Stories I Tell Myself

by Juan F. Thompson

  I did not expect that Will’s presence would change my relationship with Hunter. I also did not expect that Will’s birth would bring the five of us—Hunter, Deb, Jennifer, Will, and me—together into a family. But it did. Will became the focus. When we came up to Owl Farm, there were always new toys, some that Deb had found at garage sales, and some that Hunter had ordered. As Will got a bit older, he would sit at the end of the kitchen counter and eat his lunch while Hunter ate his breakfast in his Command Chair. Or, Will would stand on the couch in front of the kitchen counter, facing Hunter over the typewriter, and Hunter would grab something and give it to Will to play with, and they would talk nonsense. When it was time for Will to go to sleep, Hunter said to put him in his bedroom, and when Will started to cry when he saw the masks and stuffed animals, wolverines or skunks or foxes, in the bedroom, Hunter said, go ahead and cover them with sheets. One night when Will was asleep on the bed, without warning Hunter retired early, and when Jen and I went looking for him, we found him and Will sleeping together on his bed, curled up on their sides. It is an image I will not forget.

  When we came to visit, there was nearly always a present for Will. There might be a novelty like a plastic hammer that made a sound of breaking glass when it struck something, or a book on the history of tractors, which were a major focus for Will when he was around two years old. One time it was a little seat that could be hung from the ceiling from a springy rope. I was going to put the hook in a door frame, but Hunter insisted that the seat be hung in the middle of the kitchen, where Will could bounce and thrash his legs right alongside the Pitkin County sheriff, or the past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), or one of the wild artist/carpenters who lived up the road, while everyone was watching football. Hunter wanted Will in the action. It was important that he learn at a young age the difference between an option and a lateral pass, or the folly of betting with your heart rather than your head in a big game. We drew the line, though, when Hunter insisted that Will throw down twenty dollars, the house bet, on the game.

  For Christmas one year it was a small wooden rocking horse painted in bright colors, another year a miniature piano from Hammacher Schlemmer. Another time it was a block and tackle made of hardwood and painted red and blue. I rigged up an eyebolt in a door frame, fastened a bucket to the lifting end of the block and tackle, and demonstrated to Will how it worked. He studied it carefully, and Hunter watched him watch the mechanism move.

  There was also the tractor and the convertible. Hunter had bought a small John Deere farm tractor to mow the two-acre lawn at Owl Farm. It had a front-loader bucket and a huge three-blade mowing attachment that hooked to the rear. Knowing Will’s fondness for tractors, Hunter started it up and took Will for a ride. He sat between Hunter’s legs, not even two years old, while Hunter steered with one hand and held Will with the other, and I sat on the fender as Hunter drove over the lawn and around the house. Will smiled the whole time and could have probably ridden for hours, except Hunter couldn’t do it—the jarring and lurching of the tractor was hell on his joints. Later, when Will would get bored being in the house, Deb would take his hand and they would visit the tractor, and Will would climb in the bucket or on the front tire, or dangle his tiny legs over the edge of the seat while Deb hovered by him.

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  Doting Aunt Deb with Will in the kitchen at Owl Farm, Christmas 1999

  WHEN WILL WAS TWELVE and Hunter had been dead six years, I taught him to drive that tractor. I know Hunter would have been proud to see him confidently throwing the tractor in gear, engaging and disengaging the clutch, and scooping up the odd tire or block from the ground. I taught Will to shoot because of the thrill and because it is important to understand and respect guns rather than fear them, but also because I learned all about guns from my father. I have found a great comfort in passing on a family tradition or skill. It grounds me in something beyond myself and this day.

