Basketball was no more fun than softball. She couldn’t run and dribble at the same time, she always got turned around on the floor and ran to the wrong net, but she was taller than the other girls and able to snag rebounds over their heads. The coach told her to plant herself under the net and stay there. It was a losing season and the coach cut her after the last game. The counselor told her sports weren’t for everyone and signed her up for the Junior ROTC in the hope that she might develop responsibility and leadership skills, maybe start to see a future for herself beyond graduation.
Officer Sloan ran the Junior ROTC program at the high school. There was a rumor that he wrestled for money at the armory on Saturday nights, and she felt safer when he was around because no one was fool enough to start a fight in his presence. Halfway through the second semester he started taking the class to the shooting range to teach gun safety and get them some target practice.
The first time she held a gun she was surprised at its weight. The heft of it sent a charge up her arm all the way to the center of her stomach. The feeling didn’t have a name, but as she stood there turning the gun over in her hand, she felt a shift inside.
Sloan came up behind her. “It feels good, right?”
It did feel good.
“The rules are simple. Keep the barrel aimed at the floor and never point it at anything you don’t mean to destroy,” he said.
He showed her how to open the cylinder and load the bullets. One by one she slid them into place, then flipped the cylinder closed. He took the gun and handed her earmuffs, pointed the pistol toward the target, and fired off a round.
She watched him, the twitch in his shoulder, the bullets shredding the paper target at the end of their lane.
“Now you,” he said, and she reloaded.
He stepped behind her, adjusted her grip, and put his hand on the back of her right shoulder blade. She shuddered. It was the most human contact she’d had since sitting on her father’s lap in church.
Sloan didn’t notice. “You’re going to feel the kick right here. Brace for it and pull the trigger.”
When she fired, his hand caught the kick in her shoulder. The bullet tore a hole near the center of the target.
“I knew it,” he said. “You’re a natural.”
He stepped back and she emptied the cylinder. It was like a wind sweeping through her bones. The gun was hot in her hand, her breath steady and even. Her spine straightened as though tempered by the strength of metal. Guns cracked all around her, up and down the firing lanes, and left an intoxicating smell in the air.
She got a part-time job at the range just to be near that noise, smell that smell. For the first time in her life she didn’t mind waking early. One hour before school to empty the bins of shredded paper targets and sweep the lanes of used casings, saving the last ten minutes for practice. The rush from shredding a paper human was the medicine she needed most. Her first paycheck surprised her. She would have done it for free. She bought a necklace at the strip mall, a bullet on a chain that once she put on, she never took off again. Her enthusiasm pleased Sloan and earned her the honor of packing up the pistols and carrying them to the backseat of his apple-red truck each Friday after class ended.
Scared. She’d felt scared for as long as she could remember, but pulling that trigger made everything different. Holding a gun calmed her more than the pills, more than the breathing techniques the counselor had taught her, more than a match head on her skin. She didn’t need to burn anymore and the counselor took that as a sign of progress. The weight of the gun, the smell, and the blast annihilated fear, squashed and contained it to a size she imagined small enough to fit inside the bullet she wore around her neck.
The bullet was a touchstone that she reached for each morning. A totem, a solid thing to hold onto when so much else seemed vague. She held it in her hand whenever she heard the train pass through town, remembering the terrible noise from the wreck, knowing it had been a curse for her parents to die with that noise all around them. She drew strength from the bullet on her way to school, as she walked down Park Boulevard past the Feed & Seed, the small white church with its high steeple, and the motel where the drunks sat on the curb so close she could smell the whiskey on their breath. The bullet gave her the strength to jog until the air smelled clean again. She touched it when she walked through the lunch room trying to find an empty table where she could eat her bag lunch alone, when she left the school grounds in the afternoon, and at night when she crawled in bed. Her fingers were wrapped around the bullet when she closed her eyes and the last pill entered her bloodstream, traveled to her brain, and allowed her mind to go dark for a few hours.
She was dreaming of her granddad when she woke on Friday morning. She knew he’d been in the army years ago, that he would be proud of her aim and the skill she had in handling a pistol. After class she loaded Sloan’s truck with the gun cases. He’d parked behind a stand of palmetto bushes, which made it easy to hide while she slipped the smallest revolver from its case and stuffed it in her backpack.
Alone behind the gun range, she loaded the bullets she’d stolen from Sloan’s truck. She spun the cylinder a few times, feeling the metal’s satisfying clicks, snapped it closed. The weight of cold steel resting in her hands, the power she felt stirring in her gut. It made no sense how much she loved having this thing all to herself. She touched the bullet hanging around her neck, remembering her father’s wedding band and how she would play with it on Sundays while listening to her granddad preach. The church was hot on those mornings. Air-conditioning wasn’t in the budget and the windows were too high up for a decent cross breeze, but it wasn’t considered Christianly to complain. Before the heat pulled her into a stupefying sleep she would sit on her father’s lap and play with his ring. His hands were big, the ring too small to slip over his knuckles, but she would try until her eyelids grew heavy.
She thought about waking up in church with her father’s arm draped over her shoulder as she walked to the retirement home. The old man had aged fast and seemed to be caving in on himself more each week. After his stroke they kept him strapped in a wheelchair, his head bobbing, drool spilling on the pajamas he wore all the time. He never talked but moaned often and loudly. He was on the front porch when she arrived, watching an egret over by the oleanders stalk its supper. It stabbed a lizard and ran to the edge of the grass.
The pill she was supposed to have taken at lunch was still in her pocket. She popped it in her mouth and chewed it to make the calm come faster.
She showed him the bullet on its chain. He nodded and it seemed he understood. She wiped the drool off his chin with the blanket draped across his lap. She told him she’d brought a gun to show him, that it was inside her backpack.
He grabbed her hand and she was surprised at his strength. He knocked her hand against his sternum, mouthed the word Here.
“Yes,” she said, “I have it here.”
She told him how anytime she touched the bullet she felt better.
His hand dropped to his knee and waved like a dying fish, perturbed, uneasy. A squirrel came onto the porch, sniffing around for the peanuts the staff set out every afternoon. Callie hated squirrels, thought of them as rodents with fluffy tails. She kicked at it and it jumped into the grass.
“Me,” he said.
“What?”
He grabbed her hand and placed it over his heart. “Right here.”
A red truck pulled into the parking lot and she thought briefly of how almost everyone in town had a relative in this place.
It was the first time her granddad had touched her in years, but now she understood. She’d taken the gun for one reason, loaded it for one reason.