Rimfire

by

D.F. McCourt

TOMMY COBBLEDICK GOT A PELLET GUN for his tenth birthday. Danny Robertson got a pellet gun for his tenth birthday. And Patrick Thorpe – whose father owned the biggest pig farm in the county and was elected every four years to a township council seat on those grounds alone – got an honest to god Winchester .22 rimfire.

I got an encyclopedia.

It was July 1986. Quintilis, the encyclopedia informed me the month was called, before Caesar was stabbed in the back thirty-five times on the Senate floor. Before the assassins rewrote the calendar in apology. I was almost certainly the only ten-year-old for a hundred miles who knew how many times Julius Caesar had been stabbed. An encyclopedia would have been a good gift if it weren’t a knife in my kidney.

The dog days sweltered the southern Ontario countryside, and the dust-wreathed fan turning lazily on my bedroom ceiling barely stirred the onionskin pages of July, never mind summoning anything that could qualify as a breeze. It was a terrible day to be inside, but I couldn’t bring myself to join the packs of wild children who ran those rural hills. Not unarmed.

In the kitchen my mother whistled tunelessly while making hummus. And so, I couldn’t even entice what few friends I had with a dinner invite. Not one of them could have picked a chickpea from a police lineup. Our table was a foreign wilderness, well trapped.

Toronto-born hippies both, my parents had long since fled the press of the city to raise their children in the peaceful idyll of the rolling gravel roads, the sprawling corn fields, and some vague notion of the simple country folk of Northumberland County. But somehow it never occurred to them that this might result in raising simple country kids. For all that they’d force-fed my sisters and I Austrian opera, Walt Whitman poems, and Buddhist philosophy, all they’d succeeded in creating were feral crick jumpers, goat chasers, and choke cherry chewers with outsized vocabularies and an overdeveloped attunement to their own existential dispossession.

Outside my bedroom window, the summer sun glinted off the too-large mirrored sunglasses of my older sister Annette, sprawled across the wild uncut lawn like a coyote that had been too eager to cross a busy road. Her long black hair splayed an oil slick around her. She had her sleeves rolled up past the shoulders and her shorts hiked so high it looked as though she’d wedgied herself. A cigarette dangled from her lip, and a book lay forgotten at her side. I itched from sunburn just looking at her, but the summer sun Annette worshipped only ever seemed to burnish her to a richer and healthier hue.

A sparrow winged unshot across the yard from maple to maple and Annette’s head turned lazily to track it, spilling white ash down the sharp cliff of her cheek. She didn’t bother to brush it away. Mom and Dad hated Annette’s cigarettes, but not more than they hated feeling like cops when they tried to forbid them. Annette was seventeen and she could do whatever she wanted.

I was going to be eleven with the sunrise, Quintilis born, and hoped I might soon be able to steal some of that freedom for myself. My parents owed me an apology. An apology with peep sight, walnut stock, rifled barrel.

ON MY WAY OUT THE DOOR to tennis camp, I saw it tucked behind the couch. It was wrapped in red and green paper still left over from Christmas, but the shape of it was unambiguous. Long and thin and deadly. I was briefly tempted to test drive the new authority of my eleven years and declare that I would be skipping camp, that birthday gifts should be a morning affair. But, in truth, I cherished my time on the court. I was quickly growing taller and stronger and I had developed a lunging flat serve that made me the terror of the Under Twelves. For the first time in my life, there was a domain where I not only belonged, but excelled. At tennis camp, simply because I won, I had social standing. I was somebody. And, even though it seemed impossible to convert that currency to one that could be spent anywhere it mattered, it was nonetheless intoxicating.

More importantly, I knew the long day’s anticipation would only sweeten the moment when I tore the paper from the gun.

By 4 PM, when my father pulled his rusted grey pick-up into the cracked asphalt parking lot of the Plainville tennis club to retrieve me, I was lobster red. My hair lay plastered flat to my head and sweat ran down my back in torrents, dripping from my shorts onto my scuffed tennis shoes. I clambered into the passenger seat, placing my racket carefully alongside my father’s guitar in the footwell.

“Did you play well?”

“Didn’t drop a set. I even six-ohed Derek Winsome and he’s thirteen.”

“Birthday magic,” my father said, and I was riding so high that for once it didn’t even bother me to hear him attribute my victories to the universe, as he always did.

