Rifle Seasons

Abstract

Rifle Seasons Greg Bottoms (bio) If memory were a story instead of clattering and rearranging fragments in search of stories, I’d have to start this one—to get where my mind always takes me—on a Saturday morning in 1980, maybe 1981. My neighborhood friend and I climb onto the front seat of his father’s Chevy pickup truck. His father works at the local shipyard, like my father, is big and brawny and often silent. He has cracked, hairy hands the size of kid baseball gloves. My friend wants to be like his father, I think, and maybe his older cousin, too, one of the boys who still brings up an embarrassing, effeminate polyester disco shirt I wore to school last year. The gun rack in the truck’s back window is empty. Today his father plans to check out and probably buy a decade-old .30-30 rifle. We’re tagging along and have been told that, yes, maybe we’ll get to take a shot, too, if we can stay quiet and out of the way while his father haggles with the man about the price. I do not come from a family of hunters, a family who owns guns. I’ve never shot a real rifle and did not tell my mother that I might get to on this outing. Hard to sit still, but I do—except for the wiggling of my sneakered foot in the air. Out the window, the gray light of misty October. We leave suburban tract-home streets and soon bump along slick, mud-puddled dirt roads. I watch the thinning-out fall trees roll by on the far sides of ditches, half-filled with running water the color of weak chocolate milk. It’s almost rifle season. [End Page 85] The man selling the gun has a big, tan, vinyl-sided house and several big American cars and one big American truck straddling the gravel driveway and the grass. He has a detached, vinyl-sided garage opened up to the day with tools on the walls, red tool drawers and cabinets, an air compressor, a generator. He waddles out of the front door of the house, down the three stairs, holding a metal rail with one hand, the rifle with the other, straining a bit. He has a short, white beard and wears a new green baseball cap. He’s swollen as a full tick in his blue sweatshirt. The three of us get out of the truck, us boys leaping from the passenger side. Rich smell of mud and damp grass. Air wet and heavy. Once in the backyard, I stand aside and watch attentively as the two men haggle, the old man waving his hand along the gun as he explains its stellar attributes. Says he’ll throw in a special cleaning rag with the gunmaker’s logo on it and a small can of expensive lubricant. The gist of it all is that the gun has been taken care of, is hard to let go of, and is quite a deal at this price with deer season just around the corner. The old man tells us he has diabetes but he doesn’t think he does but maybe he does since a second doctor said so but you can’t always trust a doctor because they just want your money like everyone else. And he has poor eyesight, too, that’s for damn sure, part of the blood sugar thing, “shit useless without my bifocals.” His lower legs are all swollen like rotting gourds—he points at his white socks above black, Velcro-strapped medical shoes—sore as ripe boils when he walks. No more hunting for him until he arrives in Heaven’s hunting grounds, but “let’s go on and take the measure of this here weapon.” We all turn and follow the old man as he uses his weight to shift and shuffle and proceed another twenty yards or so away from the house. This backyard—newly mown, with wet bunches of lopped grass in lawn-mower lines—smudges into an expanse with higher grass, half a football field or so long and...