by Thomas Melo
Conversely, he felt that if he let on to his father that he wasn’t interested in hunting, but that maybe they could still go down to the shooting range and still shoot together, that his dad would still be a bit disappointed that his son had chosen to omit the ancient rite of passage from his life. Little did Tyler know: his father wouldn’t have cared in the least; he would simply find another activity they both could share together. Communication could solve so much unnecessary unpleasantness.
“I mean shoot it with the bb gun, silly,” Lilith explained.
Immediately, Tyler thought of his father’s dark story about the rabbit when Ray was his son’s age. He told his son about how he saw a rabbit in his mother’s garden gnawing on one of his mother’s plants and how he had taken aim with his own pellet gun and fired at it. Ray wasn’t nearly as good of a shot as Tyler was but he had hit it nonetheless. The pellet tore into the rabbit’s hind quarters and it toppled over on its side with a sustained piercing screech that summoned Ray’s father (Tyler’s grandpa) on the quick. Ray had told his son that he immediately dropped his rifle and pressed his palms to his ears, not only because of how surprisingly loud the penetrating shrieks were, shrieks that could conceivably drive a boy crazy, but he actually felt, in his youth, that if he plugged his ears tight enough, the recollection of doing such a thing to this rabbit would simply bounce off of his hands rather than enter his head, where it would reside with him for decades.
Ray’s father had come rushing out of the house, thinking that his son had had an accident with the air rifle that his mother was so against from the beginning, just like her future daughter in-law, Cindy. Once Ray’s father was relieved to see that both of his son’s eyes were still safe and secure in their respective sockets, he allowed himself to become a little annoyed with little Ray.
“What the hell are you doing, Ray!?” Ray’s father bellowed.
“I-I-I didn’t think that I would h-hit h-him!” Ray answered his father through both of his hands, which were covering his mouth as if he was blowing his nose with an invisible tissue.
What happened next is the other half of the baggage the rabbit incident had supplied Ray Swanson, the rabbit’s screaming being the first half of the hefty load.
“Well, Swansons don’t start anything that we can’t finish. Put him out of his misery, Ray,” his father ordered.
“I don’t want to do that!” Ray argued.
“It’s the least you can do after shooting him. It’s either that or he’ll continue to holler himself to death. Do him a favor, Ray,” Ray’s father reasoned, starting off stern and ending with an underlying sympathy in his tone.
Ray saw his father’s point and did what had to be done. He ran up to his room to quietly sob into a pillow while his father disposed of the rabbit. For the next few days, Ray hated his father for making him kill the rabbit; but hadn’t Ray done that already? Did Ray really believe that if he left the rabbit alone that eventually it would stop screaming and say, “Well, now that I got that out of my system I’ll be on my way!” and hop off to another yard? No, Ray didn’t think so; not even in his sugar coated juvenile dreams. His father had been right: finishing the job he had started was the most merciful way to go about it.
Later, in his more mature years, when Ray thought about the rabbit incident, he would liken his father’s actions to that of a parent who caught their teenage son smoking and as a punishment had forced them to smoke the entire pack in front of them. A hard lesson to learn, but one you’d never forget.
Tyler didn’t forget either. After hearing his father tell the story, he couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out how someone who tells a story like that could possibly grow up to enjoy hunting.
So, when Lilith had dared Tyler to shoot the squirrel off of the fence with his rifle, he immediately tried to think of ways he could get out of performing such a task–and that’s exactly what it was…performing–and still save some face. His quick wit had failed him and he struggled to say anything.
“Nah, I don’t wanna shoot the rab–uh, the squirrel,” Tyler began with a Freudian slip. “You know I could shoot him if I wanted to. You saw me put a bb right through the “O” in the Coke can, remember? No way I’d miss the fat ass on that thing! Nah, I’m pardoning him. HEY! I PARDON YOU, SQUIRREL!” Tyler joshed at the squirrel in good natured humor, hoping that it was contagious and that Lilith would forget the whole thing.
