The Shooting

by James Boice

  —I was the executive in charge of the four-hundred-million-dollar family trust, his father is saying. —Back then, that was a lot of money. I was in over my head and didn’t know what I was doing, and I got in trouble with a stock trade. I worked out a deal, testified against some guys to get off lightly, but I still had to do a year in prison. My prison wasn’t exactly your prison. This wasn’t Rikers. It was a white-collar facility in Oklahoma, and we only had to be there Monday through Friday. Weekends I had me a little condo in town. I used to wander around, going to honky-tonk bars, rodeos, this and that. I liked it. They made us do landscaping at a golf course, digging sand traps and mowing grass. I liked that too. It wasn’t New York City. New York City ain’t real life. This, I thought, was real life. So from prison I bought some land sight unseen—mistake—and had a house built on it and moved you and your mother out from New York. And when I got out I joined you. But on my way out of town, I went into a department store and bought some dungarees and a cowboy shirt, a cowboy hat, some underwear, and that old secondhand gun. I bought it because it looked like something Clint Eastwood would have. His father whistles the first few notes of the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. —The guys I’d testified against were pissed. They were wannabe mafiosos. But all they ever did was send some goons out to the house to kill some of my chickens.

  —It wasn’t chickens, Lee says, —it was pigs.

  —Couldn’t have been. We didn’t have pigs.

  —Sure we did.

  —Pigs are too much trouble. They root around, dig their way out, eat anything and anybody. We didn’t have them. We had a dairy cow. Some chickens. No pigs.

  As Lee tries to argue about this, his father chuckles and points to another picture, one of Lee poking his head out the door of the barn and grinning from ear to ear. —I love this one. Lee peers close at it. His face is not swollen, there is nothing oozing. His eye is completely white and healthy. Lee feels dizzy.

  His father leads him farther in, saying, —I’d offer you a beer or something, but I don’t have any Pop okay?

  Lee sits at the kitchen table and takes his son out of the car seat as his father comes back with sodas. He asks Lee if he may hold him. Lee lets him. He holds the baby far out from himself and stares at him silently. —Hello, he says. The TV is on in the other room, Lee can hear it. Live coverage of the latest.

  Lee says, opening his soda, —No beer, huh?

  —Not for me these days, no.

  —Drying out after Santa Fe? Lee says with derision. The latest sure to be short-lived attempt to ease up, get a handle on it.

  —More like one day at a time.

  His father gets up and carries the baby to the kitchen, digs around in a drawer, returns with something in his hand. Drops them on the table. Lee doesn’t know what they are.

  —AA chips, his father says. —Three years’ worth. As Lee examines them for evidence of forgery, his father sits back down and says, —Right now I don’t miss it. But I sure did when you were calling from jail.

  Lee can’t believe what he’s hearing.

  —Look, I made mistakes with you that I learned from. I’m sorry that’s the way it had to be.

  —So coming to help your son, your grandson, that would have been a mistake?

  —For me, yeah. Yeah, it would have.

  Lee hands him the chips back, says nothing. And they sit there watching the baby, listening to the TV.

  At last his father says, —Hate to say it, but she tapped into something heinous.

  Lee looks at his father. For a moment, he thinks he’s talking about his mother before he realizes whom he really means.

  —What did she expect would happen? I don’t condone it, but what did she expect? It’s only going to get nastier. You need to protect yourself, if you aren’t doing so already.

  —A guard at Rikers said he was going to kill me.

  —There you go. What are you going to do?

  Lee says, —I don’t know. My lawyer says I ain’t out of the woods, that I should be heading somewhere they don’t extradite right now.

  —Are you going to?

  —I don’t know. Makes me sick, the thought of being run out of my country.

  —An outlaw, his father says grimly. —Like Jesse James.

  —Jesse James never had to leave the country, did he?

  His father shrugs. —You have protection?

  Lee does not answer.

  —Come on.

  His father takes him downstairs to the basement. Leather furniture, plush rug, and glass cases containing guns. Now this is as Lee remembers, but there are even more of them now, much more, there seems to be hundreds of them, from old one-shot muskets to fully automatic tactical weapons.

  —I always buy one or two more every time she goes on TV spewing her bile across the earth. Then I send her a note telling her so. Guess now I’ll have to send someone else the note. I’ve bought five since what happened to you. Here, take one of them.

