The Tarnished Shooter

by Charles James

  I learned the next day that the fool I beat up ended up in the emergency room at the hospital with black eyes, a fractured jaw, and a broken nose. The big guy that used to punch me in the gut when I walked down the hall—well, that dick-head never laid a hand on me again.

  The bully’s parents demanded the school do something. When I told my story of being bullied for months to the principal, in his office, with both of my parents present, there was nothing anyone could say. My old man was happier than a pig-in-shit after learning I pulverized that kid. After all, I was raised by him to kick-ass first and take names later. Show no mercy. There were only a few weeks of school left. I was relieved to be able to walk to and from school in the nice weather without having to worry about bullies.

  When school was out for summer vacation I started to work on the trucking business as a helper: loading, unloading, delivering furniture and appliances and doing the preventative maintenance. By the middle of summer, I had turned fifteen. I was still paid only a buck an hour and the old man was still keeping my money and time on the books. I still didn’t like that arrangement, but it was a job and there wasn’t much I could do about it. My father had always talked about making me his partner when I got to be old enough. I never said anything to anyone about my plans to leave home and never come back when I turned eighteen. I figured I could hop a train or join the Army and never be seen or heard from again. I could live the life of a soldier or traveling hobo. It wouldn’t matter what I’d do as long as I was away from him.

  I think it was 1970, when there was a nationwide truckers’ union strike. Eighteen-wheelers pulled into our driveway and dropped their trailers. Jack and I went to work unloading the trailers then reloading the contents into our trucks. We worked like sweltering dogs in the summer heat, spending our weekends and most of the week unloading and loading trucks. I worked my ass off because I had my eye on a motorcycle and tortured myself to earn and save a couple hundred dollars so I could buy it.

  The motorcycle I bought was a 350 Suzuki X6 Hustler. My dad’s best friend and trucking foremen, Jerry Milner, who was known as Dusty, said to my father, “I’ll take it for a test drive to make sure it’s safe for Frank to go down the highway with.” He jumped on the bike and went screaming down the road like a bat-out-of-hell. When he reached speeds up to about sixty miles per hour the front wheel started to wobble and Dusty spilled the bike. He ended up on the pavement sliding down the road about a hundred feet or more on his hands and knees, with the bike on top of him.

  He was wearing a new pair of sandals, new jeans, and a new shirt. The metal fastener, we called a wonder bolt, in the front pocket of his jeans was ground down to nothing—leaving a permanent burn mark on his leg. When Dusty and the bike came to a stop, he was more concerned about the busted up bike than his own injuries. He limped a bit, but otherwise he was ok. But his new clothes were totally destroyed. My old man gave Dusty a few days off and reimbursed him for the clothes. I was grateful to him, and glad it wasn’t me sliding down the road on my hands and knees, but I was out a new bike that I never even got to ride. The bike was a wreck so I sold it for parts.

  Dusty was originally from Louisiana and talked with a sort of easy southern drawl that identified him as a man from the south. He loved cars and drove a souped-up 1956 two-tone red and cream colored, two-door, Chevrolet with two playboy bunny emblems dangling from the interior rearview mirror. Occasionally he chewed on fat cigars when he didn’t have a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He drank cup after cup of sugared coffee with just a hint of cream. He never seemed to be nervous and was very polite with the right words to say in any situation. Beside my Uncle Seth, I thought he was one of the coolest tough-guys I had ever met. When we worked together on the trucks he treated me the way I wished the old man would have. He helped me sort out any kind of problems I was having.

  Grandma and Grandpa Barker didn’t like him; to them he was a smooth talker and they believed he was a crook with another agenda. They couldn’t put their finger on what bothered them about the guy. They just knew they didn't want to see their oldest and favorite son get taken by a double talking, Louisiana con-man.

  Dusty supported four pre-teen kids and a wife. His wife liked the party life and sometimes was the life of the party; she was a somewhat large woman, attractive when all dressed up, and more interested in perfect looking red nails than anything else. She was fun because she laughed at just about anything after she’d had a beer or two. Dusty loved to arm-wrestle and loved showing us arm-wrestling tricks that he said could always guarantee a victory. Part of his daily garb consisted of a black leather jacket, sunglasses, and black engineer boots—a sort of, tough-guy get-up worn back in the early sixties. He stood six feet tall with straight slicked back black hair, weighing in at a solid one-hundred-ninety pounds. Both of his hands revealed tattooed letters on his fingers. The left spelled “less” and the right spelled “more.” He liked to brag about himself, claiming to be a real bad-ass, but he always made you feel like you could count on him, and if he was your friend he was your friend, offering you a smoke and then a light. To me he looked like he could “more” or “less” kick the shit out of anyone. But I knew things or people were not always what they seemed to be. Sometimes it took years to learn the truth about some of the best of friends.

  When we worked together, Dusty let me bring my other Honda 160 motorcycle along in the back of the truck. Once we got out into desolate country roads we used the hydraulic lift attached to the back of the truck to unload the motorcycle. We took turns cruising on the bike behind or ahead of the truck. I didn’t have a driver’s license, but neither Dusty nor I gave a rip.

