The Gunners

by Rebecca Kauffman

  The Gunners

  Copyright © 2018 by Rebecca Kauffman

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are

  the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance

  to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kauffman, Rebecca, author.

  Title: The Gunners : a novel / Rebecca Kauffman.

  Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017040045 | ISBN 9781619029897 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. | Interpersonal

  relations—Fiction. | Self-realization—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3611.A82325 G86 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040045

  Jacket designed by Nicole Caputo

  Book designed by Wah-Ming Chang

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For George

  For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live

  permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.

  michael ondaatje, Divisadero

  Chapter 1

  Mikey Callahan discovered something about himself when he was six years old.

  Students from his first-grade class were taken one at a time from the classroom and ushered to the gymnasium for standard medical tests. The woman who barked his name (although she called for Michael, instead of Mikey, as his classmates knew him) held his hand as she walked him down the hall, and her fingers were as dry and cool as a husk. In the gymnasium, there were rectangular tables, screens, clipboards, grown-ups dressed in white. A man with a rust-colored mustache put a cold rubber point into Mikey’s ears, stared in at them, and led him through a series of easy tests: instructing Mikey to close his eyes and repeat words the man whispered, then listen to two recorded tones and tell him which was louder.

  Mikey proceeded to the next station, where he was asked once again to close his eyes, and say “Now,” when he detected that he had been touched, on his face or his arm, by the tip of a pen. Easy. Mikey liked this better than sitting in a classroom, and he enjoyed being touched in this way. Gentle, clinical.

  At the final station, an easel at the far end of a long table displayed a white piece of paper with a pyramid of black letters on it. A woman stood next to the paper and pointed at letters one at a time, and Mikey read the letters back to her. The letters got smaller as she moved down the page, and he struggled to read the final two rows. The woman made a note on her clipboard; then she handed him a black plastic spoon and asked him to cover his left eye with it. She replaced the set of letters with a fresh one and repeated the exercise, with similar results.

  She said, “Cover your other eye now,” and turned the page on her easel once again.

  Mikey did not raise the spoon to his face. He felt the heat of dark blood spreading up into his cheeks. He said, “But that’s my good one.”

  The lady said, “What now, hon?”

  “I can’t cover this one.” He gestured toward his right eye, puzzled by her request. “It’s the one that works.”

  The lady came and knelt before him. She looked at his face and said, “Oh, dear.”

  Mikey didn’t understand.

  She explained to him that both eyes were supposed to work; most people had two good eyes.

  Mikey nodded slowly as he considered this. He had a compulsion to nod when faced with unpleasant information.

  He said, “Please, let’s not tell my dad.”

  When Mikey got home from school that day, his father stared at his left eye, the bad one, with a look of mild distaste; then he led Mikey through a series of his own tests, as though the school had exaggerated the condition. He made Mikey close his right eye and tell him how many fingers he was holding up. Mikey tried to answer correctly, fluttering his right eye open to peek. He begged his father not to make him wear a patch like a pirate, and his father said, “What in the hell would that accomplish?”

  His father told him he must make the decision, right at that moment, whether the world would know about the left eye or whether it would be Mikey’s secret, and he seemed relieved when Mikey quickly answered that it would be his secret. As though the condition, if known by others, would in some way reflect poorly upon both of them. They didn’t speak of it again.

  Mikey’s father worked for the meatpacking facility in Eden, several towns over. He always smelled of blood and had red in the corners of his fingernails, carrying with him the insinuation of violence, brute force. His face was lumpy, as though it had been stuffed full, his eyes drooped. For Mikey’s entire childhood, the two of them lived in the first floor of a townhouse on Ingram Street in Lackawanna, a depressed suburb of South Buffalo. Only half the homes on their block were occupied. The others had boards for windows, liquor bottles smashed into the front porches, stray cats shitting in overgrown lawns. The upstairs tenants in their townhouse wore slippers to the store and always smelled vaguely sulfuric, and they engaged in monthly screaming arguments with the landlord over late rent and threats of eviction. Mikey’s father always paid rent on time, but sometimes he forgot about the utilities, and a man in navy would show up demanding a cash payment—saying that if they couldn’t pay, he’d pull the plug on their house, and then how would they see at night? What would they eat?

  Mikey’s father ate four things: cereal, apples, white bread with cold cuts, and Chips Ahoy! cookies. Mikey was not introduced to other foods until he was offered them by his friends from their lunch boxes or by his friends’ mothers in their homes.

  Mikey did not have a mother of his own, and because his father refused to provide any information on this matter, Mikey took it upon himself to search their home for clues. He looked for things he had seen in the homes of his friends belonging to their mothers: a ball of panty hose or a shoe with a pointy heel, long lists written in cursive, a little plastic basket filled with nail polish or a box of Tampax beneath the sink, an apron with roosters or reindeer embroidered onto it. He recovered not one piece of hard evidence in his own home.

