Shots Fired in Terminal 2

by William Hazelgrove

  My mother had never liked them. She was one with the mother in the film A Christmas Story—“You'll shoot your eye out.”13 I am sure she disposed of my rifles, and I never bothered to ask. Guns were something for kids and I was now a young adult, but the gun culture had affected even our liberal family. The scene in the movie where the father, played by actor Darren McGavin, says that he had a gun when he was kid to explain why he bought Ralphie a gun is a perfect example of how gun culture is handed down through the generations. “Oh I had one when I was a kid,” he explains to his wife. I would imagine video games and Xboxes supplanted a lot of this with the middle class, but the feeling is still there.

  I had plastic machine guns, bazookas, plastic grenades, pistols, muskets, cannons, cap guns, blank guns, guns that fired plastic bullets, squirt guns, ray guns, holsters, armor, rifle slings, targets, model rockets, water rockets, and a very realistic M16. These were all toys and I didn't end up a “gun nut.” But I fantasized about shooting people with my toy guns. I didn't fantasize about shooting animals, though I did take shots at squirrels and birds with my BB guns. I ran around pulling my toy gun out and blasting away at my friends, parents, and neighbors, and no one thought anything of it. Why should they? The Westerns we watched showed men proficient with guns, and Clint Eastwood was an urban version of a tough guy who dispensed the bad guys with his .44 Magnum.

  I doodled incessantly in my notebooks and drew soldiers firing machine guns, hiding behind hills. In my doodles people were always getting shot. I ate my cereal imagining violence of all kinds. The news was on in our house a lot; there was constant footage of the Vietnam War, and it was the era of assassinations. I was in Indian Guides and Boy Scouts, in which playing cowboys and Indians was standard, and if we didn't have plastic guns we used sticks. Someone was always dying. You're shot! You're dead! Many arguments would break out over who was dead and who wasn't. Sometimes the dead would stomp off in protest saying they wanted to be the shooter and not the victim. All in all I was a normal American boy of my time; little did I know that I was merely the product of a nation with a long history intertwined with guns.

  I did see myself as a cowboy, and to this day when I take the trash down our long driveway in the darkness and go down a small grassy incline, I see myself on a horse. This comes from hours and hours of watching men with guns bulging out of holsters and rifle shucks crossing the frontier with their horses. A cowboy is self-reliant, independent, takes nothing from any man, is a dead-eye shot, and, more than all that, he is a man who backs up what he says and banishes enemies with his guns. It is no coincidence that our Western states are the most heavily armed, with pickup trucks replacing horses and automatic weapons replacing six-shooters.

  The gun culture was given over to the military in World War II, with GIs finishing off Germans and Japanese with machine guns, M1s, pistols, grenades, bazookas, or fifty-caliber machine guns. The good guys were armed to the teeth again, except this time we were not just saving our country but saving the world. Hollywood had a field day.

  Now boys were running up hills with guns to knock out the Germans or the Japanese. The duck and cover of the movies translated to boys diving behind hills and looking over to take a shot. One of my favorite toys was my GI Joe doll. You could buy all sorts of weapons for him, and this was long after World War II had ended. Our collective memory of that war was kept alive through movies and television shows, and action films of amped-up police and heavily armed bad guys kept the gun culture alive.

  The Matrix and Quentin Tarantino's films would take guns and American violence to its next logical step, with orgies of murderous mayhem, guns front and center. Video games have taken over a lot of the cultural mores presented in movies, only now the viewer is able to participate in the carnage. Even at a time when rural culture is in decline, we cannot escape the heritage of the gun and hunting ethos that belongs to our rural traditions. Modern mass shooters live out their gun fantasies by taking action. They are already well schooled in American gun culture going all the way back to cowboys and Indians. Add a touch of mental illness, PTSD, or psychopathic tendencies, and they take that next step in our gun-laden history and consummate their affair by killing prodigiously. They are the cowboy gone bad.

  I learn later that some people do try to get out of the airport. They hop fences, cross access roads, or head across fields, only to be met with the raised guns of a SWAT team. The pictures show people with hands raised marching toward what look like soldiers. They are then frisked, questioned, and have their IDs checked before they are turned back and returned to the airport. The police have no way of knowing who is a shooter and who is just someone caught in the airport when it was closed. So we all become suspects and I receive more than a few suspicious glances from gun-toting officers.

  I feel like we have all been parked, like that burned-out 757 I saw on the way in. We have all been affected by the initial shooting and after the second shooting we have all become potential terrorists. The police are still checking parking garages and combing through the airplane hangars. All anyone wants to do is leave. We want to get away from the police, the ambulances, the SWAT teams, the television trucks, the people sitting on the curbs, on the sidewalks, clustered around buildings, the people out on the tarmacs, the jets that cannot fly, the jets that cannot land. We are all in a state of suspended animation with just one overriding thought, common to all refugees—escape and get away from the lurking danger.

