by David Thorne
“Yes, you’re very creative Jamie. You should take this up full-time. There’s probably a huge market for lamps made out of traffic cones.”
“Don’t do it. You’re going to have serious buyer’s remorse then stop the car on the way home to leave it by the side of the road.”
The Walking Dead
“Get a haircut, Carl. Or put the hat back on. Where is that hat? Have you lost it?”
“Quick Darryl. Grab a stick!”
Clowns
Holly looked over my shoulder. "What are you writing? Is it another email correspondence?"
"No," I responded, "I’m writing an article."
"You should post another email correspondence," Holly advised, "People like the emails."
"Yes, I realize that, the problem is that when I post an email exchange, everyone says, 'oh, another email exchange' and when I post a non-email article, they say 'I like the email correspondences better. I’m like one of those clowns that twists balloons into animal shapes at children’s parties.”
"Is the article about clowns?" asked Holly.
"What? No. Nobody wants to read about clowns."
"They might if it was an email exchange.”
"When have I ever emailed a clown?"
"How would I know? I have no idea what you get up to all day on the internet."
"It certainly isn't corresponding with clowns."
"I can only take your word for that. What's the article about then?"
"The time I went to deer camp with JM.”
"That sounds boring," Holly replied, "you should email a clown and see what he says."
Deer Camp
I met my good friend JM at a work function Holly dragged me to. It was one of those networking things that I usually manage to get out of by pretending I’ve hurt my back or have a toothache, but that takes some prior planning and she’d only informed me about it at the last minute.
“It’s for the building association. You’ll have fun, it’s at a kitchen renovation company this time.”
“Why would that make it any more fun?”
“There will be taps and sinks to look at. We need new fittings for Seb’s bathroom.”
“Seb doesn’t care about bathroom fittings. All he wants in his bathroom is decent wi-fi and a lock on the door. ”
“We’re going. You’ll meet new people and you can wear that new shirt my parents bought you for your birthday.”
“It gets worse every time you say something.”
“Just get ready. We’re leaving in ten minutes.”
“What? That doesn’t give me time. I need to shave and shower. I took the rubbish out today and got a bit sweaty and my hair still has a massive cocky from bed last night. You’ll have to go without me.”
“We’re leaving in ten minutes. Just don’t stand too close to anybody or turn your head to the right.”
For the first hour or so, I feigned interest in sinks close to the makeshift bar. I flicked a few taps on and off and nodded as if to say, ‘good tap that one, definitely a tap I’d consider buying’. There were almost fifty people standing around in small groups chatting about whatever people at building association networking events chat about - probably doors and vinyl siding - so it was fairly easy to avoid Holly who would make me meet people.
Apart from an occasional nod and smile, I’d managed to avoid most interaction when I felt a firm hand on my shoulder.
“Allow me,” said a man with a large, friendly smile. He reached up to the back of my shirt collar and yanked off the $12.99 price tag, handing it to me with a chuckle.
“Thanks. I’ve been walking around for an hour with that on. People have been looking at me strangely but I thought it was because of my hair. ”
“No problem, do I detect an accent?”
“Australian.”
“Ah, you must be Holly’s husband. She’s a nice girl.”
“Yes, she can be. Not all the time of course, mostly just in public or when she wants something. I’m David.”
“JM. ”
“Nice to meet you, JM. Are you a member of the building association?”
“Yes, I’m the president.”
“Nice. You must be doing alright then. Can you get me a good deal on taps?”
“Maybe. What do you do, David?”
“Have you ever been to a shopping mall and seen those motorized animals that kids pay to ride around on?”
“Yes. You run one of those?”
“No, I just ride around on the animals.”
“Haha. Holly already told my wife Lori that you’re a writer. Do you shoot?”
Gun ownership isn’t a thing in Australia. People used to be allowed to own rifles, but some moron went berserk at a popular tourist attraction in the nineties, resulting in the introduction of some of the world’s most restrictive gun legislation. Even before that I wasn’t exposed to guns. There was a kid on our street that owned a BB gun but I wasn’t allowed to play with him because his house had a letterbox shaped and painted like a cow. According to my father, it bought property values down and displayed a lack of refinement. Words were exchanged and letters written which resulted in bright pink teats being added.
The closest I had ever come to holding a real gun was playing Bug Hunt with the Atari XG-1 light gun. For those not familiar with the game, you’re not missing out on much. It consisted of shooting bugs made of pixels the size of paint swatches with a gun so inaccurate, shooting at the wall gave you a higher score. The game lasted about ten minutes which included eight minutes to calibrate the gun, a minute yelling “Oh my god, this is bullshit”, and a minute loading Missile Command instead.
“Bug Hunt?” queried JM.
