Reckless Faith

by David Kantrowitz

  “You were carrying your pistol on you?” John said.

  “Yeah, I told you I would be.”

  “Please tell me you sent away for your New Hampshire permit,” said Ray.

  “No,” said Ari, “I didn’t. I was told a lawful person doesn’t need a permit to carry in New Hampshire.”

  “Holy shit, Ari,” began John, “that’s Vermont, not New Hampshire. You need a non-resident permit for New Hampshire.”

  John withdrew his wallet and showed his permit to Ari.

  Ray shook his head. “Do you realize what would have happened if you were discovered? I mean, for God’s sake I’m a New Hampshire cop. I’ve had nightmares that were more pleasant than what would happen to us.”

  Ari was ashen. “You’re not going to say anything, are you?”

  “No, but you are not to carry that pistol concealed outside of this cabin again. Are we clear?”

  “Crystal.”

  “Good.”

  “Shit, guys, I’m sorry. I screwed up. I’m new to all this. Vermont, New Hampshire, I mean come on, it’s all hick country. No offense.”

  “Forget it,” said John, “it’s okay.”

  Ray said, “Now that it's been cleared up, you can carry in the open without a permit. Just make sure your weapon is plainly visible and we can avoid any legal snags.”

  “Wait, I need a permit to carry concealed but not in the open?” asked Ari. “What sense does that make?”

  “I don't make the laws, Ari. Just please do as I say.”

  “Fine.”

  There was a long pause. Ari was genuinely embarrassed, which was the first time ever as far as John knew.

  Ray gestured towards the table. “Now clear and lock that thing so we can get this tradition going.”

  The three arranged the items on the table by classification. When they were done, an impressive spread lay before them. There was a bottle of Elijah Craig bourbon, a bottle of Genevir from Holland, and four bottles of extra-high proof French ale. On the other side of the table lay Ari’s clove cigarettes, John and Ray’s pipes, and two kinds of pipe tobacco. On the side closest to John there lay a Glock 17, a Remington 870 twelve-gauge shotgun, a H&R twelve-gauge shotgun, a M1 Garand rifle, and a Beretta M92 pistol. The last three belonged to John.

  “God bless America,” Ari said.

  “I see you bought that H&R you’d been drooling over,” said Ray. “I wondered which shotgun you’d meant over the phone.”

  “Why did you buy a single-shot shotgun?” Ari asked.

  “Because it’s fun,” John replied.

  “Isn’t it practically useless for combat?”

  “You want to stand in front of it?”

  “That’s not what I meant. It just seems way too slow to reload.”

  “Ari, listen, and I’ll use small words so that you can understand. Because it’s fun.”

  “Right, right. Fine.”

  John noticed something he’d been looking forward to was missing.

  “Ray, where’s your Smith and Wesson?”

  By the time Ray had finished answering this question, a third of the bourbon was gone and John and Ari were more uncomfortable than they’d been in years. Ray had just lost his partner, Pete, in a shootout with two bank robbers. Ray had just barely survived himself, and had been forced to kill both suspects. His favorite Smith and Wesson revolver had been taken for the duration of the investigation.

  John already knew what needed to be said, and it wasn’t much, but Ari was stricken to near panic with the dilemma. She had no idea how to respond. Fortunately for her John decided to go first.

  “Jesus, Ray. I’m sorry. I’m sure Pete was a good guy. I mean, what cop deserves that? We’ll be here for you, we’re not going anywhere. But we’re obviously quite happy that you’re still alive.”

  “Yeah,” said Ari.

  Ray sighed. “It’s just, part of me can hardly believe what I did. I guess I had this doubt deep down inside that if the time came, I wouldn’t be able to act.”

  “Nobody knows for sure how they’ll react, Ray,” began John. “That’s what training tries to conquer. The fight or flight reflex is mostly flight. The training you got was meant to make sure that you knew when to fight.”

  “Pete didn’t freeze up either, but he’s still dead.”

  “Sometimes you can do everything right and still end up dead. Training helps you beat the odds, but the odds are still there.”

  “I really wish I could stop feeling guilty about it all. I know it’s not my fault. I mean, maybe I’d feel a little better if I’d been wounded. Somehow it doesn’t seem fair that I walked away without a scratch.”

  “Your friends and family would hardly think it fair if you were dead.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Let’s have a toast,” said Ari. “A toast to Pete.”

  “Yes, let’s,” said Ray.

  The three raised their glasses. A solitary tear escaped Ray’s eye. For the first time, he felt sadness.

  6. October 4, 2003

  Byron was thinking. He sat on a bench in the commons, overlooking the Frog Pond. On this particular Saturday morning, a day on which the first few leaves of fall freed themselves from their homes, he had reached a conclusion. The conclusion was very simple. He was infatuated with Professor Tolliver.

  He wasn’t so immature as to use the term love. He knew he couldn’t love her based on what he knew of her. The person she presented to the class was bound to be different than the person she really was. How different, Byron suspected, could be discovered if he could just spend more time with her. So far, he hadn’t noticed any difference during the times that they’d spent outside of class, but those encounters were so casual as to be almost meaningless. Except, of course, the last time they got together. And except, of course, that Byron had blown it by asking her out too early.

