The Tarnished Shooter

by Charles James

  For heating, the house had in-floor radiant heat and three fireplaces. We used the wood-burning fireplace in the dining room daily during winter but never used the two gas-fired ones. My father had truckloads of scrap wood delivered from one of the local lumber mills and had it dumped in a huge pile somewhere on the property.

  Jack and I steered wheel barrel after wheel barrel full of firewood across the property and meticulously stacked little five inch square pieces of scrap wood next to the house near the back door of the garage. The old man raised a big stink if the wood wasn’t stacked against the house to darn near perfection.

  Once we got settled, I turned the contractor’s shack into a clubhouse. When our buddies came over we had a place to hide, smoke cigarettes, talk about girls and just hang out. Sometimes we held high stakes poker games there, complete with Mexican music playing in the background. We smoked cigars and pretended to be cowboys on the run from the law down in Mexico.

  I remember one time my old man came home from work and went looking for me. He called my name numerous times, but I didn’t answer because I was hiding-out in the clubhouse with a few of my buddies and we were all smoking cigarettes. We couldn’t ever lock any doors because it was his house and he wanted access to any room or building at all times. Eventually he opened the door on the clubhouse and was hit by a huge plume of blue smoke. Fighting his way through the small door and the smoke he choked out, “Who the hell is smoking?” Nobody said a word, we just looked at each other with a, “Not me” expression on our faces. He studied each one of our faces looking for a guilty expression. The old man wasn’t buying our denial and refused to leave until he got a straight answer. Lenny and Mitch finally fessed up to save the day. After he closed the door behind him we looked at each other and busted out laughing. Surprisingly he never said anything more about it.

  My father, mother and everyone else it seemed smoked like chimneys in those days. When I first started experimenting with the psychological high from smoking at age fourteen, I would find a fresh pack of cigarettes sitting on a coffee table or the kitchen counter and snatch a few of those coffin nails from their packs. One of my favorite things to do was to go up to Jack and my room, act like James Dean and practice blowing rings of smoke as I watched late night TV. It was a bit of an adrenaline rush to see if I could get away with stealing their cigarettes and smoking in the house while they were home. And I did. I could hear the old man’s footsteps whenever he decided to take a trip upstairs, so it was fun to take a chance. I was becoming more and more adventurous when it came to disobeying rules and regulations. Authority figures made my blood boil.

  We were getting used to the house and falling into new routines. There was so much more property to take care of. Yard work and driveway maintenance took up way too much of my time. Appearances were more important now that father was a businessman representing a large retailer. I remember spending entire afternoons at the end of a shovel filling in driveway potholes.

  Father had my sister Joanna, Jack and I paint the whole house because he didn’t like the color. It didn’t make any sense to us because he was colorblind. We chiseled away the entire summer painting the house only working in the shade or during the cooler parts of the day. In the end I don’t recall him telling us we did a good job. We joked amongst ourselves he probably couldn’t see the difference. In those days Joanna, Jack and I were real tight. We tried to look out for each other in attempts to keep things humming along smoothly. We didn’t want the old man blowing a gasket, because it would have been hell for the entire household.

  It didn’t take long before my father bought a tractor with an end loader to remove snow and repair the long gravel driveway which meant Jack and I didn’t have to wheel barrel tons of gravel to pot holes in the driveway. I remember my mother complaining about the cost of the tractor. He used the end loader to get snow removal contracts and just made more money. It wasn’t long before he bought a 20-foot aluminum boat to sit in the crescent shaped harbor. A few months later he bought mom a brand new car, we even got a color TV and a pool table. Life was looking up!

  With the trucking business occupying so much of the old man’s time, and me getting older, the physical, verbal, and emotional abuse he’d directed toward me had diminished. I still had numerous responsibilities doing yard work, fixing things around the house, property and doing maintenance on the trucks. I did things the old man couldn’t do because of his eyesight.