At home I leapt out of the truck before my father had even pulled to a stop, leaving a dark shadow of sweat on the velour seatback and raising a plume of gravel dust as I ran to the door. My mother would be home from her shift at the Reserve Employment Centre in just twenty minutes and, if I wanted to make a reasonable pitch for doing presents before dinner, I would need to be showered and dressed when she arrived.

Dashing through the front door, I kicked my shoes into the closet like mortars, grabbed a clean towel from the shelf and ascended the stairs three at a time. But, at the end of the hall, the bathroom door was shut tight. I banged on it like a drum, hopping from foot to foot with impatience.

“Fucking occupied!” Annette shouted through the door.

“Yeah but hurry up!” I called.

“Sorry chief,” she said, less prickly once she realized it was me and not Mom or Dad. “Period shits. This is gonna take a while. Use the downstairs.”

“Why are you so gross?” I asked. “And I need a shower. You could poo in the downstairs, you know.”

“Trust me chief, I’m gonna need a shower too when this is done.”

“Fucking hell,” I whispered, deflating.

“I heard that!” There was a laugh in her voice. “Watch your fucking language.”

“Sorry.”

In response, a grunt and an unearthly stomach-turning squelch. I jumped back from the door, routed. As I dragged my feet down the hall, trailing my clean towel uncaring along the unswept floor, Annette called out one last time. “Hey! Happy birthday, chief! I got you a badass present.”

At the bottom of the stairs, I passed my father, leaning back in his armchair, plucking idly on the strings of his guitar.

“You need to fix the downstairs shower soon,” I said.

He just strummed a major chord and nodded unconvincingly.

In the backyard, I stripped naked, leaving my salt-streaked tennis clothes piled in the grass. The water from the garden hose came out fast and frigid and I yelped. Turning and twisting to direct the spray over every inch of me, I spied a fat gopher watching me with bemused judgment from his hole by the treeline. With a twist of the nozzle I set the hose to jet and caught the voyeur with a burst of cold water that sent him bolting down into his burrow.

“Just you wait until I have a gun, you little shit.”

THE BIRTHDAY STOOL, hand-made from poached Crown Land pine, painted in garish swathes of purple and yellow, bedazzled with glued-on beads of glass and plastic, sat in the middle of the living room, awaiting me. Mom, Dad, Annette, and my little twin sisters – Willow and Poppy, just five years old – were arrayed on the couch and chairs all around, beckoning me to take the ceremonial place.

I almost protested that I was too old for the birthday stool, that it was too silly. But then I remembered Annette, a few months earlier, perched atop it with the dignity of a sentry eagle, surveying the offerings laid before her to mark her seventeenth year. I took my seat and tried to channel even the slightest shadow of Annette’s easy cool as my family burst into a raucous jazz improvisation on the theme of Happy Birthday.

Willow and Poppy were the first to bring me a gift. A broad flat square wrapped in the comics page of the Toronto Star. Tearing through Garfield, Dagwood, and Family Circus, I revealed a paint-spattered canvas depicting a tall pink boy with a wild splotch of yellow hair and two great blue circles for eyes. In one hand he held a tennis racket as big as he was and in the other a bright green snake that coiled its tail around his wrist. He stood triumphant on field vert.

“It’s you!” Willow shouted with glee, clapping her hands.

“We painted it,” Poppy added seriously.

“I love it,” I said, meaning it.

From my father, I received a harmonica and a speech on the sacred power of reed instruments. From my mother, a book, of course. The Tao Te Ching, with Chinese text and English translation on facing pages and a two hundred page introduction penned by an Oxford fellow of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

Annette had not bothered to wrap her gift but instead stood before me with her hands behind her back.

“Pick a hand.”

I rolled my eyes, tapped her left elbow, and watched her very plainly shift something from left hand to right.

“Wrong again, chief!”

She punched me in the shoulder with her empty left hand and then, with her right, pulled a shirt from behind her back with a flourish. In white and red on a black t-shirt two sizes too big for me, a skeleton bludgeoned a policeman with a hockey stick. Underneath, in rough spraypaint letters, the words: “SOMETHING BETTER CHANGE”

I looked upon it with naked awe.

“It’s DOA,” Annette said, reaching into her pocket and withdrawing a cassette tape adorned with masking tape and Sharpie, pressing this into my hand as well. “You’ll love it.”

“It’s a good message, Annette,” my mother piped up from the couch. “I just wish it weren’t so violent.”