  He offered me cigarettes and let me drive the truck sometimes, even though he knew he’d be in a world of shit if I got caught driving without a license. If my old man knew what we were up to he never said anything. One day I was driving the truck down a country road and was pulled over by a state patrol officer. In a matter of seconds Dusty had that cop eating out of the palm of his hand. He was such a smooth talker, the cop never even asked to see my driver’s license. He told us to have a good day and sent us on our way. Whew! My heart settled down. If that cop knew I didn’t have a license I probably would have ended up in jail.

  Dusty and I talked about everything, especially girls and how to get laid. He was always giving me pointers on how to seduce women. I thought he knew what he was talking about because he had plenty of girlfriends who were waitresses at restaurant stops we made on the road. Before long Dusty became such an influence on my brother, Jack and I, we bought ourselves black leather jackets and cowboy boots—we wanted to be just like him only to find out that we couldn’t just throw on a coat and boots to be something we weren’t. I worked just about every day at something and summer went flying by. Before I knew it, I was catching the bus for high school.

  It was always interesting to start a new school year thinking maybe it would be better than the year before, but then it became disappointing to find out things were the same. It didn’t take but a couple of weeks and the same old patterns of bullying started. This time it was a kid from my old junior high school who started messing with me for no apparent reason. I guess he hadn't heard about my status as an experienced, bully ass-kicker. He hadn’t heard I was all done taking shit from incompetent dick heads.

  The bully, who was my size and build, bumped into me purposely in the hallway then made a threatening remark. Not even thinking I immediately grabbed him by the throat and slammed him against the wall lockers that lined the hallway. With one fast solid punch to the right side of his ugly shit-talking face, I broke his big nose. Blood was everywhere—on his face—the wall lockers—even some on the floor. He was screaming like a little girl holding his face in his hands. Blood oozed between his fingers and dripped on the floor. He stood there like he was expecting someone to quickly come to his aid. I looked around and then slowly slipped away like a military commando hoping not to get caught or spotted leaving the scene.
I muttered, "That will teach that asshole not to mess with me again."

  The next day that kid’s father called my house and demanded to speak to my old man. On the phone he insisted my father pay the doctor bills for his kid’s busted nose. My father told the guy, “Go to hell!” then slammed the phone down. He slammed it so hard that he darn near busted the hanger for the receiver of the old rotary wall phone. The kid’s father called again and this time my old man got nasty and told that pest, "If you don't quit calling, I’m going to come over to your house right now and do to you exactly what my son did to yours!" The bully’s dad never called again and I was never bothered by his kid again either.

  I was practically failing every one of my subjects in school and would have much rather delivered furniture or flipped burgers than go and be a part of all that school nonsense with all the silly little social groups. I didn’t fit in anywhere. I didn’t like sports. I hated schoolwork. I spent most of my school days skipping classes, hanging out down at Dairy Queen—smoking one cigarette after another with the other potential dropouts. I would sit in a booth with my legs stretched out on the seat trying to think of a way to make life better—at the same time fearing what was going to happen to me once the shit hit the fan.

  Because I skipped so much school, I was never in any yearbooks—basically I was an unknown. I just didn’t give a shit about school anymore. I knew report cards would eventually show up in the mail, but that didn’t bother me much anymore. Not like previous years. If the old man got a hold of them before they could be intercepted and changed I didn’t care if I was in a world of shit. I was older and getting more daring. If he started in on me about those grades—I might do something I would regret. I could tell something was changing in the way I thought about things. I was developing an uncontrollable temper that affected everything I did.

  One of my hobbies at the time was building a scale model of the lake house out of small pieces of wood I cut down to size on my father’s table saw. I made miniature two by fours and other miniature dimension lumber gluing them together to shape the frame of the house. I worked for hours and hours on that project and had it almost finished—then one winter day, for a reason I no longer recall, I got angry and destroyed it.

  PART 3

  The Change

  Chapter 12

  Finally it was spring and the end came to another school year. I looked forward to working and making some serious cash. It was the summer I would turn sixteen. I was excited because I would be old enough to get a driver’s license and be able to drive a car. Little did I know something else in my life was about to change—forever.

  With so much money rolling in from his trucking business, my old man was spending it like he had a blossoming money tree planted out back. In early June, he rented a huge paddlewheel boat from one of the resorts up the river and threw a weekend party for all his employees and anyone else who was a friend of the family. The big boat anchored a quarter mile out in front of the house and was stocked with booze for a Saturday night extravaganza. My job was to drive our ski boat, like a shuttle service, transporting the partiers from our house to the paddle wheel and back again.

  The good times for my old man were about to end as fast as they began. He had managed to accomplish so much in just a couple of years without the full use of his eyes. And despite his maddening temper, he brought the family out of almost poverty and into a big house on the lake with a good income and all sorts of new toys. My friends from the old and new neighborhood reeled with jealousy and I thought we might be millionaires someday.

