Faithless: Tales of Transgression Page 14

  THIS RIFLE BELONGING to my Uncle Adcock, before he got to be a multimillionaire developing a thousand acres on Mackinac Island and feuded with the relatives. It was a Springfield standard-issue .22- or .30-caliber with a satin-nickel finish and a maple stock and it was so heavy, that long barrel, I staggered holding it. My cousins Jake and Midge got their dad’s glass breakfront open (the key was beneath a loose brick in the fireplace) and smuggled the rifle outside. After they played with it awhile, aiming at birds and sailboats on the lake, they told me to “try aiming.” I was afraid, but Jake insisted. He fitted the rifle onto my shoulder and my index finger against the trigger and helped hold the barrel steady. That rifle!—it had a cool oily smell, I’d remember afterward. And the smooth-polished stock against my cheek. I squinted along the barrel through the front sight (that looked bent) at white sails billowing in the wind. It was my imagination, the sails were magnified by looking through the sight. Uncle Adcock’s big sailboat had candy-striped sails you could recognize anywhere. Jake said, “If it was loaded you could fire,” then he said, “There’s a recoil, so watch out.” (I wouldn’t think until afterward what he said, whether it made sense.) I wasn’t sure what was expected of me. Jake and Midge were giggling. I suppose I looked comical, a potbellied little girl with glasses in shorts and a T-shirt holding a grown-up’s rifle to her shoulder, and her skinny arms trembling with the weight. We weren’t on the beach but in ankle-deep clover buzzing with bees. I was afraid of getting stung. Where the adults were, I don’t know. Maybe on the lake. Jake was eleven, Midge was nine, and I was even younger. These were Michigan-summer cousins. When I wasn’t with Jake and Midge it was like when I wasn’t with my mom or dad or brother or anybody, I guess—I’d just forget about them, as if they didn’t exist. But when I was with them, I’d have done anything they wanted.

  THE STORY WAS, after the basketball game, around 4 A.M. the next morning, two or three carloads of black kids from Bridgeport drove past some Malden Heights basketball players’ houses, plus the basketball coach’s house, plus the principal’s house, and sprayed the fronts with buckshot, breaking some windows. Or maybe it was only just BBs. You heard different stories. We’d moved from Darien that winter to live full-time with Mr. K. (“Kaho”), who was a Japanese-American (“Jap-Am”) architect and a self-described cynic. He made my brother and me laugh, and embarrassed Mom because it was usually her stories he doubted, saying with a roll of his eyes, “Oh, yes? Interesting—if true.” Which he said of the drive-by shootings. (How’d black kids from Bridgeport know where anybody lived? And why’d they give a damn, since Bridgeport won the championship?) By then, I was twelve. I was wearing contacts.

  AT THE HUNGRY HORSE RANCH north of Hungry Horse, Montana, near Glacier Park, where Dad took us to learn horseback riding one August, I had a serious crush on Blackhawk (his actual name was Ernest, but he was from the Blood Reservation), who tended horses. I was always following Blackhawk. It got to be a joke, but not (I think) a mean joke. Once I trailed Blackhawk carrying a shotgun to where he shot at woodchucks running for cover. The gun was a .12-gauge double-barrel Remington belonging to the ranch owner. The shots were so loud! I pressed my hands over my ears; it was almost as if I couldn’t see. Blackhawk, standing over a burrow and cursing and firing inside, ignored me. He’d missed every woodchuck except one he’d wounded (it looked like) that had dragged itself into the burrow, and now he was practically straddling the burrow and firing inside. The buckshot blasted into the earth! Blackhawk stood with knees apart horsey fashion and his dark face flushed and tight and clenched as a fist. Except for the noise, and the wounded woodchuck, and how Blackhawk could blast me in two if he whirled and shot like somebody on TV, it was such a funny sight I couldn’t help laughing.

