Guns I’ve Known

Steve Featherstone

The first: a .22 caliber revolver in an unlocked desk drawer, behind a stack of old utility bills. I discovered it while rifling through the desk for change to put in the soda machine at the gas station. It was dull gray with a narrow black plastic handle that slid easily into my palm. I was eight years old, and I had never held a real gun before. It was not unlike a cap pistol. Small. A minor threat of a gun, hardly lethal. Spun the chamber, cocked the hammer, pulled the trigger. Snap. Aimed at the wall. Snap. Dumped it back in the desk. Tiny brass bullets rolled around the bottom of the drawer, but I was looking for quarters.
    The only loaded gun was kept on the top shelf of the cabinet above the sink, sealed in a Tupperware container. I had no idea it was up there. Cookies, maybe. My mother baked a lot. My feet got wet as I stood in the sink to reach in the cupboard. The gun was buckled tight in a black leather holster. It gleamed, shiny as bumper chrome, and it was heavy. The fat rubber grip took two hands to hold. Little half shells of lead, like the heads of nesting wasps, poked out of the chambers. From time to time I carried it around the empty house, crouching behind furniture, pointing at closed doors. It was a Smith and Wesson .38 caliber snub-nose, a standard service revolver. My father was a policeman.

I owned three BB guns. One, a replica of a US Navy .45 caliber Colt. Not too accurate, not too powerful and, because it was spring-loaded, it jammed a lot. But it was blocky and it was solid. For this reason, I still keep it handy. I’m not a believer in handguns, but at a glance, you can’t tell the difference between it and the real thing. Once, I shot my friend in the ear with it. He dug the BB out of the cup of his ear and rolled it around in his palm, staring at it, staring at me. After his ear stopped bleeding, we went back to shooting bottles. More powerful than the . Colt was the Colt Python .357 Magnum replica. My friend gave it to me. It took expensive c02 cartridges and shot lead pellets only. I didn’t have it for long. I got caught stealing cartridges at KMart and had to give it up as the easy part of my punishment. To this day I don’t know where it is, though I never asked. Most powerful of all: the .766 caliber air rifle. The manual recommended no more than ten pumps. Usually, I gave it somewhere between fifteen and twenty. It took both BBS and lead pellets. I preferred the pellets because they tore ragged little holes in things and turned bottles into a fine spray of glass. I killed a robin with it, which I regretted at the time.
    My cousin’s old Daisy one-pump got run over in the road and shot better than it ever did after that. At least that’s what my cousin liked to say.

A guy my father was chasing one time, a burglar, I think, chucked a double-barrelled shotgun into some bushes. That’s how the story goes. My father brought the gun home, although he skips that part. Anyway, he likes to tell about the time he and his older brother took the gun out one night after a card game and fired it into a snow bank. They wanted to see what it could do. They were also pretty drunk. My uncle is a big guy, a bricklayer, and he was showing off and holding the gun with one hand. Then a flash of light, a boom, and snow exploded everywhere. It took a moment before my father found his brother laid out on the icy road, the gun on the ground beside him, snow still drifting down. There was a gash on his forehead where the gun had jumped back and kicked him like a mule, as my father likes to say. My story about that gun isn’t as funny or dramatic. We were playing hide and seek when it dropped on my head. It was tucked between two studs above the entrance of the upstairs hail closet, next to a light blue canister of cs gas. I remember sitting there in the dark closet, rubbing the knot on my head. I was worried about making too much noise. I waited, then opened the closet door enough to let in some light. The gun was heavy and worn. Both barrels had been sawed off. The stock, too, was roughened up where someone had taken a saw to it. At the time, I didn’t know anything about the burglar who’d chucked it into the bushes. He could probably tell a few stories of his own about that gun. But me—I only looked at it for a second, then closed the closet door again because I didn’t want to get caught.
    There were other shotguns. Antiques. A relative died, left them to my father. I’d never seen guns like that. They were long and sleek and elegant and protected by thick leather cases. When I unzipped the cases, I was careful not to touch the oiled metal. I liked to balance them on my lap one by one and admire the scroliwork and intricate firing mechanisms. They smelled like machine oil and looked too fancy to shoot. Ornamental. Tiny letters stamped in the metal said they were from Belgium. I liked to imagine the rich people in Belgium—riding around on horses, shooting birds, maybe a fox—who had owned them at one time. After looking, I would wipe them down with an oiled chamois, just in case I had put something there I couldn’t see.
    In the cellar, leaning in the corner near the fuse box, stood a sixteen- gauge Savage semiautomatic shotgun with a rusty barrel. Every so often I check to see if it is still there, and it always is. I believe that gun will outlive me.