“Not very punk rock of you, Mom,” Annette chided, clapping me on the shoulder and sneaking me a grin. “Try it on, chief.”

But I saw in my mother’s eye a terrifying waver and it occurred to me that she may yet decide the final gift – the gift that really mattered – was a mistake. In a sudden flash of insight, I realized it would be literally impossible for her to place a gun in my hands while a murderous skeleton glowered out from my chest.

And so, coward that I was, I folded the shirt and stood to give my sister a long hug.

“Thank you,” I said. “I should listen to the album first, probably, right?”

“It’ll blow your little mind,” Annette assured me.

My mother smiled thinly and took one heavy breath before saying, “Well, there is one more gift.”

And then my father was reaching behind the couch and lifting out the long thin parcel. I noticed for the first time that it was bulkier around the chamber than I’d expected, but there was no doubt that it could be anything other than the gun that was owed me.

My father was just about to place the gift in my hands when my mother spoke up again. “Before you open that, you need to know that if you so much as point it at a living thing, we’ll take it away for good.”

“Of course,” I said, knowing such promises could hardly be binding deep in the forested hills where children run free.

My mother nodded, and my father released the gun into my grasp. I tore the paper from it in one motion and time stopped.

The thing in my hands was all wrong. The barrel, which should have been raven black or silver, was instead bright safety orange. And a bulbous plastic tumour the shape of Caesar’s punctured kidney protruded from the top of the chamber.

“It’s . . .”

“It’s a paintball gun,” my mother said, as though I were an idiot. “Dad made a practice target for you on a hay bale from the Gilfords. It’s in the shed.”

“Thank you,” I managed weakly.

I DRAGGED THE HAYBALE – hung with a plywood board painted in concentric circles, blue, yellow, red – out of the ramshackle shed and across the yard. I blinked my eyes against the dust and spores, and dumb baby tears fell onto the DOA t-shirt, putting a glisten of sweat on the brow of the skull.

Once the target was positioned at the edge of the woods, I turned and strode three dozen paces back towards the shed, cursing myself as I counted, a fool for having expected any different.

I opened the box of paintballs and barked a sour laugh. Of course they were pink. I poured a dozen of them into the feeder.

I lined up the target in my sights, trying to wish away the bulk of the feeder from my peripheral. Squeezed the trigger. Fzzt-clack as hammer slammed forward and compressed gas rushed into the chamber. My first shot disappeared invisibly into the woods.

Fzzt-clack. Fzzt-clack. Fzzt-clack. The target remained pristine. My anger, my betrayal, all dissipated into the leaves with those little pink spheres. What remained was only self-loathing. I wasn’t Tommy Cobbledick. Wasn’t Danny Robertson. Not really. I certainly wasn’t anything like Patrick Thorpe. I never would be, my parents had made sure of that. Of neither country nor city. Of course I couldn’t shoot for shit.

Fzzt-clack. On the fifth shot, I finally saw the paintball burst. Not on the target. Not on the trunk of one of the young trees just beside the haybale. But on a high branch of an oak a good twenty feet to the left of my target. “For fuck’s sake,” I choked out. It was far worse than I’d thought.

“You’re tensing your shoulders, chief.”

I turned and found Annette leaning against the shed, her cigarette almost burnt down to the filter. She’d been there awhile.

“You’re also raising the barrel as you fire,” she continued. “Phantom recoil. Too many movies.”

I scoffed. “What do you know about shooting?”

Annette rolled her eyes at me, stubbed her smoke out in the dirt, and dropped the butt into a rusted paint can. She disappeared into the shed and reappeared, a moment later, with my old yellow frisbee in her hands. She crossed to where I was standing in a few long strides and lifted the paintball gun from my hands.

“I was hunting long before I was your sister,” she said as she weighed the gun in her hands, sighted down the orange barrel. “Every kid did, back in Saskatchewan. In the real bush.”

With a nonchalant flick of her wrist, Annette sent the frisbee in a long high arc across the yard. And then, unhurriedly, she lifted the gun to her cheek, exhaled, and, without any perceptible movement squeezed the trigger, fzzt-clack.

The frisbee, fifty yards away and curving quickly down towards the treeline, exploded in a pink cloud.

“Stick with me, chief, and you’ll be alright.” Annette handed the gun back to me. “These southern Ontario BB preteen pricks ain’t near half as hard as they think they are.”