  ASHLEY, my first roommate at Exeter, took me home at Thanksgiving and I was surprised at how old her father was, expecting a man like my dad. Mr. D. was a congressman from Maryland. They were living in Annapolis in this old stone house they said had been completely renovated. It was a beautiful house but I remember that the white walls were too much. Not a big house upstairs and Ashley’s bedroom was close by her parents’ and I heard Mr. D. snoring through walls and doors and I couldn’t sleep. I tried, but I could not sleep. Ashley was asleep (or pretending: how she always dealt with things). I went downstairs in the dark and into a study off the living room and tried to read, pulling down books from shelves. One of them was a Reader’s Digest edition, very old and dog-eared, but I got to reading Lost Horizon by James Hilton and liked it. About an hour later there came Mr. D. in a navy blue terrycloth bathrobe and barefoot staring at me. As if for a scary moment he didn’t know who I was. His big belly tied in by the sash. How he knew I was there, I have no idea. Mr. D. scratched his chest inside the robe and tried to smile. In his right hand was what looked like a toy gun he might’ve hidden in his pocket but didn’t. As though he had nothing to hide he was ashamed of. Making then like a joke of it showing me the “snubbie”—it was bigger than my mom’s, with a three-inch stainless steel barrel—an Arcadia automatic “bedroom special” Mr. D. called it—a tough-looking little gun that fitted Mr. D’s hand just right. I liked the blue finish and checkered walnut handle. He had a homeowner’s permit for the weapon, Mr. D. wanted me to know. He kept the first chamber loaded with “just a .38 shot shell” (he showed me) to scare off an intruder, but the other chambers had the real thing, hollow-point bullets. I was too shy to ask Mr. D. if he’d ever actually fired his gun at a human being. I guessed I could see in his face he’d be capable of it, though. “Want to hold it?” Mr. D. asked. “The safety lock’s on.”

  IN MOTHER’S SUMMER PLACE at East Hampton, I had my things spread out on the drawing board on the porch, radio turned up high, and I had a sort of idea something like this might happen; Kaho and I had had all we could take of Mother’s shit. So the floorboards behind me give a little beneath my bare feet and I’m leaning over the drawing board and there’s this poke, this jab against my rear (I’m in denim cutoffs cut pretty high in the crotch). My first thought is it’s a gun barrel, I was going to be shot at the base of my spine!—but it turns out to be Mikal with just a hard-on.

  “WHAT’S IT LIKE? For a guy it’s like a gunshot going off. Before you’re ready. And this stuff that shoots out of you … weird like something in a sci-fi movie. Christ.”

  I said, I’m glad I’m not a guy. It wasn’t true, though.

  When we made out, I pretended he was Blackhawk.

  WERE WE IMPRESSED! In English class Mr. Dix read to us from a biography of Ernest Hemingway how, when Hemingway was eighteen, at his family’s summer place in northern Michigan, sometimes he’d pick up a loaded double-barreled shotgun and draw a bead on his dad’s head (where the old man, oblivious, was working in a tomato patch). Wild! Before this we’d just been thinking of Hemingway as one of those weird wrinkled old coots with white beards they wanted you to read.

  Did you ever think of doing it? To yourself? Charl passed me the note. Charl S., coming on like Junior Dyke (the guys resented her terrific style). Too lazy. Don’t do anything myself. I flicked back the note, and naturally we got caught.

  THERE WAS Adrian L. we never saw again after Easter break our junior year. Adrian L., sixteen, from Rye, Connecticut, went home and died of a “gun accident” in the rec room of his family’s house. In a Rye newspaper (some kids who’d been at the funeral brought it back to school) the coroner was quoted saying that Adrian had died “instantaneously” of a .45-caliber bullet in the brain discharged while he was cleaning his father’s Army handgun. (A Government Model automatic.) Mr. L. had been a decorated U.S. Army lieutenant in Vietnam. Mr. L. insisted to investigators that the gun “was never loaded” but Mr. L. insisted too that his son had not shot himself deliberately. There’d been a single round of ammunition in the gun. At school we talked a lot about Adrian. We cut out his picture from last year’s yearbook. “Adrian treated a girl with respect. Not like some of these assholes.” We’d go around saying that, t
hough actually none of us had known Adrian well. You couldn’t get to know him, he was so quiet. High grades but the Math Club type. He’d dropped out of school activities and missed a lot of classes that semester, staying just (his roommate said) in his room. Somebody’s dad (maybe my own?) made the remark that if you know guns, the Government Model .45 is a “classic.” There’d be worse ways to go than a .45 in the brain, point-blank.