I was jealous when a friend of mine got a .22 Marlin rifle for his birthday. An only child, he got everything he wanted, which was fine by me because sometimes he gave me his old stuff. He could shoot it only under supervision. But his father was blind in one eye. He sat sideways to us in a lawn chair and drank beer, keeping his good eye on us. I hardly ever got the chance to shoot anyway. My friend always hogged it. Spoiled rotten. To keep myself busy, I collected the brass shell casings and put them in my pocket while he fired away. When we stopped being friends, I had tons of those brass shell casings. I threw them away and kept one as a whistle.

I had a great-uncle who was in World War II. He sat on his screened- in porch all day with his beer and his cigarettes, and then he died. They say he was in the Battle of the Bulge, but he never said anything about it. During the war, he sent home a German infantry rifle, a 1936 Mauser model 98-K. He sent home a lot of stuff from the war, but most of it was stolen in the mail. I can’t imagine how the Mauser made it, although someone did take the brass off it. The stock was made from oak or some other hardwood and it was unfinished, as though the Germans were in a hurry making them. Tiny Nazi eagles were stamped on all the parts, no matter how small. Usually my uncle gave me five bucks for mowing his lawn, but one time he gave me the gun instead. He knew he was dying and he was getting rid of stuff. I got my friend to chip in for some 7mm Mauser ammunition from KMart. We wrapped the gun in a garbage bag and ran to the dump at the end of my street. The dump was in a deep ravine where we thought no one would hear us; or, if they did, they wouldn’t bother coming in there after us. It took a while to figure out how the clip worked. Finally, my friend managed to slide home the bolt and lock it. Immediately, he handed me the Mauser. It is not advisable to shoot old guns. No telling what condition the parts are in, whether the barrel is torqued just enough to burst, or whether the chamber is going to blow up and send the bolt straight through your eye. The last person to fire the gun was probably a Nazi soldier. So 1 handed the gun to my friend and told him he could shoot it first if he wanted. He declined. Eventually, because it was my gun, I got first honors. Pointing the gun at the ground, I held it away from me with one hand and shielded my eyes with the other hand. Through my fingers I could see my friend standing with his back to me, fingers stuffed in his ears. The gun jerked my arm when I pulled the trigger, but that was about it. Slowly, my friend turned around, taking his fingers out of his ears as he did so. A little whiff of white smoke drifted out the end of the barrel. We watched it float away, then set up some targets.
    That same friend went into the Marines after he turned eighteen. It was his dream. When he got discharged he got married, and he was never quite the same. Married life didn’t suit him, but it was, like the Marines, something he thought he had to do. Soon after he got married, he bought a Colt AR- 15, the civilian version of the military M- 16, only semiautomatic. He couldn’t afford it, but he really wanted it. His wife was mad at him for buying it. Sometimes, when he wants to get away, he calls me and we take the AR-15 up to some property my father owns. We shoot clip after clip at stumps, at trees, at apples, whatever. We have to be careful where we point it because the AR- 15 has incredible muzzle velocity and those bullets go forever, and they get there fast. At thirty yards, one of them will go straight through more than one tree. Once, we put so many bullets through a small sugar maple that we were able to push it over with our hands. That was when my friend first had the gun and wanted to show me what it could do. He talked some about what a drag his carpet cleaning job was, and I asked him a few questions about his wife, but mostly we fired the gun. For a week afterward I was deaf in my left ear.