  Chapter 11

  The sweet smell of her freshly washed hair. Lenny and I met a couple of girls as we were walking downtown one day. We spotted them across the street. I decided to be a smart-aleck and whistled at them. It was enough to intrigue them to cross the street and introduce themselves.

  They checked us out and seemed interested, so Lenny and I made dates with the girls, promising to meet up in a couple days. Kim would be my first girlfriend. She was a cute and petite girl with long strawberry blond hair that always smelled of fruity shampoo. Lenny’s girl was a bit taller with short frizzy blond hair. She needed braces on her teeth real bad. At first we thought they would be stuck-up, but the two chicks turned out to be lots of fun. They chewed bubble gum—cracking the bubbles while looking at each other, before laughing at our silly jokes. The girls, Lenny, and I spent our days together walking down the railroad tracks back and forth between the lake house and my old neighborhood where Lenny lived. We crossed the river via the railroad bridge because it was closer than the bridge on Main Street.

  Sometimes when we were halfway across, we’d see a train coming down the track a few hundred feet ahead with its bright light shining just above the windshield. In the dark, the train coming at us looked like a giant one eyed-monster. With just a few planks on the side of the tracks to walk on it would only take one slip and we’d have fell in the river. We often walked on the cross ties to feel safer, though there was always the possibility of getting a foot caught in between the railroad ties. A small shack stood near the middle of the center truss where the bridge operator opened the bridge to let boats through. The bridge was unlit making it dark and spooky at night. We were always telling the girls scary stories about hobos who hid in the bridge shack; saying they would sneak up from behind and push us off if they had a chance. It made the girls want to stay close and hold hands after hearing those tales. They probably didn’t believe any of that nonsense it just gave them an excuse to get closer. For some reason girls like holding hands, like they are being led somewhere, or being led astray.

  After we’d hung out together a few weeks, we created a hiding spot along the side of the railroad tracks using the long grass and old railroad ties to shelter us. The fort was camouflaged so we could use it to drink booze and make-out with our new girlfriends. One night we got a hold of some peppermint Schnapps and beer from a guy we called Howie-the-homo and got the girls drunk and acting silly. Howie was a short, balding man in his thirties. He looked like dirty and grubby most of the time because he worked at the foundry, he wore clothes that didn’t fit and he didn’t shave every day, so he constantly had a whisker shadow on his face. He liked young boys. We used him to get us beer, booze, or whatever else we wanted. We knew he was a pervert and were mean and nasty to him for being one. We might have been young, but we weren’t stupid when it came to guys like Howie. If he started putting the moves on us we threatened him with consequences.

  One summer night when a car full of us boys from the neighborhood were riding around with Howie and he put his hand on Mitch’s leg, so we retaliated by throwing the knobs to his radio and heaters out the car windows. We told him we’d find something else to throw out the window if he didn’t stop acting like a pervert. We didn’t believe he would ever intentionally harm us.

  The night we got the booze, I was making-out with Kim. A few minutes into our hot and heavy kissing session she started complaining of feeling sick. I didn’t want to hear such nonsense and we continued kissing. Not more than a minute later she suddenly threw-up a nasty brew of Schna
pps and beer right down my throat. I jumped up from under her like I had just been stung by a bee, coughing and spitting the nasty stuff out of my mouth and throat. I couldn’t help but swallow some. Lucky for me, I didn’t notice any chunks—it was mostly a disgusting brew of ingested alcohol. She was totally embarrassed and wanted to go home directly after her vomitus episode. I understood and assured her I wouldn’t hold it against her.

  After that experience, if a girl told me she was sick, I vowed to move myself out of puking range. Fast! I didn’t hear from her for a few days. Her friend told Lenny she didn’t know if she could even look at me again because she felt so embarrassed. Then when she called, I told her to forget about it—I thought it was kind of funny.