‘Yes, I had the high score. Just in my family though, not the highest score in the world or anything.”
“What are you doing Saturday morning?”
I had no idea what to expect as I drove up the winding dirt road towards The Flying Rabbit. The road was lined by wooden fences, behind which tall corn grew, and every second fencepost had a plastic American flag stapled to it. To be honest, I had no intention of actually going when I said I would but that Saturday morning, Holly wanted me to help her go through her wardrobe and organize it into three piles; Keeping, Maybe Keeping, and Trying On Again With Different Pants in a Minute.
“When did you arrange this?” Holly asked.
“At the faucet party on Wednesday. I said I’d go and I don’t want to disappoint the guys.”
“What guys?”
“I don’t know, guys with guns. JM invited me. I’m meant to meet him in less than an hour.”
“Are there going to be girls there?”
“Yes, thousands. Apparently the National Bikini Model Clay Shooting Championships are being held there today.”
“Right, well JM is nice. He’s a work client so don’t say anything stupid. Is that what you’re wearing?”
I only have three types of outfit; suits, pajamas, and stuff. All of them are either black or grey so I usually just mix and match for most occasions and use the ‘single pile on the floor’ system for ready access. The first project Holly and I undertook when we purchased our house was to knock down a wall between our bedroom and an adjoining room to turn it into a walk-in closet, but I learnt upon completion that it was only for her to use.
The dirt road led to a parking area near a small shack and I pulled into a space between identical Chevrolet Silverado pickup trucks. One had a large confederate flag sticker on the back window, which made me doubt my decision for a moment, but it also had a sticker with a snake saying, “Don’t tread on me” so I figured the owner of the vehicle couldn’t be all that bad if he cared about local wildlife so much.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” asked JM. He was sitting with a group of four others on the front deck of the shack. I’d heard shots as I left the car and they’d watched as
I ducked behind two pickups and ran with my head down like I was boarding a helicopter the rest of t
he way. I was introduced to the owner - an old guy named Rick with a red setter named Rusty - and the people I’d be shooting with that day. There were five in our party: JM, me, a dentist named Doug, a marine named Murdock, and a short chubby Indian man named Amar. I left my suit jacket and scarf in the car and donned the green size 3XL shooting vest offered.
“Fits well,” JM said, “Plenty of room.” He pulled tabs on the sides and the bottom of the vest flared out like a dress.
“Do you have safety glasses?”
“No.”
“Here,” he said, handing me a pair of mirrored Aviators.
I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the window of the shack as we headed out to the course trail. I’d hoped to get photos of the day to post on Facebook, which wasn’t going to happen now. I’d also hoped that there would be some form of safety lesson and instructions.
“You’re up at the stand,” said JM, “We will give you a few practice shots before we start properly.” He handed me a shotgun and a box of shells.
“So there’s no safety lesson or instructions?”
“Don’t shoot anybody.”
“Right. And how do I put the bullets in the gun?”
“They’re shells. It’s an ‘over under’ so you push the lever to the right to open it... that’s right... put two shells in, and snap it closed. Keep your finger off the trigger because it’s now loaded. When you’re ready, yell “Pull” and I’ll press this button that sends a target flying into the air. Try to hit it. After I hear your first shot, I’ll send off the second target. That’s called report pairs. A true pair is when I send both targets at the same time. If you hit a target, you get an X on the score-sheet, miss and you get an O. There’s 16 stations, six shots per station. Person at the end with the most X’s wins. You’re up.”
“Do I have to remember all that?”
“No, just the part about not shooting anybody.”
I was in the woods, with a group of strangers, holding a loaded weapon. I’ve heard that some people feel a sense of power when they hold a gun, of being in control. I felt the exact opposite. This is how accidents happen I thought, you give loaded weapons to people who have no idea what they are doing, people who have no training, people who are extremely conscious of how much their vest flares out and wished they’d helped organize a closet instead.
“Pull,” I yelled.
A machine to my left made a thudthuda noise and an orange disk sailed into the air. I pulled the trigger. There was a muffled ‘doof’ and recoil punched me in the shoulder. I missed. Almost immediately a second disk flew up, I fired and missed again.
“Perhaps if I watch someone else do it,” I suggested.
“No, you’re doing fine,” replied JM, “just lean into the shot, follow the clay, and relax. The trick is not to overthink it.”
I reloaded, mounted the gun to my shoulder, and closed my eyes.