  And so, Byron thought. He thought about scenarios that might result in her forgiveness for Wednesday’s gaffe. He thought about whether or not Christie had a boyfriend (likely, it seemed). He thought about ways he could impress her.

  The most obvious thing was to study astronomy. If he could get ahead of the curriculum, he could remain authoritative during class. If he could get ahold of some of the textbooks for subsequent courses, he could even best Christie at her own game. He’d just have to find a way to do it that was flattering and not arrogant. Byron had no idea how he might accomplish this.

  Byron figured that the more he knew about her personal life, the more he’d be able to impress her. If he knew what she liked to do in her spare time, he could pretend to share those interests. If he could get Christie to become apologetic about Wednesday night, it might give him enough credit to start over. Maybe by the time the semester was over and he graduated, he could have enough of her faith to ask her out again.

  Besides studying his astronomy book, then, there seemed little Byron could do. Then again, there was passive research. Byron reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. He dialed three numbers and waited.

  “Hello. I’m sorry, I don’t know exactly. Boston area. Yeah, address and phone number. The name is Christie Tolliver.”

  A few minutes later Byron had boarded a train at the Park Street Station. The red line went to Somerville. Byron had gone there before with friends, so he knew it would take about fifteen minutes to get to his desired stop. The train wasn’t crowded, so Byron put his feet up.

  The friends that lived in Somerville were gone. All of Byron’s friends were, in fact, gone. His need for a ninth semester at Suffolk had left him behind while his friends had graduated. To his dismay, none of them chose to remain in the Boston area. For the record, four had gotten married, one had joined the Army, and one had moved to Europe. The last summer had been a lonely one, and Byron was quite glad to have classes start up. He could have tried to make new friends, but it seemed pointless with so little time left for him. Byron had also come to regard the students he interacted with as plebeians, sin
ce all of his classes were introductory level courses that he put off until now. Freshmen and a few sophomores were all he ever saw. Christie was much closer to his own maturity level, he thought. He thought it quite unfair that she didn’t differentiate him from the other students.

  Byron knew he’d have a hard time finding Christie’s apartment. If he’d bothered to go home first, he could have looked up the address on the internet. He knew where the police station was, so he thought he could go there as a last resort. He wasn’t sure what kind of useful information could be gained by scouting out the apartment. Perhaps he could note some landmarks and become familiar with them. In the future, knowing the area might come in handy. He could say he had a friend from high school who lived in Somerville. It might backfire, however, if it turned out that Christie didn’t like Somerville. Seeing what kind of neighborhood she lived in would certainly help establish that.

  For some reason, Byron found himself thinking of a song by The Police.

  __________

  Ari had never been to the gravel pit that the guys used for a range. It was immediately obvious why it was a good choice. The dimensions had to be something like 250 yards long and 75 yards wide, and the walls, or “berms,” as Ray called them, were ten yards high. Ray said they could shoot in three directions at once as long as there was nobody else around. That was true today.

  There was certainly enough evidence that this place was used as a range. Brass cases littered the ground, and various targets flapped in the gentle breeze. John and Ray wasted no time in complaining about the state of the pit, indicating the possibility that the town might shut it down if things got worse. In fact, before they got any shooting done John and Ray picked up all the trash they could find and consolidated it near the access road. The only thing they left behind was the brass. That completed, Ray began to set up some targets while John loaded the magazine of his Beretta. Ari watched him, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth.

  “That wouldn’t have been much help last night,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, if something happened.”

  John patted himself on the hip. “I have another magazine filled with hollow points. It was in the pistol last night.”

  “Oh.”

  “Besides, Ray had his Remington loaded. As long as one of us is ready we’ll do fine.”

  “Right.”

  It was overcast and cold. Ari picked up John’s Garand and examined it.

  “Be careful you don’t stick your finger into the magazine. You’ll trip the bolt.”

  “It’s not loaded, right?”

  “No, but the bolt could break your finger.”

  The fact that a firearm could hurt you without actually being fired was a strange idea to Ari. Why this was the case with the Garand seemed to point to bad engineering.

  “With all the technology we have, they can’t avoid it doing that?”

  John smiled. “First of all, this rifle is over sixty years old. That’s misleading, though. The rifle is working exactly as it’s supposed to. When Ray gets back to the line I’ll show you why.”

  Ari nodded, and brought the rifle up to her shoulder. It seemed impossibly heavy. She pointed the front sight at Ray and tried to imagine what it was like to fire.

  “What the hell!” Ray said, returning to the others.

  “Ari, it’s really bad form to point a weapon at someone. Even if you know it’s unloaded.”

  Ari lowered the rifle. “I know. Ray trusts me, though.”

  “I trust you,” Ray began, “not to shoot me on purpose. This is how accidents happen.”

  “Sorry.”

  John held out his hand to Ari. “May I?”

  Ari gave him the Garand. John picked up a clip from the tailgate.

  “The reason why the bolt will release like that is because it automatically loads the first round in the clip. You take the clip with your right hand, hold back the charging handle with your pinkie finger and press the clip in with your thumb. Then you release the handle and the bolt will close.”

