Jim Shepard - You Think That's Bad

I got everything in Wichita Falls at a gun-and-knife show after I got out of the military. I still had the.308 and a.357 Desert Eagle and a lot of ammo, so I started another bag. This one I made sure I hid better.

Fifth grade we used to play this capture-the-flag game where anybody who got touched had to go stand on the base and there’d be fewer and fewer kids left after one side started winning. Fifth grade for some reason everybody decided it was boys against girls, and they’d pick out who they wanted to get caught by. You had to use two hands to touch and I would always tear free and so I’d be one of the last ones running around. This horrible cold day the girls were looking at their first win if they could just get me. Four or five of them boxed me in and everybody on both sides was going crazy. This girl named Katie Kiely was right in front of me and all she had to do was step forward. I remember not being able to stop myself from grinning. And her expression changed when she saw my teeth, and she couldn’t make that last move. The other girls were shouting at her and then it was like they caught what she had and they couldn’t step forward either. It was like I was a hair in their food. The teacher rang the recess bell and we all just stood there looking at each other. Then she rang it again and we all went inside.

My dad left the year before, or the year before that. I was in either third or fourth grade. Apparently when he and my mother could still joke around it was always about me coming to a bad end. At least that’s what she said later. Like anybody could tell anything about anybody when they were nine years old. One Christmas she said that as part of the joke he gave her a VHS of Boys Town , the movie where Spencer Tracy’s the priest and Mickey Rooney’s the tough kid who goes straight because he gets a new baseball glove or smells some home-cooked bread or some fucking thing.

She watched it every year around Christmas. I think it might’ve been the only thing he gave her that she didn’t throw out after he took off. She’d always go, “Your movie’s on,” after she put it in the machine, but she always ended up watching it by herself.

There was one scene in it I liked, where a kid at one of the big lunch tables at the home tells Mickey Rooney how easygoing the place is, and how if he wants, he can go on being Catholic or Protestant or whatever. And Rooney tells him, “Well, I’m nothin’.” And the kid says back, “Well, then you can go on bein’ nothin’. And nobody cares.” And one of the other kids showing him around says that on a clear day you can see Omaha from there. And Rooney goes, “Yeah? And then what’ve you got?”

I didn’t think I’d seen the movie that often but I got it in my head so I must’ve watched it a lot. There’s this other scene where they’re about to strap a guy who didn’t pan out into the electric chair. And the guy goes to Spencer Tracy, “How much time have I got, Father?” And Tracy goes, “Eternity begins in forty-five minutes, Dan.” And the guy asks him, “What happens then?” And Tracy goes, “Oh, a bad minute or two.” And the guy’s like, “After that?” And Tracy tells him, “Dan, that’s been a mystery for a million years. You can’t expect to crack that in a few seconds.”

There were a lot of things I wanted to do about my appearance but only so much could get accomplished until I got certain things squared away. I recognized that. I had a lot of stress. That’s what nobody understood. I was in the military and after that I was working two jobs, and trying to raise a family, and it seemed like even so, living at home and not doing anything, I had even more stress than I used to. Back then I never complained about it, I just did it, but people didn’t realize that I did whatever the average person did times two. I took whatever shit the average person took times four. And I never said anything, never said a fucking thing. I did my job and worked my eighty-hour weeks and knew as sure as shit that whatever I wanted was going to get taken away from me.

And the kind of thoughts I started to have people had all the time. But it was like everybody said: thinking and doing were two different things.

After my dog took the dump on her sidewalk I didn’t see Janice around for like three weeks. I thought maybe she was avoiding me. Or maybe she’d gone to Florida. Or maybe she was dead. I wrote a note, finally, and stuck it in her screen door: ARE YOU STILL INTERESTED IN DOG WALKING? And then when I got home I remembered I hadn’t put my number on it. And then I remembered I hadn’t put my name on it.

That third week, my dog finally flushed a turkey in the state forest and I blew its wing off. I took it home to my mother and she said, “I’m not cleaning that fucking thing.” And I said, “I bring you a whole turkey and you act like all I’m doing is making work for you?” And she said, “I’m not gonna start up with you,” and went back to her show. So I threw the turkey in our Dumpster. Then when I was walking the woods I thought that was stupid, so I hiked all the way back and pulled it out. I’d give it to some charity or church so some poor kid could have some decent meat. So somebody could get something good out of it.

The guy who sold me my Desert Eagle told me that it was the last of the Israeli ones and that no more were going to be imported. Somebody else told me later that that was bullshit. I got all the extras at the same time and taught myself how to change the barrel length, so the version I had in my new bag had the ten-inch barrel instead of the six. The guy at Gilbert’s Gun & Sportsman kept telling me he wanted to see it again. He called it “the Hand Cannon.” I joined an Owners’ Forum on one of the USA Carry Web sites for a little while to get some tips and just talk to somebody. My user name was MrNoTrouble and somebody trying to be funny asked if that was the name my mother gave me and I said yeah. I met some guys online who seemed okay and some of them said they knew what I was going through. One guy, triplenutz, didn’t live too far away and said we should meet up and go hunting together, but we never did. Another guy talked about taking his old toilet out back and letting fly at it with his Eagle from eighty yards. He recommended the experience for all Eagle owners. He said a piece of the flush tank broke the garage window behind him.

I got my dog from the stray facility at Fort Sill when I was leaving. I saw his photo on the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation Web site. The poor little fuck was just sitting there behind the chain link looking at his paws. The adoption fee was fifty-two dollars but that came with rabies and distemper-parvo shots, plus deworming and the heartworm test.

I stayed away a couple days after the turkey incident and when I got back I sat on the porch and cleaned my rifle in the cold. After a while the porch light went on and finally the door opened and my mother asked me to take her shopping. She had the door open only a little, to keep the heat in. “I need some things,” she said after I didn’t answer, like she was explaining.

“Why didn’t you have Owen take you?” I said. She’d had trouble driving since she hurt her back. It didn’t bother her to ride, though.

“He hasn’t been around since you left,” she said. “So you gonna take me or what?”

We went to the Price Chopper and the state package store. “It’s not for me,” she said when she told me about the second stop. “I’m getting stocking stuffers for Daryl.”

I went up and down the AM dial while she was in there. Every single song I heard was what my father used to call a complete and utter piece of shit. “Don’t ask me who Daryl is,” I said to her when she finally came out.