  On one occasion, however, Mikey discovered a single item that didn’t fit in his home; it wasn’t quite right. It was a small suitcase located in the corner of his father’s closet, beneath a stack of neatly folded sweaters in various shades of gray. The suitcase was tacky and bright—it was the only thing in their entire home that Mikey simply could not imagine his father purchasing. When Mikey opened the suitcase, the scent of the cobalt-blue lining inside tickled at a memory, as faint and faraway and indistinct as a single puff of smoke. Maybe a memory of a memory. Even so, Mikey began to wonder if he had not been born out of a lady’s peeing-hole (like his friends), but had simply arrived in this suitcase, which was perfectly sized to hold a small child a
nd vaguely womblike in its shape. Mikey had no proof that this suitcase had produced him, but as a young boy it was his most persistent theory, and he liked to open the thing and stroke its strange synthetic fur and imagine that life had begun in this soft, blue place.

  Mikey’s father was a man of dark and quiet emotions. Things were rarely horrible between Mikey and his father, at least not in the usual ways; things were not vicious or unbearable. But things were never easy. Mikey’s father had bad knees and bad moods, a shadowy disposition. He drank too often (daily), but rarely too much in a single sitting—Mikey never once saw him stumble or slur or fall asleep upright in a chair. When Mikey was a child, his father’s moods manifested in biting criticism over meaningless things and treacherous, silent evenings at home when, for no reason at all, he would refuse to let Mikey out to play with his neighborhood friends. On these nights, Mikey would put himself to bed early just to remove himself from his father’s presence. He would close his bedroom window so that he would not be pained by the faraway voices of his friends.

  Alice, Sally, Lynn, Jimmy, and Sam became Mikey’s friends when they were neighbor kids, all living on the same block, all seeking playmates as well as an escape from their own homes. The children claimed one of the abandoned homes on Ingram Street as their official meeting place, and the rusted mailbox mounted to the front door of the house read the gunners in gold Mylar stickers. The house had been vacant for as long as any of them could recall, and they knew of no Gunners in the neighborhood, so they took the place over and assumed its name as their own. They furnished the main room of The Gunner House with items found on the side of the street: mildewed mattresses, throw pillows with cigarette stains, three-legged patio chairs, eyeless baby dolls, an artificial Christmas tree in such a tangle it took days to reassemble. They hung a flashlight from the center of the ceiling in this room, and it was in here that they invented jokes and games and secret languages, made plans, made trouble, bad-mouthed their parents, played cards, gambled, told stories, plotted against bullies, bickered, made up, luxuriated in boredom, and dreamed of the lives they would one day live, far from

  Lackawanna.

  As children, The Gunners could not have imagined that by the time they were sixteen years old, one of them would turn her back on the others, and the group would be so fractured by the loss, the sudden and unexplained absence of this one, that within weeks the other friendships would also dissolve, leaving each of them in a dark and confounding solitude. Mikey Callahan became a sinkhole; everything inside sort of loosened and then just collapsed.

  Chapter 2

  It was springtime, April, with one month left of her junior year of high school, when Sally Forrest cut herself off from the rest of The Gunners. She stopped speaking to them at school, never again set foot in The Gunner House, would not answer them when they called to her in the hallway or when they tried to approach her as she walked down Ingram Street. She would quicken her pace and lower her eyes and change her route. She would not answer phone calls to her house. The rest of them finally went directly to her home to seek her out, where Sally’s mother, Corinne, said that Sally was unwell, and she would not allow the children to enter.

  Sally did not replace the group with new friendships at school; she seemed altogether uninterested in the company of others, taking her lunch outside or to a classroom that was not in use. She never raised her hand in class. Her pale eyes went cool, and her posture was hard.

  For several weeks, the others puzzled over the situation together, replaying recent conversations, devising theories, formulating vague and uncertain but genuine apologies. When they could not reach any single conclusion as to what might have caused Sally to turn on them, they began to turn on one another, with accusations and assumptions, resentment and suspicion. The Gunners found themselves behaving like strangers toward one another in the halls of school and the streets of Lackawanna for their remaining months of high school.

  Mikey was one grade behind the others in school, and the only one, aside from Sally, who remained in the area.

  Mikey moved out of his father’s home after graduating high school, into a tiny ranch house twelve miles north, so that his commute to General Mills, where he worked on the maintenance crew, would be ten minutes instead of thirty. He rented the ranch home from an elderly woman named Louise who had just moved into a retirement center. Louise explained to Mikey that her daughters had both married weasels and she didn’t have any plans of leaving the home to them, so Mikey should go ahead and do as he liked with the place, paint-wise, plant-wise, and pet-wise. Mikey brightened the dull gray-pink walls to a warm cream and planted a forsythia bush out front. He got a black kitten one Friday, and named the cat Friday.

