Gunsmith
by Henry Luzzatto
When I was six years old, I got suspended from school for pretending a stick was a gun. I remember pointing it at Ms. Gore, that reedy, perm-wearing teacher with too-large glasses, and imagining a burst from the stick firing into her head, the first bullet impacting right above her left eyebrow and blossoming out of the back of her skull, the second shearing off her bulbous nose, and the final blasting into her jaw so it hung off like the last piece of meat on a lamb chop bone.
But she didn’t know I was thinking that. She just saw me point a stick at her and say “bang,” and decided to call the principal on me anyway. Narc.
I understand the impulse of her fear, I guess, but getting mad at a boy for pretending a stick is a gun is like getting mad at a girl for pretending a stuffed animal is a baby. It’s not about violence, it’s inherent human nature. You’re attracted to the social part of your destiny, some sort of animal brain that connects to that object you know is supposed to define you. And hell, at least a gun can be a tool in some circumstances. It doesn’t have to ruin your life.
“My Dad took me hunting a couple times last year,” said Mark, the buzz-cut kid on the baseball team, progressively dropping letters off the word “hunting,” first the “t” and then the “g” at the end, rendering it a caveman-esque, glottal-stopped “hun’in.”
“Him and my uncle. They let me sit up in the tree stand with ‘em as long as I didn’t talk, and I even got to aim down the sight. Coulda got a buck one time, I swear, if they let me fire it, but my Uncle took the shoot instead. I can’t have my own gun ‘til next year when I’m grown.”
I asked my dad to take me hunting once. He choked on his salmon. “We don’t even eat red meat,” he said.
They were Catholic-school yankees and liberals to boot, which made them slightly off-color outcasts in the county, even as they converted to the First Methodist Church and attempted a yowling ‘y’all’ to their speech. I, on the other hand, was born and raised here and left unbaptized at birth.
Mark and I were supposed to be the new counselors for Vacation Bible School (as the newly minted teenagers in the community) but he was out most Sunday mornings with his dad in a different part of the woods. That left me as the only remaining teen. Me and the ghostly non-presence they called Parker.
He was older than us and a mystery. Even though he was technically a member of the church, too, no one had seen him at services or events for a few years. When people at church talked about Parker (as they inevitably did), they intoned his name quietly, as if discussing someone dead. I had no choice but to think about him.
The annual Fellowship Dinner brought everybody important in town out to the church cabin tucked away in the woods at the edge of the county. They made it worth everyone’s while with the food: fried chicken, biscuits with Smithfield ham, tomato pie, spoonbread, mac and cheese, deviled eggs, collard greens and baked beans smokey with deep pork fat, fried green tomatoes, mashed potatoes and gravy, all chased at the end with jugs of tooth-achingly sweet tea and lemonade and pecan pie where you could taste the booze. It was almost like a mawkish parody of the food church folk were supposed to eat, a gesture towards some sort of fundamental unifying tradition we could demonstrate annually, as if saying “see, this is the kind of community you can have in Christ.” Still delicious, just cynically so.
As they set up inside, I went down to the creek’s edge when I heard footsteps and a lighter click behind me.
I recognized him immediately, even though we hadn’t met before. Parker was tall and stretched out, extra because his pants were always an inch or so too short for him. The tight pant leg bunched up around his ankle, where a black box blinked green every few seconds.
He wore his hair in a greasy swoop over his forehead and most of his eyes, the rest of which were shrouded by perpetually dirty glasses. His face was stained with chronic acne and his throat bulged with a huge Adam’s apple in a way that seemed almost proudly ugly, defiantly adolescent. I watched it pulse up and down as he dragged on the cigarette.
“You want one?” he said. “Want what?” I said.
“A cigarette. Since you’re staring and all.” My face flushed.
“Sorry,” I said. “I just didn’t realize people still smoked. Like, young people, I mean.”
“Yeah, dude,” he said. “You’re not gonna tell on me, right?” “No,” I said. “Obviously not.”
“I’m Parker,” he said, sticking out a fist to bump. “I know,” I said. “Tyler. People talk about you.”
“I bet.”
He threw the still smoking back-half of the cigarette onto the dry leaves. It burned but he didn’t care.
He stuck his hands in his pockets and walked away.
My eyes met the burning cigarette butt threatening to catch the underbrush ablaze. There was enough left for a taste. I picked it up and considered for a moment, the thought of lips meeting, separated through time, on the browned filter. But I stomped it instead, grinding it into the wet part of the ground lying beneath the top leaves.
