John Ball: Johnny Get Your Gun

It was close to the summer solstice, so that all day long the sun had hung high in what had been a cloudless sky. Throughout Southern California, in spite of approaching evening, the heat was still thick in the air. The morning smog had been long since carried away by the Santa Ana wind so that the mountains surrounding the Los Angeles basin stood out with sharp and brilliant clarity. Because there was still no real rapid transit in any part of the city, the rush hour traffic clogged the freeways almost to a standstill. As they sat and sweltered, the motorists could look up and see the early-rising moon three quarters full in the sky.

In common with uncounted thousands of other housewives in the vast metropolitan area Maggie McGuire was making iced tea to serve with the dinner she had prepared. At one time she had been called Margaret, but in the section of Tennessee where she had grown up very little attention was paid to formalities. As a consequence she had been dubbed Maggie well before she had started in school and Maggie she had remained during the almost forgotten days of her formal education. Now on this hot and oppressive evening, she was far from the home in which she had grown up, not yet adjusted to her new scheme of living, and Maggie still. Mike, her husband, never addressed her in any other way.

She moved about mechanically in the cramped kitchen of the little apartment. They had rented the place when they had arrived here because it had two bedrooms and was still within the price which they had felt they could afford to pay. To Maggie calling the little cubicles which had been provided “bedrooms” was a misuse of the word. They were both so small that each could hold a double bed and little else. The bed in her young son’s room was a single, which allowed him to have a cheap little dresser and a wobbly table which held a confused pile of his boyhood treasures.

Maggie glanced at the clock. Mike would be home shortly and she hoped, as always, that he would be in a good mood. She had no special reason to expect trouble, but she never knew. Their venture in coming out to California, undertaken with such hope and aspirations, was not starting out well. Perhaps they had expected too much too soon, but she had noted that for the past three weeks Mike had seemed to be coming steadily closer to the raw edge of discontent.

Her own life had molded itself into a pattern of preparing food, looking after clothes, accommodating herself to her husband’s sexual wishes, and looking after Johnny. She loved her son almost desperately, despite the fact that lately Mike had seen in her boy a smaller fragment of himself and had all but taken him over.

Through the thin wall she could hear that Johnny, in his room, was listening to the ball game on his little Japanese transistor radio. It had been the only gift they had been able to manage for him on his ninth birthday, three weeks before. Already he seemed old enough to understand that for unstated reasons they had less money to spend, as a family, than did some of the other people who lived around them.

When the single door to the apartment swung open and Mike came in almost quietly, Maggie’s breath tightened, for that was not a good sign. She eased as he kissed her perfunctorily on the forehead, giving proof that he was not displeased with her. She watched as he checked the two dishes she had on the small stove to see what was being prepared for his dinner, then he went into the nine by eleven living room and sat down on the vinyl-covered settee.

Maggie recognized his mood: in some way he had been humiliated and that was one thing which Mike could not stand. As she had many times before, she reminded herself that he was a proud man. “Proud” was a good word, a respected word, far removed from such terms as “ill-tempered,” “abrupt,” or even “mean.” Mike was none of these things; someone had once told her that he was strong-willed. That was it, strong-willed, a man not easily defeated. She preferred to think of him in that way.

She served up the simple dinner and called her men. Mike reappeared and seated himself before the kitchen table, which was one of the supplied furnishings. Johnny slid into his place with caution, aware at once that his father was not in his most congenial mood. For several strained minutes the three of them ate quietly, Maggie and her son waiting for the moment when it would please the head of the family to speak.

When it came, it was without preamble. “I got a traffic ticket today. It’ll probably cost us some money.”

Johnny knew instantly that whatever had occurred, his father had been in the right, nothing else was possible. Maggie kept control over the expression on her face and waited to hear the details this time.

“I was comin’ up the freeway,” Mike said, talking with his mouth half full and making his words deliberately harsh. “A goddamned kid in a hot rod cut in ahead of me, almost knocked my fender off.”

“Mike, Johnny’s here,” Maggie warned cautiously.

“I know, but he’s goin’ to be a man and he might as well learn man’s language now.”

“Did you fix him, Dad?” Johnny asked eagerly.

Mike nodded. “Of course the cops didn’t see him do that, they never do. I caught up with him about a mile after that, then I cut him off just like he done me. To teach him a lesson.”

“Good!” Johnny enthused, his eyes aglow at his father’s triumph.

Mike ignored the comment. “’Course this time there was a cop on a motorbike sitting up on the bridge. He came down and gave me a ticket.”

“You won’t lose your license, will you?” Maggie asked. “They’ve got some law, I think, about how many tickets you can get. Something like that.”

“Hell no, I won’t lose my license!” Mike barked. That settled it and the subject was closed.

The rest of the meal was quiet and edgy. The citation would cost at least thirteen dollars, possibly as much as twenty, which meant that something would have to be given up. Johnny badly needed a new jacket, his old one was out at the elbows. Maggie decided that if he could wear it just a little longer, the money she had put aside for a new one might help to take care of the fine.

When the last of the meal was being eaten, and Johnny was industriously scraping his plate with the edge of his fork to capture the last bits of gravy, Mike turned to his son. “Johnny, I know that I promised to take you to the ball game. We’ll still go, but it might have to be a little later on. Is that all right with you?”

Into Johnny’s eyes tears came very quickly; he blinked rapidly several times to make them go away. He had been counting the days, and the hours, until the promised trip to Anaheim to see the Angels-Gene Autry’s team. Postponing that was almost more than he could bear, but he tried, as best he could, to measure up to his father’s strength of character.

“You had to do it, Dad,” he said. “An’ I’m real sorry about the cop.” One small consolation appeared and he seized at it. “I can listen to the games on my new radio.”

Mike gave his son a powerful squeeze. He did not have many moments of softness, but he realized how much it was costing his son to support what he had done. For a second he was almost ashamed of himself, then he remembered that it had not been his fault that the cop had been there.

“Can we go-some other time?” Johnny asked in a small voice.

“You bet we can. There’ll be another double header. Not with the Twins, maybe, but some other good team. Maybe Boston or the Tigers. We’ll go and sit in reserved seats.”

There was a pause during which Mike silently cursed the policeman who had put him in this humiliating position and who was causing his son this hurt. He looked at his boy once more.