I went with him to JJs house. JJ was a skateboarder. He had a half-pipe in his backyard. I wasnt good on the half-pipe.
JJ had a BB gun. We stood in his backyard and shot at birds that flew overhead, but didnt hit any.
JJ sold me the BB gun for $50.
When I had the BB gun, Ivan and Ed and Dan and Jerry and I took it out. We walked in the creek by my house, Matadero. It was a cement creek that ran from one side of town to the other. The water got really high when it rained. My dad said not to go in it. He said that every winter, when the water got high, kids would take a raft in it, and someone would drown.
But that was when I was little. When I was in eighth grade, we went into it all the time. Sometimes we would catch crawfish and step on them and theyd crunch. We also burned things down there: a stuffed bear that an ugly girl gave me on Valentines Day, sitting on a little wooden chair that my brother made. It smelled like chemicals.
We walked down the creek with a BB gun. Dan hit a bird, and it dropped to the dirt. It wasnt dead, so he shot it a bunch more times until it stopped moving.
We shot at house windows from the creek. We made designs in the glass. We almost made a smiley face in one, but the eyes were crooked.
We walked down the creek, all the way to Hoover Park. Some men were working on a roof. They were bent over in construction hats and hammering boards. Jerry aimed at one of the men. He missed once, and then he hit him. The man stood up. The way he stood, we knew Jerry got him in the ass. The man looked around and then he ran to the side of the roof. We all ran back down the creek toward my house.
It was far to get back to my house. In the bottom of the cement creek the water was low and we ran down there. The bottom was covered in slime and it was easy to slip, but it was harder to see us down there because the cement walls on the sides were high.
We could see the construction mans car stop on all the bridges over the creek. He was looking for us, and we ran faster.
Finally we made it back to my house.
Inside, we rested. We watched some of Diffrent Strokes, and then everybody left.
Later, someone stole the BB gun.
I dont know who, but theyre out there shooting things.
In high school, Howard Vern got a paint pellet gun. The balls were brightly colored: yellow, green, red, blue, white, orange, and black. They were round and waxy like candy.
One night I slept over at Howards house. At midnight, Bill came by in his jeep. Bill was handsome, but retarded. It was hard for him to put sentences together, and his emotions were all fucked-up. Other days, he and I spent a lot of time smoking pot and doing pull-ups on a bar above his bedroom door.
I wasnt friends with Jerry or Dan anymore. They played on the school sports teams, and started calling me a fag after I quit the football team. They said Ed and I were gay together. It made me want to stay away from Ed because everyone started saying we were gay. Some girls even made up a song and a dance about us. I never saw the dance, but I heard about it.
Bill and Howard and I drove around town thinking about things to shoot with the paint pellet gun. We shot stop signs and mailboxes, and we shot at the high school, but those things werent very fun.
Lets go shoot Alice Hendersons house, I said.
Alice was the girl who made up the gay dance about me. I think that she was mad at me, and at everyone because she was a slut, and everyone knew that she was a slut. I guess the song and dance helped her anger out.
Howard and Bill thought Alice Hendersons was a great idea and we drove over to the richest part of town, at the end of University Avenue.
All the houses were very big in the area, but Alices was one of the biggest. Bill pulled up and I leaned out the backdoor window and fired. The pellets hit the house with a hard, wet sound. I spread the shots around the front of the house, and they left dark flowers on the side of the white wall. I kept thinking of the words crime, crime, crime, and faggot, faggot, faggot.
I was a dark agent of the night, delivering terror in the suburbs while the inhabitants slept. I was evil in anyones eyes, but in high school, underhanded action rules.
After Alices we wanted more so we shot some other houses. We shot Jerrys house because he ditched me as a friend, and Eli Foxs house because he was an annoying guy Howard knew from Hebrew school, and Anna Zimmermans house because she had a big crush on me and had no chin. She had given me the bear that we burned.
Later we got caught because Howards mom found paint on his clothes. She was a friend of Eli Foxs parents. The Foxes turned us in and we had to do community service. Jerry called me a fag to my face in front of everyone at school, but he was too scared to start a fight. And I heard that Alice kept doing the gay dance about me.
* * *
Some people when they were young shot deer, and foxes. Faulkner shot a bear, Hemingway shot lions and a lot of things. Gangs shoot people for initiation.