Buying a Gun
by James Cato
I drove sixteen miles on dirt roads to the gun store and it only felt like betrayal because Olam didn’t know why I needed one. I’d brought up buying a gun over morning tea before, a what-if, dishonestly casual. He’d told me I might as well bring inside the rabid raccoon we’d seen on our window ledge so it could gobble our necks as we slept.
Olam had flown home to Tucson for the week. If he discovered what I’d done I’d say I felt vulnerable without him. I’d point out (very smartly): the rabid raccoon was still out there somewhere, rocking strangely with its wide shattered mouth. Olam was a sucker for white lies.
No, I did not need Olam’s protection.
He had slender arms and big glasses and the furrowed face of a puzzled dog.
I wanted a gun for indefensible reasons. At least, indefensible-to-Olam reasons. My anniversary with a former lover was coming up. Most people would discard such a date. In my life the holiday had not been discarded, but recycled instead. A fossil of passion, preserved in a jar of vinegar, can become dangerous in the wrong hands. I kept these things from him, not having the words to communicate them. So the gun would live a secret life.
Half-expecting someone to stop me, I stepped into the store. The first floor had rows of glass boxes containing handguns. They rested on their sides, sleek and separate, napping. I peered through as if visiting the zoo. I fought the urge to tap the sides. The cases reminded me of lobster tanks in the supermarket. The walls bore long rifles all facing the same direction like a school of fish circling an aquarium, but I had only a passing interest in those.
A man with a ponytail and skimpy beard approached in a collared shirt and asked if he could help with anything. The shirt had a pistol and the store name Gun Rack embroidered on its breast. I wondered if the mysticism of these objects had worn off on him or if he worshipped them the way I couldn’t help but do.
“I would like a handgun…a revolver!” I told him, perky and eager, as if ordering a martini…on the rocks! An entire morning of no Olam, of freedom, of solitude. I had researched brands and models and prices this morning as soon as my idea hit the system. Suddenly I had forgotten it all. The male voodoo of the store had cursed me.
He handled my inexperience smoothly. “Would you prioritize stopping power or concealability? We carry wheel guns. Blow-back automatics. There are different calibers. Thirty-eight, nine-millimeter, twenty-five, twenty-two, forty-five. Most women don’t like forty-five,” he added, as if letting me in on a little secret about myself. This was a man who categorized the world relentlessly like the great naturalists of old.
“Hey, excuse me!” the cashier barked. “No hoods!” On the opposite side of the room a Black man tugged down his red hoodie, keeping his eyes low. The cashier did not say thank you. The salesman asked if this would be a gift for someone special. I told him no. “One second. You might like this,” he said. He left for a spell and returned with a pink plastic gun the size of a turnip. The stippling dazzled with glitter and the metal slide on top had a purple tint.
The object in his hand required further analysis but in his absence I’d noticed a different weapon—a stainless revolver with a snub nose and a black rubber handle to my left. It resembled the magnums I’d ogled on my computer. This puppy, this little special boy, had wagged its tail at me. “Let me hold that one,” I said. He stuck the That’s-So-Barbie Glock in his pocket and stooped to unlock the object of my fixation.
“Smith and Wesson,” he muttered to himself, a memorization exercise, reciting a flash card. “Thirty-eight special plus P, internal hammer, two-inch barrel snub, used.” He raised his volume and his eyes to convey the grave nature of this choice. “This thing kicks. Small frame for a cartridge of this size. I don’t recommend this one to beginners.”
What did beginner mean in this place? Give it here.
I held it and it held me. A sixth finger numb in my palm. Snug rubber. I closed my fingers gently as if to hold a living creature, those lizards and garden snakes sunning on the porch steps. Yes, if I pointed this stubby thing at C.A.B. it would kill him with no compunction, no sass, no anger. If I spent enough time with it perhaps it would transfuse those qualities into me.
Five hundred ninety-nine-ninety-nine. The price was absurd. The price was right.
***
Another sliver of life to hide.
We’d moved in together. We shared a bathroom. Olam had tamed me, so he thought.
He loved books and hated guns. I slid it to the bottom of my sock drawer.
