Larry Wilcox grabbed a handful of popcorn and threw it at the TV screen.
“That was a terrible call and it made no sense!” he yelled.
But of course nobody on the screen—the referees, the players—heard. A lot of boos poured from the crowd. Like Larry, they felt cheated. Ripped off. Sixty seconds ago the Cleveland Browns had a chance to win this game. Now, after a ridiculous pass interference flag, the Green Bay Packers were in field goal range. Kicking the ball through the goal posts would give them a two point lead with three seconds left to go in the game.
The Packers’ kicker entered the field of play. Everyone got set. The ball was snapped. The kicker stepped forward, followed through. His execution was perfect. Seconds later the game ended—Packers 30, Browns 28.
“Yay!” Larry sang, tossing more popcorn over his head. “Another loss!”
His daughter came into the room just as the last kernel bounced from his hair. The kernel hit the floor and—of course—rolled right under the couch.
“Did I miss something?” Penny Wilcox asked. Her astonished gaze was trained on the floor, which now looked like something to kick through rather than walk across.
“Sorry, honey,” Larry said, sheepened. “Bad game.”
“Want to play cards? I just bought a new deck.”
“Not right now.”
“Please?” Her eyes went back to the mess. “Mom’s going to shoot you when she sees this.”
“Not if a certain, beautiful thirteen year-old girl sweeps it up before she comes home.”
Rolling her eyes, Penny went to get the broom. She wasn’t really angry, Larry knew. Her own football team—the one her JV cheering squad screamed and danced for on Friday afternoons—had two days ago blown out Garfield Heights, 42-10. She had also aced a math test that day. Things were good on Penny’s front.
Larry’s too. The Browns never bothered him as much as he let on. He kept a well-paying job as overnight stock manager at the town’s largest grocery store. His wife was a veterinarian at Feathers and Fur animal clinic. And speaking of animals, their daughter Penny seemed perched on a high branch with that rarest of teenaged birds: She was popular, smart, pretty, and of happy temperament. A good package for two working parents. Easy to maintain.
She cooked Larry’s dinner that evening. She made him coffee. She also made him play a hand of poker with her new cards, though Larry, like the Browns, always found a way to lose. Then she sent him off to work with a tip-toed kiss on the cheek.
“Love you, Daddy!”
“I love you too, sweetheart. Your mom will be home before midnight.”
Penny’s blue eyes flickered for a moment. “Actually, she said on the phone she wants to stay over one more night with grandma.”
“Really?” Larry said, frowning. “I wonder why she didn’t tell me.”
“She probably did. You were just too busy with the football game to notice.”
“Probably.” Larry was standing in the open doorway, ready to leave. He peered over Penny’s shoulder. The house was clean and organized. But dark. “You’ll be okay alone tonight?” he asked.
“Who says I’m going to be alone? There’s fifty kids coming here for a wild party as soon as you leave.”
“Right. Well try not to burn the house down.”
“No promises.” She kissed him again. “Bye, Daddy. Have a good night at work.”
He walked to the store (his wife had the car) in good spirits, letting the autumn wind have its way with his hair. Dry leaves rushed over the walk. Chimes jingled. Smiling, Larry breathed the night in.
“Happy Halloween,” he said to a cardboard skeleton on somebody’s porch.
The skeleton grinned. Larry could almost believe it was wishing him the same.
∞
“Guns don’t kill people,” one of the Blue Jay Market’s stock boys, a twenty-something rube named Billy, said. “People kill people.”
Another kid, Steven, rolled his eyes as he pulled open a box of Calumet baking powder. “Not that dumb cliché again,” he said.
“It’s the simple truth,” Billy told him. “No gun has ever magically floated into the air and squeezed its own trigger. You need a person to do that.”
“But Billy,” Larry broke in, “why put something dangerous, something deadly, into the hands of a person unfit to use it?”
Billy shook his head. “We shouldn’t do that.”
“It can’t be avoided,” Steven said. He put the last can of Calumet on the shelf, knelt, and began to stack the flour.
Larry dropped a box of Aunt Jemima on the floor. “What do you mean?” he asked, inwardly cursing his clumsiness. The pancake powder had broken open to make a dusty, slippery mess.