The murdered frisbee finally struck the ground, bounced, and began rolling back towards us, leaving a faint trail of pink on the blades of untrimmed grass. I watched it wobble and fall, and then turned my gaze back to my sister, who had lived an entire life before Mom and Dad even met her.

“Shirt looks wicked as fuck, by the way.”

BY MID-AUGUST, I was putting the paint in the red from fifty paces near every time. Then Annette started me on the frisbee. Moving target. It was like day one all over again. Except that this time I knew I could learn.

My tennis game suffered. My heart wasn’t in it and my mind, it seemed, only had room for one trajectory. The day I plinked my first frisbee out of the air – Annette rushing over to throw me over her shoulder in celebration – I double-faulted three times in a row, putting every serve halfway to the baseline.

Danny Robertson and Tommy Cobbledick started coming by, even though my mother wouldn’t let them bring their pellet guns on the property. They wanted the novelty of the paintballs anyway. They marvelled at my marksmanship and with every perfect shot I could feel my cachet grow. They ate my mother’s cumin shakshouka without complaint.

ON THE FIRST DAY OF SIXTH GRADE, Patrick Thorpe cornered me at the water fountain by the bathrooms at the fieldside end of the school. My eyes darted all around. There were no teachers nearby to break up a fight, but there were also none of Patrick’s cronies lurking in the hall. I considered that, even by himself, he might shove me into the boys’ room or, worse, the girls’ room, for who knows what torture. But Patrick was not standing like someone who had a shove locked and loaded. With surprise, I realized that I had grown taller than him over the summer.

“You should come over this weekend,” Patrick said. “Bring the paintball gun.”

“Okay.”

SUNDAY AFTERNOON, I slid the paintball gun into my tennis bag along with a fresh box of red paintballs. Annette was sitting smoking on the stump by the driveway as I climbed onto my bicycle.

“Do you think it’s a trap?” I asked her.

“Naw, chief. I think you’re just cool as fuck and people are starting to notice.”

I laughed. “I don’t think that’s it. But thanks.”

It was a hot September and the deafening buzz of the cicadas masked my panting as I pumped my too-small second-hand bicycle along the coarse macadam roads of Northumberland. I stood on my pedals to climb the steep hills and then coasted gloriously down the other side, tucking my shoulders in above the handlebars in search of an aerodynamic form that might carry me most of the way up the next hill, which was never more than an instant away. But the tennis bag acted as a sail, always slowing me on the descent, and bouncing unevenly across my back as I climbed. I was drenched with sweat by the time I reached the Thorpe farm on the escarpment high above the lake.

Patrick was out front of the big white house when I arrived, doing lazy figure eights in the yard on a cherry red riding mower, without the blades even engaged. Just wasting gas and day. He killed the mower when he saw me and hopped off, leaving the machine stranded in a sea of perfect green.

“Good,” he called. “You came. Is it in there?”

I nodded, dropped my bike on the grass, and unslung the tennis bag from my shoulders.

“Follow me then,” Patrick said.

We circled the house – with its wide porch, large windows, and three chimneys – to the garden behind. Mr. Thorpe, the councilman, was feeding wood chips into a great outdoor meat smoker, bulldog tobacco pipe clenched unlit in his teeth. Mrs. Thorpe – still wearing her church clothes, a wide brim hat and flowered scarf completely covering her head – was half-heartedly poking at a tomato plant, not quite gardening.

I stood awkwardly as Patrick walked right past them into their shed, a behemoth of red painted aluminum with honest to god glass windows. Mrs. Thorpe gave up on the tomatoes and stood to appraise me.

“You’re Patty and Harold’s boy, right? With the twins and the little adopted Indian girl?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “But Annette’s not that little. And she’s Cree.”

Mrs. Thorpe glanced over at her husband and snorted. “You aren’t so little anymore, either. And I certainly don’t have the energy to remember all the different kinds of Indian.”

“Who does?” agreed Mr. Thorpe.

Before I could think of what to possibly say to that, Patrick reemerged from the shed with the Winchester.

“We’re just gonna go plink out the back forty,” he said to his parents.

“Very good,” Mr. Thorpe said.

“Will your friend be staying for dinner?” asked Mrs. Thorpe.

“I’m vegetarian,” I mumbled at the same moment as Patrick simply said, “No.”

Mrs. Thorpe shook her head in silent disbelief. Patrick tapped me on the shoulder and gestured with his head away from the house.

