Gun Stories

It was getting late and everyone was telling their gun stories. Times they’d had a gun pulled on them, almost been shot, or, for just a couple of people, times they actually had been hit with a bullet, mostly accidents, nothing serious. For some reason it was only girls who had really been shot: Teri in the hand, Amy in the stomach—that one left a big, crooked scar we’d all seen before but let her show again. One guy, Trey, had a close call, a gun that had backfired right next to his head on a hunting trip, but he’d been fine in the end, except that his ears ring still, all the time, and especially when it’s quiet. That one had been his own fault, he’s the first to say it—he’d dropped the gun in the mud and hadn’t cleaned it properly. Nine, maybe ten years old, hunting with his neighbors.

The girls, no one would say it was their fault, except in the way people fault girls for being somewhere at all, putting themselves in that situation. But no one said any of that this time. We were camping, or that’s what we liked to call it. We parked off this gravel road by the woods and hung out drinking and talking, and sometimes, if we drank too much, we’d pass out in our cars down there. Camping, we called that, sleeping out in nature, hearing all the coyotes and owls and cicada noise.

We’d heard all these gun stories before, a bunch of times. Amy with her scar, her belly creasing around it, a deep purple like nothing else we’d seen before. It was her mom that shot her, but she never said it that way. She’d say it was an accidental discharge of her firearm, the official wording on the reports she repeated every time she talked about it. Her mom was a cop, or she had been. She lost her badge, but they didn’t press charges. A party at her house, her mom throwing a party for someone’s birthday or something, no one remembers really, except it was summer and they’d been drinking beers from coolers in the backyard since afternoon, and it was night by then. Amy was maybe six, seven years old, supposed to be in bed and sleeping, tucked in safely inside the house, that was what they thought. The grownups were all messing with their guns—some of them cops, but not all of them—not even meaning to shoot anything, just handling them. No one intended to shoot anything.

When Amy banged through the screen door her mom’s gun went off. That was the other way she’d say it—the gun went off. Amy would be the first to say it was an accident. She and her mom were still close, still lived together. Amy hadn’t moved out when we graduated from high school. She was enrolled at the community college, studying nursing and working at the Winn Dixie part-time, helping cover costs at home. Soon she’d be a real nurse; she’d get a job at the regional hospital. She had no plans to move out.

It hadn’t been easy for Amy’s mom after the accident, we all knew that. Not everyone called it an accident and not many people came by her house anymore. She hadn’t been able to work much after it happened. Mostly she stayed inside. She was lucky to have Amy, she always said so.

Amy tried to tell the story funny, a comedy of errors. Drunk people playing with guns, something was bound to happen, it could have been anyone. It didn’t always land, but we let her tell it as many times as she wanted, every time she got drunk we let her tell us again, we understood she had to get the story out of her system. Like she might get it right eventually and we’d all laugh together and it’d be okay, it’d be over then, finally, it would be over.

We were all sitting around a little fire someone had built, a ring of big rocks encircling the flames, too bright in the woods until our eyes adjusted. Amy’s boyfriend, Ricky, had his truck backed up close to the fire and he sat on the tailgate with Amy, his jacket over her shoulders. The rest of us sat on blankets we kept in our back seats or on the big fallen log someone had pulled up close to the fire. It wasn’t cold, really; it was October and still warm, around 85 degrees at midday. But it was dark and cool out there in the woods, and we huddled around the fire.

We knew what to expect: Amy’s mom, the party, the accidental discharge of a firearm. Or Teri’s brother with his first rifle on Christmas morning, reckless in the living room, the stray bullet right through her hand. The little bit of metal still in there: you could feel it if you pressed on her palm. Or Trey’s hunting accident, the gun backfiring in his face, no harm done, not really. We thought there was nothing we hadn’t heard before, but we still wanted to talk, to tell stories we already knew, repetition mitigating their stakes.

We were gearing up to hear about Amy’s mom again, when Shelby said she had one we’d never heard before. Shelby didn’t talk a lot; she wasn’t exactly part of our group, but she spent a lot of time with us because she’d dated half the guys and slept with almost all of them. Whoever she was dating at the time would bring her to hang out with us, often enough that she knew everyone. She never showed up alone; she wouldn’t have been invited. Not that we didn’t like her, it was just how things were. She’d been around enough that we assumed we would have known if she had a story to tell, one worth throwing into the ring ahead of Amy’s.

