One

Dan

I gave Billy his first gun when he was three. He shot his mother right in the gut. Found her bleeding all over the kitchen floor that night.

It was a 357-snubnose magnum. I remember that. Course, I didn’t know bunk about guns back then. It was just something for the kid to play with. Toughen him up a bit after all that crap the boys down at the plant were giving me from when Pam, that’s Billy’s mom, brought him down to the company picnic in a pink bonnet. She said it was a sun hat. Salmon colored. But that’s not the point.

The point is, when I pressed the pearle-inlaid handle into Billy’s little palm, I told him, “Son. This here’s a firearm. The great equalizer, they call it. You point this at anybody, squeeze just a bit, and you’re in charge.”

He looked up at me, big brown eyes all swollen with tears, and I told him, “Hell, with this gun in your hand, you may be just a panty-waist, trickle dick, little three year old in a pink bonnet, but to anyone on the other end of this thing, you might as well be Jesus-big-ball-fucking-Christ himself.”

He smiled at that, but just then I couldn’t yet tell if it was because he liked the feel of that piece in his hand or just because I had said “balls.”

That night, though, when I found Pam rolling back and forth on the kitchen linoleum in a puddle of herself, I knew it was the feel of it made him smile. He was a shooter. My boy. A born shooter.

“Did you do this?” I asked him, pointing down at Pam.

He stood in the corner against the pantry, dangling the gun from two fingers. “Didn’t want to take no nap,” he said

“It’s all right,” Pam said, scooting back against the wall so she could stand, probably thinking that Billy had stolen the gun out of my closet and was inches away from a blue ribbon beating. “I’m OK really.” She was always sticking up for him back then. “He didn’t even hit any vital organs. Might have just nicked my stomach. That’s all.”

I skipped over the blood, and grabbed Pam’s wrist to help her up.

“It’s just a lot of blood is all,” she went on. “You wrap some gauze around my belly, I’ll be pink as a peach by sunrise.”

The kicker is she was right. I mean, sure the bullet had done its damage. Gone clean through. A thin slab of Pam’s back was still gobbed up against the refrigerator door. But other than that, she was fine. It was one of those one-in-a-million flesh wounds you read about in strange-but-true magazines.

When we got her to the hospital, the emergency room docs couldn’t get enough of it. Three of them gathered around her, rubbing the backs of their necks.

“This must have been the same magic bullet they killed Kennedy with,” said one.

Then, “This thing had moves like Michael Jordan—came in at a forty-five degree angle, veered left around the stomach, then banked a hard right, climbed two inches in an instant, leaped over her spleen, and, poof, it was out.”

“Passed through her cleaner than an enema.”

It would take a few weeks to prove out what was then just a hollow feeling behind my belly button, but in the years since, these docs hovering over Pam cracking jokes would be the moment that my memory played in slow motion. The moment I first suspected Billy had something that would stand him out from the rest of the world. The moment Billy Shooter was born.

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