  I make my way back toward the media trucks. The swirling lights and the people sitting everywhere give the world a surreal quality. The media people are still looking for stories and I see other “witnesses” getting their fifteen nanoseconds of fame. My phone is still ringing with people who saw me on television and want to make sure I am safe. My father has called several times but I can't seem to get through. The cellphones are still acting strange and I don't know if this is because of the media antennas or the fact that ten thousand people are stranded in an airport with nowhere to go and all trying to call loved ones on their cellphones to let them know they are alright.

  I see Kitty and the girls are still in the reporter's car. I see other journalists in the street doing live feeds. Kitty holds her finger to her mouth motioning to a man in the front seat phoning in a report. I go back over to Clay, who is sitting on the ground looking stressed. I sit down next to him and he looks up.

  “What did you find?”

  I shake my head. “Nothing. They wouldn't let me in.”

  Clay nods and stares off. He was to go to college last year and at the last minute—and I mean the last minute, the car was packed—he said he didn't want to go. He had scored very well on the ACT exams but decided he wanted to hold off. Clay has taken a nine-to-five job at an import-export company and likes it, but I know there are times that he wonders about the path not taken and thinks he should have gone to college. I get it. We all wonder about that path not taken and now we are pinned down in an airport and we question the twists and turns. Had I been a business man we would not have had a layover in the airport. We would have gone to the beach for the day or we would have flown out earlier. But a writer must watch his money, and I have been thinking like a writer for so long I don't know how to not think about money. But isn't this unfair to my family? Shouldn't I have chosen a path less risky, something not so close to the edge of the cliff? Because right now we are all on the edge of the cliff. Maybe Clay would have taken a different path if he had grown up seeing a father with a steady nine-to-five instead of an overeducated man who lines his mantle with books and his office with signing posters.

  My son might then have found my routine in his and school would have not been such a burden. Even I know this is ridiculous, but this must be someone's fault. Why did we stumble into a shooting? Why did we run for our lives? Why might my kids now have PTSD or some other psychological stressor when others breeze through airports all the time and nothing happens? The kicker is, we never fly. Writers go on driving vacations. This
was a treat and now we are in an airport being searched by SWAT teams, with five dead people in a building just a few yards away. The hell of it is those bodies will be there for a while as evidence is gathered, and family members will not be informed for too long. The forensic teams will have to have their time, and identities will have to be confirmed while the families wait. In Columbine and Sandy Hook family members would have to wait until the next day for confirmation that their loved ones had died.

  Clay and I sit in silence. We are in one of those sidebars of family life where there are no markers. We have joined forces with families caught up in wars, hurricanes, tornadoes, freak floods, and blizzards. There are the strange stories of families being swept off a road by a deluge or running out of gas in a desert with the father setting off never to be heard from again. Or the families murdered in their homes by unknown assailants. When I read In Cold Blood I always marveled at that 1950s Kansas family that had it all and then had the incredible bad luck to end up with two killers in their house. This is all in that other world of existence, and all you can do is endure and try to get to the other side and get the hell out and never look back. The thought of our home with the fireplaces waiting in a snow-crusted landscape seems like a Carrier and Ives scene, something out of a Christmas movie where there are no guns and no death.

  Like most fathers and sons, Clay and I were close before he hit adolescence and then our relationship got lost under the pressure of school and growing up. Now I wish I had been able to break down those walls. A phrase stuck in my head long ago—the silent shame of fathers and sons. We are always careful around each other. We both have a temper and are careful not to set each other off, so real talk is sidelined and instead we talk about the Cubs or the Bears or food. Chicken wings are our mutual favorite and we have frequented Yak-Zies next to Wrigley Field, which has the best wings. Many times I look for topics that we can both enter into but come up short.

  “This really—”

  “This sucks,” he says, looking over defiantly.

  “Yes,” I say, nodding.

  He pauses then looks down. “I hate it that you did those interviews,” he mutters.

  I nod slowly. I know what he is talking about; Dad the whore. The media whore selling himself because maybe it will sell a few books. This thought has crossed my mind. I have been selling books for so long I don't know how not to. I have a media persona and it turns on like a light when the camera or microphone swings my way. It comes from an early realization that being a good writer with awards and great reviews is not enough to sell books in the age of the internet. You have to make noise, and noise is not pretty. It is countless hours of social media badgering and grabbing any mainstream media you can lay your hands on. I had a fantasy, as all writers do, that my career would follow the Fitzgerald–Hemingway arc, where my books would magically sell and I would be sipping absinthe on the Left Bank of Paris. I was quickly disabused of that myth. Hemingway married well and Fitzgerald was almost destitute at the end.

  It is with shock that all writers realize they are on par with a man selling insurance once a book is finished. The crass economics of selling books to make a living requires the development of another side of the writerly world. My father is one of the best glue salesmen in the world while my mother was a writer and a painter. I do have both sides and people don't recognize the salesman writer barnstorming bookstores and popping up on television or invading their morning drive time. He is one with that man setting out with glue pails in the back of his car. The thoughtful, hidden-away writer has left and will not reappear until another publishing contract appears on the horizon.

