Fucking disappointment.
He drank one of his dad’s beers. He thought maybe it’d make him happy and relaxed like it did sometimes for his dad, but instead it made him feel queasy and light-headed. He ambled into his parents’ bedroom. He opened some drawers and looked at his mom’s underwear and then he closed them fast. He squatted by the bed and pulled out the rifles from underneath. His dad kept them in their original boxes. They weren’t supposed to touch them, but he liked to look at them sometimes when he was alone. When he was younger his dad used to take him out in the woods for target practice. “Nice one, Pauly!” he’d say when he hit a can, and he’d reach out and ruffle his hair. He’d do stuff like that with him all the time when he was a little kid.
His dad used to hunt, but he’d heard his mom say once that his dad was too hungover these days to shoot anything.
Paul took the lids carefully off the boxes and he reached out and stroked the metal. They were beautiful.
He pulled one of them out of its box. He wanted to feel it again in his hands, to remember what it felt like to hold that kind of power. He thought it would feel good to fire it. It might relieve all the pressure in his head and the weird beery feeling in his stomach. To shoot at the target on a tree and imagine his father’s face. Fucking disappointment. When he had tried so hard in his new school and gotten mostly Bs and even an A in biology. He picked some bullets from the box under the bed and he tucked the rifle under his shirt and he headed out the back door.
He passed through the hole in the fence and into the cornfields. There was an old dirt road that snaked through them and eventually skirted the woods. It was a fine spring day and it felt good to walk along the road with the corn rising on either side of him, feeling the rifle against his stomach. His whole body began to tingle with excitement. He was thinking how it was a damn shame none of his friends was around to see him holding the rifle when he heard a squeak of wheels on dirt and saw a boy wobbling fast toward him on his Schwinn, his hands raised a foot above the handlebars, a crazy grin on his face, like he knew his mom would kill him if she saw him riding fast like that with no hands.
The boy slowed up when he saw him and put his hands back on to steer out of his way.
Paul had seen him around the neighborhood and had even played a pickup game of baseball with him once in Lincoln Park. He was Aaron’s age but he was all right; he was a really good pitcher, for a nine-year-old. Aaron always talked about how he played up with the twelve-year-olds. He was black, like a lot of the kids around this neighborhood, which made Paul like him better, somehow, though he didn’t know why. The boy rode right by him on the bike and nodded at him (why couldn’t this kid have been his brother instead of Annoying Aaron?) and he thought, well, why not? It wasn’t like showing a friend but it was better than nothing. He was tired of being alone all the time. Tommy was his name.
“Hey! Tommy,” he called out.
Tommy had passed him; he put his feet down and looked back at him.
“Wanna see something?”
Tommy wheeled back a bit and looked at him over the handlebars like he thought it might be a trick. “What kind of thing?”
“It’s really cool. Come here.” Tommy got off the bike and walked over to Paul. “You can’t tell Aaron. If you tell Aaron I’ll know and you’ll be sorry.”
“I won’t.”
This wasn’t such a good idea, Paul thought. If he told Aaron, his brother would rat on him for sure and he’d get in big trouble. But Tommy was waiting for him to make good on his promise. What kind of a loser would he be if he backed out now? He’d be the laughingstock of the whole neighborhood.
Paul edged the top of the rifle higher and higher until it poked up over his collar. “Look-ee here.”
“Wow. That is cool.” Tommy seemed suitably impressed. “That yours?”
He grinned. He liked this boy. He was a damn fine kid. “Yep. Genuine .54-caliber Renegade. I’m doing target practice. Want to take a shot?”
“I don’t know.” Tommy’s face wavered. He grinned and then he grimaced like he couldn’t decide. Paul could almost read his mind: my mom wouldn’t like it, he was thinking. For some reason this made Paul want him to come even more.
“Come on. Onetime offer. Ends today.”
“I’m going to Oscar’s.”
“Come on. Just for a minute. I won’t tell anyone. I’ll bet you’ve never tried it before.”
Tommy’s face turned up to him with this weird look, like he wanted Paul to tell him the right thing to do. Like he really wanted to go to his friend’s house but he also really wanted to try the gun and he couldn’t decide which person to be.
“You’re probably a good shot, too, what with your pitching and all.”
He knew that would do it and it did. “Well … okay. Just one shot.” And Tommy set his bike aside by the low wall of corn and they walked together down the road and into the woods.