  After moving out of his father’s home, Mikey made a habit of going to see his father every Sunday. His father would pour him a beer and they would stare tensely at the TV for a few hours, then his father would get up to take a piss and say, “Lock the door on your way out,” and Mikey would feel a great sense of relief.

  Mikey never left the area, or his job at General Mills, although he did receive two promotions over the course of a decade. He never left the ranch home either; he was shocked to find that Louise had actually left the house, and all that it contained, to him when she eventually passed. He hadn’t realized she was so serious about those weasels.

  Mikey took Louise’s impressive accumulation of Redbook magazines, erotic novels, and cookbooks to the Salvation Army, except for The Joy of Cooking, which he kept for himself. He paged absently through this book, many of its pages stained with sauce or textured with crumbs, until one day it began to interest him. He learned to baste and blanch and caramelize, poach and macerate and emulsify, learned the quick mental math of dividing recipes into a portion for one. He pored over Louise’s collection from the classical repertoire on cassette tapes, listening to this music while he cooked and late into the evening.

  Friday became a dear and happy companion. He was a cat of the highest caliber. He purred when Mikey touched his head, while leaning and arching his back into Mikey’s legs and walking figure eights through them as Mikey cooked, purred in the morning when he moved from the foot of the bed, where he slept every night, to Mikey’s chest, happily and dutifully kneading at Mikey’s neck with his little black paws, purring so rapturously that he gasped and wheezed fishy breath into Mikey’s face. Mikey wondered what had brought him the great fortune of having such a merry and contented cat, who, unlike Mikey, never seemed to slip into dark, pensive, and ungenerous moods.

  It was not long after Mikey left his father’s home that his vision in his right eye began to grow worse. Faraway road signs, individual leaves on trees, and tiles on roofs were the first things to go. The change was so gradual that it wasn’t until years later that he finally went to see an optometrist.

  The optometrist performed tests and gave Mikey a prescription for his right eye. He inquired as to when Mikey had lost vision completely in the left.

  “I never had it,” Mikey said.

  “I see.” The optometrist stared back and forth between both of Mikey’s eyes and shone a bright blue light into the right one.

  Mikey picked out a pair of wire frames, and reiterated to the receptionist ordering the glasses that he would only need the proper prescription in the right lens.

  Several months later, Mikey returned to the optometrist when he could tell his vision in his right eye had already grown worse. He was retested and given a stronger prescription.

  A year later, he was back again, for the same reason.

  This time, the doctor asked about blind spots. Mikey confessed that he had several and asked what this meant. The doctor explained that he was undergoing early-onset macular degeneration.

  Mikey asked him directly, “Will I go blind?”

  The doctor answered directly, “Probably.”

  “When?”

  The doctor compared Mikey’s
new prescription with the previous one. “A few years most likely. Although you never know what might happen with technology between now and then.”

  Mikey felt an angry and fearful indignation shiver through the cold organs in his belly. He said, “Why is this happening?”

  “Are you asking if it’s hereditary?”

  “I guess.”

  “Possibly,” the doctor said.

  Mikey was quiet for a bit. Then he said, “There was one time I looked directly at the sun when I was a kid.”

  The doctor smiled gently. “They warn you about that. But it’s almost impossible to cause permanent damage that way. You didn’t do this to yourself, I can assure you of that.”

  Mikey started to learn Braille. He started practicing to cook and clean and clothe himself with a piece of tape over his right eye. He also started to catalog images, colors, memories, and he created associations that would make sense to him when—if—he lost his sight. The color red = the smell of cinnamon. Blue = fingers under running water. White = the taste of cream. A full moon is Chopin’s Nocturne, Opus 9, No. 2. The first snowfall looks exactly the way sugar tastes. A tree-lined street with lampposts is Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis One.”

  Excluding Sally, the rest of The Gunners started up a group email thread within a year or two of graduating high school and going their separate ways. Any ill will among the rest of them caused by Sally’s absence seemed to have been forgotten. Although this was never formally acknowledged between them, they reconnected easily over email, the ongoing thread coming to life every few months, and their contact was warm, often containing a happy childhood memory or an ancient inside joke. With all of them now around thirty, the past decade had seen a great deal of movement and change, all documented through these emails.

  Jimmy had come into great wealth since moving to Los Angeles at age nineteen and making wise investments. Sam had been married at age twenty-one in a family-only ceremony, and was now deeply involved with the church he and his wife attended in Georgia. Lynn had attended a music conservatory in New York City, but now lived in a small town in Pennsylvania, where she and her boyfriend ran the local AA chapter. Alice had attended the University of Michigan, eloped with a graduate student who she referred to as “The Saint,” been married to him for a year and then divorced him; she now dated women. She currently owned a small but successful marina on Lake Huron. Sometimes, Mikey felt embarrassed by how little his own life had changed since high school compared to the rest of them. In their emails, the others described marriage and travels and concerts. In Mikey’s emails, he described renovations to their high school gym, a new recipe he had attempted, and minor updates to Friday’s health.