The Tarnished Shooter

by Charles James

  We worked like slaves on those jobs for basically minimum wage. Dusty made Clem the foremen which I couldn’t believe because Clem was a lousy carpenter and only interested in his weekly paycheck. Clem went to the bar just about every night and came to work with a hangover, making him even more useless. Dusty gave him bonuses and loans he never had to pay back, while I straightened out all the fuck ups on the jobs. Dusty started having parties at his house now that he was making all kinds of money. He felt the need to have bigger and better parties than we had had at the lake house. Everyone ended up drunk, and Dusty’s wife started making eyes at Clem. They became lovers and started sneaking off to secret rendezvous at motel rooms. Dusty got wind of the affair between his wife and his could-do-no-wrong foremen and threatened to kill Clem if he ever laid eyes on him again. After that Clem and Dusty avoided each other like the plague. It seemed like everybody’s world was turning upside down. To screw another man’s wife was about as daring as one could get. To Clem it was one big joke. Something he could snicker about while swilling beer at his favorite bar.

  Dusty had a greedy side to him and he failed to pay his material bills at lumber yards and suppliers he had business accounts with. Eventually everybody cut off his credit and demanded payment in full for the materials.

  He didn’t have the money to pay off the debts so judgments were filed in small claims court. The Louisiana smooth talking tough-guy ended up filing for bankruptcy and his aluminum siding days were over. It didn’t seem to matter though. A few weeks later he went into the auto body repair business doing the work in his garage. With his silver tongue he was able to get customers to believe in his car fixing expertise. He eventually used some of the same con game tactics he’d used for the siding business. Customers paid money upfront expecting quality workmanship only to receive excuses for why they couldn’t get their car fixed or their money back.

  Dusty tried everything, but his life, like most who’d hung out at the lake house, was slowly falling apart. His wife had been unfaithful. She was running around with Clem. He’d failed at all of his business ventures. He finally threw in the towel and divorced his wife then left his four kids behind and went into hiding by going back to his home state of Louisiana. It would be years later before I’d run into him again.

  Somehow Jack and I managed to put a patch on the gun incident and never brought up the subject again. It would take me thirty years to realize I owed him an apology. A big Box Elder tree had blown down right next to the house. Jack and I chopped that tree up with nothing more than muscle, sweat, and a double bit axe. We chopped at that thing for hours each day until it was finally nothing but a pile of firewood. Turns out even after all the shit I pulled on him we still had the same brotherly respect for each other. And then I got into more trouble.

  My buddy, Clem, a friend of his, and I, went out for what was supposed to be just a few beers on a Friday night. It turned into an all-night party. When the bars closed down at two in the morning Clem suggested we cruise around and find some action. We were driving around town when Clem saw a warehouse he knew was full of appliances. He and I had delivered things there a few years ago when we were working at the trucking company. He acted like there might have been a pot of gold left there by some mysterious little leprechauns. I knew there was nothing in there worth risking prison time. He didn’t care, he wanted to see what he could steal, without much effort he kicked in the door and looked around a bit before he stole a set of keys and a medium sized TV set. He thought he had victoriously gotten away with another crime. He laughed about it as we drove off. We came to our driveway a few minutes later a bit nervous and smoking cigarettes. Just as we were making the turn into the driveway, we were cut off by a cop with his red lights flashing. A silent alarm system in the warehouse had tipped off the cops. They were looking around the area for anything or anybody suspicious. We knew we were fucked as soon as we saw those red lights.

  The cops were always watching the Barker house to see who came and went. The cop got out of his car with his flashlight in his hand and looked in the windows of Clem’s buddy’s car. The surveying flashlight revealed a pathetic looking TV set sitting on the back seat. The three of us got busted right there for burglary and we were hauled off to the county jail.

  I saw the same puce green walls, the same jailors—and experienced the same nauseating bullshit that I’d known before in the county jail. A few days later Clem’s buddy got his charges reduced to a misdemeanor theft charge. His folks had lots of money and the district attorney figured he just got in with the wrong element. Clem and I, both having histories with the cops were charged with burglary. I was about to turn twenty-one. Now I was going to be a felon because of some bullshit my idiot buddy Clem instigated again. It never ended with that guy; he was bound and determined to ruin his life, as well as everyone else’s who hung around him—I never saw it coming until it was always too late.

  I plead no-contest to the charge fearing a few years of prison time if I had to try and convince a jury I was innocent. The burglary conviction netted me ninety days in jail, and three years of probation plus restitution with psychological counseling. I was convicted because I was at the scene when Clem did the deed. The thing that bothered me most was that the value of the TV that was taken was virtually worthless. What was the point in hanging a felony conviction on me other than to take away some of my civil rights for the rest of my life?

  A ploy used by most prosecutors to give them leverage for the next time a poor guy fucks up. Once you're a felon, it’s easy to hang on other charges to make you appear to be a menace to society.

