by Tucker, Todd
At the end of the week, the instructors pitted Tom and me against each other in a friendly shooting competition as the other kids watched jealously. We shot targets at a variety of ranges from a standing, sitting, and prone position. Tom actually outshot me by a little, but I won the prize for best overall score in the class by virtue of my higher grade on the written test. I received as my reward a certificate that pronounced me to be an “Eagle of the Indiana Wilderness,” and a new box of .22 shells, both of which were displayed proudly on my dresser during the six months between the class and Christmas day, the day I discovered why dad had enrolled me in a gun safety class to begin with.
“Can I show Tom?” I asked, when I finally regained the power of speech that Christmas morning.
“Sure,” said my father. “Go on.” He grinned in a way that told me the surprise wasn’t quite over.
“Bundle up,” my mother said.
I found my coat, hat, and gloves in record time, shoved my box of shells in my pocket, and then walked as quickly as I could (the safety rules prohibited running with a weapon) up my driveway and down Cabin Hill Road. About halfway down the road, I saw Tom coming my way, with an identical gun in his hands. We found out later that his father had found them both at a gun show at the fairgrounds in Louisville, and quickly identified them as ideal first guns for us both. Our fathers had carefully coordinated the gifts, after agreeing on the gun safety class and evaluating our maturity and readiness for gun ownership.
Tom and I spent the rest of Christmas morning blasting away icicles that hung from tree branches—they exploded with a satisfying noise and sparkle. When we paused to reload or talk, we heard all around us the distant, jubilant firing of other men and boys with their Christmas-morning guns.
Yes, these were real guns, and we were shooting real ammunition, unsupervised, at will, all over the countryside. We were not inside any city limits, and there were no laws that prevented two kids like us from shooting icicles, Dr Pepper cans, or any other inanimate object for as long as our ammunition held out. Out in the country you heard people shooting all year long, the blast of shotguns and the high-pitched crack of powerful rifles. It was not any more surprising to find empty red and yellow plastic shotgun shells on a path in the woods than it was to find acorns. At thirteen, my age that Christmas morning, I was far from the first of my classmates to own a real gun. Every boy I knew had a hunting license before he had a driver’s license, and most had killed their first deer before their first kiss.
The M6 was not designed for marksmanship. In our hands, however, after shooting thousands of rounds through spring and summer, Tom and I became dead-eyed experts. We knew exactly what the little gun was capable of doing, and within those limits, we could command the weapon perfectly. We designed ever more challenging targets and scenarios for ourselves. When the Coke can on the fence post became too easy, we switched to a small tuna can, which we soon after hung on a string from a tree limb, learning to shoot it dead center as it swung in the breeze. By the time school let out, we were shooting the string.
For our everyday shooting, we bought boxes of shells at Miller’s, whenever we had a few dollars from a birthday or a mowed lawn. The ammo secured in the buttstock’s storage compartment, however, was sacred, to be saved for an “emergency,” that situation Tom and I fantasized about in which we’d need the little gun to save our lives. Most often these fantasies involved invading communist hordes swarming across Clark County. While Tom and I certainly had nothing resembling formal military training, countless shots in every corner of the valley, an intimate knowledge of the landscape, and our vivid imaginations taught us well the value of high ground and interlocking fields of fire. I like to think we might have given an invading horde a pretty good fight.
For the .22 shells in the storage compartment, we chose the Winchester .22LR. That decision was made easy because that was pretty much the best .22 round we could buy in Borden, although we had heard about a .22 center-fire round that was more accurate. That was far too exotic to be found on the shelf at Miller’s. In addition, we practiced constantly with the inexpensive rimfire rounds, and thought it wise to have a familiar rifle round at the ready when the Commies finally came over the hill.
The decision as to what shotgun shells to store in the buttstock was more complicated. A wide variety of things can be fired from a shotgun, one of the reasons it is the most practical of guns. The options we studied included shrieking noisemakers, flechette rounds that shot tiny steel darts, and flamethrower rounds that shot pure fire about twenty feet. After an exhaustive evaluation of our options, Tom and I finally picked up three flare rounds at a gun show at the Holiday Inn in New Albany. That we paid four dollars for each was an indication of how badly we wanted the flares. This gave us one to store in each of our guns, and a third to shoot, to try it out and see what it looked like. On a cool spring night, after flipping a coin to see who would get the honor, I shot the third flare round from my M6 into the sky. It exploded above our heads with a pop and a blinding red starburst that burned intensely for seven seconds, just as the box advertised. Ever since, we had each kept three regular rounds of .410 birdshot stored in our guns, along with the flare round, a compact, portable fireworks display that forever tempted us.
