Gun Love

by Jennifer Clement

  He looked at the cooler and opened the top and said, Milk and yogurt. A Diet Coke. A few apples.

  Look at this stuff, Torres said to the other policeman. Come look. Where did you get these things? Did you steal all this?

  No, my mother answered. They’re things that belonged to my family.

  Yeah, right, Torres answered. Let me see your arms.

  What do you mean?

  My mother’s arms were crossed over her breasts.

  No. Why?

  I won’t say it again, Torres said.

  He took my mother’s left wrist and twisted her arm open to the sunlight.

  He looked at the inside of my mother’s smooth, soft arm.

  Well, I thought she might be a user, Torres said. I thought someone might be giving you some tar, lady.

  Then Torres turned and looked at me.

  What’s this pretty little angel of a daughter you have here thinking? Huh? he said.

  Listen to me, lady, the redheaded policeman said. He had to lean over at his waist almost at a complete right angle in order to look straight into my mother’s face.

  Listen to me, lady, he said again. We’re going to order up a tow truck to take this car away. What are you going to do with your stuff? You better find a place to store it. Once I order up a tow truck to take this car away, it’ll be here in a day or two. Do you have a place to keep your stuff? Where’re you going to live?

  My mother began to cry but she didn’t make a noise. Her tears just blinked out of her eyes and meandered down her cheeks.

  It’s not illegal to be homeless, she said. It’s not a crime.

  She’s always been my mother, I said. Ever since the beginning.

  Listen little girl, the policeman answered. If she can’t prove it, you’re going to go straight into foster care. That’s the law. How do we know she didn’t kidnap you, huh? How do I know you’re not missing? Maybe you’re missing. Maybe.

  My mother kept nervously placing one bare foot over the other as if the ground were burning the soles of her feet.

  Don’t you have a birth certificate? The policeman said. Listen, lady, you cannot live in a car. You’re homeless. A car is not a home.

  I raised my eyes from my mother’s small feet and looked up to see Sergeant Bob limping toward us. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and I could see the place where his peg leg was attached to the stump with a leather strap.

  Sergeant Bob had his soldier helmet on his head and was carrying a huge gun on his shoulder. He was ready to fire. I’d once seen the machine gun in his trailer.

  April May was running behind him. I thought she’d left us alone to deal with the policemen, and I didn’t blame her. Anyone with any intelligence ran away from the police. Instead, she’d run to get help. As I looked at her walking behind her father like a foot soldier, I knew I’d let her boss me around forever. I was hers.

  The policemen couldn’t see Sergeant Bob as he came up behind them and pointed the gun at the officers.

  I don’t want to shoot, Sergeant Bob said. I’m not in the mood. Believe me, I know better than to miss. I’m a dead shot.

  The policemen turned around slowly and I could see both the shock and fear in their eyes as they raised their hands.

  Hey, hey, the policeman with the red hair said. Slow down, brother.

  I’m not your brother.

  You know what I mean, man.

  I’m not your brother. Get out of here. Both of you. Are you listening to me?

  The policeman stepped slowly backward toward the police car.

  If you have ownership on your life I’d just turn a circle, walk out of here, and forget this ever happened, Sergeant Bob said. Find yourselves some amnesia.

  We’ll have you arrested, Torres said. You’re under arrest now.

  Listen, boy, give me your driver’s license so I know your name for the rest of my life. If you ever tell about this I will hunt you down and kill your family. I’m serious. I’m PTSD. You know what I mean, right? I’m not responsible. I’m in Kabul right now. The Taliban is walking up the street.

  Come on, let’s get out of here, the policeman with the red hair said.

  That’s the spirit, Sergeant Bob answered.

  Okay, we’re leaving, Torres said, but before he got back into his police car, he turned toward my mother. Listen, lady, he said. You’d better move out of that car or they’re going to take your daughter away. It’s going to happen.

  I want to see the back of your head now, Sergeant Bob said. Get out. You never had this memory.

  The cops got into their car and drove away.

  Sergeant Bob dropped his shotgun from his shoulder and limped over to my mother. She was so small beside him. He held his weapon in one hand and placed his other hand on my mother’s head as if she were a kid.

  Listen, he said. Margot, you can’t live in this car anymore. You’ve got to find another place for you and Pearl. Social Services are going to take her away from you and you know it.

  Thank you, Sergeant Bob, my mother said. You’re a friend.

  I mean it. You have to find a place to live.

  I know. I know.

  Didn’t you go to the hospital today?

  I forgot.

  Margot, you can’t forget to go to work. What’s up with that?

  I just forgot today was Monday, my mother said. I thought it was Sunday.

  Sergeant Bob shook his head, turned, and limped back toward his trailer. April May looked at me and shook her head. She looked sad. I knew exactly what she was going to say to me later on. April May’s superstition would explain that everything bad that happened was because we’d left that box, with the collection of moths in tissue paper, in the dump.

  Through the smoke of a few stolen cigarettes, she was going to say, I told you so. Everything is connected. The police came here because of the moths and their moth souls.