Steven looked at it for a moment before saying: “I mean we’re all unstable. Angry inside.” His eyes went to Billy. “Ever have a guy steal your parking space at Wal-Mart?”
“Sure,” Billy shrugged.
“How did it make you feel?”
“I wanted to kill him.”
“Exactly.”
Billy’s face became appalled. “But I didn’t do it, Steve! My God!”
“Thinking’s as good as doing.”
“Tell that to my girlfriend when I skip Valentine’s Day.”
The debate cooled off for awhile. The team had three more aisles to stock, plus ordering for Tuesday night. During lunch break, however, Billy picked up the bone again.
“I would never shoot another human being,” he intoned. “Period.” He sat down, unwrapped a ham sandwich, and was about to take a bite when an exception struck him. “Unless,” he added, “my family was being threatened. Or my home.”
“So you admit that the capability to kill is in you,” Steve said.
Billy’s answer came like the unswerving, confident gaze of a bald eagle on the hunt. “I admit the capability to protect my loved ones,” he said.
Larry blinked at both men before ripping open a Twinkie. “I agree with Billy,” he told Steven. “A man should have every right to defend his home and his family from”—he paused, groping for the right word—“undesirables.”
“Niggers, you mean,” Steve said with a snort.
“What?”
“Niggers. Spics. Zipperheads. Taco brains.”
Larry blinked some more. “Those are your words, not mine.”
“No,” Steve went on, “they’re everybody’s words. He leaned forward, pushing his can of Coke aside. “Let me ask you something, Larry.”
“Ask away.”
“If a nigger broke into your house, what would you do?”
“With a gun?”
“Yes.”
“Shoot him right in the melon.”
Steve turned to Billy. “And you?”
“Same thing.”
“Unbelievable.” As a lost man’s shoulders slump when the last of his water is spent, so did Steven slump in his chair. “I’m sitting here with two men who would protest sin with sin.”
“When a man breaks into your home what other option is there?” Larry wanted to know.
And Steven: “You call the police from a panic room.”
Billy looked like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “A panic room?” he huffed. “Panic rooms are for women, Steve. Girls.”
“Are you implying that I’m—“
“Men use guns. Or their fists.”
Steven shook his head. “You’re not talking about being a man. You’re talking about pride.”
“As far as I’m concerned they are the same thing.”
“And that,” Steven told Billy, “is where your problem lies.”
“And everybody’s problem,” Larry cut in, rising from the table, “is that lunch is over. Back to work, gentlemen.”
∞
They finished stocking the aisles. They faced the products, getting everything nice and neat for that day’s customers. At six o’clock Larry sent an order for the following night’s truck. At six-thirty the crew clocked out and went home.
Larry walked under the same bare trees he’d walked under last night. He passed the same crooked porches with wind chimes singing at their concrete steps. Dogs who’d barked at him earlier were now snoozing in trampled, fenced in yards.
The human race is not fit to live.
Those had been Steven’s final words on the topic of gun control. He spoke them just as they finished the last aisle. His penultimate opinion had gone something like this: We’re beasts. Animals. All we do is hurt each other.
Larry disagreed. He knew plenty of good people. And the ones he didn’t know, he read about in the paper, or watched on TV networks like CNN and Fox. They gave to charities. They spent time at shelters, feeding the homeless. Nor did they limit such kindnesses to one another. The internet fairly brimmed with stories about lost animals being rescued from squalid streets. Free veterinary care. Vaccinations.
When Larry mentioned these things, Steven had replied: There are just as many stories about pain and misery. Sick kids with moms who beat them for vomiting up their dinner. Dogs chained in the desert with no water. Women raped and murdered.
From here the stock boy had moved to lesser crimes, giving a list that, in its way, seemed more hateful than the heavy ones, if only because they so often went unpunished.
“Ever have your car door keyed, Larry?”
“Yes,” he had to admit.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ever been in a car accident?”
“The occasional fender-bender.”
“Whose fault was it?”
“The other guy’s.”
“Is that what he thought?”
“No. He blamed me.”
“Of course he did.”
Steven next asked, while they faced aisle thirteen, whether Penny had made the basketball cheering squad this year. Proudly, Larry replied that she had.
