Twelve

Billy

Karen says that between the ages of three and four is when kids begin to learn right from wrong in a, quote, “social context.” The ideas of good boy, bad boy are replaced with fair and unfair. Behavior separates from identity. This is, she says, when the image of a mother’s disapproving face begins to recede in favor of an internal voice – a conscience. According to her second dissertation, the roots of all the religions of the world stretch back to the imaginations of three-year-old-boys.

Between the ages of three and four my mother’s face was replaced by upside down street signs, strings of telephone poles holding hands along the road, highway exit signs stretched sideways across the edges of a passenger side window. For a full year as I looked up waiting for sleep, laying in the truck curled in the passenger seat or stretched out in the flat bed on the nicer days, this is all I saw.

This, of course, and the men who asked me to shoot them. Large, barrel-chested men with thick curls of hair sticking out from their collars. I see them now mostly as bodies balanced on the end of my gun. Strange figurines molded into life from the gray steel that held the bullets that could never kill them

There were others too standing to the side, either backed against the warehouse walls, or closed in a circle in some backroom of a bar. Their eyes bouncing from me to the men I shot, their hands beating out an unsteady rhythm against a pack of cigarettes, scratching at their stomachs, or nervously adjusting their crotches. Then, of course, there was my father sitting at a folding table somewhere in the corner counting the money.

My mother’s face, the memory of it at least, did come to me in my sleep some times, but even then it was fading, and mostly I just saw it the way it looked the last time I’d seen it for real—staring back at me as I pressed a gun against her forehead, her eyes telling me something I still feel too young to understand.

Dad said we needed to keep moving. These words, this phrase, becoming for me almost a sort of bed time prayer. Each night whether I slept in the truck or in some highway motel, he’d tuck me in with the same words. “Got to be up early now Billy. Got to keep moving.”

If you could base a religion off of those words and images, make that its solemn prayer, the street signs and the men dancing on the edge of my gun the sacred icons, my mother’s eye’s stretching wide and sinking behind a well of tears the face of some great and unknowable god, then that’s what I got. That’s what I learned from three to four.