Don’t Shoot!

      I spent my early formative years in the 1960’s in Barcelona, Spain, a place where only the police and the military had guns.  When my family returned to the US as I entered high school, I was a thoroughly European kid, with little recent contact with the nuts and bolts of American culture.  Sure, we watched The Fugitive and Bewitched on TV, dubbed into Spanish, of course, but outside of that, I spoke Spanish most of the time, French in school, and yes, English with my family, though, my sister and I code-switched into Spanish a lot.  My father was a cultured European, who immigrated to the US to escape the Soviet takeover of his native Czechoslovakia.  He had us in French schools, in a rather posh tennis club and valued courtesy, elegance and savoir faire in anything that mattered.  He ended up in small town America because of his job, but made it his business to get his family to Europe, where we would have stayed. 

      Except that when I was 13, he died an early death.  So, my mother moved us back to our hometown, Alpena, a small conservative town in northern Michigan, largely surrounded by wooded areas and lakes.  Which made hunting and fishing common hobbies, especially for men–though not my father, who had no interest in, and even sometimes ridiculed, those pastimes. It was not uncommon for people to have a cottage on the lake or a hunting camp in the woods. 

      I was 14 by this time.  We were out at Phil Park’s hunting camp one summer evening.  Clearly, a taxidermist had gotten quite a bit of work from Phil: several deer and moose with various configurations of antlers looked down on the main room.  Over the stone fireplace a large twelve-point buck graced the room.  Outside, Phil’s daughters were fixing hotdogs on the grill, and the smell of charcoal permeated the air around the picnic table.  Off toward the property line, Phil had set up a target on a tree.  The men took turns with the pistol, mostly men, but the twenty-something daughters also tried their hand.  The gunshots were loud, but not as loud as I’d imagined. 

      “Wanna try, Karl?” somebody asked.  I froze, tried to be invisible in that moment; I had never shot a gun before.  I caught my mother’s eye across the way; she must have sensed my reluctance.  Phil’s daughter persisted. “OK, here.  Take it, it’ll be fun,” she coaxed playfully.   She placed the revolver in my hands, put her hands on my shoulders and pointed me to the target.  “Here, like this,” she said, standing right behind me, lifting the gun in my hands for me.  “Now, close one eye and line up this little thingy with the bull’s eye.  Then pull the trigger.”

      By this time, my mom had made her way over to where I stood, cocked her head and nodded, knowing that I wanted out of the situation. 

      “Maybe you can try shooting the gun next time, Karl,” she suggested.  With that, I was saved, and the pressure on me dissipated mercifully. 

      In those days, I spent a lot of time with Dick LaLonde, a 15-year-old boy, the son of my mom’s close friend Bette.  When the moms were together, I found myself with Dick a lot.  Dick was “one of the guys”, a thoroughly normal Alpena boy, a couple years older than me, who hung with older boys, would steal candy at Sunnyside Market, pined for a motorcycle as soon as he turned 16, and got to see Joanne Denmark’s breasts in someone’s garage one day–I didn’t. 

      Me, I was the recently arrived “kid from Spain” who knew little about such stuff, at most did harmless things with friends like sneak a cigarette–and had certainly never seen Joanne Denmark’s, or any other girl’s, breasts, not even in a magazine. 

      Though he was almost two years older than me, Dick was rather slight, perhaps even smaller than me.  But because our moms were friends, like it or not, Dick was often saddled with me.  He was a pretty good sport about it, but he made sure that in all things, he was boss.  One day we were across the street from Bette’s house in an empty lot next to McPhee School, shooting at birds with slingshots.  Not having actually killed an animal, I found this to be fun; for Dick, however, it was serious business.  To my mind, there was no way either of us could hit a bird way up on a wire from 30 feet away with a slingshot and a BB, and I was satisfied believing that.  Until Dick actually hit one, a sparrow perched on a phone wire.  The bird landed plop! in the leaves, flapped its wings violently as it lay, feet in the air, a blank feral look in its eyes.