Tom stared into the woods more intently than normal as we walked, fishing rods in our hands and guns across our backs. We were actually going to fish, we hadn’t been lying about that. But from now on, just as Tom had said that night at the museum, every walk in the woods would also be a search for Sanders and Kruer. He studied the path for any sign of them as we walked to Silver Creek, walking a half step slower than normal and peering through the trees. My thoughts about the bombers were vivid at night, when I remembered the dark silhouettes of them running in front of the fireball, or their somehow menacing black-and-white yearbook photos reproduced in the newspaper. When I was trying to fall asleep, Sanders and Kruer represented everything that was dangerous and out of control in my town. But out there in the bright sunlight, with Tom and my Springfield beside me, I tried to get into the spirit of the hunt without feeling any real fear, or even excitement. The woods seemed utterly, completely normal. Actually finding a couple of killers out there just seemed too unbelievable to be frightening.
After a while, Tom began scratching his head and clearing his throat as we walked, and I got the feeling he had something to tell me.
“Did you hear about Taffy Judd?” he finally asked.
“No. What?” I was certain she was lost in a cave.
“She’s gone,” said Tom, the regret clear in his voice. “Her mother and sister, too. Their dad was beating the shit out of all of them last night, all liquored up. Taffy ran down the road to Miller’s in the middle of the night with a broken arm and called the sheriff on the pay phone. Dad heard it all on his police radio—says that drunk might have killed them all if Taffy hadn’t got away.”
“Shit,” I said, picturing poor Taffy running down the dark road, her arm at a funny angle, wincing as she put a nickel in the phone with her good arm. I was relieved beyond words that she hadn’t died in the cave. At the same time, I was sickened by the thought of her brutal father hitting her. I knew Taffy could get away from him, especially if he was slowed down by cheap booze. If she got hurt, I knew it had to be because she was trying to protect her sister and mother. And now she was gone.
“I guess their dad beat them up all the time,” said Tom.
“He did?”
“That’s what Dad said, said it like everybody in town knew about it. He said Judd spent so much money on booze that their mom had to get food from the church.”
“I guess that’s why Taffy didn’t talk much in school,” I mumbled.
“How’s that? Because she was hungry?”
“And she was probably worried all the time, about what her dad was going to do to them every night when he got home from Kirtley’s, or wherever he got liquored up.”
“The cave was probably the saf
est place she could go,” said Tom, and I realized it was true, despite the fact that I was so worried about her getting hurt down there.
“Where are they now?”
“Their dad’s in jail. No tellin’ where the rest of them ended up. Maybe she’s got family somewhere. I hope.”
“Yeah,” I said. People rarely left Borden, at least for any period of time longer than an army enlistment contract. So it took a few seconds for me to comprehend that I might not ever see her again. And I didn’t even have a picture to remember her by.
“Shit,” I said. We’d stopped walking. Tom stared at the ground sympathetically, hands on hips.
“I’m sorry, man.”
I shrugged, trying to fight off the gloom, or at least put on a brave front. I was surprised at the force of my sadness, the feeling of loss. I could tell by the careful way Tom was handling the situation that he wasn’t surprised by my reaction.
“She’ll be back,” Tom said unconvincingly
“Sure.” We resumed walking.
Tom and I pushed through the weeds to a wide spot in Silver Creek where we’d had some recent luck with bluegill and small but tasty channel catfish. It was a popular spot among knowledgeable locals, so I was relieved to see that Tom and I had it to ourselves, at least for the moment. I really didn’t feel like talking to anyone. The creek was pinched and fast moving at both ends of the pool, but the water where we fished was wide and deep—the pool was roughly in the shape of a giant eye. We leaned our guns on a fallen tree that ran along the bank, a natural bench, dug some grubs up from under a rotten log with our hands, dropped our baited hooks in the water, and waited. The sweltering heat didn’t encourage conversation.
After a time, Tom reeled in out of sheer boredom, and got his line snagged on some floating weeds. He pulled hard, trying hard to free the hook from a variety of angles, because neither of us had brought along any spare tackle. Finally, with his rod bent almost completely over on itself, the line snapped.
“Well, shit.”
We both turned and started looking into the tree branches behind us, looking for any hooks that had been snagged and abandoned by fishermen before us. It was amazing what some guys would leave behind just because they didn’t feel like climbing a tree.
With nothing visible close by, Tom began walking along the bank, looking in the weeds and along the water’s edge for anything remotely usable, even an old rusty hook that might be sharpened on a rock.
“Here we go,” he said, about halfway to the end of the pool. He was leaning down almost to the dirt, where a length of fishing line was running from a small tree near the shore into the water. Tom tugged it, hoping that a hook in relatively good condition would be at the other end.
As he pulled, the whole thing came out of the water. It ran all the way across the creek, where it was tied to a branch on the opposite shore. A dozen leaders baited with red worms dangled from it on swivels at neatly spaced intervals. On two of them, tiny bluegills shimmered in the sunlight, twitching and fighting to escape.
I put my pole down and ran over to look. “What the hell?”
“It’s a trot line,” he said, excited. “That’s smart—fishes all day for you, you just come haul them in at night! You lay low, don’t have to worry about anybody seeing you out here.”
“Do you think …”
Tom was grinning wildly. “Who else could it be?”