Before Olam, peace meant boredom. Love meant fucking. Life meant running. Funny meant hurting. Super-funny meant hurting others. Good meant new. A squalid homunculus version of the old me huddled in the bird’s nest of my stomach and occasionally got hungry. When Olam skipped town, I fed it. Thinking of him flooded my veins with complex chemical cocktails like appreciation + fear of loss, oxytocin, come-give-me-a-kiss-mwah-mwah-mwah.
We snuggled on the couch his first night back, me on my phone him buried in a romantic novel. I remembered the gun, the secret thing tucked in its den of underclothes like a small mammal in drywall, and experienced a jolt of intense pleasure. A gun in the house meant something. Olam had no clue. He looked up and asked if I wanted to have sex but I could tell he’d taken all that urgent passion from the book.
Throughout the week I moved the magnum from stash spot to stash spot. What a difference it made, whether I let it swim beneath waves of unfolded underwear or slid it tetris-like between stacks of folded jeans. A hole inside of a car seat, illicit and intimate. Inverted behind our large wooden mirror. Weighing down the fanny pack I toted around the block.
With each dead drop, the sequence of the violent fantasy changed. If C.A.B. crawled through the vents, I’d crouch behind the bed blasting the walls. If he crept out of the wall of trees on my walk, I’d leave one hand in my fanny pack and fire through the fabric. If he brought his friends and they made a cul-de-sac of faces around my car, I’d pop them through the glass. Home alone, I squinted down the notch on the barrel’s tip, aiming at Olam’s things, his picture frames and bookshelves and lamps, not because I hated them but because they were not mine.
This pocket buddy could knock down a hippo.
While on the clock I poured a steaming curtain of water over a fistful of coffee twice per hour. A pile of grounds took the shape and texture of a buzzed scalp. Then hot water melted those teeming grains into a single pulpy puck. I lilted in the reflection of the silver espresso machine, seeing my features warp and stretch and smear. People ordered piping hot tea and coffee and soup. Enough boiling soup made a face crumble and peel off like a snake’s and then C.A.B. had chased me into the woods in his truck and perhaps he chased me still.
If I pulled into our gravel driveway earlier than Olam, I played a little game. It might nestle into a shoe. It might press into the cereal box, a lucky child’s prize. It might be found or might not. Olam came close to stumbling upon it many times, but the cunning device eluded him. I daydreamed of palming its weight at work again and again and again. Olam would never find it without help. I wanted to tell him about the gun, about me, but found no entry point in our banal pleasantries. It was an intimate cruelty.
***
“How about tonight?” he asked. “Let’s do that thing you like. You’re always asking.”
He held the keys to my heart.
I tousled his curls and stepped into a sizzling bath. Thought about the gun. It contained stories from the past. Before me, a stranger had held it, hidden it, used it. It contained stories to come because it had no memory, no trauma, no preference for the future or the past. Whether it had killed before or would kill later it remained static, unfeeling and unbiased, the one perfect tool. Suspended in time. If only the past glanced off me so easily.
I toweled off and stepped into the living room. “Olam?” The house had a gutted, deveined quality without him. “Still here?” Years ago, before Olam, I’d collected minerals and had seen myself in a certain colorful cut of opal, asymmetric and brutalized if beautiful. Olam caressed my jagged fractures, ogling the iridescent shelf on my belly, the rim of metallic sheen under my wrist. He was a perfect river stone sanded smooth by decades of immersion.
I’d gotten so lost in visions of crystals I didn’t register the door slamming until a masked man towered over me. He wore a leather jacket with peeling curls along its edges where fingers liked to pick. A baseball bat whistled as it skimmed his jeans. I dropped my towel with a shriek and stood before him nude. His eyes, pellets behind the mask holes, slid up and down, approving. Holes fascinated me, what huddled within. Hooded pupils behind the mask. Polecats crouching unseen in the yard. The hole in my gun.
The first time we did this Olam had pried open a window, so I sealed them with polyurethane. Then he had wriggled through the crawlspace and snuck up from the basement. I stuck leg-hold traps on alternating steps. Today he busted down the back door. I’d invest in a thicker lock. Soon my precautions would thwart him entirely and our consent/non-consent play would end. I always asked him to wear boots to seem taller and the leather jacket.
“Get down,” he purred. The crossbars of his arms locked around my waist and steered me into the bed. I struggled like Houdini. Before Olam, I’d poured boiling hot soup over someone’s hair. Before Olam, I’d run for my life through a stand of trees with a black pickup following me, an orca in the woods. Olam in a mask became a representation. If I could not become unaware of the past, I would mock it by repetition into redundancy, a serialization of my worst fears, until that old danger floated distant in a sea of fiction.