  My mother opened the door and got back in the Mercury. I followed her into the backseat. There was a yellow box of Cheerios on the floor. She picked it up, placed it on her lap, and began eating them dry, one by one.

  You didn’t go to work today? Why not?

  I couldn’t see myself there, she said.

  Why not?

  Oh baby, she said. There’s a man who they brought in to the hospital a few weeks ago and I just can’t look at him. I can’t be near him. His wings were torn off. They just brought him over here straight from a VA hospital in Miami. They’re overcrowded down there. I just can’t be at that hospital anymore.

  Why, what’s wrong with him?

  Baby, he counts his heartbeats.

  Maybe he’ll be gone soon, I said.

  My mother placed her arm around me. Get cozy with me, she said.

  It’s too hot.

  Hot? I feel so cold.

  Do you think Sergeant Bob scared those policemen away for good?

  You know, my mother said. I just had a thought. For all this time, I always thought that Sergeant Bob was KKK. But maybe he isn’t. Maybe I was wrong.

  Two weeks later a gun came into our car. For twelve years the Mercury had been full of dolls, stuffed animals, our clothes, boxes of dried foods and fruit, blankets, and books.

  We need this gun now, my mother said. Eli says we need it because the police were here. Don’t touch it ever. I’ll teach you how to use it. On the weekend we’ll go down to the river and practice, okay? We’ll go early when there’s no one around.

  She handed me the pistol. It was small and black.

  See, it’s not so heavy, she said. Eli says it has fifteen rounds. I can shoot it fifteen times before I have to put another magazine into it.

  Where did he get this gun?

  I don’t know.

  My mother said we would keep Eli’s gun under the driver’s se
at, which was exactly where I kept all the objects I found in the dump. If anyone placed their hand under that seat they’d find a bag of mercury beads, marbles, one gold hoop earring, four brass buttons, and a gun.

  The following Saturday we woke up early and went down to the river.

  I’m not even scared of an alligator now that I have this gun in my hand, my mother said.

  Do you really know how to use it?

  Eli’s been giving me lessons while you’ve been at school, she said. I’m a natural. A real natural. That’s what Eli said. I think it’s all my piano practice. I hit all the targets. It was easy. I got lucky every time. Eli said, when anyone shoots a gun, you don’t have to do a whole lot to make it happen.

  At the river, near the dock, my mother placed a white piece of paper on a tree. She’d drawn a black circle in the middle with a marker.

  Eli made me do it blindfolded and I did, my mother said. I hit the mark every time.

  At the river my mother repeated the words Eli had used to teach her. Use your dominant eye, she said. Do not squat, blink, or duck your head.

  I stood square to the target and placed the gun up to my eye level.

  You want something good to happen with that bullet, my mother said. That’s what Eli said. You want something good to happen.

  I didn’t hit the target.

  It’s your little hand, my mother said. You really need a tiny, child’s gun.

  My fifteen bullets only left holes in the air.

  Do we really need to have this? I asked.

  Eli gave me the gun, my mother said. It’s a present.

  Why?

  Don’t tell any of your friends we have it. Don’t tell. It is to be safe. Protection.

  Protection?

  It’s like an umbrella in the rain.

  Why did Eli give it to you?

  He thinks this pistol is like giving me roses, my mother said.

  Eli thought that two girls living all alone in a car is all a gun needs.

  13

  After the police had threatened my mother and Eli had given us the gun, I had my first, last, and only fight with April May. It was the only fight because we never made up and I lost her forever. I couldn’t think of a dare or a trick or a bet to get her back. The words to make her forgive me didn’t exist.

  We’d always been friends. Her family was the only family who had been at the trailer park ever since the day my mother moved into our car in the visitors’ parking area. Sergeant Bob told me my mother arrived dressed in her school uniform with a school bag filled with schoolbooks over her shoulder and a newborn in her arms. April May was practically a sister. And the worst thing was we had a fight about something we didn’t even believe in or know about.

  When I got to the dock by the river, April May was already there. I was in a good mood because I had cigarettes with me that I’d stolen from the Mexicans. Corazón and Ray had left some Marlboros on a chair and I managed to slip two out of the box.

  April May was sitting cross-legged on the dock, much too close to the water.

  Hey, move back a bit, I said as I gave her a cigarette. An alligator can pluck you out in a second.

  April May shrugged and lit up.

  I sat beside her and lit up my cigarette too.

  Well, I said. If you’re going to get attacked they can attack me too. The river can have us both.

  You’re a real friend, Mouse Lick, April May said.

  Mouse Lick? Seriously? Is that what you call me?

  Well, yes.

  That’s my nickname?

  Yes. Don’t feel bad, April May said. It’s not bad. Lick my cheek, come on. Do it.

  No, I’m not licking your cheek. I can’t believe this. You’ve been calling me Mouse Lick behind my back?

  We were laughing and full of tobacco-smoke-filled smiles about this and then everything went wrong.

  So, those cops didn’t come back, right? April May said.

  No. My mother thinks we might need to find other places to park our car for a while.

  Maybe that’s a good idea.

  Yes, maybe. If we move, though, we’ll need to stay near school and near my mother’s job.