  THERE WAS a more romantic way, though. “Teen Wedding” was a song we listened to, a lot. We never knew anybody who actually got married but we’d heard of kids who got in so deep they wanted to die together. A red-haired boy called Skix (he’d dropped out of Exeter a few years before; almost nobody remembered him but tales were told of him) who’d shot his girlfriend (nobody we knew, from the Rhinebeck public high school) in his car they were parked in overlooking the Hudson River, then turned the gun on himself. Both bullets in the heart. Guys who knew guns spoke knowledgeably about how Skix had used a Crown City Condor semiautomatic .45 (registered in an uncle’s name). Skix had lived in Rhinebeck in what somebody described as “an actual castle, almost.” It was a sign a guy took you seriously, if at least he’d twist your wrists till you cried. The sexiest was both wrists twisted at the same time.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  THERE WAS a certain avant-garde drug called “ice” not everybody could handle. A guy I knew after college, Kenny B., who worked for Merrill, Lynch in Manhattan, made us laugh recounting tales of his high school days in Westchester County. He’d been so strung out and crazed from “sucking ice” he’d actually driven to school one morning with a carbine rifle!—a Safari Arms .30-caliber with a satin blue finish and a smooth walnut stock with a thumbhole design looking like, Kenny said, something Wild Bill Hickock might’ve used shooting up the Indians. This fantastic gun had belonged to Kenny’s grandfather, who hadn’t touched it in thirty years. Kenny sat in the parking lot with the gun on his lap, hidden under his jacket. Watching kids trailing into school. He’d had the intention of shooting somebody, preferably his math teacher. “I just wanted to waste some dude. Not any girl, though. I wouldn’t have shot a girl, I’m sure.”

  SOME OF US still missed Adrian. We believed we would miss him all our lives. We were stubborn and loyal. I’d say suddenly, in rainy weather, “I loved him.” Actual tears stung my eyes. We were young but prescient. These beautiful times! How they keep bringing you back to somebody gone.

  WE WERE LISTENING to “Black Sabbath.” We were frankly stoned, but cool. My dad (we weren’t expecting him back so soon) came in, in this foul mood. The market was down, we knew. Everybody’s dad was scared, and pissed. A few months ago my dad had been mugged by (he said) a “black Hispanic” with a gun outside the 30th Street Train Depot in Philadelphia. He’d given up his wallet, wristwatch, and briefcase with no resistance, desperate not to die. Reduced to “quivering cowardice” in five seconds, Dad said. White pride! Didn’t save him from a pistol-whipping, though. So that spring he’d gotten a little crazed over the Tawana Brawley case, her photo and Reverend Al Sharpton’s on the front page of the Times. Staring at Brawley’s photo saying, this look in his face, “Who’d want to rape her?”

  IN The Tibetan Book of the Dead some of us were reading spring of senior year (not on our honors reading list!) somebody had underlined in red ink, In the Occident, where the Art of Dying is little known and rarely practiced, there is the common unwillingness to die.

  DRIVING BACK from a weekend at Dartmouth. Four of us crammed into the backseat and three in the front of my roommate’s boyfriend’s stepmom’s black Lincoln town car. We were totally wasted! The boyfriend was Nico W. from Peru; his dad was a diplomat and his stepmom an American. Nico was “100 percent Americanized.” Insisted he knew a “scenic shortcut” to Bellows Falls but, sure, we got lost. Mountain roads turn and twist so, you can’t get anywhere. Then the road turned into practically a ditch from so much rain. Nico was trying to turn the car around in like a six-foot space and we got stuck in mud. It was still raining! Just off the road was this crude house trailer resting on tires with a plastic Santa Claus on the roof and a giant satellite dish. Piles of trash around the place and a pungent odor of smoldering garbage. We were so pissed at the situation we were laughing like hyenas. Nico turns these tragic eyes on us, the pupils tiny as poppy seeds. He’d been snorting other people’s coke all weekend and was burned out. But he was in the best shape of any of us to be driving. We heard yelling and looked and in the doorway of the trailer there’s this heavy woman in overalls, what looks like a shotgun over her arm. Double-barreled shotgun! Aimed at us! She was drunk or crazy, or both—“Get the fuck out of here, I’ll blow your fuckin’ heads off!” It was a TV scene. On TV it’s funny, but in actual life it wasn’t. We were scared we’d all be killed. Nico was desperate, gunning the engine and the car wheels spinning and the car sinking deeper into mud and all of us screaming and laughing so hard I almost wet my pants, or maybe did a little. How Nico got us out of there, I don’t know. They would say the crazy woman fired the shotgun over our heads but I wasn’t sure I heard it. I woke up later, my head bumping against the back of the seat, Nico flooring the gas pedal. We got lost another time, too, before we got to Bellows Falls.

