***sorry for the republish if you got an email twice, I submitted this to a short story competition and had to take it off my site. It was rejected, it happens. A friend once said if we don’t have a stack of rejection letters that fill our desks then we never really tried.***
My son pointed the loaded gun at my chest. It was my over/under 20 gauge that Grandaddy Al gave me before he died.
“Easy, son.”
I tried to use my calming voice, the one I use after a fight with his mother when she’s trying to drive away. But Louie didn’t blink, unfazed in his pose. Here was death. My undoing had taken the form of a four-year-old in Wolverine underwear who was wearing his dusty square-toed boots on the wrong feet.
I’d only been outside for a second, gone to piss off the porch like I always do. When I was out there, I’d realized I could go ahead and grab the flank steaks that were still thawing in the sink under the running water and throw them on the grill. It hadn’t taken long to light. Now the smoke was rising from the grill, the mesquite had burned hot real quick. I’d pissed three times already since we’d been back from the pasture, the seal was broken—burst, actually, on account of the fact there hadn’t been any birds again, just like opening day last year. So the boy and I had just sat there on our overturned buckets, listening to the grasshoppers chirp, and I’d thrown back a few extra Banquets. Those stubby bottles sure don’t hold much beer, but I like the way they feel in my hands, and they were what Dad drank. Though I don’t remember much about Dad, I remember the little bottles with the yellow label and the mountains. I remember he talked about the mountains, and I guess that’s where he went all those years back.
The boy had begged me to hold the gun earlier, and I probably should’ve let him, or I should have remembered to throw the orange sodas he likes into my Igloo and maybe he wouldn’t have asked about the gun. I probably should have taught him safety like Grandaddy Al taught me from the first time I took to his gun. The boy had bawled when I wouldn’t let him hold it back at the field, and as he was crying and I was grabbing his bare shoulder and telling him to hush up now, the only doves of the day had flown over the sunflower field, the damn things didn’t even give my mojo decoy and its spinning mechanical wings a second glance. They fluttered on toward the Archer place where there was still water. Archer’s place always has birds. The pasture used to be a sunflower field, I should say, but it’s just a cracked patch of earth now, withering like everything else that’s gone to dust with this drought. I lit into the boy about him making too much noise, and he cried some more. Where my fingers had been on his shoulder, there were now marks that were lighter than the rest of his golden-brown skin. He rubbed it with the palm of his hand and said how I’d hurt him. The poor kid would never want to go hunting again, I couldn’t blame him.
Now, he growled at me, and a string of spit seeped through the gap in his top teeth as I stood there like my boots had been nailed to the cracked vinyl floor of the single-wide. I stared at the rusted steel of the gun. I thought about how I should have cleaned it more, and I wondered if I ever had. Grandaddy Al cleaned it every Sunday in his recliner, maybe it kept his emotions in check as he watched the game. I’d been holding the gun against my shoulder and hadn’t taken it back to my closet yet because I was behind on dinner. I must have leaned it against the doorjamb after throwing the potatoes in the oven to bake, and there he’d grabbed it while I was listening to all the shots ring out over Archer’s way. Archer’s fridge would be full of dove breasts tonight.
The door to the deck had been open the whole time, but I still hadn’t heard Louie grab the gun. Once I turned inside, I stumbled on the warped threshold Annie had been asking me to replace for months. I almost went to my knees, but I caught myself; I was an honorable mention all-district wide receiver for the Outlaws after all. As I stood up, I saw that my fly was still unzipped, so I thought I should fix that right then and there, I needed to make myself presentable with Annie fixing to be back with her parents. I’d let them down at a few dinners in the past. They sure wouldn’t be excited about no dove poppers and tough steaks tonight, but I had promised Annie I’d be better around them and around her and around the boy, and in turn she had told her folks I was trying. She hadn’t mentioned the gig in Oplen falling through yet though, I reckoned. But I zipped up, looked up, and there he was with my granddaddy’s old Benelli.
The gun faced my chest and my heart raced, the heart that once pumped the blood into my pecker that had hardened and then played a part in bringing this child into the world. If the boy knew how to pull a trigger, that same heart would be full of lead soon. I hadn’t grown up with a daddy, and the look in the boy’s eye seemed like he wasn’t going to have one neither. I grabbed at the shotgun, but it just made Louie jump back.
“Easy now, Lou,” I said.
“Die you alien!”
“S-Son, give me that gun right now.”
“It’s my turn with it, you need to share!” Louie shook the gun at me like he was ushering me to put my back against the wall.
I lunged forward, deciding to spend no more time staring down the reaper’s barrel. I tried to jump quickly enough that I could cover the feet that separated us in time to grab the barrel with one hand and push him away from the gun with the other, my entire motion was a gamble. It was a risk trusting that I’d left the 20 gauge’s safety on, but if I hadn’t, maybe he’d be too clumsy to pull the trigger. Maybe he didn’t want to pull it to begin with, and we’d be eating an ice cream sandwich in a minute to smooth all this over and maybe this would be something chalked up to a game, the worst outcome of the evening Annie’s disappointment that there were no fresh dove poppers wrapped in bacon with a little cream cheese. Annie, she liked hers with fresh jalapeños and a little honey drizzled on top. But my in-laws, Kurt the Kia King of the Caprock and Ruth the retired secretary at First Baptist, would sweat buckets if they so much as dipped anything in ketchup. How they raised a daughter with a fiery-hot palate like Annie’s, I ain’t got a clue. So I usually left the peppers out of their bacon-wrapped dove poppers, they liked them that way.
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As you might have noticed, this has nothing to do with the Longhorns. This started as a weekly article in the fall that I used to channel how Texas Longhorn fans should be feeling. It was also a place where I could combine my passions for writing and sports, etc. Now, I’m shifting gears and I’m going to write about the things I care about: Texas Football, Spurs Basketball, fiction writing and whatever else is on my mind. Subscribe to the section that best suits your interests. There will still be Dance With Who Brung Ya articles weekly in the fall. If you stay in this section, I can't promise it won't be unhinged, but I hope you stay regardless.
Engaged and invested in the outcome from the start.
Riveting opening, my heart was pounding, just like you planned