  I broke up with her a few months after we met because her big brother was always threatening to kick my ass. I couldn’t figure out why. I never did anything to him. Like most tough guys, I think he wanted to impress me with his bad-ass attitude. Kim lived in a tough area of town too and I got tired of dealing with all the drama that went with dating her and hanging out at her house in that neighborhood. A short time later I met another girl named Lydia. At fourteen, older boys couldn’t keep their eyes off her when she walked by. She had been a girlfriend of many in the neighborhood and was considered an easy lay. I didn’t care about that. I liked her instantly and so did most of my buddies. She was a true party girl and lots of fun so she fit in well.

  ****

  A year had passed since we’d moved into the lake house. When one day my Uncle Seth came driving down our long driveway in an old 1960, white, two-door Cadillac. He had wired a pair of bullhorns to the front grill. It was a sight to be seen. I had to laugh when I saw that. Seth really knew how to get attention—always adding a sense of fun—mystery and adventure to everything he did. I think it had been a couple years since I’d seen him. When he got out of the car I swear he stood six foot-five. He looked bigger than I remembered him being. Sporting a Stetson hat, he still had that marijuana bud earring dangling from his ear. When we made eye contact he asked me if I’d been thrown in the river lately, then laughed and looked away. He came looking for my father and wondered if he could hang his hat at the house for a while. The old man was glad to see him and fixed him up with some space in the unfinished part of the upstairs. Seth could use an exterior door and the metal stairway that led to the ground level so he could come and go as he pleased. At the same time Seth moved in, the old man agreed to let me get a beagle puppy. The pup was only a few weeks old and needed to be house broken. It seemed like those first few days he peed everywhere and the peeing made my old man start to think it had been a mistake letting me keep it.

  One day he was standing in the kitchen smoking a cigarette; he looked down and said, “Well Buster, where are you going to pee today?” Little Buster straddled the old man’s right shoe and peed right on top of his foot. With the soaker he gave the old man, I thought for sure that dog was going to be airborne and I was going to get chewed out good, but the old man just swore at him and shook him off his shoe. Then he started laughing and said, “Well, I asked him, and I guess he showed me!” The old man seemed to be happier in the new house. As if he had proved to the world that a man with disabilities could compete and win.

  As the weeks turned into months we started to learn more mysteries about the house. We learned from the owner, who’d built it, that those vented interior bedroom doors had come from an old ship that had sailed on the high seas. That explained the numbers painted on the doors, but not other strange occurrences. The ship had been taken over by pirates sailing between Florida and Cuba. The pirates used the vessel for transporting illegal contraband which was then seized by the US government and sold at auction. The retired contractor traveled to Florida in winter and bought the doors at an auction.

  Anything could have happened on that ship before it had been seized. Many of the other materials used to build the house came from other old houses too. The contractor who’d built the house did all the work himself and used a conglomeration of used materials he’d scavenged for a bargain here and there. Even at that, it was a well-built and very nice house. Jake, the youngest boy, started seeing strange people in the house when he was the only one there. After a while he and Jenifer believed they were seeing ghosts. When we sat around the fire at night talking, Joanna, Jack, and I discussed that maybe someone was murdered on the ship and the doors harbored some sort of evil spirit that only came out when there was only one person in the house.

  My new junior high school turned out to be an adventure in humility, at least for me. Physical education classes required swimming as part of the curriculum. I thought it was going to be kind of weird my first time in the pool because I was told by fellow classmates that boys never wore swimming trunks. They said the physical education teacher claimed it took too long to get changed into swim trunks. I didn’t believe it at first, thinking everyone was just trying to pull a fast one on me.

  The first day I had a swimming class I couldn’t believe they actually made us swim naked. I felt funny running around the pool naked in front of a bunch of strange dudes, everyone looking at each other and comparing the size of their dicks. Jokes flew around the pool about how it was real embarrassing if a guy had a hard-on. Swimming with no trunks felt wrong, but adults obviously knew it was being done and they didn’t seem to care. That kind of behavior would never happen in the world today, but in the free love era, perversion and child pornography didn’t seem as important as it is now. I liked to think the physical education teacher was just an old pervert like Howie who was obsessed by looking at the swinging dicks of teen age boys. I heard that it had been going on like that for years. Didn’t they discuss that stuff at PTA meetings? I couldn’t believe swimming naked in school would be acceptable to parents.