He threw me (gently) into bed and I flung my arms wide. The gun shifted under Olam’s pillow and clacked against the headboard. Tonight I had planned for the magnum to hibernate inches from Olam’s ear. Maybe he’d find it and we’d fight but at least he’d know. Peeking through the hole, five hollow point brass studs tucked themselves in. “That sound wasn’t your head, was it?” he murmured, breaking character. He curled around me like a fingernail.
“No. Keep going.”
Olam never questioned when I spent a month’s pay on a twenty-year-old black pickup truck and parked it in the field out back to watch it sink. I told him the birds liked it. Crows swiped their beaks on the mirrors and filled the bed with seeds. Olam never raised a stink, not even an eyebrow, when I pissed outside and let it dribble down my legs, never wondered why this behavior always followed a thump in the attic or the eek-eek of our floorboards. But Olam did ask why I wanted home invasion C/NC. I told him it was my fetish. He peered into my face and tried to read the little words in my crow’s feet and frown lines.
Days repeated like waves on a beach. They eroded my secrets, eating at the stony shell around the pit. There were things I needed to tell Olam. The truth: not a fetish. It was practice, survival. I have always organized my hours around my fears. I folded preparation into our home life. Smith and Wesson into hide and seek. War room simulations into sex. When he asked me why I wanted this, I spoke of other things instead…but I needed him to know. Desperately.
The handgun was too easy to conceal. It was designed for concealment. Olam constricted my limbs so I could hardly move. I reached for the grainy steel under the sheets but could only brush its muzzle like a small pet. I strained and he tightened his embrace. The sound would snowball in this bedroom. A mystical concussion from a small lever. You’re mine, you’re mine, you’re mine, he was saying. Even in the violent fantasy his words belied loyalty, love, dedication.
The snubnose was the great equalizer, if I could only reach it—Olam was bigger, stronger, better positioned, but it hardly mattered in the presence of a three-pound hunk of rare metals vastly engineered in Germany. I waited in a snail pose as he willed himself to get hard, sliding himself against my backside. Olam didn’t slip into these shoes easily. Did I treat him as human? We’d met on an app. Where I’d chipped my edges with many people, he had sharpened himself alone. Did he resent this—a complete relationship with me, limited by his singular life, when I had had so many lives, all incomplete?
Still I could not quite grab it. My fingernail caught a screw on its handle and I scooted it meticulously closer with an inchworm motion.
Olam had taken me home, a dangerous thing, to his rural clapboard shack. He’d absorbed my rough edges smooth as a sword swallower. He rubbed the crease of my ass up to my notched back, and I felt the soft cock drag. He loosened his grip. Got it! I whirled around on my hip and shoved the gun right into his neck where it flattened some duct and he fell back onto the covers and I kept the barrel leveled at him. “Get on the ground,” I snarled as he sucked air.
Gasping and flipping like a fish he landed on the floor. His penis curled against his left leg, stuck like a pressed flower. The gunmetal seemed to absorb light from the blind slats and return it to the room slim and fuzzy in front of me. I leaned on my hip, still aiming, a suggestive pose. His eyes worked past the dark circle and found mine. “Don’t!” he said. “Please!”
I didn’t. I waited as his face asked questions. Confusion in his furrows, and shock, but no rage. Bless him. I was an actor still. I told him, “you’re fucked. If you move, I will paint you all over the floor. If you don’t move, the police will drag you off to prison forever.” It was over. I finally had the upper hand. I was telling him. I was trying to tell him. I paused. I had gone too far. I needed to go too far.
I kept the gun on him. It whispered the words I couldn’t find. It told him something about me, I hoped, it gave clarity to my preparation, my paranoia, my past. Through a symbol I could reveal myself to him. I wanted him to figure me out. All my secrets rolled like a dirty snowman’s head into one thing. “I finally got you,” I said. “I finally got you.”
“You…you’re done,” he stammered. He was an actor still. He raised his hands. He took off his mask as if to wipe away that other face. “You’re finished with this.” Two more breaths passed in the stand-off and then a tremulous smile dawned on both of us because although it was a euphemism it was also true.
