here? Get out to your first class!”

  For a split second, I think maybe Sanders won’t look into the stalls.

  Wham! He kicks the first one open as I scoop the backpacks up and leave the bathroom.

  I can hear the second door being kicked and know Ty is busted. I walk down the hall and stand in front of one of the girl’s lockers, my hands shaking. A moment later, Sanders is bringing Ty out. He has him by the shoulder and has one hand twisted behind his back. Ty’s left sleeve is rolled up and I know he was on a nod.