      “Got ‘em!” Dick bragged, smiling, as we both ran to the fallen bird.  I did not hesitate to put the bird out of its misery; I reached into my bag of BBs, drew one out, placed it as quickly as I could in the leather pouch and fired point blank, right at the bird’s head, but the creature still moved.  I fired another, right at its neck.  A gush of blood.  Still alive.  Another BB straight to the chest opened its beak.  Then the bird was still, mouth agape, but mercifully, dead.

      “Good job!” Dick cheered.  “You got him good!  He’s dead now, that’s for sure.”  I was breathing heavily, unsure of what I’d done.  Dick clarified: “I bring’em down, you finish’em off.”  In that way we became a team.  It’s just that I really didn’t want to play that game.  It was Dick’s game, not mine, but I was playing because, well, we were a team.

      We went back to Bette’s house, where our moms were playing gin rummy.  We traipsed into the house, boyish and boisterous. 

      “Got a bird!” Dick announced, “right behind Linke’s garage!  Ping!  And down it came!  I nailed him, Karl did the rest.  He’s dead now!”  Bette seemed to barely be listening.  My mom grew serious, shook her head slowly. 

      “I’m sure that poor little bird had a brother or a sister or a friend.  But not anymore,” she intoned.  I contemplated what I had done.  She’s right, I acknowledged to myself silently.  This was wrong.  But it was Dick’s idea, so how could it be bad? 

      Many times, Bette and my mom socialized with Bob and Annette French, who liked to cook and entertain at their hunting camp.  When they had a party, the grown-ups would have martinis and play cards before dinner, Tonk being their favorite game.  Dick and I found ourselves together as usual. 

      “Why don’t you boys go take a walk in the woods?” Bette suggested.  Dick had a rifle, a shot gun, and he knew how to use it.  His uncle, the chief of police, had taught him.  Dick was a slight guy, neither tall nor robust, but his voice commanded attention.  At a party, you might see him chatting up a group, with a Stroh’s beer in one hand, and two more, one in each back pocket.  He was clever and funny, and the girls loved him. 

      We were walking among the maples and sycamores; the leaves were beginning to turn amber as the summer was ending.  Dick walked out ahead of me, leader that he was.  I would catch up and walk beside him, on his right side.

      “Are you planning on shooting anything?” I wondered aloud.  Just then, Dick pivoted, the rifle sweeping across in front of us like a searchlight. The length of the barrel of the gun crossed in front of my chest forming a barrier.  I stopped; Dick smiled knowingly, happy to be teaching me this little bit of hunting etiquette. 

      “Always walk two steps behind,” he imparted patiently.  “Ya never know.  I might need to shoot.”   

      We walked along, kicking up leaves and making noise, to perhaps startle an animal, maybe get a rabbit out in the open.  Nothing materialized. 

      “Next living thing I see, I’m gonna kill it,” Dick announced.  An orange-breasted robin rose out of the bush and landed on an oak branch to our left.  Dick stopped. I stood still, waited for his next move.  Slowly, the shot gun rose at Dick’s side as he cocked it with a deep click.  He set the stock against his shoulder, lowered and tilted his head lining up the sight with the targeted bird.  And pulled the trigger.  Instantly, the bird fell to the ground, dead.  We approached the small victim, several bits of shot lodged in its breast.  Wordlessly, Dick bent over and picked the bird up by one leg.  In a huckleberry bush he found a forked branch from which he could hang the bird, as a trophy of sorts.  As we walked away, the dead robin hung gently dangling by that one leg. 

      Circumstances bring people together in ways that often make sense only because of those circumstances.  Dick and I had little in common other than our mothers.  I never had the strength to stand up to Dick, to say what I thought or felt.  I don’t remember even wanting to, or imagining that I might.  I was kind of afraid of him.  After all, he was the one with the gun; I was the one with a quiet inner voice that said, “Don’t shoot!”.  I felt closer to the bird on the wire than I did to Dick himself.