A few years back, the agency I worked for was commissioned to design a brochure titled Living with Anxiety, which included a list of relaxation methods. Along with the usual breathing and physical exercise suggestions, it described a Japanese technique called Iwa-Baransu which requires you to close your eyes and visualize balancing a round stone on top of slightly larger round stone to form a stack against a wind. The issue at hand determines the wind’s strength. Apparently it was a technique practiced by Samurai before battle and now more commonly before business meetings. I tried it prior to a meeting to discuss responsibility for twenty-thousand copies of the brochure being printed and sent out with ‘We’ll bring highkicks’ listed under services offered instead of ‘Well-being checkups’ and have used the technique daily since.
“Are you falling asleep?”
“No Holly, tell me more about your day.”
“Well, I returned her call and left a second message and she called me back an hour later while I was at lunch and left a message to call her but when I did, it went straight to messages again so I rang reception and they said she was in a meeting for the rest of the day. As far as I’m concerned, the bitch can order her own promotional travel-mugs.”
It doesn’t work every time of course. Our department recently had to take part in Excel training for no apparent reason and ten minutes into the lesson, despite my stone stack reaching shoulder height, I wanted to stab everyone in the room. At one point, Joylene (a large woman from HR with four framed photos of her cats and one of her deceased father holding a trout on her desk) actually stated, “Ooo, I love Excel.”
Who says, “Ooo, I love Excel.”? How is it even a sentence? Each time Joylene had a question, she waved her pen, with a huge rainbow colored feather taped to the end, above her head while making excited “uh, uh, um, uh” noises.
“Yes, Joylene?”
“If I want my columns color coded, am I able to mix my own preferred range of blues from a palette or do I have to select from the four-thousand shades of blue it already has?”
“And that, your Honor, is when the defendant leapt across the desk. I enter into evidence the rainbow feather pen.”
If there ever comes a time where I’m typing numbers into boxes and decide I’d really like those boxes with numbers to be a specific shade of blue, it will be time to turn off the computer, pack my things, and start a fire. Along with photos of cats and dead fishermen on her desk, Joylene has a vast collection of scented candles with names like Highland Bog and Tuscan Spitpig so it would be easy to make it look like it was her fault.
I opened my eyes.
“Pull.”
I squeezed the trigger. The disk exploded in a puff of orange dust and the group behind me exploded in cheers. In that brief moment, I understood how Olympians feel standing on a podium, how mountaineers feel looking down from a summit, how Joylene felt when told she had a good grasp of Excel basics.
I was instantly addicted. Though I completed the course with a pitiful score of seventeen percent, every hit had been front-page newsworthy and every miss evaluated for next time. Afterwards, we drank beer from the back of a Chevrolet Silverado. It was, as far as I was concerned, the greatest sport ever invented.
I bought my first gun the next day. A Browning Citori from the top rack at Dick’s Sporting Goods. I also bought a cleaning kit. And a shooting vest. Then glasses and earplugs, field-carry bag, fiber-optic sight, a better shooting vest... Hours were spent on YouTube watching instructional videos. I learnt about stance, following the shot, placement, choke types and what the numbers meant on boxes of shells. The following week my score was around thirty percent, then fifty. I became good friends with JM and the others and looked forward with fervor to each game. Then it snowed and the Flying Rabbit closed for winter.
From: JM
Date: Thursday 20 Nov 2014 11.06am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Shooting
David,
What are you doing this weekend? Do you want to come shooting?
JM
................................................................................................
From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 20 Nov 2014 11.19am
To: JM
Subject: Re: Shooting
Hey JM,
The Flying Rabbit is closed. :(
David
................................................................................................
From: JM
Date: Thursday 20 Nov 2014 12.46pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Shooting
I know. We’re headed up to Deer Camp tomorrow afternoon for two nights and you’re more than welcome to join us.
I can pick you up at 3 if you want to come, it’s a three hour drive from your place.
JM
................................................................................................
From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 20 Nov 2014 1.08pm
To: JM
Subject: Re: Re:
Re: Shooting
What’s at Deer Camp?
................................................................................................
From: JM
Date: Thursday 20 Nov 2014 1.23pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Shooting
No phone reception and no women. It’s a large wooded property in West Virginia with trails and stands. Tent and bunks are set up, you will just need to pack your license, warm gear and a rifle with a decent scope. You coming?
JM
................................................................................................
I bought my second gun that afternoon. A Browning Medallion 308, with Redline scope, as it matched my other gun. I should have also bought the pair of battery-heated socks I saw at Dick’s for $49.99.
It was cold at Deer Camp. A lot colder than I thought it would be. A deep, biting cold that was barely kept at bay by the roaring campfire waiting for us. Murdock and Doug had arrived a few hours before us, Amar cancelled due to an issue having his hormone replacement prescription filled. I’d known him for almost three months and hadn’t realized he was born a woman.
“Are you sure about that, JM?”
“Of course I’m sure, I’ve known him for five years and he’s only been a man for two. His name used to be Aisha.”