She’d never told the story before, she said, but she would if we wanted to hear it. She was drunk; we all were, passing a bottle of Evan Williams around the circle, a cooler full of beers sitting next to Ricky’s truck. She’d never told anyone any of it before, she repeated, her voice quiet, so we all quieted to hear her better. She was a couple years younger than the rest of us, just a couple years out of high school, and she still seemed like a teenager, skinny with her arms wrapped around herself to keep warm. She had come with Cutter, but they weren’t really dating—he wouldn’t call her his girlfriend, but they hung out a lot. When we asked him about it, he would laugh, like it was funny that we would think it was anything real, anything serious. If we pushed him, he’d get mean and it wouldn’t be funny anymore; he’d snap at us, insisting he wouldn’t date a girl like that. He brought her with him that night and ignored her completely after we all sat down. He didn’t offer her his jacket or bring her a beer from the cooler when he got one for himself. He didn’t sit with her on the blanket from his car. She’d been staring at him all night, but he pretended not to notice.

No one encouraged her to keep going, but no one objected, either, and she continued talking. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen a gun, she said, but it was the first time she’d seen a stranger holding one. It was the first time she hadn’t known what to expect from the gun, hadn’t known what it was for, why the stranger was holding it. In a way, then, it was the first time she had seen a gun—the first time she’d really understood one, the power of it.

She was home alone one weekend in high school, as was often the case when her mom and her mom’s boyfriend drove out to play at the casinos in Biloxi or even New Orleans if they were really on one, getting high and counting out their cash in a motel room each night. Shelby and her mom lived a ways out of town with her mom’s boyfriend. He had some land and he was building a house out there, but it was taking forever. As long as we’d known her he’d been building that house and they’d been living in a camper parked on the land, a decent walk from the half-built house.

They had been gone a couple of days and Shelby was walking around the property one night, wandering, looking at the stars, which were so bright outside of town it wasn’t even that dark out there, it wasn’t scary at all. Across the property toward the half-built house she went, and she wanted to go inside, walk around and look at everything. When her mom’s boyfriend was home he wouldn’t let anyone go in there—the jobsite, he called it, though he’d been working on it by himself, paying for everything bit by bit. He worked in construction, mostly commercial buildings, so he knew what he was doing, but he only had so much time.

She hadn’t gotten to the house yet when she could tell something was off. There was something going on in there—animals, she had assumed, moving around inside, something big enough that you’d notice from afar, bears maybe. She felt like Goldilocks, she said, walking up to the house, thinking maybe there were some bears inside but not really believing it.

There are bears in those woods, sure, she said, but they wouldn’t really come down a road, onto someone’s property and into their house; that wouldn’t make any sense. That’s why she wasn’t scared, why she kept walking up to the house. As she got closer, she thought about what else it could be: not a bear, but maybe a deer? some coyotes? Nothing she could think of made sense.

The house had windows cut into the walls but no frames yet, no glass, so you could see pretty well once you got close enough. Walking up to the structure, she saw the shape of a man, a tall man, a man wearing a coat and pacing around, swinging his head like he was in an argument. He was quiet though, not yelling, not saying anything at all. There weren’t yet rooms inside the house, just tall wooden beams that marked out where those rooms would eventually be, and he walked through them very slowly. He hadn’t seen her yet, she said—she could have turned around and gone back to the camper, turned all the lights off and locked the door and held her breath, hidden until morning. But that was somehow worse, somehow so much scarier than the alternative. She would be powerless under the covers in her fold-down bed, trembling in the dark. She had a shitty flip phone back then and it didn’t get any signal out there on the property, and she didn’t have anyone to call anyways. All she would have had was hope, hope that he wouldn’t see the camper, wouldn’t find her.

Instead, she told us, she kept walking toward the house. She knew she should be scared but the fear wouldn’t come, only the awareness of danger and a hollow feeling that came with that awareness. Before he noticed her, she called out to him: Hello! she called out in a friendly voice, as if they had planned to meet. He heard her before he saw her and immediately drew his gun, wheeling around with the weapon drawn. She hadn’t known he had a gun, but it was likely, she had guessed it was likely he did. When he spotted her, he kept the gun drawn, pointing it right at her through the window. We have a camper down that way, she told him, gesturing over her shoulder, if you want to come inside?

He lowered the gun but kept it in his hand as he walked outside to where she stood. He was quiet but kept shaking his head, a loose, hard motion like a dog shaking off water. She talked to him the whole way back to the camper, telling him how long that house had been under construction, how it probably wasn’t a good idea for anyone to be in there, but the camper was fine and maybe she could fix him a drink. She kept glancing at the gun in his hand, every few seconds she would look down at it, but it didn’t matter, he wasn’t looking at her at all. He wasn’t as old as she’d thought at first, maybe twenty-five years old with long, shaggy hair and a coat.