“We can’t be sure, anybody could have made this thing…”
“Let me ask you something, Andy. We’ve been fishing here a long time, right? Years and years? Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
I had to shake my head. “Still…”
“Well, if we watch this thing long enough, I guess we’ll find out who it belongs to. We need to come back at night. Goddamn, a trot line—what a great idea.” He unsnapped the nearest leader, and let the line go. It dropped back into the water until only a few inches of it were visible again, the short distance from the waterline to the baby tree. “Holy shit, that is cool.”
We walked back over to our log. Tom grabbed his pole in a kind of happy daze, convinced we had found our first concrete evidence of the bombers. He tied on the leader and cast it into the pool, still using the red worm that the bombers, or whoever, had used. He stared across the water contemplating the possibilities. The complete lack of action made it easy to get lost in thought. We fished silently and fruitlessly for an hour, listening for any sign of the bombers, glancing occasionally at what we could see of the trot line. Soon, I was again pretending to concentrate on my line while thinking only of Taffy.
“Look at that,” Tom said, after a long period of quiet. I saw what he was talking about, a big, slow hit on the surface of the water, right in the center of the eye, the large ripples expanding outward. The waves weren’t the frantic work of a bass snapping its hungry lips at a fly, but something big and lumbering.
“Was it a turtle?”
“I think it was a carp,” Tom said. “A huge one.”
We both reeled in our hooks and threw them in the general direction of the fish, to no avail. Then it hit the surface again, and this time we could actually make out the gaping white mouth. Its pale whiskers broke the surface, and just below we could make out the body, widening and disappearing into the deep. It was a monster.
“How’d that hog get in here?” I asked.
“Probably came down the creek as a baby,” said Tom. “Grew up to where he was trapped in this pool by his size.”
The activity of the big fish on the surface stopped, it having either filled its stomach or heard our voices.
We tried again tossing our hooks in front of it, hoping at least to provoke the fish into rising to the surface again so we could take another look at it. Already I was losing the image in my mind, forgetting the actual size of the thing. I was about to give up when Tom suggested a new course of action.
“Let’s jump in and look at it,” he said.
“What?” I had been fishing my whole life, and no one had ever before suggested just jumping into the water and taking a look around. It was the kind of original thinking that made Tom both fun and a little unsettling to hang out with.
“I’m serious,” Tom said. “The water’s pretty clear. The pool’s not that big across. Let’s jump in and see if we can see it.” He was standing on the log, waiting for me to follow his lead. As was so often the case, Tom’s idea was so far out in left field that I couldn’t even formulate a rebuttal. The heat also made the idea of jumping into the cool water sorely tempting. I removed my shoes, stood up on the log, and on the count of three, we jumped in together.
I sank slowly to the bottom with my eyes closed. The cold of the water quickly soaked through my shorts. The current pushed me downstream with surprising force, pressing me into a sideways lean. When my feet hit the gravelly bottom, something tiny and hard scurried to escape from under my heel. I opened my eyes.
The water was clearer than I’d expected. Rays of sunlight hit the smooth surface about two feet above our heads, and broke into sparkles that danced across the muddy bottom Weeds grew around the edges of the pool and swayed with the current, and I could see all the way to the steep walls of the far bank. Dancing bubbles marked where the swift water of Silver Creek tumbled into the pool, the trot line invisible in the turbulence. And directly across from us hovered the enormous carp.
It was huge, at least twenty-five pounds. Its large, mirrorlike scales reflected the sunlight with a greenish glow. It stared at us, swinging its big, flat tail calmly from side to side. Its large lips were turned downward in a mild frown. The fish was unhappy to share his pool with us, but seemed to recognize that we couldn’t last down there for long. We stared at each other until my lungs burned. As my breath finally ran out, the carp’s mouth opened slightly, allowing a perfectly spherical bubble to follow me as I pushed up and shot to the surface.
Tom popped up right after me. We both gasped for breath.
“I can’t beli
eve it,” I said. “Did you see the size of that thing?” Tom didn’t respond, and I turned to see what had his attention.
Calmly sitting on our log, his booted feet dangling nearly to the water, was Solinski, the head thug. Solinksi was inspecting Tom’s rifle, and mine was across his lap.
I was too stunned to move—I wouldn’t have been more surprised if I saw Solinski sitting on Tom’s living room couch. Tom was already climbing out of the water and heading toward him, seething.
“Hello, boys,” said Solinski with a smile, wholly un-threatened by Tom’s outrage.
Tom grabbed his gun away, so Solinski picked up mine and resumed his inspection.
“An M6,” he said. “I’ll be damned. I’ve never seen one before.”
I was out of the water and standing by him, but I didn’t have the nerve to snatch it away like Tom had. I just stood there and dripped.
“Did you know these were designed for air force bomber pilots?” he said. “So that when they crashed in Siberia or whatever, they could hunt their food and chase away the polar bears for a few days. That’s why they’ve got this squeeze bar instead of a trigger,” he said, pointing at it. “So you can shoot it with mittens.”
“Yeah, we know,” said Tom. He was so emphatic that I am sure Solinksi could tell he was bullshitting. In fact, I had always thought the small gun was designed for kids. Solinski’s information made the gun seem even cooler, and I was grateful to him for that.