That thing made me nervous. Not in a this-could-cause-bodily-harm way, but rather a these-pellets-could-destroy-a-garage-window sort. The last thing that my 11 year-old ass needed was a swift kick from my father because I shot Ryan’s BB gun into the neighbors house.
Ryan had shattered glass before. He didn’t get in much trouble, an almost exasperated reprimand, maybe, and enough yard work to cover restitution. His dad was always in the yard—the tree hedge wasn’t level enough; blades of crab grass needed dulled; why won’t this damn garage door hinge stop howling? He liked toys—men’s toys, like saws on tables and air generators—and gave Ryan his fair share.
The BB gun was one of those. He didn’t unpack it often. But Ryan was allowed to play with guns—toys, of course—so his mysterious fascination with real firearms was muted. I wasn’t, and mine was loud.
“Can we take out back?” My persistence was relentless.
“No, my parents’ll flip.”
“Yeah, probably.” Defeat. The one thing Ryan wasn't allowed to do was shoot sans supervision.
My parents were ferocious in their opposition to guns. (My father was abnormal: a Catholic Republican less pro-choice than the Pope, but severely anti-Second Amendment.) My brother, sister, and I weren’t allowed to own fake guns or play with our friends’ fake guns. We were scolded for holding baseball bats backwards, fat end under arm, flurried noises and saliva flying from our mouths, pretending to shoot fake bullets. We didn’t watch TV with guns. Naturally, there was an attraction.
Still, that thing made me nervous.
Ryan would sometimes remove the black canvas sleeve from the hidden ledge atop his heavy oak dresser mirror. It was shaped like a baseball bat. The zipper started from the narrow end and unhinged towards the wider one, where the fatness of the trigger handle rested.
Sneeze.
Oh, right, the dust. Clean that shit off.
Ryan would set the gun on his desk chair sitting left of the stained wooden doorway. We’d slide it out with awe and trigger-happiness. “Don’t pump it,” Ryan demanded. Our friend Mike knew someone who got shot in the face, supposedly, so no use in arguing with gun instruction. Mike was there too. Just as eager to shatter pickle jars and squirrels as me, but with prior experience.
I’d hold the rifle—this wasn’t a rifle—at my shoulders and glare down the barrel, a pale bedroom wall lit by the sun’s glare in its site. What did it feel like to shoot this toddler of a weapon? How sensitive was the…“Don’t touch the fucking trigger, dude!” Would it kick back like Estele Getty in that terrible Sly Stallone cop movie? (Uh, which one?) Or did the rounds exit smoothly without sound but with pulse, like a steady stream from a siphon? I had to know.
“Ok, but only for a few minutes, they’ll be back in, like, an hour.”
Finally.
I’d wanted to shoot this thing forever. Never did. Now Ryan’s parents were gone—leaving him to preserve their trust—and we were about to break shit. We started with empty Coke cans perched on the bird feeder between the two obvious windows of Ryan’s tan-bricked garage. Me, Ryan, and Mike. (Eveywhere we went, I’d tell my mom, it was me, Ryan, and Mike.) Down the steps to the left of the side-door, beside the white siding adjacent to Ryan’s dad’s groomed tree row, was a table on the back patio. We slid it onto the grass to keep the 35-foot oak—growing from the middle of the yard—gunshot free. The firing range was open. Wait a second, nobody else seemed to think, what about those windows?
“Don’t be a girl, dude. If you can’t hit the wall you’re a puss.” Ah, yes, Ryan—how nonchalantly the kid who had never been punched in the face could emasculate you.
“Ok, but what if someone breaks a window?” That made Mike laugh.
I was a puss. My folks were so hard-line that even someone else firing a BB gun, hidden from their complete sight, worried me. But I had to shoot that gun. I’d wanted to shoot this thing forever. Please, just don’t break the windows.
Ping. Pang.
Ryan would knock the cans off the feeder, not on the first shot, but a few after. Mike hit some; I did too. We missed more than we didn't. Perhaps sixth graders aren’t as proficient in their accuracy as they think they are. We’d get bored quickly. Ryan would want to conserve ammunition so his dad wouldn’t realize he’d been packing heat after school while they were working. Mike and I dreamt of the troubles of a latchkey kid.
This went on for a month when Ryan could be convinced that pelting cans was better than smoking one of his mom’s Marlboro Lights among the three of us. (The latchkey house was a summer hideaway.) We switched to full cans. Eventually, our boredom progressed; we were over cans. There needed to be new targets that moved, testing our prowess with CO2-propelled steel peppercorns. Squirrels had proven too, well, squirrelly. But the pigeons, they just stayed there.
Four or five would loiter, pecking through the hail-size rocks for stray weeds and edibles. (Philadelphia’s Love Park it was not.) Done waddling across the pebbles, they made short, swift wing flaps and landed atop the roof of the garage. This happened every afternoon around 3:00.
Mike was gone one day. Just me, Ryan, and the BB gun. Ed’s plywood coal storage trunk sat mere yards from Ryan’s unpaved driveway—a tributary to the neighborhood's gravel alley running west. Ed’s yard separated mine from Ryan’s and we constantly ran across it. In the three feet between the coal box and Ed's faded, baby blue shed, we hunkered down. Only our heads surfaced above the trunk. We stalked our victim: that unsuspecting pigeon. It squawked alone at the highest point of convergence on Ryan’s garage—where a support beam covered by calloused shingles met briefly before descending to the gutter.
We waited. Ryan caught the bird in the scope. I watched, ill prepared for a shot of such magnitude.
Pop. Pop.
The seemingly lifeless white and slate body tumbled down the roof, ramping off the spouting, landing like a sandbag on the concrete path below. It tumbled…like a dead bird. But it wasn’t dead. It moved and twitched. Flapped it’s wings and jolted its feet. Impossible. This bird wasn’t alive. It had just taken a bullet to the throat, fallen twenty-five very high feet. Ryan shot it again. And again. Still moving.
“Holy shit,” I stammered. “This fucking thing won’t die.”
“You shoot it,” Ryan instructed.
Pop. Pop. And again. Nine times total.
“Maybe it’s just a spasm, you know,” Ryan scratched his head, petite rifle resting on his forearm as if returning from an elephant cull, “because it’s dead.”
Because it’s dead. The bird had been shot almost ten times. How could it not be dead? Oh, that’s causing the twitching. Because it’s dead. All along, we thought it was still alive, choosing to defy us, and mortality, to flop on some stones. And we kept shooting it—murdering it, repeatedly—instead of putting it to rest. Instead, of all things, letting it live.
They say serial killers start small, killing for fun, assassinating small creatures before targeting victims of greater consequence. Creepy? Perhaps, but Dexter Morgan we were not. Fun? Devastatingly so.