Back in the camper, she brought an ice tray and filled two glasses, heavy pours of whiskey over ice. He drank and she drank, both of them fully quiet now. After a few minutes passed that way he took a glass pipe from his coat pocket and hit it, filling the camper with a horrible chemical smell. He held it out to her and she nodded—she had no choice, she said—and he lifted it to her mouth, holding the flame of his lighter up to the end. She didn’t breathe in, but pretended to, and this seemed to be enough. He started talking then, fast sentences that were mostly half-formed; she couldn’t make sense of anything he said except that he was trying to make his way to Missouri. Once he made it to Missouri, he kept saying, he would work everything out. She didn’t ask any questions—she didn’t want to know where he was coming from, what he needed to work out. She didn’t like that he’d started talking, she told us, it made him seem more unpredictable, or made it obvious just how unpredictable he was. She wanted him to stop; she wanted to make him stop. The gun was still in his hand, resting on the table between them. The only thing she could think of was to stand up and take her shirt off, walk slowly around the table and climb onto his lap.

He hurt her, she told us, but not badly, not worse than any other man would have. She’d never even kissed a guy before. She didn’t think she’d slept at all that night; she was sure she had laid awake listening to his shallow, drugged breathing, making sure he was asleep. But she woke up and the trailer was hot; it was midday already and he was gone. There was no sign of him except the smell that hung there, the plastic smell of whatever he’d been smoking. Even the next day when her mom and her mom’s boyfriend came back, she could still faintly smell it, but they didn’t notice. She didn’t tell them anything—she didn’t tell anyone what had happened. There hadn’t been any consequences to any of it, she said, it was like nothing had happened at all. There was no proof of anything, but it lived inside of her like a dream, and so did the man, his smell and the feeling of him, his mouth so dry his lips cracked, almost sharp against her skin. She had thought that by not telling anyone she would make it disappear, but instead, as the days went by, it became louder and louder in her mind. She thought about it constantly. She remembered every detail of his face, his shaggy hair and the stubble on his cheeks, and she saw his features everywhere, in other people’s faces: all the guys she’d dated since then, she’d see him in each of them. Every time she’d been with a guy, it was like he was there too, but he wasn’t, of course he wasn’t. That’s what drove her crazy, she said—she knew she’d never see him again, but she never stopped seeing him either.

Cutter cleared his throat and she stopped talking and looked at him. No one said anything and the quiet was so intense it was almost physical, something pressing down on us, holding us still as stones where we sat. Cutter cleared his throat again before speaking. Y’all don’t actually believe a fucking word she says, do you? he asked, and then laughed so short and harsh it was like a branch snapping beneath his feet. You need to go to bed, he said, aiming his face at Shelby. You need to go home and go to bed, but I’m not driving you anywhere. She ignored him and the silence gathered over us again.

So if this man is everywhere, is he here with us right now? Trey broke the silence, smirking. A few of the guys were, their laughter barely concealed. ‘Cause if so, can I get a hit off his pipe? And then they were laughing loudly, not the whole group but a few of the guys, Cutter and the guys he was closest with.

Ricky and Amy got up from the tailgate and said they might need to head off home now if that was okay, and the rest of us got up too, an awkwardness between us, no one looking at each other. Amy asked Shelby if she wanted to ride with them and she said sure, they all lived out in the same direction. Some of the guys were pretty drunk and might have slept in their cars on another night but no one said anything, just packed up their blankets and put the fire out. Everyone got home alright anyways.

After that night Cutter stopped bringing Shelby around. It was up for debate whether he still saw her on his own; we were split, half of us saying he hated her and the other half saying that was kind of true, but there was more to it than that. We were split, too, on whether we believed her or not, her story about the man and his gun and what had happened. Some of the guys said that girls like her always want to explain the way they are, how they got that way—they want it to be someone else’s fault. Others said things like that happened all the time, actually, way more than you’d think, especially these days; it’s sad, but it happens. Someone always asked why she hadn’t ever called the police, even afterward, the next day or something. But what would she tell them? There’d been a strange man and she had invited him in? Because at the end of the day that’s what had happened, in her own story, that was what she had told us. She had gotten up and taken her shirt off, walked slowly around the table and climbed onto his lap. She had said it herself, and none of us could argue past that point: those were the things she had done.