  But my son sees none of this. Dad disappears into the room over the garage to write and then appears in newspapers, as a voice on the Chicago radio, signing an occasional movie deal. But he doesn't see the gritty sweaty pushing that is so awful that it makes me cringe when people block the social media posts that dun them to death. It is in a way horrible. And so when the camera turns on I don't shrink away. Even when it concerns death because, of course, death sells more than anything else.

  “I know. It looks bad to you,” I begin.

  His eyes are red. “No one is going to buy your books because we're on television.”

  I nod again and look at him. “I know…that's not why I did it. I was there and people should know there was a second shooter.”

  He looks at me and shrugs. “Yeah. Whatever.”

  This is where we are. I am not sure what a man who writes books can say to his son who is not big on the life of the mind. He aced his ACT without studying and he has the cerebral horsepower, but I just don't think he sees a need to read books or sit in a classroom. He hated his classes in high school and I suspect there were other things he hated there as well. But these are the things we don't talk about so I founder again.

  I nod slowly and see another crowd of journalists gathering as the governor of Florida walks up to the microphone. I stand up and, like all fathers the world over who don't have easy answers, I change the subject. Sons and fathers are better doing things together—eating chicken wings, going to a ballgame, or going to a press conference.

  “Guess I'll see what the governor has to say.”

  Clay looks over, then stands up. He sees the suits walking up to the lights. His eyes grow. “That's the governor?” There is awe in his voice, and a dad-son adventure beckons.

  “Yes, I have never seen a governor…. You want to check him out?”

  Clay gets up and nods. “I'm not doing anything here. I'll go with you.”

  “Good,” I say, as we walk over to hear the governor.

  Governor Rick Scott is surrounded by a crowd of security guards, media, and his own entourage. They move as one and approach the microphone. Clay and I are on the outside with the cameramen and the reporters are closer in. The governor says to pray for the victims and the wounded. He is asked how he got there and says he flew in to Executive Airport, which is about fifteen miles away. “What do you think about guns in airports,” a reporter asks. The governor ducks and says this is no time to get political. He says he has the National Guard on standby. I wonder about this. The National Guard is on standby when the police have declared there is a lone shooter? Clearly, he knows more than he is saying. He brings up the National Guard several more times while taking questions. He has talked to President-Elect Trump but not President Obama. Several reporters question why he has not talked to the president. He says he has a personal relationship with Donald Trump. The governor looks small and pale and is in a drab suit. Television will fill in the rest for America and colorize the incident.

  The truth is, there are a lot of media trucks and police cars parked all around with a large number of people doing nothing. There is not a lot to do and the interviews have tapered down. Clearly Governor Scott flying in and telling everyone to pray for the survivors and letting people know he can bring in the National Guard at a moment's notice is the main event. Clay and I stand as the only non-journalists inside the media pool around the head of state. I am amazed that no one has asked us to identify ourselves, but the sheer amount of law enforcement has created a perceived safety zone.

  The National Guard is only called out for true emergencies: floods, rampaging fires, riots, epidemics, threats of invasion, threats of terrorism, and the like. They have never been called out for a mass shooting, but the airport is closed and the planes are being diverted, with ten thousand people stranded in an area that is considered an “active situation.” You would only bring out the Guard if you believed the breakdown of order was at hand or that the airport was under siege. The police story is at odds with the governor's having the Guard on standby. Cleary there is another threat that could bring in the tanks and armored vehicles and soldiers.

  But the press conference is over. Clay and I go back to our cement column and sit down. My son shakes his head.

  “You know what I don't get?”

  “What's that?”

  He holds h
is hands up. “Why don't they just get rid of the fucking guns. Just tell people they can't have them?”

  This is the reaction. It is the thought you have when confronted with murdered people and the breakdown of order. There is something wrong and if you have a problem, you want to solve it. Why can't we all agree that guns are not doing us any favors? Why can't we just say, as people of the twenty-first century, that it doesn't work anymore to have armed people in our society. Clay stares at the cement wall that goes along the sidewalk. Beyond the wall is the tarmac where people are standing out by 737 airliners because they don't know if they will get shot or not.

  He turns to me. “Why is that, Dad?”

  I look over and see that he is a stressed-out twenty year old with day-old stubble and airport grime smudged on his face from lying on the sidewalk with his mother and sisters. The thought that we are prisoners waiting to be released or sent to our doom is inescapable. The governor can leave the airport but normal people are trapped along with any terrorists, shooters, psychopaths, deranged boyfriends, or pissed-off coworkers, all of whom could be carrying an automatic weapon capable of murdering a hundred people in minutes. These guns can be bought in department stores all over America or on the internet. They are as easy to get as buying a loaf of bread. And one might ask: if one were trapped in a major airport shut down for the next twenty-four hours because of people with guns, why it is that we cannot do anything to curb this national health problem? Because, ultimately, human health is the opposite of human death. So my son's question is dead on. Why can't we just get rid of the guns?

  “It's complicated,” I offer up.