  There were the presents, and there was also the bonfire. When Will was four, Hunter had a bonfire made for him during one of our visits. Unknown to us, over the previous year Deb had been planning this event, collecting dead trees, branches, and random flammable objects that littered the property into a giant pile about fifty yards behind his house. It was late winter, there was a thin layer of snow on the ground, the sky was overcast, and the ground was wet. The time had come to light the fire. Hunter led us out back to the great pile, and soon Joe, a friend and neighbor who was a volunteer fireman, drove up in an old red fire engine just in case the fire got out of hand. Joe soaked the pile in gasoline and then set the match to it. We stood out there for hours, well back from the intense heat of the fire, watching the flames leap and flicker far above our heads as the sky darkened and night fell, until it was time to go inside. The next morning Will and I went back to the site of the fire and found it still smoldering, the coals still glowing red below the surface ash. It took another day for the fire to go out completely, and even then there were probably hot coals buried deep in the ashes. Long afterward, Deb would take Will (after they had explored the tractor) to poke through the ashes and search for treasures.

  Ace and Will at the kitchen counter in 2002 with the iguana we gave Hunter. He was still the doting grandfather.

  Will brought a completeness. I was no longer only a son, I was a father, with my father. I saw how he loved my son, and I understood better how my father loved me. For those weekends the five of us created a circle of protection from the chaos of the outside world, and inside that circle there was love, and acceptance, and connection, and family that I craved. I am positive that he wanted us there that last weekend for that reason, so that he could take his own life while standing in that circle with us.

  It’s strange and sad that that which took him away from us that weekend was also one of the threads binding us. The man loved his guns. And I loved guns because of him. They brought us together. Isn’t that a perfect American story? Guns brought us together. And a gun took him away.

  Guns were always around in my childhood—shotguns leaning in the corner by the hall to the bedrooms, by the doorway to the living room, and by the front door. The ammo was stacked on shelves in the kitchen. Every kind of ammo: 12 gauge in multiple shot size, 20 gauge, .410 gauge, boxes of .22 ammo, 9mm, .357, .44, .38, .223, .45, hollow points, fully jacketed, it was all there, stacked behind the glass doors of the country cabinets. Where another family would have put china and knickknacks, we had a small armory, tools, batteries, screws, and of course the ultraviolet head zapper, a thing out of the ’40s that had various glass neon-filled attachments that fit into a heavy black handle. Hunter would bring this out during parties, turn down the lights, plug this thing in, and wave it around as a purple glow emanated from the glass and it buzzed ominously.

  Guns had made it hard between us too. I have never forgotten that incident with his fancy pellet gun when I was twelve, his hard anger, my shame, my anger too, at this bastard grinding me down, forcing me to carry that little metal sight to remind me of how I had fucked up. I still haven’t quite forgiven him for that, though it’s so long ago now I wonder why it matters to me still.

  I remember sitting in the kitchen on the couch, Hunter in the Command Chair at the kitchen counter behind me, a shotgun barrel across my lap, the gun cleaning supplies spread out around me. Some basketball or football game was always on the TV, or maybe CNN. There was the rustle of Hunter’s newspaper, either the news or the sports section, and the acrid smell of cigarette smoke, always the cigarette smoke. I used to hate it, but after many years of going to visit Hunter, it stopped bothering me. It was a part of him, like the whiskey and beer and late nights, and in a strange way it was reassuring.

  The smell of Hoppe’s gun solvent was another comforting smell; it connected me with my father. I was in no hurry, not paying attention to the time, just cleaning the gun. I’d take a cotton square, saturate it with solvent, put it on the tip of the cleaning rod, and push it into the b
arrel. At first the cotton square would come out dark gray, even black, coated with gunpowder residue. I’d hold up the filthy square to Hunter, he would look up at it, grunt with approval, and resume reading. I would drop the square on the floor along with other used cotton squares and take a new square, saturate it, and push it through the barrel. With each pass the square came out a bit cleaner, from black to dark gray to light gray to just touched with gray. I’d hold up this last swab for Hunter’s inspection, and he would grunt again. A grunt was good.

