And—just because he couldn’t get whatever he needed from my neck, that didn’t mean he didn’t still have hands.
The big pistol jerked up almost on its own, my arm straight behind it, and my finger was already pulling the trigger over and over into the middle of that darkness, that body.
What I was saying inside, if anything, it was to stay away from my little brother. That you’re not helping anymore. That I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but—the shots cracked the world in half, then quarters, then slivers of itself.
The flashes from the end of the barrel were starbursts of orange shot through with black streaks, and they strobed the inside of the hall bright white. And my shots, because of the recoil, because of the way the barrel jumped up each time I pulled the trigger, they were climbing from the midsection, higher and higher.
Five.
I shot five times.
And the sound—I heard the first one deep in my head, and felt the other four in my shoulder, in my jaw, in the base of my spine.
I know it’s too fast for tears to have come, but the way I remember it, I was crying and screaming while I shot.
It was the worst thing ever.
It was my dad.
I was killing him again, wasn’t I?
He’d clawed and fought his way back to us, and he’d come back better, he’d come back in the regalia he’d been supposed to wear, before everything else found him.
And he danced. He was dancing now, with each shot.
First his right side flung out, his arm following, and then his left, from the next bullet, and then, for just an instant, there was a clean hole right through the middle of the front of his head. Through his face.
Just ten minutes ago, we’d been playing catch with the football.
When you grow up with a dead father, this isn’t something you ever expect to get to do. It had felt like cheating. It had been the best thing ever.
But now it was over.
Because—I had to say it, just to myself—because he’d been feeding on Dino, I was pretty sure.
The wet lips. The empty eyes.
Dino’s seizures had started before I’d seen Dad walking across the living room, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been making that trip for three or four weeks already, then, did it?
Dino was never going to set any math records, but his counting, it had been going all right, anyway. He was last in his class, was on special watch, was a grade or two behind. But whatever Dad was drinking from him, whatever Dad needed from him in order to get whole again, to come back, it was something Dino needed.
It made me hate him.
That fifth time I pulled the trigger, the last shot?
It was the most on-purpose of any of them.
I was holding that revolver with both hands by then, a stance I knew from TV. I was trying to get the front of the barrel to stop hopping up.
The fifth shot, it went center mass. That was a term I knew from the cop shows, too.
Dino, he knew all about dinosaurs and fairies and talking cars, from what he watched.
Me, I knew about justice.
And, thinking back on it now, we’re lucky not to have all blown up that night, from one of my shots hitting the propane tank.
I was shooting at someone taller than me, though. That was the thing. It meant my shots were more or less pointing upwards, and climbing, once they splashed through.
All that was behind us was empty pasture.
One with a few more ounces of lead in it now. A few shards sprinkled down, coated in blood for the bugs to crawl over and lick, if bugs even have tongues.
All this in maybe three seconds.
A lifetime, sure. But an instant, too.
The world was so quiet, after all that sound. And because I was deaf.
I let the pistol thunk to the floor.
It hit on the barrel, tumped over into my bare ankle. I flinched away, took a step forward to see what I’d done.
Lying on his back just past the back stairs was the neighbor, who’d come for me just like he’d said he was going to. A different shotgun was clamped in his hands like if he just held on to it, he couldn’t fall back through whatever he was falling through, because its length would snag, would hold him up.
It didn’t.
He had no face, had a mass of bubbling red for a body.
My chest sucked in, my whole body kind of undulating, and when I looked up, it was because the sheriff’s deputy was standing beside me, naked.
A lot of grown men would have simply backhanded the upstart twelve-year-old punk who had taken a gun, unloaded it out the back door like that, just for attention.
Not this sheriff’s deputy.
His name was Larsen.
Years later he would run for sheriff.
His campaign speech probably didn’t include driving his knee into my side, so that I ragdolled over into the paneled wall. He probably didn’t put on any of his posters the way he didn’t let me fall but held me up with his left hand, for his right fist to drive into my teeth.
I was a murderer, though.
Killers, they deserve what they get, don’t they? You cash in your rights when you start blowing people away like I just had.
By the sheriff’s deputy’s third punch, my mom was riding his arm.
Me, I was on the carpet by then, my head turned to Dino’s open doorway.
He was standing in it, his face slack, a thin line of clear water seeping down from behind his ear.
I took a picture of him in my head to save for later—for all the jail and cameras and whatever was coming.
It’s a picture I’ve still got.
None of us left the house the next day. Not me or Dino for school—it’s not like we had grades to wreck, really—and not Mom, for work. It would mean she’d have to get another job, probably something at night instead of day, but that was all for later.
We sat on the couch and watched whatever the television gave us.
There was so much static we could hardly tell who was who.
When Mom finally turned it off with the bulky old controller, the curvy green screen reflected the three of us back at ourselves.
The sheriff’s deputy—I didn’t bother knowing his name until high school—wasn’t there.
Mom hadn’t just scratched him. She’d grown up on the reservation, I mean. She’d started fighting on the playground, had moved on to parking-lot scraps, and had even crashed a vase into someone’s face at a wake once. When the sheriff’s deputy had finally left, he’d left limping, and had to crank the window on his door down with the wrong hand.
And no more deputies showed up. Not the sheriff either.
I stared at my shape in the television screen, sure that next time we turned it on, that outline would stay but it would get filled in with my face. NATIVE AMERICAN ALMOST-TEEN SHOOTS NEIGHBOR OVER PETS, or something like that.
But. Except.
Where was everybody?
Why was I still here?
Did it have to do with the fact that I’d used the sheriff’s deputy’s drop-piece—I knew the term—and not his department-issued service revolver? Would turning me in mean he was turning himself in?
It didn’t track.
For most of the night I’d been in a daze, Mom trying to get my lips and nose and ear to stop bleeding. It wasn’t shock, but it wasn’t being completely awake, either.
Now I was awake. All the way awake, my heart pounding.
When the sheriff’s deputy had left, he’d left alone.
He’d left once before with the dead—evidence—shoveled into the back of his truck.
This time he’d just left it for us to deal with.
For me to deal with.
I wormed away from Mom and the blanket, guided Dino’s arm onto her leg instead of mine, and went to the sink first, for the coffee cup of water I didn’t want. But I needed an excuse to untangle from the living room.