I went inside for the food, assuming I would see him there along with everybody else, his sister and mom and stepdad too. But when I went inside, he was gone. I even kept my eyes open during the prayer to see if he would stumble in finally at the last moment, but the door never opened.
Parker had moved out more than a year ago and was living on his own in an apartment complex near the route 460 bypass. He funded things by working night shifts at the gas station, but he was planning on getting his associates degree so he could transition into computer work, something in IT, maybe. Maybe at that point, his mom would start talking to him again. But it would have to wait. Cameron Campbell Community College was outside the county limits, and his ankle monitor kept him trapped within the bounds of Norwich County.
I went to his place one time. Told my parents I was hunting with Mark. His basement wasn’t even technically an apartment, legally, but a place that could become a home if you paid cash and generally kept the noise to a minimum.
We didn’t talk, really. I just watched quietly as he knifed keffiyah-wearing terrorists in an online match, shouting the occasional slur into the headset when someone would snipe him from offscreen. When he finally lost for good, he reached for a glass pipe and lit it.
“You ever smoke weed?” He said. “No, but I’ve seen it before,” I said. “You can have some, if you want.”
I picked up the pipe, still warm from his mouth and the bits of internal fire, but didn’t take a pull, just felt it as it cooled to the temperature of my hands. I listened as we sat, collectively contact-high, the silence peppered with loud gunshots and slurs somehow more oppressive than a regular quiet.
“So what did you get arrested for?” I said, all at once, after too much quiet. “That why you’re here?”
“That, and my parents don’t let me have video games.” He puffed through his nostrils.
“Yeah, why not?” He said. “Come on.”
His room was almost admirably barebones. No bed frame, no real sheets, just a mattress on the floor, a dirty pillow, a quilt, and a concerningly yellow spot on the wall where his body must have rested at night. A small box TV hummed static on the floor. Against the corner of the room was a large, dark painting of a man standing over a dead body. An old, ornamented frame, faded gold gilding on the outside.
I stared at the painting for a long moment, then he stood up and moved the frame away from the wall. Behind it was a hole in the drywall, about a foot around with jagged edges. Parker looked back at me conspiratorially, then reached in.
Dark wood and metal firm under his touch. He held it with reverence, like a secret, holy child.
“Three counts possession of a firearm,” he said, as he passed the shotgun to me.
The weight of a gun is always more than you expect. “Having a gun isn’t illegal,” I said.
“Depends on where you bring it,” he said. “And how many.” “You said three counts?”
He took the shotgun back from me and tested it against his shoulder, swinging it around easily.
“I had a 3-D printed Glock, a Desert Eagle, and an AR-15 with a bump stock. Those were the ones I caught charges for.”
He eyed the sight and pointed the barrel into the hole, straight at the darkness.
“This one I kept. Though I think it’s technically illegal for me to have it while I’m still on probation.”
With an athlete’s explosive twitch, he racked the shotgun and pulled the trigger, fast enough that I jumped, expecting a bang, but nothing happened. He looked back and smiled.
“So what were you, like, doing with the guns?” I asked. I saw the smile drop from his face.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking away. “I just like them.”
The fun gone, he let the shotgun fall to the mattress, right where his body would sit later that night.
“You won’t tell anybody, right?” He asked. He said it like he needed a real answer.
“Obviously not,” I said. “I can keep a secret.”
My dad had that vein going in his skull when I came home, happy to finally yell at me for something normal and teenage like staying out too late.
“It’s not a big deal,” I said. “I was just hanging out with Parker. You know, from church.”
His face blanched.. Mom finally uncrossed her arms and moved from the corner, a look of actual concern on her face for once. “What’s wrong with Parker?” I asked. “Just because he had some sort of bullshit charge, they act like he’s not—“
“Honey,” she said, and it wasn’t to condescend. “What’s wrong with him?”
She held in a deep breath, smoking without the smoke.
“It was before you started at the Academy. Or, actually, I guess the first August we were here. Back in that month and a half where I was homeschooling you, remember?”
“I remember,” I said. “After I was suspended and they were still considering whether that was a deal breaker.”
“Right,” she said. “Parker was a freshman in the upper school, and he was having really bad trouble with bullying. Like, pretty intense physical hazing. The lacrosse team made him a target for some reason, I guess because he tried out and didn’t make the team, or something like that. And things got pretty physical. He would come to school with burns on his arms, and things like that, and we heard that the players started making him strip for their girlfriends so they could make fun of his body, things like that, really awful stuff.