  My father had a handful of full-time and part-time employees. Most of his employees were part time firefighters or county jailors; they were no-nonsense guys with very little sense of humor. My favorite employee to work with was always Dusty. The other guys didn’t have the charisma that Dusty had. I never knew what to say to them. They seemed so unapproachable. Dusty had the live-for-the-day mentality and a positive attitude which I thought was the best way to go through life. He was always drinking coffee and singing old Credence Clearwater Revival tunes, trying to get me to sing along.

  Everything was going along smoothly until my father got a surprising phone call from Aunt Muriel’s husband, declaring she had committed suicide by shooting herself. My father flew out to Arizona, to deal with that. She was his favorite sister and nobody ever knew why she had taken her own life. Some speculated she was actually shot accidentally, or even murdered by her husband. She left behind eight saddened children, four siblings and both parents. The case was closed leaving everyone dumbfounded as to why such a gifted young artist decided to checkout in such a violent, self-destructive way. I don’t remember my father being totally depressed about the death of my aunt, but he was a man who didn’t reveal much emotion except for anger and occasionally a bout of laughter with his employees.

  When he took the employees out for breakfast, or out to dinner he was always the center of attention demanding service at the snap of a finger.

  It was a sunny, hot, and humid day only a few weeks after the old man rented the big paddlewheel boat, and not long after my aunt Muriel supposedly shot herself. Dusty and I were using the newest truck making out of town deliveries of chest freezers and washing machines, so we knew the day was going to be long and hot. Many of the appliances we delivered to older farm houses that were built at the turn of the century. We descended rickety old cobbled-together stairways into dark cobweb infested basements, never knowing what kind of surprises lay below. The two of us had to haul out the old appliances with muscle and sweat—we were wet and exhausted from the hot and humid weather. Some of those old appliances were extremely heavy and I struggled to hold on, climbing the stairs backward. When the last appliance was finally delivered, we headed home.

  On the way back we talked about everything we could possibly think of until we were out of words. To break the silence and boredom we played our little game called “beat the heat.” We rolled up all the windows and turned the heater on full blast. It must have been over ninety degrees in the cab of that truck. The first one to open a window to cool off was the loser. Sweat rolled down Dusty’s forehead into his eyes, making them burn, but he was not about to quit no matter what. I was having a hard time because I rarely perspired even when temperatures soared. It felt like I was going to pass out from the heat, but I didn’t quit either. We traveled more than twenty miles fighting the exhausting heat, with neither of us giving in.

  We had an excuse to quickly roll down the windows and end the silly nonsense without either of us having to reveal any weakness, when we noticed my mother standing in the truck parking area waiting for us to pull into the yard. “Dusty,” She said “I have something to tell you.” She tearfully continued, “Les drowned this afternoon.” “What! Well how did it happen?” asked Dusty. My mother said Les, Uncle Seth, and Seth’s girlfriend were out in the boat taking turns pulling each other in the rubber raft. Les fell out of the raft and the wind blew it out of reach—he was overcome by exhaustion. Seth said he tried to pull Les out of the water, but he was too heavy so he couldn’t do anything to help him. Seth claimed after a few minutes Les just threw his arms in the air and shrugged, before going under water. He had given up. Seth said he dove underwater to try and save his brother, but couldn’t find him. Seth’s explanation didn’t seem right to me because he made it sound like Les just gave up. I knew my old man would never just give up and die. And what about the little ladder that we used when skiing to get up out of the water and into the boat? Why wasn’t that ladder used?

  Sometimes Seth and my father didn’t see eye to eye. Ever since he’d returned from Vietnam he had a violent temper. Maybe Seth and my father had an argument and Seth just let him drown or maybe he pushed him overboard and took off then made up the whole story. Whatever happened out there on the water would remain a mystery to the rest of us. Not long after the drowning Uncle Seth and his girlfriend broke up. Last I heard she never wanted to see him again and moved to Californ
ia. To me the whole thing sounded suspicious.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The old man bragged so many times about what a great swimmer he was. He claimed when he was a boy, he and his friends swam across the river on numerous occasions. When on the water, my father never wore a life jacket; he always said they were for sissies. He was in his late thirties, older and a few pounds heavier than he’d been as a boy, and smoking like a chimney sure didn’t help matters when it came to needing air. A life jacket would have saved his ass had he been wearing one. Looking at all those factors, I was not terribly surprised at what happened. I remembered the time he threw me in the river just to see if I could swim. I remembered that day he threw me in I had to dog-paddle my ass off to stay above water. I didn’t know how to feel when mom said he’d drowned because mostly I felt fear when I was around him. I guess I actually felt a little guilty for having wished he would die and then he actually drowned. For a day or two I thought his drowning might have been some sort of fantastic hoax. “Was he really dead?” I thought.

  When a fisherman found his body down river eight days later, snagged on a set-line, almost nine miles from where he drowned, he was described as looking like a dead fish—water logged and bloated. It wasn’t a pretty picture. The coroner recommended a closed casket funeral. He said the body would be too horrifying for anyone to look at. One of my other uncles went to the morgue to identify the body. His description confirmed what the coroner had said. It was too bad he met such an early demise because he seemed happier. It was disappointing to me too because I was waiting for the day when I got to be older and I could unload on him. I wanted to let him know what it felt like to be a kid and have no power to stand up to his abusive tactics.