  Once the swabs came out clean, I’d hold up the barrel, point it at a light source, and look through it just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. Any stray grains of powder would show up as tiny black specks against the silver smooth interior of the barrel. When the interior of the barrel was flawless, I’d put a bit of gun oil on a swab and run that through the barrel to prevent rust. I’d then set it aside and start work on the rest of the gun, cleaning around the firing pins, the pivots where the barrel joined with the stock and trigger mechanism, until those swabs were pure white also. When this was done, I’d put a bit of gun oil on a cloth and run that over all the metal parts of the gun as a protective covering.

  Finally, I’d reattach the barrel to the rest of the gun and close it with a clean snap, a smooth, slightly oil-dampened snap of two precisely milled parts coming together perfectly with no extra play, no jiggling, no resistance, just a perfect fit. I would pass it to Hunter, holding it with a cloth to avoid touching the barrel. He would take the gun, tilt his head back a bit so he could look through his reading glasses, and examine it. At first he would carefully look it over, but later this became an act, his part in the ritual. He would grunt, or nod, or say, “good,” then hand it back to me. I would carry the gun back to the gun safe, carefully slide it back into the cushioned rack alongside the others, and select the next for cleaning. I don’t know how long each gun took. Maybe twenty minutes, maybe an hour, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t in any hurry.

  People told me how proud he was of me, and I wonder if he was proud of me, in part, for playing my role in our ritual. For another father it might have been working on a car, or tying flies, or gutting a deer, some task that needed to be done that had been passed on and therefore was a shared experience. Those nights, and there were many of them over the years, are precious to me, and I hope were precious to him also.

  The night before he died he asked me if I wanted the guns when he was gone. I said, of course. He said, “You’re going to shoot them, right?” I said, of course. It went without saying that I would clean them too, carefully and thoroughly.

  Each time we came to visit there came a point in the evening (because it was always evening when we came, and evening when we left) when I would ask him which guns needed cleaning, or he would say, “The .45 needs cleaning. It’s filthy,” or whichever gun he had been shooting recently. I’d ask, “Is it in the safe?” Usually it was, but sometimes it would be closer to hand. He always kept a pistol in a cabinet next to his Command Chair, hidden from view but easy to grab if he needed it. And unlike every other gun in the house, this one was loaded. Sometimes he would reach down, grab that gun—it might be the compact Walther PPK, made famous by James Bond, or maybe the .45, always a semiauto, though, not a revolver—and hand it to me over the counter. I would take it carefully, as if there were nothing unusual about a man having a gun next to his office chair in the kitchen, pop the magazine out, make sure the breech was clear of shells, set it down, and get the gun cleaning tool kit from the closet next to the gun safe in my old bedroom. Pistols, especially semiauto pistols, were hard to clean.

  Some pistols could be disassembled for cleaning, like the World War I German Luger. It was like a 3-D puzzle: swivel this lever, pull it this way, pull the slide, push the barrel, and suddenly it came apart. I remember Hunter pointing out that each part in a Luger was stamped with the corresponding number, so that when German officers were cleaning their guns, there was no chance of mixing up parts. I never tried to take that gun apart by myself—what if I broke it? I would take it to Hunter and let him break it down for me. I cleaned the parts and gave them back. He reassembled it, and I put it away in the gun safe.

  That night before he died, he took the .45 semiauto pistol from its place in the cabinet by his chair and handed it to me. It was no big deal, just another gun that needed cleaning. I ejected the magazine and checked the breech like I always did, cleaned the barrel, and put a thin coat of oil over everything so that the action slid smoothly and it glistened in the light. It was not one of the prettier guns he owned, but it was well suited to stopping people if that’s what was necessary, and given Hunter’s diverse and sometimes crazy fan base, not to mention enraged boyfriends or husbands of women over the years, there was no telling who might show up with a gun, ready to avenge some wrong. And every now and then they did.

  Hunter examining a pistol I have just cleaned in the kitchen at Owl Farm, 2003

  It was that same gun, the .45 semiauto, that he used to shoot himself the day after I cleaned it. He took it from me, cleaned, polished, and oiled, in perfect working order, knowing he would shoot himself in the head that weekend. I haven’t seen that gun since. It was confiscated by the sheriff as evidence that day.