“Aww, shit; I’ll shoot the stupid thing, if you’re too much of a pussy!” Jayson badgered.
“Oh, shut up, Jay, you couldn’t hit my house!” Tyler shot back with a dismissive wave of his hand. A humiliated Jayson got familiar with how his shoes looked once again.
“Not only that, but Tyler’s gonna do it because I’m going to give him a kiss if he does,” Lilith promised.
Tyler’s heart raced. The tax on his heart was a two-pronged assault: first, the idea that he was slowly but surely succumbing to peer-pressure for not the first, but the second time today. The other factor that was getting his heart into a tizzy was the prospect of having his first kiss with a gorgeous girl (to him, a woman). Lilith was freakishly good looking. Everyone has seen the type of attractive girl about whom people always whisper behind her back regarding her beauty. Lilith had more beauty than that even. Again, they were freakishly good looks.
“Well? What do you say? Deal?” Lilith waited.
Tyler knew he could hold out no longer. All the while he felt himself just inching towards the edge of a precipice, slowly but surely, inch by inch, centimeter by centimeter…femtometer even. Now? Now he was about to swan dive right off into uncharted territory.
Tyler started out as a typical boy who would think absolutely nothing about kicking over an ant hill, burning ants with a magnifying glass, stepping on caterpillars, or hitting lightning bugs out of the air with a whiffle-ball bat and watching them fly across the summer evening sky like shooting stars. Ray would never admit it, but deep down, perhaps even on a subconscious level, he wanted to make sure that killing insects was where it would stop with his son. He didn’t want Tyler to have a “rabbit incident” of his own to pass down to his son one day. Yes…this coming from an avid hunter. Everyone allows for a certain degree of hypocrisy to reside within themselves.
After the story of the rabbit incident was rehashed in his mind, Tyler had felt so bad for this rabbit, dead for perhaps thirty years at this point, that he swore off killing the minutest of God’s creatures, including insects. Tyler hated spiders, but would still muster up enough strength and unadorned sympathy to coax it into a cup and let it free outside. His father would always laugh to himself when he saw this. The real laugh was how a man notices this temperament in his son and thinks that someday he’ll get him to go hunting! That, my friends, was the laugh of all.
“Ok. Ok, I’ll do it,” Tyler conceded; but he wasn’t happy about it. No, Lilith and Jayson both understood that this was a real chore. Nonetheless, a triumphant smirk breached the surface of her countenance, but only slightly.
Tyler pumped the rifle a few times to make sure that the shot would be at full power–he wasn’t going to have a rabbit incident of his own, no sir–so that the shot would most likely kill the squirrel outright instead of wounding it. Tyler raised the rifle butt against his shoulder and steadied the rifle in his hands as he peered through the scope. He could see through the telescopic sighting scope that the squirrel was enjoying an acorn on Tyler’s fence. Tyler closed his eyes in premature mourning. “Am I really gonna do this?” Tyler wrestled this thought out of his head at once and conceded that the quicker it was done…well…it would be done. He had the squirrel’s head dead center in the scope’s cross-hairs. He sucked in a breath, held it, and squeezed the trigger which, to him, felt heavier than ever.
Chapter 6
PFFFT! A sharp blast of compressed air turned the idle bb resting in the Sure-Fire’s chamber into a destructive projectile traveling across the Swanson’s backyard at no less than six-hundred feet per s
econd. Tyler’s view inside the sighting scope yielded almost immediate results after he squeezed the trigger. What he saw was a quick puff of red-stained fur lackadaisically float to the ground well after the lifeless body of the squirrel fell to the grass on their side of the fence with a meaty thump.
“Whoa! Nice shot! I knew you’d get it. See Jayson? That’s how you shoot!” Lilith celebrated.
Jayson and Tyler said nothing. Tyler felt immediate remorse for what he had done. He felt beyond appalled.