  John demonstrated this. The bolt snapped into place.

  “Now the rifle is loaded and a round is chambered. You can remove the safety and begin firing. Ears?”

  Ray and Ari both placed foam plugs into their ears and nodded.

  “Going hot!” John said.

  Using the sling as a brace, John tucked the rifle into his shoulder and fired. Ari jumped and smiled sheepishly. John continued firing until the clip was ejected.

  “Piece of cake,” he said.

  Ninety minutes later, the trio began packing the weapons back into the truck. Ari was pissed beyond words, something that worried John and Ray. They’d never seen her this mad. John would joke later to Ray that he was keeping his crotch guarded at the time, although the source of Ari’s rage was not the two men.

  Ari had just discovered that she was a terrible shot. The only thing she was any good with was the scatterguns, and John had initially referred to this as “so easy a blind, alcoholic Panda” could do it. It was the wrong time for some friendly ribbing. Ari had already come to see that with the boomsticks that only fired one projectile at a time, she was out of her league. Ray had heaped more direct encouragement on her. It was of no use. As they got into the Ford, John tried again.

  “There are so many aspects of shooting well, Ari. Nobody is going to get them all down their first time out. Stance, sight alignment, trigger control, follow-through... this sort of thing requires lots of patience and commitment. I sucked when I first started. It was with Duncan's Beretta. I couldn’t hit a pie plate at seven yards.”

  “You’ll do better next time, Ari.”

  Ari remained silent. John knew why she was so mad. As far as he knew, Ari never failed at anything, except relationships. And to hear her tell it, it was always the boyfriend’s fault, not hers. The results of the late morning shooting session were undeniable, and the blame lay squarely on Ari’s shoulders. That it mattered so much was something John could understand, even if he didn’t agree.

  Ray pulled the truck onto the road. “You’ll have plenty of chance to work out your frustration when we go hiking.”

  Ari folded her arms, and said, “Hrumph.”

  There was silence in the Ford. John decided to let the issue rest for now. Ari would probably snap out of it once they started heading up the mountain. The fact that you had four hours of hiking ahead of you tended to grab your attention once you got out of breath, which for the three of them was bound to be pretty quick. On the way up John had asked Ari about her exercise schedule simply as something to make conversation. Ari said she hadn’t been doing any exercise lately. Ray probably had the best chance of all of them. The police academy, however, hardly focused on medium-paced steady-incline hiking, to use his own words. John began to think about the task of cleaning the firearms which awaited them that night.

  “Whadya think of my H&R, Ray?” John asked.

  “Well, that was certainly fun. It was quite instructive to see the difference between it and my Remington using the same loads. Men must have been of tougher stuff back in the forties.”

  “That thing,” said Ari, “is a torture device. The Marquis de Sade would have loved it.”

  John grinned. “It wasn’t meant for combat use, like I said. It was a hunting weapon. You don’t normally fire fifty shots in a row through it.”

  “I liked it,” said Ray. “It makes such a satisfying sound when you eject the shell.”

  “It doesn’t take a lot to make you two happy, does it?” said Ari.

  John smiled. In fact it did not.

  Thirty minutes later, Ari was well into working out her frustrations. She was also well ahead of John and Ray, as she was all but sprinting up the side of the mountain. The two men were happy to keep a slower pace. The sun had come out, and filtered through the colorful foliage.

  “I underestimated Ari,” John was saying.

  “She’s got a bit of a problem with handling
her anger, don’t you think?”

  “That’s always been so.”

  “True.”

  “You know, it always bugs me when I have to carry my pistol after I fired it, if I haven’t had the chance to clean it yet.”

  John wasn’t trying to change the subject. He had a way of coming back to old conversations that were often considered long finished by others. Ray was used to it and never objected.

  “I bet Ari’s really pro-gun now that she’s got one, huh?”

  John furrowed his brow. “Actually, the only thing she said to me was quite elitist. Ask her yourself, if you want. I think time will bring her over to our way of thinking.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me, really. Nothing makes you feel elite more than the first time you strap on a pistol. Reality comes creeping in soon enough.”

  “Aye.”

  Talking while hiking made a difficult affair even harder, and the men stopped to catch their breath.

  “I should stoke up my pipe,” John said, “this is getting too easy.”

  “So you never finished telling me how work was going.”

  “I never intended to.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  The two continued up the trail.

  “What can I say? Work is boring. I wanted to design aircraft, Ray. Now my greatest accomplishment is an industrial integrated HVAC unit that we're helping develop for Hamilton Sundstrand. I am not pleased.”

  “That sounds pretty high tech. Why are you allowing yourself to languish in your current job?”

  “I just don’t care about it anymore, Ray. I’m happy enough coming home at the end of the day and kicking back. The only thing I feel like I’m missing is spending more time with my friends.”

  “You think you’ll be happy with this pattern indefinitely?”

  “Probably not. But I’m happy with it for now.”

  “You know, it was the thought of turning thirty without accomplishing anything that made me become a police officer.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And, I think at some point you’re going to realize that you can’t waste your life away doing something that doesn’t matter.”