“And I don’t know what happened over that summer in particular, but he didn’t come to school for the entire first week. Then that Monday, he sat out in his car, the same car, all morning, from the crack of dawn, and recorded videos on Facebook with a bunch of guns. And they said it was a mental health break, and he was just angry, but he, I mean, he had a plan. He went into so much detail, the videos just kept going and going. He said he was going to hide in the homeroom that the lacrosse boys booked together, kill them, rape and murder their girlfriends, make sure to shoot himself in the head so his body would be unrecognizable. He had a written out note, maybe even a manifesto type of thing.
“Mr. Davis got there early and saw him crying in his car. When the police arrived Parker tried to shoot himself. He missed with the first shot and the police broke the window open before he could do it again. Even with the videos and the manifestos, they
talked it down to firearms possession. The benefits of coming from a good family. But we know what happened. We know how close he came to doing something really horrible.”
She swallowed, broke the trance of eye contact as Dad reemerged. He finally spoke.
“It’s not your fault. It’s just dangerous. We try to be loving to every member of our…flock, you know, but…”
He looked at her for input, but she let the silence speak for itself.
“And what about the lacrosse players? What happened to them?” I asked. They shared a look. A shrug.
“Whatever happens to those people, I guess.”
Parker texted me that night, but I didn’t respond. I couldn’t.
He didn’t come to the last night of Vacation Bible School. He didn’t come to church the next week, or the week after that, for as many weeks as I still felt like counting. Sometimes I thought about replying, calling, maybe even taking the long walk over there again, but I never did.
One night, my dad was outside and I was watching his silhouette bring something wrong to his mouth over and over again, when another body joined him. He stepped out from the porch to meet him, and I could tell who it was from the height, from the shadow of the hair and the glasses and the undulating Adam’s apple.
Both kept quiet, knowing not to raise their voices and alert us, even though I’m sure both knew we were watching from inside. Dad didn’t let him onto the property. Didn’t let him inside.
A week of Sundays later, I told my parents I was going hunting with Mark. I took the long walk back to Parker’s for the first time in too long, and couldn’t help but think how much more overgrown it had become in the time, as if it could somehow get swallowed even deeper by the inertia of nature.
I tried to knock on the door, but this time it didn’t swing open, just thudded dully. I called his name, but heard nothing. Looked through the clouded over windows. Heard nothing. It got dark and I left, alone. I could have called his mother and asked her about him, but I didn’t. I said nothing. I heard nothing. I walked home silent and alone.
I heard it took them a week to break down the door and find the body. They did the service at the baptist church instead of First Methodist. We weren’t invited, and neither were the other families. Apparently he was cremated quietly.
When I turned 18, I told my parents I wanted to move out as soon as I could.
They didn’t object. In celebration, I went to the new gun shop that just opened up — not one of the pawn-shop looking ones, but a real, polished looking sports center with decent lighting and plastic bucks on the wall.
“Can I help you with something?” called a voice from behind me. I turned and saw a burly looking young man, probably early 20s, maybe 25, bulging muscles in a uniform t-shirt beneath a vest, blonde hair in a swoop and a big, chiseled smile.
Immediately I felt inferior, even though I was shopping and he was selling. “Nah, just looking around. Mostly firearms. Birthday present.”
“Ok, let me know. You go to the Academy?”
I guess the tucked-in polo shirt and shorts made it self-evident.
“Cool, me too,” he said. “Graduated, damn, I guess seven years ago now. Good times. Sports, especially. You play any sports?”
I looked at him. His dumb, charming, beautiful face.
“Baseball, once upon a time. What’d you play?” I asked, without needing to hear the answer.
“Lacrosse,” he said. “I was a midfielder. Would have played in college if I didn’t fuck up my knee.”
I didn’t say anything. Just looked at him in his smile, and thought about the kind of person he’d be if he were forced to bleed. If he were put face-to-face with the person he punished, gun drawn, and pushed to reconcile with the thing he made. If he were the body left alone, rotting for a week, everyone too scared to confirm what they know is true.
“So,” he said. “Any of these interest you?”
I looked at the rack of weapons. Bushmaster. Beretta. Remington. Smith and Wesson. Glock. Sig Sauer. An AR-15, composite plastic, cheap, calling my name.
“No,” I said. I left.
Henry Luzzatto is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor with work featured in Slate, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, and more. He plays guitar in the DIY band No Jersey and is working on his first novel. He can be found on instagram and twitter @herny_luzzatto.