  Years later, Hunter’s lawyer returned the unfired bullets from that gun to me. I have them in a Ziploc bag pinned to the wall in front of my desk. On the shell around the primer is stamped, FEDERAL .45 AUTO. The slug is copper-coated, fully jacketed. If I examined them carefully, I would find my father’s fingerprints on them. I have not touched them and do not plan to.

  Like swimming and cleaning the guns, tending the fire was another ritual. If we arrived in fall or winter, my first job was either to start a fire, or tend to the fire, just as it had been when I was a child. It was a point of pride for me to avoid the fire-starting shortcuts like starter sticks or fire logs that Hunter had given in to in the intervening years, and to build the fire as he had taught me. It was important that I do this because it was part of our ritual. When I came home, I was the fire tender.

  Jennifer and I usually brought something for Hunter each time we visited. It might be a gag gift or something small: chocolate truffles, music, hot sauce, a book. At Christmas the gifts were more elaborate. Up until Will was born, Jen and I would make him a gift each year. One year it was a Jacob’s ladder, a high-voltage transformer attached to two metal poles, between which an electric arc would travel slowly upward until it reached the top and vanished, to be replaced by a new arc at the base (think of the lab in an old Frankenstein movie). If you put a piece of paper in the path of the arc, it would burn dozens of tiny holes in the paper as it passed over it. Deborah said that at parties, Hunter would bring it from the living room, set it on the kitchen counter, and light his cigarette with it, his face a couple of inches from a ten-thousand-volt arc. It was dramatic and impressive to his audience. She said that he would then announce with pride, “My son made it for me.”

  Another year we made him a mobile out of old radio tubes and bullets. A third year we fitted an old black rotary phone with TV tubes, buttons, and dials we had found at an electronics flea market. Another year we decorated a dartboard with Christmas lights, a picture of Nixon on one side and the Dalai Lama on the other, and various random things hanging from it. He hung that proudly in the window, so everyone would see it as they arrived.

  In turn, on each visit, as we prepared to depart, Hunter would give us things. It was always last-minute. We would have our coats on and be ready to walk out the door, and Hunter would mumble in an offhand way, as if he were embarrassed to be asking, “How are your tires?” or, “You have enough gas? Here, take this,” and he would push a hundred-dollar bill into my hand. Or he would grope around for something else, whatever was close by. One time it was a travel clock, another time a miniature shortwave radio. I didn’t begin to understand until after Jen’s first visit to meet Hunter one New Year’s Eve. As we were leaving she said to me, “Wow. Your da
d is very proud of you.” I was pleased, but confused. I said, “Why do you say that?” “You can tell by the way he looks at you,” she said. “Why do you think he gives you all this stuff when you leave? He loves you very much.” She explained that he used the gifts instead of words.

  I gradually began to see what she was talking about. It was like learning a new language, except that in this case I hadn’t even recognized it as a language to be decoded. In giving me a hundred dollars for gas, or buying new snow tires for our car, or giving me a travel clock, he was telling me that he loved me. On our next visit I paid attention, and when upon leaving he pressed into my hands a million-watt car spotlight, or a leather duck decoy, I imagined that he was telling me he loved me. I didn’t say anything, of course, but I accepted it.

  Will holding his stuffed monkey, George, by the tail on the hill overlooking Owl Farm, spring 2002

  As we were walking out the back door, Hunter would say, “Call me when you get home. Let me know you made it.” We would agree, and when we got home, I would call him. The check-in phone call from home was the unbinding ritual. I would say, “We made it home safely. Uneventful.” He would say, “Good. Good.” Then I would say, “It was a good weekend. Thanks.” One time I told him, “I love you, Hunter.” It was the first time I ever had said this. He mumbled and hung up. By that time, I didn’t take it as a rejection. Some time later, after a good visit, as Jen and I were getting in the car, he stood in the doorway, and as I was swinging the door open, he said, “I love you, man,” then ducked inside.