An old girlfriend of mine had twin brothers, younger than herself. They looked exactly alike, and I was always mixing up their names. It didn’t help that their parents also gave them names that sounded alike. They quit school when they were sixteen and started working construction full time. They saved enough to get a Winchester over/under 30.30 rifle they had been looking at, and they wanted me to go with them to get it, in case the clerk gave them trouble for being young. They bought the gun and a box of bullets without trouble. We spent that afternoon at the dump, shooting at old refrigerators and cars and junk. I liked those kids. Recently, I heard from my old girlfriend that they have moved on. The Army got one and one got married. Sometimes I wonder which one ended up with the gun.
    Another old girlfriend—not exactly a girlfriend, although I like to think of her that way—had a beautiful antique Civil War single-shot Remington rifle in her house. Her father owned some property around town and thought of himself as a ‘big shot. He belonged to the same local sportsman’s club as my father, but he never hunted, just sat around and talked a lot about all the stuff he had or was planning to get. He started collecting guns so that he could have something to brag about at chicken barbecues at the club. It was at one of those events that I found myself kissing his daughter in the woods behind the barbecue pit. I still don’t know what to make of the whole thing. She had never before said two words to me and we haven’t spoken since. She was one of those girls who went out with guys from other school districts. Anyway, we sat there in the woods with smoke from the barbecue pit drifting through the trees, and she talked and talked. It didn’t seem to matter that I was there. It was hard to listen and even harder to kiss her because I kept thinking, Why is she talking to me? Her family was going through tough times. Her father was running around with another woman or something like that. I don’t remember much of what she said except a story about her father shooting squirrels and birds in their backyard, but doing it from inside the house. After she talked herself out, she said I was a good listener and we necked some more. Later that week I called her. I knew I was pressing my luck. Over the noise and shouts of people splashing, she told me to come over for a dip. She was having some kind of pool party. Her parents weren’t home. In fact, her father had moved out altogether. She told me this as she gave me a brief tour of the house, pointing out the stuff her father left behind. She said her mother was going to sell everything. It made her sad, I think, but I didn’t know what to say. Then she showed me the bathroom and left me alone. I changed into my trunks and found my way through the house to the backyard. She was stretched out on a lounge chair, shining with oil. The sunglasses she was wearing made it hard to tell whether she could see me or not. There were a few people fooling around by the pool, mostly guys I didn’t know, trying to throw each other in. Another girl I didn’t recognize sat at the edge of the pool, looking bored and swirling her feet in the water. No one paid me any mind, so I dove in, swam to the other side of the pool, and climbed out. I toweled off in front of her father’s gun cabinet. Inside the cabinet was a haphazard collection—a little .410, some muzzleloaders built from kits, and the antique Remington. Before I knew it, I was out the front door, the gun shoved down the leg of my jeans. I was still wearing my swimming trunks, and in my other hand I carried my shoes and socks. It was a stupid thing to do, but I couldn’t just leave it there. Her father couldn’t appreciate it. As far as I know, no one ever noticed it was gone.

The two guns I saw briefly in my father’s safe: a Smith and Wesson .38 long-barrel Special and a small Waither PPK that was kept in a velvet-lined box and reminded me of something a card shark or James Bond might carry in a suit-coat pocket. My father called me up a while ago because he forgot the combination to that safe. I didn’t remember it either.

My gather got a scope for his Thompson Center Contender. You hold it like a handgun, but it will take all sorts of barrels. My father keeps a .32 Remington rifle barrel on it, for hunting. I prefer a shotgun, but my father got some good deer with that gun. To sight in the scope, we fired the Contender at some targets. I tried it, hit nothing, then stood off to the side to let my father have a go. He rested his arms on a rubber floor mat that he had laid across the hood of the car to keep it from getting scorched. In broad daylight, I saw a flame shoot about six inches from the end of the barrel at the same time my father’s arms jumped off the rubber mat. During hunting season about a month later, he came out of the woods with blood running down one side of his face, cradling the Contender in his arms. At first, I thought he had been shot, but he was walking fine. When he wiped the blood away there was an almost perfect circle cut into the skin around his right eye, his shooting eye, where the scope had gouged him. We joked about it, but the important thing was that he got the deer.
    We like to go fishing in the summer, my father and I. We load up the car with gear and sandwiches. My father drives and I sit in the passenger seat. Laying on the seat between us is a matte black 9mm Baretta semiautomatic pistol. The police department, my father informs me, has switched guns. Times are getting tough, he says, and the police have to keep up with the crooks. When they are not carrying automatic weapons, the crooks have 9mms. Every day it gets more and more like the Wild West, my father says. At a gas station, he pops out the clip and hands me the Baretta. I don’t think he trusts me enough to look at it without blowing a hole in something.

I keep a Remington Model 870 Wingmaster twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun in my closet. The magazine is loaded, but I leave the chamber open and empty. I live alone, so it is no big deal. I feel better knowing there is a loaded gun in my house. The first shell in the magazine is a game load, for birds and squirrels. Small stuff. Behind that are four hollow point slugs, the kind for killing big stuff like deer and bear. If someone comes into the house, I will have to pump the action first. In the dark, that sound is enough to scare most people away. If that doesn’t work, there is the bird shot, which won’t always kill a man, even at close range, unless he gets hit in the face. And if that doesn’t stop him, there are the slugs, four of them. I shouldn’t need more than that.

Steve Featherstone grew up and lives in upstate New York. He has not bought a hunting license since he was twenty-two.

“Guns I’ve Known” appears in our Autumn 1996 issue.