  He pulls off the wall a brand-new polymer semiautomatic pistol, hands it to Lee. It is a more powerful firearm than the old gun, it holds more rounds, it fires more accurately, it is smaller, easier to conceal. It requires less maintenance and attention, demands less skill and care. Aesthetic pleasure rushes up Lee’s arm into his body. He wants this gun. He wants to hold it in his hand forever because it feels perfect there. Like an extension of himself. But he tries to hand it back. —I don’t want it.

  —Doesn’t matter. You need it. His father says to the baby, —And when you’re a bit bigger your daddy’ll teach you how to use it. He’ll teach you about safety and responsibility and independence. He’ll pass on the traditions. The values. He looks up at Lee as though to ask, Won’t you?

  When he leaves his father’s house he is very tired and his son needs to eat and sleep, so he finds a motel. He gives a fake name, pays with cash. He locks the door, jams the chair under the knob, and feeds his son, gives him a bath, sings him to sleep. And then he stays up all night, moving the bed so he can sit with his back against the wall facing the door, new gun in his hand, loaded. He starts at every noise he hears out there, feeling them coming for him, hearing his son breathe. He is ready to do whatever it takes, whatever he must to keep his son breathing, even if it means never leaving this room. The night gets darker and quieter. When it’s darkest and quietest, he hears whispers outside. They are right outside the window, right outside the door. They are here in the room. Right behind him. They are all around. Remember the trees? they hiss. Remember Violet? Remember a boyhood that never was? Remember? Remember? And he does, he remembers it all. And then he remembers one last thing: what his father said today in the basement, the question he seemed to ask. Won’t you? And he realizes it was not a question at all.

  And he realizes it never was.

  12

  THE NUCLEAR OPTION

  —spits in her face. He spits in her face. In an airport he walks up to a woman he does not know, who is simply doing what she believes is right for the safety of the American people, and doing it within the mechanisms of the democratic process, and he spits in her face. It is gooey, coffee-caramel color tinged with nicotine-phlegm yellow. The cholesterol and trans fat excretion of a dying species. It slides down her forehead over her closed eyelids as all her fellow travelers watch in horror, come help her, and hold him for the police—ha, yeah, no, they don’t do shit, they pretend not to even see, faces buried in their phones, while the man walks off without a word, if you can call him a man.

  Something in her breaks. It breaks. It is not the first time a man has spit on her—spit does not bother her, nothing does—but this time it makes her suddenly aware of how tired she is and how long she has been doing this, and how shredded she still is from Michelle a decade later. This is it, she realizes. She has taken it as far as she can. New York will be the final one.

  She gets up and gropes her way blind, loogie burning her eyes, to the Auntie Anne’s for a napkin, wipes it off, crying out in disg
ust so even if they will not see they have to hear. Then she gets on her plane, lands in New York, tries to help the Kabedes; they will not help her, they embarrass her, get in her way, would prefer to keep everything how it is, this will not do, and she can still smell the man’s phlegm on her face, can still hear him call her a cunt as he walked off. If she does not act the NRA and the myth of guns will not even be dinged after Clayton, the shooting of Clayton Kabede will be forgotten and the country will keep limping along, bleeding and broken and sick and infectious, its most vital parts falling off the wind.

  She has not gotten us as far as she has by being kind or even being a good person. She has tried that tactic. After Michelle, she wasted years being nice and taking the high road and appealing to the best of us. Making a difference does not take those things—it takes war. In wars they have no time for traitors—they execute them and move on. They punish those who are enlisted but refuse to fight. And those two, the parents, they were enlisted, they have been called on by their nation to fight for it but they refuse to fight for it, and so maybe it is not their nation after all. The night after 60 Minutes, once she calms down by pounding the shit out of a treadmill in the hotel gym, she calls a late-night strategy session with Howard and Maureen, who dials in from Chicago.

  —Howard, she says, wiping at her face again and again, expecting the spit to still be there because she can feel it, —look at their papers.

  Howard does, says they are fine. She tells Howard to look again. He looks again. The papers are legit. Jenny tells Maureen she needs money to hire a consultant.

  —For what? Maureen says.

  Jenny says, —To look at their papers.

  Maureen says, —Jenny, no, enough, I won’t be part of this, leave them alone.

  Jenny throws a fit, Maureen relents, okays the hiring of a former CIA agent to pick apart the documents. The former CIA agent is not a good man and Jenny does not know what he does to the documents, but he comes back confirming Jenny’s hunch—it is not the Kabedes’ nation after all. That is why they will not fight for it. She tries to have someone at RSA send in the tip to Homeland Security, making it appear like it is coming from the NRA, but no one will push the button to release the bomb, no one has the courage that she has, no one has the balls, no one has the cunt, apparently she will have to fight the whole damn thing herself—plan the war, fight the war, win the war.