  Now I would get to spend the rest of my life with bad military paper and a criminal past. “Yippee!” I learned the hard way—in the real world nobody gets a gold star for being a good little boy, but whenever a mistake or two is made—people just want to destroy you. Look out! They want to see you burn in hell. All this made me even angrier than I already was. As I got older, I realized my luck would run out and I might end up in one of those prison rat holes, so, I vowed to change my ways.

  While I was out on bail awaiting my trial for the burglary, I enrolled in technical school to take classes to learn how to be a machinist—just like my father had been. Once I went to court, I was able to get privileges so I could go to school from jail. In jail there were only three other guys who also had work release privileges. We spent our weekends in jail playing cards and the week days going to work, or in my case, going to school.

  Jail this time didn’t seem so bad since I could get out during the week and spend time in school instead of arguing with a bunch of jailhouse idiots twenty four hours a day. I had one of the students in my class buy a small bottle of brandy which I kept in my wall locker at the technical school. I didn’t need much, but there were days when a sip was just enough to take the edge off the anxiety. I made friends easily at the school and had my eye on an attractive woman also in the machinist course. We became good friends and had made a date to go out once I was released from jail. Time went fast and I was soon out of jail. On the night the woman and I were to go out it was a freezing night in December and most of the roads were glazed with patches of black ice. I was elated and half drunk driving on country roads going to pick her up. I hit speeds of seventy-five miles per hour. On a curve I lost control of the car, the car spun around in circles and it seemed like an eternity before it finally came to a stop. Lucky for me the car stayed in the center of the road.

  When the car finally stopped spinning, I sat there in amazement. I couldn’t figure out why the car hadn’t left the road and found a ditch to rollover into or a tree to hit. I guess it was another blessing or maybe just dumb luck. Once my sense of direction returned I decided to just go back home. I took the experience as a kind of message not to push my luck. With so many things going on at the time I soon lost interest in pursuing the woman.

  I graduated from the machinist courses, three months after I got out of jail. I went out seeking a job and to my
amazement got hired a few weeks later as a lathe operator. The day I got hired, some old machinist said to me, “The only thing you know about being a machinist is what a lathe looks like.” I could have belted that old man right in the chops for that remark. I studied hard and worked my ass off to learn everything there was about being a machinist and I thought his snide remark was uncalled for. It sounded like bullying to me. The first thing I had to do when I reported for work was to clean up some old lathe. It looked to me like I was probably the first one in twenty years to clean up that old piece of crap. After a few weeks, I found I didn't like production work and I hated being chained up inside to a big noisy machine all day especially in the spring and summer. I quit that job and vowed never to work in an environment controlled by buzzers and time clocks again. I was a man, not a robot. I knew where I belonged and went about seeking a new path.

  I had always wanted to build houses, so I started looking for a job as a carpenter. Being outdoors, swinging a hammer all day appealed to me. I had liked doing aluminum siding jobs for Dusty, even if he wasn’t a good businessman. I figured I had enough experience to get hired by someone else.

  With so much building going on it didn’t take long to find a job as a carpenter building apartment buildings. In time one of my favorite construction jobs was to nail sheeting down on the rafters or trusses. I could spend all day sitting on the roof pounding eight penny nails while daydreaming at the same time feeling good about what I had accomplished for the day. The work kind of reminded me of being in the Marines when we built landing zones for the Harrier jet. I traveled around getting construction jobs here and there, but never really fit in anywhere. I allowed my hot headed nature to get the better of me; then I would get fired or just walk off the job. I was on a path to nowhere and kept running into the same problems at every job I got.

  My Marine Corps experiences and my street smarts made me skeptical of everything and everybody, especially the do-gooders. They always had ulterior motives for their self-righteousness. The people who were supposed to love and protect me showed me nothing but contempt, and my friends were all back stabbers, narcissists, or sociopaths. Carpentry work seemed like the only thing that was real in my life. At the end of the day I could actually see what I had accomplished.

  I was ineligible to work as a government employee. I couldn’t be a cop or anything that required carrying a gun. I didn’t think I could have any kind of career that required a professional license. All I could do now was semi-skilled or skilled labor, I guess I could have been thought of as a loser.

  I started to think of all that gun training I had. It was all useless. Now I was forced to walk around in fear of breaking the rules again, thus landing in the bureaucratic nonsense of government corrections. As a felon, I lost all credibility and couldn't even take up arms to defend myself against attacks from other criminals. The felon who has paid his debt to society, but lives in a catch twenty-two world, for he is neither totally free to enjoy life the way the Constitution guaranteed—nor is he really a criminal.

  The strategy from this type of legal wrangling seemed to me like nothing more than a model for control of human flesh. Some serial murderers need to be locked up like rabid dogs, but to strip the rights away from young men forever just because they were causing a bit of mischief on a Friday night is pure nonsense.

  There was nothing I could do about any of those issues anymore. Life must move on, so I remembered all I’d learned about the government systems of control and tried to keep a low profile.

  My current position reminded me of a book I once read by Carlos Castaneda on the teaching of Don Juan. The teaching, though not in these exact words, explained this idea: why should we trust a stranger or our fellow man; he is no different than the hungry cheetah or lion out looking for food for survival. He would just as soon eat you as look at you; he is only looking out for number one. That idea became perfectly cemented in my mind.