“I guess I owe you a little somethin’ somethin’, huh?” Lilith reminded him...as if he had forgotten. The disgusting and cruel irony of it was that at this point, the way he was feeling, he didn’t even want the kiss anymore, but the more practical (or perhaps darker) side of himself said that he did the horrible deed, and he might as well get what he was promised for it. The alternative was that he had done that awful act for absolutely nothing at all, and he couldn’t abide that.
“Well? What’re you waiting for, Ty?” Lilith asked.
“Let’s go already. Give him the stupid kiss so we can get the hell out of here, ok?” Jayson said, obviously overcome with jealousy.
Tyler stood still. Lilith took control of the situation and stepped toward Tyler and leaned in. Their lips met. A numbing jolt, which Tyler would always remember for the rest of his life as a nearly unpleasant full-body electric shock surged through him as they embraced; both of them with their eyes closed.
Something had passed between them at that moment. He didn’t know what, but it was most assuredly something virtually profane.
Lilith’s lips were perfectly warm and exquisitely moist, and it was fine. As soon as their lips met, Tyler’s eyelids shot open to see Lilith’s still closed…but then…
But then, Lilith’s eyes slowly crept open to meet Tyler’s gaze, which wasn’t one of lust or pleasure, but of apprehension. Tyler tried to pull away even after the jolt had passed, but when the kiss began, she had her hand around the back of his head, which was now holding him in place.
“Jesus, get a room, you two, would ya? You’re making me fucking sick,” Jayson chimed in once again.
Lilith gave Tyler a simpering wink and released him and he stumbled back a bit and looked at Lilith and then quickly at the ground. Tyler didn’t know it at the time, but his life would never be the same after that kiss, nor would that kiss with Lilith be his last.
* * *
That night in bed, Tyler couldn’t stop thinking about the kiss he had shared with Lilith. It wasn’t exactly the lustful and smitten wonderment that accompanies a boy’s first kiss. No, he had no trouble quelling his hormones. Quite the contrary; his memories of the “incident” brought with it a mild bout of anxiety…because of the squirrel. However, after that, during dinner, while he was doing his homework, and when he was watching Hell’s Kitchen with his parents, the anxiety went from a seven or an eight, down to a two, to put it clinically. It may have had something to do with a funny meme about Hell’s Kitchen that a friend showed him once that the TV show they were watching reminded him of. It showed Chef Gordon Ramsay clearly spewing venom at one of his chefs with his blonde locks all askew and the meme read, spoken as Ramsay of course, “That steak is so black that a fat white girl would try to fuck it!” How he and his friend laughed until tears rolled down their cheeks during recess.
Tyler’s anxiety was dwindling still, as he lay awake staring at the DC Comics poster across from his bed.
“It’s done Superman. I didn’t want to, but what’s done is done,” he justified to the empty room, well, actually to a two-dimensional Superman. Of course, Superman didn’t answer him. But he didn’t have to, did he? He was familiar enough with the Man of Steel to know his position. You made your bed, little buddy; now you have to lie in it. And that’s what he was doing, quite literally. He was starting to find it easier and easier to drift off to sleep, but there was an unrelenting nagging in his head. It was akin to that scratch at the roof of your mouth that doesn’t heal or that piece of apple skin caught between your teeth that you can’t stop trying to jar loose with your tongue. It was Lilith.
He couldn’t get her out of his mind since the kiss, and lying quietly in bed where many people on this planet do a lot of their thinking, a lot of their deep thinking, why, she was front and center in Tyler’s mind’s-eye, demanding his attention before sleep finally took him. This would be something he would need to get used to.
Chapter 7
It was Tuesday, which also meant that it was test-day in Mr. Colabza’s seventh grade social studies class. Tyler typically looked forward to this class because he thought that Mr. Colabza was a great teacher. He supposed that anyone could simply read from a textbook and spew out the information in front of a class full of brats, but a teacher–a good teacher–will make the material relatable to the students and even get them motivated to receive the material. Tyler wasn’t exactly a history buff. That is to say he liked it as much as the average student, which was not that much, but he had always done well in Mr. Colabza’s class because it was fun and interesting.