We walked side by side down the long gravel road that ran through the pear orchard, which provided a sound and smell buffer between the house and huge steel pig barns that stood in rows like airplane hangars at the back of the property.

“How many pigs do you have?” I asked awestruck as we came up alongside the first barn. It loomed incomprehensibly large, windowless, the overbearing hum of environmental control systems erasing any memory of katydids.

“Oh, these are just the nursery barns,” he said. “This time of year, we’re only farrowing show sows here. Maybe 300 or so. Most of the pigs are over on the ninth line property.”

Past the barns, the farm road curved to run along the top of the legendary Thorpe Toboggan Hill, the best in the county. I’d never once been invited to the annual toboggan parties, only heard tell of Mr. Thorpe ferrying a dozen kids at a time out from the house on a huge sleigh pulled behind a top-of-the-line 600cc Ski-Doo that my father once said cost more than most cars.

Laying eyes on the hill for the first time, I felt an urge to throw myself down it, tumbling head over heels down the long, steep slope that seemed magically devoid of rocks, tree stumps, gopher holes.

Patrick caught me looking. “It’s better in the winter.”

I tried to imagine a way of interpreting those words as an invitation, but came up short.

“We’re here,” Patrick said.

Here was a stile ladder over a fence to a big empty field opposite the hill. The grass was trim, too green for second cut hay, though it was the season for it. In the middle of the field stood a single ancient cedar tree, its terraced branches spreading out like green clouds. In a great looping oval around the cedar, the soil was trampled low and the grass grew thin, suggesting that there had once been a run here.

“Mom used to ride out here,” Patrick said once we’d climbed over, as though he’d read my mind. “But we sold the horse last year when mom got cancer. Now I just shoot here. Let me see the paintball gun.”

I unzipped the tennis bag and withdrew my prized possession, no longer embarrassed of the bright orange barrel. Patrick handed me his .22 as though it were nothing and took the paintball gun from me. He hefted it appraisingly and nodded. “Cool.”

I made a show of inspecting the Winchester as well. Feeling the smooth walnut stock in my hand, seeing the gun oil sheen on the barrel, the clockwork perfection of the action, I had to admit I coveted it still.

“Here’s the deal,” Patrick said. “I’ll let you shoot the .22, but you have to let me shoot you with this.”

My eyes bulged out of my face. “You want me to shoot you with the .22?”

“No, retard,” he smacked me on the side of the head. “That thing’ll kill a man. See the old cast iron pan hanging from the tree?”

I did, surprised I hadn’t noticed it before.

“Think you can hit it from here?” Patrick asked.

“Probably,” I reckoned.

He snorted exactly like his mother. I wondered if they’d learnt it from the pigs. “We’ll see.”

Patrick showed me how to load the Winchester, sliding and locking the bolt in place. I showed him how to fill the paintball feeder.

“You’ll really let me shoot you?” he asked, clearly having expected it to be a harder sell.

“In the chest,” I said. “It stings but it’s not bad. My sister and I have shot each other before. You have to let me wash my shirt before I go though, so my mom doesn’t know.”

Patrick smiled and nodded. “Let me take a practice shot first.”

He raised the paintball gun and sighted down the barrel. I could see just from watching him that he was going to miss high and wide. I lifted the Winchester and put the circle of the pan in my own sights. Patrick fired, fzzt-clack, a wild shot into the upper branches of the cedar.

In a flurry of blue and white, a startled jay took flight from where it had been perched invisibly in the boughs. Without thinking, I tracked its path with the gun, led it just so, exhaled, and squeezed as though the .22 weighed nothing at all. There was no spray of blood, no burst of feathers, just a sacred living thing, a miracle of nature, dropping like a stone from the sky. My stomach sank and my skin went cold. My hands spasmed open in horror and the rifle tumbled spent and smoking to the ground.

Patrick Thorpe stepped out in front of me, face twisted with angry pride. He raised the orange barrel of my birthday present, and shot me in the face from point blank range.

I crumpled into the grass, numb and confused.

“Fucking showoff.”

He shot me again. And again. And again.

I raised my hand to my face and it came away crimson with blood and paint and the afterbirth of irreparable regret.

Patrick’s expression changed from rage to panic.

“You’re okay,” he insisted. “It’s just paint. You’re okay. Are you okay?”

I looked up at him and then back at my hand, pretty sure I’d never be okay again.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”