  As if swimming in the raw wasn’t bad enough, the first few weeks when I walked through the halls between classes I got punched in the stomach by the biggest guy in school. I couldn’t figure out why he did it—other than he was just a bully. Then I started getting harassed by others for being the new kid.

  School tough guys liked to harass me; the girls in the hip group giggled about it all and called me stupid names. After I endured almost six months of bullying and abuse, payback was just around the corner. On a beautiful sunny spring day, a tall stupid looking kid threatened me during industrial arts class with a steel mill file. He attempted to run the file between my legs and up my ass. I caught the tool in my hand before he had a chance to actually humiliate me. As I turned around to see who was assaulting me, our eyes met. At that moment he challenged me to a fight in the park after school. Because I never did anything about the bullying everyone thought I was a wimp. They thought I could easily be whipped or would end up running home scared, crying for my mama.

  They didn’t know about all the hidden anger that was buried deep inside trying to bubble up to the surface. They didn’t know about the whippings I had suffered at home for all those years. They didn’t know the old man was grooming me to be some sort of serious ass-kicker. I was ready to lash-out. My buttons had finally been pushed too far. I was ready to destroy someone, anyone who dared hurt me. My mind was filled with a dark voice of seething hate and rage, my shadow or dark side wanted to kill someone. Just beneath the surface I could feel the time-bomb ready to explode. I agreed to the fight and I had made up my mind I was going to totally destroy that punk and forever end all the bullying I had been putting up with. The whole school was looking forward to seeing that punk kick my ass. It was the buzz in the hallways all day long. Little did they know I had already won the fight in my mind, all I had to do was make it a reality.

  I was finally going to unload almost fifteen years of built up anger onto that cocksuckers face and I couldn't wait for it happen. The fun and games for that punk were about to end.

  When the school bell rang, everyone headed for the park to watch the big fight. I was already waiting for the bully down the street with nothing but pure adren
aline pumping through my veins. I felt like I felt when I kicked that dog in the old neighborhood. The Roman soldiers appeared briefly in my mind and I felt strong. As he approached me, I could see the insecurity in his walk and sense his false bravado. I became cool and relaxed because I knew he was the one in trouble. He walked up to me, got right in my face and started boasting about all the damage he was going to do to me. I just looked at him like he was some sort of a fool. As he stood in my personal space, nose to nose, jacking his jaw—I stepped back and with every ounce of energy I could muster—I smacked him hard in the mouth. I landed another solid blow to the other side of his head with a combination of punches. I just kept firing shots at his big ugly head until he was disoriented and confused. He never knew what hit him; he never even had the chance to hit me once. He didn't know where to turn or what to do, so he started running away down the sidewalk.

  I wasn’t going to let that cocksucker off that easy, so I ran up behind him and kicked him square in the ass the same way my old man had kicked me so many times—yelling at the top of my lungs, "Don't you ever fuck with me again!" Then I turned to the crowd with a look of insanity in my eyes. “Anyone else got a fucking problem?” I yelled. They all looked at me like I was some sort of madman and backed away. I turned and started walking home, pushing my way through the crowd reveling in my victory—feeling a total sense of relief. Years of tension had been released. It felt incredible. This would be the beginning of my revenge against a society of inconsiderate assholes. Bullies were number one on my list. They would be taken down without mercy.

  The next day at school, the kids treated me like a human being—instead of a punching bag. Even the want-to-be-tough-guys gave me respect as they eased aside when I walked down the halls. I was still pissed off at having had to endure such nonsense for so long and had put out a school wide challenge to take-on anyone who thought they could whip my ass. Nobody stepped up to my challenge. That fight would become the talk of the school for months.