(Adapted from the short story "Excerpts from a Life" by Lydia Davis)
Childhood
I was reared in a gun shop, and when I had a fight with my brothers and sisters we would twiddle our fingers at our hips and my father would call Draw! Then we’d spring our fingers into action and determine who had fired first through either stubborn dispute or the honest feigned sounds of a sputtering death as one of our pairs of knees hit the floor.
Stick to your guns
At the very least, you will have a large pile of dead meat and a convincing argument to keep others away.
The Wit and Wisdom of Will Rogers
I went to an elementary school named after the man, and committed many of his sayings to memory.
They want peace.
But they want it with a gun.
Grownups
I find that it is easy to make a child understand that a gun is a powerful thing, and dangerous, and they understand that it is no joke. It’s the grownups who talk about them as if there is some middle-ground to that reality-- “He carried that rifle on his back through the crowded Walmart as a symbol of freedom.”
Hunting with Hemingway
One day the gun shop was in the midst of another panic, and my father was running out of ammunition. He refused to put anything on hold. Hundreds of people poured through the door any time gun violence was in the news, or whenever a Democrat was elected.
It was 1992.
As I was taught, I walked back behind the counter and into the clerical office.
“Don’t let these people tell you a thing about guns.”
I watched through the office door as each person walked in. They gripped fear in their inwardly twisted fists. They were all puffed up at the chest with pride, which they often called patriotism.
“Say there, cutie, tell your pops to quit holding out.”
“Close the door, sweetheart,” my father said.
He had a collection of literature by strong American men. The stories had names like “Hills like White Elephants” and Ham on Rye, and in them life was a hard-fought existential struggle. I read these books at the height of the panics. It was inside A Farewell to Arms that I found a small warranty card for an antique shotgun from the company W.C. Scott & Son. It was signed by Earnest Hemingway. I carried that card in my wallet until my Junior year in college, when someone pointed their less than impressive nine millimeter at me and took my purse.
A little episode
I’m proud of this, and should be.
I had just read All Quiet on the Western Front, which wasn’t American, but that wasn’t a problem.
I had a friend from college who decided he would come home with me for a week during our Freshman Summer. We rode bikes into the Foothills and chained them to a tree so we could hike further up the hill. The summit of a better-known hill had two trees perched on top. High school couples carved their names into the trees. Beer cans were laid out on distant stumps, the stumps and the cans were laden with BB-gun pock-marks.
You could see for forever.
You could hear coyotes.
He asked me why I didn’t carry a gun. I told him I didn’t like the weight. He showed me his. I held it in my hand, inspected it from every angle, and then I held the pistol with both hands and aimed it at a beer can two-hundred yards off.
“Bang,” I said, then I handed the gun back to him.
“I want to know what war is like,” he said.
“Let’s find out,” I said.
We rode back into town and I took him to my father’s gun shop. My father was out for lunch but I had a copy of the key.
I took him through the back door, to the enclosed shooting gallery, which was dimly lit. From the individual shooting booths it was nearly impossible to see the floor. We laid on the ground and we waited.
We had nearly fallen asleep before the door opened and the room was filled with the sound of a group of men. They loaded their guns. We kept our eyes open as the bullets whistled over our heads.
“Oh, what a wonderful feeling,” I whispered to him.
As I listened to the rounds pop off, I swore that I’d never lay down here again.
I have learned the meaning of self-defense
To do what it takes to maintain the sovereignty of my body, and the sanity of my mind.
Annie Oakley taught me to shoot
I took a more earnest interest in the family craft during my second year at UNM. For spring break my friend, a native New Mexican, took me to stay with his relatives in Lemitar. We sat in the back of his pick-up truck in the dirt yard and he picked off quail as they came by. They’d flutter and then drop like pebbles.
“Your turn, Annie.”
“I’m no Annie Oakley.”
“I’ve seen you shoot. You’re related.”
I checked the sight and steadied the gun against my shoulder. The birds rose sporadically like shooting stars and fell like meteorites.
At night we watched an internet video of Annie Oakley taken by Thomas Edison.
I purchased every book about her.
The Star who shined brightest over the Wild West Show
When people came in droves to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, they were blown away by stage coaches, buffalo, roping and wrangling. But it was the little girl with the big gun from Oklahoma that brought down the house.
I went through round after round at an Albuquerque range. I shot skeet, and set up camp outside Socorro with my friend’s family, learning to hunt to the sound of orange dust rustling through sage-brush.
“They’re called Marksmen, Mijo.”
As they announced the awards at the exhibition, all the competitors sat in the front rows and waited for their names to be called, or not. The figure perched on my trophy looked like Apollo holding a rifle.
I sat in my seat with it balanced on my lap. The marble base felt cold through my dress. As people patted me on the back, one old woman, impressed, asked me what they called a female shooter. My friend from Lemitar, who was seated next to me, answered, “A marksman.”
He glanced at me and I wished that I had some way to tell him how immensely his words had moved me.
I looked down my sight with Annie Oakley’s eyes.
As each clay pigeon rose in the sky I followed its path with the barrel and imagined the charge exploding from the chamber and careening down the bore, drawn to the pigeon. The impact was like the precise, terse prose of Hemingway, but the repetitive shots were rhythmic and made me think of Annie standing tall on a horse, firing at targets in the corral.
I could see what I was doing, but I was shooting with more precision than I knew how. My arms moved more delicately then they could. For a moment after the last pigeon flew the coop, my arms remained in the air. A small puff of smoke from the barrel.
Nice shot, Sweetheart
My father hugged me like a loving father holds his most precious thing. We stood for a photograph, and though my cowboy hat looked ridiculous, it felt right and proper.
“Nice shot, Sweetheart.”
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