“But not every girl who tried made it,” Steven said. “One girl in particular. Penny’s coach told her to lose weight.”
“Brenda Clarke,” Larry said, nodding. “She couldn’t keep up with the rest of the girls. She couldn’t dance. She wasn’t graceful. Penny knew after one day that she was in trouble.”
“So what happened?”
“To Brenda?” Larry shrugged. “Penny tried helping her. So did a few other girls. They couldn’t.”
Stacking soup cans so fast his hands were a blur, Steven said: “Brenda missed the cut. Then she took the squad coach to court.”
“Where the case is still being fought,” Larry finished, rolling his eyes. By now he was quite exasperated with the story, having heard it from Penny, then on the local radio, then—heaven help girls everywhere who cared about looking pretty—as a piece on one of the Cleveland TV stations. “But Steven,” he went on, “I don’t care what anybody says. That girl is fat. And loud. And obnoxious. So many people tried to help her—“
“I know,” Steven cut in. His voice had turned gentle, like the tip of a leaf which bends to forecast rain. “Larry, the point I’m trying to make is that not enough people care. About each other. About anything. They have to start. And the way to start is to stop.”
“Stop what?”
But Steven never answered. By that time it was morning, and customers were in the aisles. One of them asked Steven about oatmeal. Larry didn’t see him again until quitting time.
The morning lay quiet and peaceful. In such a small town there were few other kinds. Larry unlocked the door of his house, stepped inside. He flipped on the light. A clean, shiny kitchen greeted him. Penny was a neat freak. She loved having everything just so. Flowers smiled from the table. The counter sparkled.
On the refrigerator was a yellow Post-It note. Elegant, feminine handwriting—Penny’s—beckoned Larry across the room.
Daddy,
I left for school early. There are two cooked eggs in the fridge, but you should probably cook your own toast (remember how? Ha!) Also, I left you a thermos of hot water for coffee. Seeya tonight!
Love,
Penny
The thermos was on the counter. Smiling, Larry put instant into his cup, along with two spoonfuls of creamer. He reheated the eggs and ate them with toast.
A dog barked outside. Happy, playful. Through the window Larry could see across the street to the Mansfield house, where Beatrice Mansfield’s little boy was swinging on the porch swing.
Steven didn’t think the human race was fit to live. Begging to differ, Larry went outside to rake the lawn. It felt good to work under the sun after a night of fluorescent ream. Two minutes into the job, a man he didn’t even know passed by and said good morning.
“Good morning!” Larry called back.
We are fit to live, he thought, we are indeed.
∞
SCHOOL SHOOTING ROCKS SMALL TOWN JUNIOR HIGH
By Hap Pringle (cwz)
A man claiming membership to an American freedom organization opened fire on a small town junior high school yesterday.
Police identified the shooter as twenty-three year old Calvin C. Cupola. Cupola, who is now in custody, entered the grounds of Pascal Junior High School in Crystalview, Ohio at approximately 11:30 A.M. on October 23rd. Claiming to be with a local janitor service, he entered the cafeteria where students were eating lunch. He then drew a handgun from beneath his shirt and opened fire, killing four students while injuring an undisclosed number more.
Four students are confirmed dead in the shooting. One survivor, sixteen year-old Alan Trucker, described Cupola as a Caucasian male, tall, dark-haired, wearing plastic eyeglasses and a denim jacket.
“We were eating lunch when out of nowhere this man comes in and shouts the word hello,” Trucker said. “He raised a gun over his head and told everyone that the Society for the Conservation of American Freedom loves its country too much to let children grow up brainwashed by left-wing, internet liberals.”
At that point, Trucker said, Cupola began firing at the tables.
“Everyone screamed and ducked. Food went flying. I heard, like, shouts of pain from kids who’d been hit.”
Two teachers tackled Cupola from behind, knocking the gun from his hand. Within minutes police were on the scene to arrest Cupola…
∞
Four Months Later…
Red hearts from a bouquet dreamed. Handsome boots kicked the snow. Yet the holiday—Valentine’s—was not what it seemed. At least not to four in the know.
Nor would Halloween ever really be Halloween again. That holiday had transformed, before Larry’s horrified eyes, into a bloody death anniversary. Valentines’s, however, was more bittersweet. February fourteenth had always been Penny’s favorite day.