Jim Colabza played college basketball and was Alan B. Shepard’s School District’s best basketball coach, and in these contemporary times the fact that he was a homosexual, if anything, helped him more than hurt him. It was almost the hallmark of celebrity, believe it or not.
He was scouted when he played in high school, but he hurt his knee during a game and it had never been the same since. All of his friends and family thought that despite the fact that such an opportunity had been taken away from the man in the prime of his life, or just about his prime, that he had a wonderful attitude that he applied to daily living. He had always expressed to his family that if basketball didn’t work out for him, that teaching would become his plan “B”, albeit a much less glamorous plan “B.”
When that momentous day finally did arrive, and Jim Colabza quit playing basketball competitively because of his knee, he was already in college working prudently towards his certification in History and Secondary Education. Some argue that by giving yourself an out,in Jim Colabza’s case teaching was his out,just in case you fall just shy of achieving your dream, that you’re doing yourself a disservice when it came to how much effort you put forth. The thought being, if it’s not all or nothing, then you hold back some effort. That was not the case with Jim, and it was a good thing that he backed up his future.
During his final game, a teammate, vying for the same lay-up, came down hard on Jim’s leg and grossly hyperextended it for him. People that were there swore that you could hear his knee explode from across the gym.
For the previous two decades, Jim Colabza was the name you’d hear recommended by older students who told their younger sibling in whose class they better hope to be. The tradition of the student creating his or her Teacher Wish List during their summer vacation would carry on well after the man retired, and his name would be perched right at the top looking down at the rest until that day finally came. He certainly was placed at the top of Tyler’s Teacher Wish List, not that he had any siblings to tell him about Mr. Colabza, but his cousin Marty had him two years prior and sang his praises unconstrained. Now, Tyler was happy to be part of his class. He was absolutely buzzing when he found out, as the kids say. Yes, Tyler thought that the 2014 school year was going to be a good one, and it was, for a while.
This particular Tuesday, however, on the school bus, he was deep in thought about his new woman, Lilith, (when was the last time he wasn’t thinking about her?) and forgot to use his school bus ride to look over some notes for his social studies test; but that was ok, wasn’t it? Tyler required little studying for classes that he enjoyed attending. The enjoyment he would get from his fun classes and the material he learned were not mutually exclusive. This made his lessons fond recollections rather than tedious lectures; hence, they stuck with him. Think of it like watching a movie: A typical person can watch a movie and tell you what it was about even a week after they watched it. It was the s
ame principle with classes that Tyler found exciting. Ray and Cindy Swanson were shocked on more than one occasion when Tyler would fire a correct answer out while his parents partook in their nightly 7pm JEOPARDY ritual. So, Mr. Colabza was very surprised when he observed Tyler from his desk staring off into space while the test was being administered. It was as if Tyler didn’t even have a clue that the test was in front of him.
Forty minutes came and went, and when Mr. Colabza told everyone to put their pencils down and to pass the ScanTron answer sheets to the front of each row, Tyler looked down saw that his answer sheet was empty, save for his name and the date. It was blank and he saw that it was blank, but it didn’t really phase him…not now. He was too preoccupied with thoughts of how Lilith’s warm moist, almost cakey (as odd as that sounds) lips felt pressed against his and wondered what else there was to it. What else was he was missing out on?
The resounding peal of the class-bell erupted and students were getting up from their desks and exiting the classroom. As Tyler was gathering his books and knapsack, Mr. Colabza approached him with a slight limp, which he would have for the rest of his stay on Mother Earth, and a look of genuine concern on his face.
“Hey, Ty; do you have a couple of minutes?” Mr. Colabza asked.
“Um, I don’t know, Mr. Colabza, if I’m late for my next class, Mrs. Westerfield won’t let me into the classroom and I’ll have to go to the office,” Tyler explained.
His teacher didn’t say anything, he just turned and casually limp-walked over to his desk, opened the top drawer and brought out a pad of pink late passes and held it up in plain view as if he were an attorney presenting evidence for the big trial.
“Late pass,” Mr. Colabza said with a smile.