  She pulls the trigger on the bomb, the United States cruelly does the bidding of the immensely powerful, moneyed, entrenched, ruthless National Rifle Association, in whose pocket it sits, and deports those two honest, hardworking Americans even in their time of unspeakable grief following a horrific tragedy. Social media picks it up; it becomes established fact that it was the NRA, emphasizes in spectacular fashion the bottomless, dehumanizing destructiveness of the group and the urgent need for voters to eradicate its influence over society, garners more support for Repeal the Second Amendment, the ammo tax. When that man in the airport was emptying the bowels of his lungs onto her face, support in New York for the ammo tax was polling at 51-49 opposed. Today, as the parents walk into the courthouse after Jenny "crossed the line," it is now 53-47 in favor.

  Victory at the Battle of New York City.

  When she hears about the grand jury decision, she finds herself going to Fisher’s building, bringing with her an ocean of repealists. They march down Seventh Avenue, police flanking them, NOT ONE MORE, their signs say. —Not one more, they shout. Other contingents of protestors have shut down the Manhattan Bridge, the Holland Tunnel. The mayor has declared a state of emergency. The National Guard is here, the state police, the SWAT team, counterterror platoons with armored personnel carriers with the sand of Iraq still in the tires. Jenny and the protestors overtake the block. She climbs atop a car and speaks to them through a bullhorn. They await her word to burn down the city in retribution. The system is broken, the system is guilty as hell—nothing to do now but smash and loot. She puts the bullhorn to her face. Her skin flashes red and blue from the cop cars. She thinks about Clayton’s father.

  —When word came, she begins, —that the grand jury reached its decision, I did not join the rest of you to watch La Cuzio’s press conference, I did not need to, I knew what it would be. All the commentators and experts said of course the grand jury would indict. A gun death in New York City? Of course it would. This is not Middle America, for crying out loud, we are better than that here; whatever is the matter with them is not the matter with us, the grand jury will indict, no question, if not on homicide then at least on the gun. But I knew better. Geography is irrelevant. The myth does not respect state lines. The myth does not even respect whether or not you see through it. Because the myth knows you need it. You need it. New York needs the myth just like Indiana needs it, and Kentucky, and Texas. It gets us through the day so we can get through our lives. Without it we could not bear to breathe, without it, if we were to look at ourselves in the mirror, we would be unable to bear it. America is the myth. We had a choice: get rid of Fisher and the myth or keep him. I did not need to watch to know how we had decided. We decided it long ago: We keep him. We always keep him. We keep Lee Fisher and we throw away Clayton Kabede, we trade a boy for a myth, that is what we do and we do it gladly, proudly, every single time.

  In the distance there is a black Hummer with an eagle painted on the side fighting its way through the crowds, as deep as it can get, and then it stops and out of it climb several men in black Kevlar with walkie-talkies and night-vision goggles dangling from their belts, scowling around with affected big-dick swagger like, she thinks, little girls imitating boys. They stare at her, flip her off. They look at each other, and one nudges another and whispers something to him, and this one’s face is very pale and tight as he reaches back into the truck and comes out with something, then climbs into the truck’s bed and raises the black plastic semiautomatic rifle to her, peering through the scope.

  The police do not seem to see. She could say something, she could duck and move—she does not. Though he is a hundred feet away she can hear him breathing through his nose, can smell the cigarette smoke on his breath and see down inside his barrel. Michelle is in it. Michelle, curled up like a circus performer to be shot out of a cannon, her arms extended to reach out toward her, her happy, excited face: Here I come, Mommy... She stares at Michelle. She opens her arms. She opens them to Michelle but also to the bullet. She says to Michelle, —We choose the myth. And it’s killing us. But if I can leave you all with one thing to take from this, it is that we do not have to. We do not—

  He pulls the trigger.

  That night, the city burns. The gunshots burst like drums across its skyline. They beat all night, in the flames and the flow of the stars and the fading skyscraper lights. In the end the fires are dead and the lights are out and all you can hear are gunshots, they never end, even when the ammo is gone.

  JAMES BOICE is the author of three previous novels, MVP, NoVA, and The Good and the Ghastly, all published by Scribner. His work has appeared in Esquire, McSweeney’s, Salt Hill, Fiction Magazine, and Salon, among other places. In 2006 he was selected as the New Voice in the Esquire 100. He lives in Jersey City, NJ. Credit: PHOTO BY MICHAEL TUREK

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