  Other than the personal gripes I had with the law, I didn't hold grudges or seek revenge for wrongs done to me. I believed in staying focused on what was important at the moment. I had grown up in a house where petty little things were made into a big deal. I was glad to be out of jail and working. Then I went back to technical school to take my GED exam. I passed the exam with high marks in science. In GED school I finally learned how to do the technical math I needed to know for the electrical equipment repair course I was dropped from in the Marines. It didn’t do any good at the time, but at least I finally understood what I wasn’t able to understand back then. I tried to repair all the damage from the last four years of my life.

  I had big plans and big ideas and I knew I needed some help to make my big ideas into a reality. I started to really get serious and educate myself. I didn’t need a college degree to go to the library and read books.

  I humped along fixing up old cars when I didn’t have a construction job. I spent days tearing engines apart and putting them back together in the garage of the lake house. Sometimes I did auto-body work. I even bought a car painting business from a guy Dusty knew. The business didn’t cost me any money out of pocket. The previous owner just wanted to be free of the responsibilities because he was hired by the post office. I owned and operated that business for a year then got audited by the IRS. After the audit I sold the business for lack of interest in breathing paint fumes for the rest of my life. I made a few bucks, but never really liked working on cars. Then I caught a break after my mother got hired as a cook at a new restaurant opening up in a few weeks. The owner was a free thinker who liked to smoke pot and flirt with his cute kitchen and wait staff. He didn’t care what I had done in the past. He needed a small table that could be used by the waitresses to place orders. The table had to be custom made to fit into a corner at the end of the bar. It had to have a Formica top so it could be cleaned according to health inspection standards.

  I had a table saw that was my old man’s and a few various other wood working tools. It took me a couple of weeks to build the table. It was great to be out in the garage sawing up lumber and assembling the table, putting my own unique touches on the piece. The owner thought I did such a wonderful job he gave me another project. The new project was bigger and more complex, but I was sure I could deliver what he wanted. It took me two months to finish the built-in bedroom wardrobe for his house. I designed and built it with solid oak and oak lumber core plywood. When I went to install the individually constructed compartments they fit perfectly. I was promptly paid for my labor and everyone was happy.

  With the money I’d earned from the wardrobe project I decided to spend two-hundred dollars on a plane ticket to Las Vegas, Nevada. I had always wanted to go and see what sin city was all about, ever since my mother and father drove out there years ago.

  I flew into Las Vegas on a hot Saturday afternoon in the end of June. The city was bustling with people everywhere and the strip was more exciting than I’d imagined. I checked into a forty dollar a night hotel near the action—threw my overnight bag on the bed—and hit the casinos. I had three hundred dollars in cash. It was all that was left after buying my plane tickets and paying for the room. Three hours later I was flat broke. I ended up sitting in my hotel room for the rest of the night, watching TV. Now at least I knew what it took to come to Vegas. To be the high roller I wanted to be, I needed at least a couple thousand dollars to even begin to have some fun.

  The only thing I didn’t gamble on was sports. I began thinking of ways to lead me to the proverbial pot of gold. I liked the idea of windfall riches, the kind of money that comes from putting together big deals for big amounts of cash. I guess everybody does. I thought if I could start a construction company or get into real estate I would make the kind of money I wanted. I looked so young and was a bit inexperienced as a general contractor; I knew it would be a tough sell to try and get a house building gig on my own.

  My fear of dying young made me want immediate gratification. I wanted everything now. I was willing to try just a
bout anything. For fast money I started scrounging around for scrap metal to sell. Clem and I learned there were copper vats used for brewing beer in the old abandoned breweries. We went into the old buildings and stripped all the copper we could haul out without getting busted. It was hard and risky work and eventually we quit doing it because word of our enterprise was getting out. We were being watched too closely by the cops.

  Chapter 22

  Leland, and his girlfriend, Michelle, were hot in love. They were key players leading a group of socially accepted misfits, guitar players and party girls. The two attractive young lovers planned a big party at the lake house to celebrate his eighteenth birthday. He was legally old enough to drink, so he ordered up five barrels of beer weeks ahead and invited everyone we ever knew from the social outcasts to the squeaky clean types to the party. It was the talk of the town as people waited for the day to arrive.

  When party day finally came, people came to spend the day and night drinking around a bonfire. Once the bonfire was going strong and the birthday celebration was under way, it didn’t take long before the nosey neighbors across the street called the cops. The cops came with the fire department to demand the bonfire be extinguished. The partiers couldn’t see any reason why the bonfire was causing such a problem so they revolted; a couple of ring leaders assaulted and disrespected an officer by throwing beer at him. The angry partiers united and threatened to do whatever it took to keep the cops from stomping on their rights as free citizens enjoying Leland’s birthday. Michelle was famous for her outgoing nature. Most couldn’t get a word in edgewise when she started in. Before long she was leading the angry mob.