  SEAN STAYED with some friends in a high-rise off Bleecker Street. We didn’t get much sleep. It was the Fourth of July weekend; through the night we’d hear firecrackers and gunshots like a war zone.

  IN POUGHKEEPSIE, I ran a red light. Returning to school in a freezing rain. In one of those moods, thinking, If it happens, it happens. Like I wouldn’t use the brakes if the car skidded. On the other side of some railroad tracks there was a New York state trooper patrol car, I saw too late. Turns on his lights and pulls out after me. I wasn’t pregnant because I’d started bleeding in the car, into my clothes and onto the car seat. Here I’m stopping the car on the shoulder of the road shaking, crying, I’d been crying all the way up from the city. The cop is a youngish white guy, Italian-looking. He’s got his gun drawn! I just about freak seeing that gun. He sees I’m a Vassar student, sees I’m alone, holsters the gun but talks kind of suggestively to me, asking for my driver’s license, auto registration, etcetera and taking a long time examining them with a flashlight. All this, in the rain! He asks me then would I please step out of my car and accompany him to his car but by this time I’m crying so hard, I’m in no state to comprehend. My face all smeared and the crotch of my jeans soaked with blood. I can see he likes me crying but doesn’t want too much of it. The last thing a guy wants is hysteria. I’m pounding the steering wheel, “Shoot me! I hate you! I want to die anyway!” The trooper looks at me disgusted and relents. Lets me off with just a traffic ticket, $60 fine and a mark for moving violation on my license, and a warning. “Lucky this time, Vassar girl,” he says. I know I am.

  LUCK RUNS in our family, Dad used to say. Maybe he was being ironic but it’s a fact, it does. Like when Mother was knocked down, robbed, and raped in the ass, she wasn’t murdered, too. See?

  WHAT HAPPENED WAS: Mother was living in a two-bedroom apartment on East 77th Street, near Madison, in a building you’d think, she said, would be safe, except nowhere’s safe in Manhattan any longer, returning from a performance of Miss Saigon (in which she was an investor) and absolutely not drunk (though she’d had a few drinks just possibly at Joe Allen’s with friends), alone in the elevator to the ninth floor and alone (she swore!) in the hall, opening her door with her key and suddenly she’s hit on the back of the head, hard as a sledgehammer, a man’s fists, she’s knocked inside, flat on her face, too panicked to scream, or hasn’t the breath, he’s pounding her on the back with his fists, grunting and cursing her, bangs her head against the floor, she’s half-unconscious and he dumps the contents of her purse onto her back, back of her mink coat, paws through them to take what’s valuable, unfortunately there’s Mother’s “snubbie” with the ivory handle, so her assailant presses the barrel of the little gun against the base of her skull, he’s straddling her, panting and sweating
, a dark oily smell she will swear, calls her bitch and cunt, a black accent, from the Islands she will swear, and he hikes up her skirt and what’s called “sodomizes” her and he beats her unconscious with the gun fracturing her skull and tearing the scalp so she’ll be found barely breathing in a pool of blood, but at least alive. She would beg my brother and me not to tell our father. Dad said, “What’s she expect? Living alone.”

  WHEN I WAS with G. G. in his Varick Street loft, men wouldn’t leave me alone. Not just strangers, guys on the street, but G. G.’s so-called friends. One of them led me into a storage room at a gallery opening, pushed his tongue into my mouth and brought my hand to his penis, where it protruded from the fly of his stonewashed jeans like an extra, eager hand. “See what I’m packing, baby.” In a sleaze-porn film you’d be howling with laughter; in actual life you just stand there, waiting.

  THEY WERE medical students high on some new amphetamine. They claimed they manufactured their own with Bunsen burners. We were telling nude stories. I was the blond, and blonds are listened to in a way that makes you uncomfortable until you get used to it, but it might be a mistake to get used to it. I told how in first grade at my friend Betsy’s house, her older brother made us take off our clothes so he could “examine” us with a flashlight. Oh, did that tickle! In the telling, which I tried to dramatize, making them laugh, because I’d taken acting at Vassar and was said to have talent, I remembered suddenly it wasn’t Betsy’s house and it wasn’t Betsy’s brother but my own brother. It wasn’t a flashlight he’d had but something else. Mom’s little snubbie? He warned, “This is gonna tickle.”