  You know, April May said. I should tell you something, Pearl. Margot has not been going to work at all. She’s going to lose that job. My dad told me today that your mother shouldn’t be with Eli. My dad says Eli’s not walking on God’s good side.

  That’s not true, I said, and defended a man who’d broken into our lives and stolen my mother away from me.

  My father says Eli’s eating up your mother’s sweet soul, April May said. He says Eli and Pastor Rex are gunrunning and that this buying guns for God is one big con.

  No, Eli’s a good man. Why did your dad say that?

  My dad knows people, knows them inside-out. He was in the war. Eli’s bad for your mother. What are you going to live on if your mother’s not working?

  My mother says your daddy is KKK, I said as if this were a tit-for-tat talk.

  And I never should have said that, even if it were true.

  April May closed her mouth. She threw her cigarette butt into the river. I knew it was sinking down to the riverbed that was paved with bullets and where Pastor Rex’s Jesus-on-the-cross toothbrush lay buried in the brown muck, mud, and dregs of gunpowder.

  Your mother says my father is KKK? April May answered. Oh, really? Like a wizard or what?

  I knew I should’ve kept my mouth shut. I wanted to grab the words out of the air and stuff them back into my mouth.

  It’s not true, April May said. You’re mother’s mistaken. I’m going to ask my father right away.

  No, she’s not mistaken, I answered. How do you know he isn’t? Is there a black person living here? I don’t see one. Your father’s always controlling who comes and goes around here. My mother says your parents are racists and we’re only friends with all of you because we have no other choice.

  I couldn’t stop myself even though I knew I should. My words flowed out of me in the stream of my breath and blew over the river, over palm trees, into the clouds and toward the ocean. I could not get them back.

  The letter k was not just another letter. It should have been cut out of the alphabet with a knife.

  14

  My mother soon forgot about the threats from the police and stopped talking about moving the car elsewhere. She was with Eli all the time.

  I had nowhere else to go but the abandoned trailer.

  Most days I went straight from school to the trailer and did my homework there or read a book. Sometimes I just lay on the bottom bunk bed and smoked a cigarette from my Eli cigarette supply.

  It didn’t take me long to realize that someone else was using the trailer in the mornings while I was at school. At first I’d find a new cigarette butt in the sink, or some Kleenex rolled up in a ball under a window, or a newspaper lying on the bunk bed.

  Once there was even someone’s light-yellow urine in the toilet bowl.

  And then the guns began to appear. At first there were two shotguns lying across the lower bunk.

  Over the next days, the top bunk was filled to the ceiling with shotguns, machine guns, and pistols and then the bottom bunk was filled up too. In no time the weapons became stacks of metal rising in layers on both beds.

  After two weeks, the number of guns had grown to such a degree that the person keeping them had begun to divide them into types. The top bed was assigned to machine guns and the bottom bunk to rifles. Pistols and other handguns were now placed in two large boxes that took up most of the space between the bedroom area of the trailer and the kitchen.

  Now I could not lie on the bed and do my homework and so I sat in the kitchen at the kitchen counter filling in my copybooks and doing my reading assignments. I stopped working every now and ag
ain to look over at the collection of weapons.

  From this side of the trailer, I could also look out the window at the abandoned recreational area with the old swing set and slide.

  One day I was so sleepy I just put my head down on the kitchen counter. In my half-awake dream, I heard the guns speak.

  The guns told me about a seven-year-old girl and twenty-two-year-old man shot in a drive-by shooting, two teenage boys fired at by cops, a two-year-old boy shot in a gang-related shootout in a park, twenty schoolchildren killed on a school bus, a mother dead in a supermarket, two women shot to death in a parking lot, twenty teenagers gunned down at the movies, a ten-year-old girl shot at a library, five college students slain at a football game, nine people shot at a church prayer meeting, a mother and daughter shot in a car, four nuns gunned down at a bus stop, eight eight-year-old girls shot at ballet class, two policemen shot in their car, and a nine-year-old girl shot in a playground and shot at again and again, bullets breaking trees to shreds, ninety holes in the sky from a machine gun, gunshots in a rainstorm killing raindrops, twenty bullets for the moon, words broken by gunfire, words pierced by bullets so the alphabet became a b c l r s t x z, lovers fallen, tears and bullets on the floor, my dearest, my-one-and-only, my little one, one-of-a-kind, we are all one-of-a-kind, and all lonely and all afraid and all looking for love bullets everywhere.

  Then, as a part of the gun-song-dream, I heard a person walk slowly up the stairs to the trailer.

  I lifted my head and watched as the door handle moved downward. There was fumbling. Something fell and was picked up. A kick pushed the door open.

  Corazón walked into the trailer. She carried six shotguns cradled in her arms. She turned toward the pile of guns and laid them down in the rifle pile on the bottom bunk bed. Then she turned to leave and, as she walked toward the door, she saw me.

  Ay, bebe, she said, and pressed her hand against her heart. You scared me. You so quiet.

  Corazón?

  Sí, bebé, sí. ¿Qué haces aquí? What are you doing here?

  She walked toward me and could see the pages of my schoolwork spread out on the kitchen counter.