He did not linger at the gift shop window. There was no woman to buy flowers and chocolates for. Larry lived alone. It had been that way since New Year’s.
The light at the street corner turned green. Figures, Larry thought. Whenever he was in a car it turned red. But walking? Oh walking, it was always green.
A man in a long black coat waited next to him. He told Larry good morning. Larry nodded back but couldn’t say the words. The light changed. They crossed. Downtown Crystalview surrounded him. Banks and jewelry stores. A post office, a coffee shop. The sidewalks were bare. Cold. Vacant alleys breathed wisps of snow.
At the end of the block was another show window. It wore an OPEN sign that caught Larry’s attention. Blinking at the merchandise on display, he stopped.
Anything you need? one of the items inside seemed to ask. Then it wasn’t even a question: anything you need.
“I need something all right,” Larry muttered. “But it’s not mine. It’s God’s.”
A bell above the door jingled. Out came a short woman with blonde hair pulled into a ponytail. Her eyes flicked to Larry, flicked away. She got into a pickup truck, slammed the door, and drove off.
Larry looked back through the window.
Daddy? a girl who lay dying in his arms asked. Daddy, can we play cards?
“Of course we can, sweetheart. As many games as you want.”
The girl smiled. There was a bullet hole in her head.
“I’m sorry for whenever I told you no,” Larry whispered.
The item in the window—a Beretta M9—was the color of February: blue-gray, with black around the edges that made Larry think of fallen trees. The Beretta, he knew, never took no for an answer.
“I need something,” he muttered again. “But…but it isn’t mine.”
I know, the Beretta replied, soothingly, like an old friend. I know it isn’t yours. But why don’t you borrow it for a little while?
Larry closed his eyes. None of these thoughts made sense. The feelings, yes, but not the thoughts. They frightened him. He opened his eyes. The door bell jingled again. This time it was a customer going in. The customer looked around, wiped his boots on a dirty mat. It was dark in the shop, though. Rows of glass cases—coffins, they were called—glowed like footlights in a theater. The play, however, was far from over. Act three had yet to even begin.
“Can I help you, sir?” a bearded man at the cash register asked.
Larry approached him slowly, keeping his expression neutral. “There’s a gun in the window,” he said. “A Beretta.”
Nodding, the man stepped from behind the register. He retrieved the gun, brought it to the counter. Metal clattered on glass.
“This,” the man said, “is one of the most reliable, low-maintenance weapons on the market. Ideal for first time buyers.” Now the man’s brow went up. “Are you a first time buyer, sir?”
“First time buyer, long time looker,” Larry said.
“That’s fine. Looking to defend your home?”
“Yes. Yes, that’s just it. I don’t want anybody…you know…trying to hurt my family.”
“Good man,” the other said with a wink. “I know just how you feel. And this weapon, sir, it will keep them safe. It’s easy to use, easy to clean, easy to store.”
They started the paperwork right there. It was surprisingly simple. The only warble lay in the waiting period. Larry frowned for a moment before deciding it didn’t matter. The longer the wait, the sweeter the pay-off. That was something his wife used to say. Today she lived in Nebraska with her parents.
“Sir?” the man behind the counter said. His face looked vaguely troubled. “You borrowed my pen. Can I have it back?”
Larry handed it over. “My bad,” he said. “I wasn’t paying attention. What a terrible way to start off gun ownership.”
The man laughed. “It’s only a pen.”
“Tell that to John Hancock.”
“If would if he were here.”
“Still,” Larry said, “I always return what I borrow. Favors too. I always return a favor.”
“Pay some of them forward,” the man suggested.
“Oh, definitely. Definitely.”
Larry’s wife didn’t say much anymore. Last week they talked on the phone. Larry had asked her to come home. She couldn’t, she said. She was still waiting. For what she didn’t know, but she was still waiting.
Larry was almost done with that part of the play. His name on the Beretta’s background check paper made it about three weeks.
“Tell you who else is almost done,” he said. “S.C.A.F.”
“Excuse me, sir?” the bearded man said.
Larry blinked, shook his head a little to clear it. “Sorry. Just thinking out loud.”
Smiling, he thanked the man, told him not to take any wooden nickels, and left the store.