Part of Bricklin’s reward for perfect grades had been a new scouting backpack for him to take to camp. He’d given his old backpack to me before he left for camp, along with a plastic canteen that had been chewed on by a raccoon. In Bricklin’s absence, I sat in the shade of a tree in my back yard and flipped through his discarded scouting survival guide. A section in the guide that described how to get water from air intrigued me. It said that I could make a solar still by digging a hole in the dirt, stretching a clear plastic sheet across the hole, and putting a small rock in the middle of the sheet so that condensing moisture on the underside would collect in the middle and then drop into a cup. I’d gone out to the garage, taken a shovel and the plastic sheet that my dad used to cover his table saw, and then wandered into the oak forest looking for a place to dig a hole for my solar water collector.
Being in the oak forests that surrounded my house was a way for me to manage the stresses I felt at home. I knew that my parents were in trouble financially and that my erratic behavior just compounded their anxieties. The solitude I found on those game trails brought me a feeling of peace that counterbalanced the roller coaster ride of my father’s business adventures.
My dad was a car enthusiast who believed that if you worked hard and were clever enough, the world would reward your efforts. After leaving the military, he’d started a used car business that had done well, but over the years he’d become convinced that if he wanted to make big money he needed to sell imports and collectibles. The small but profitable “Harper’s Reliable Used Cars” became the larger and riskier “Harper Collectible Classics.” My father was desperate for free publicity for the grand opening of his new dealership in the wealthiest part of Oklahoma City, so he legally renamed me and my brother with the names of two of his favorite car makes: Bricklin and Delorean. When the judge at the courthouse asked for an explanation for the name change, my father told him “These cars are so great that I want to give my kids the same names.” The judge had shaken his head, but he agreed to the name change anyway. My father had fed the details about the renaming to several of the local news stations, and the story had gotten legs. It was picked up by the Oklahoma City Times in the weekend section, where the article ran under a picture of my father standing between Delorean and Bricklin coupes. In the picture my brother sat cross-legged in front of the Bricklin and I sat cross-legged in front of the Delorean. It’s the last picture taken that had me, my brother, and my father in it.
When my father went upscale with the car business, he’d borrowed heavily from banks and private lenders to build his inventory and repair the intricate and expensive foreign cars to the like-new condition that affluent buyers expected, and his gamble paid off while the oil economy boomed. I heard him talking to my mother about it at the dinner table one night. “It takes money to make money,” he said. My mom responded by saying that eventually the loans would all need to be paid back. My dad waved his hand in the air as if he were shooing away gnats. “It’s all going to work out, you’ll see,” he said. However, the booming oil economy eventually went bust as it inevitably did, and the demand for collectible imports and special rarities like the Bricklin and Delorean cars went through the floor. Summertime was usually a good time to be in my house. That summer, it wasn’t.
I’d started work on the solar still not far from the oil well. After a half day of digging, I’d made a square hole about three feet deep and six feet across in that rust-colored Oklahoma soil. I’d returned home that afternoon and washed off the dirt and the smell of crude oil with a chunk of bar soap and hose water on the back porch. My mom kept towels and extra clothes on the porch during the summer so that I wouldn’t bring dirty clothes into the house after my adventures in the forest. Privacy wasn’t much of a concern for me as I scrubbed off the dirt. Our house was at the end of a dead end road nearly a mile from the closest home, and my mother was still at work with my father, so I was alone.
When my parents came home that night, they looked haggard. My dad’s expression told me that I needed to keep things quiet around the house or risk incurring his wrath. While I was getting ready for bed, I overheard my parents having a heated argument about money. My dad said that even if he gave the car dealership title to the lender, even if he gave him all the cars on the lot, even if he gave him the title to the house we lived in, that wouldn’t be enough. “They’re asking for money we don’t have,” he said. “They came by the car lot today and told me I needed to pay or bad things would happen.” My mom suggested calling the police. Dad said “And tell them what? That we’ve been laundering money as a favor to the lender, but we’re still going under and the lender is making threats? We’d go to jail regardless.”
I didn’t sleep at all that night. I lay in my bed reading through the scouting survival manual and trying to convince myself that if I knew the right techniques I’d be able to weather any storm that the world sent my way. After overhearing my parents’ conversation, learning outdoor survival techniques took on a new urgency; I needed to know how to take care of myself if we came under siege. When morning finally came and I heard my parents talking downstairs in the kitchen, I hatched a plan for how I would spend the day. I needed a gun, though.
My father had a Colt forty-five caliber pistol that he kept in the nightstand beside his bed. The previous day I’d seen feral dogs at the perimeter of the clearing when I was digging the hole, so before I left the house that morning I’d gone into my parent’s bedroom, taken the gun from the nightstand, and examined it. I pulled back the slide assembly far enough to see that there was a bullet in the chamber, flipped the safety off and on a few times, then dropped the pistol into my backpack. At the time, it made sense to me to borrow the gun in case I needed to defend myself against the dogs. I reasoned that I’d have the pistol back in my dad’s nightstand before he discovered that I’d borrowed it. Better safe than sorry.
My parents were at the kitchen table when I came downstairs. They had a stack of receipts and a bank ledger out on the table, and they were so preoccupied with their discussion that they barely noticed when I left the house. I’d filled the plastic canteen at the kitchen sink, and then gone out through the opened garage door and across the road. As I had the day before, I followed the trail that led through the oak groves to the open space and the hole for the solar still. I’d started digging again and had been there about an hour when I heard a series of muffled booming sounds coming from the direction of my house. I dropped the shovel, pulled on my backpack, and started to run. The forest flashed by in a blur as I raced towards my home.
As I reached the exit of the trail, I saw someone leaving my parent’s garage. I slowed to a stop in the shade of the oak trees and stared at him. Tan tee shirt pulled tight across his weight lifter's torso, and brown hair cut in bangs across his forehead but long on the sides and back. Faded bell bottom jeans over pointy-toed cowboy boots with a brown leather holster strapped to his thigh. He sauntered out of the garage with the lethal self-confidence of Wyatt Earp stepping out of a saloon. He walked over towards the passenger side of a black Dodge Charger parked in the driveway, and as he reached for the car door handle, he scanned the surroundings in all directions. That’s when he finally noticed me, and his pistol materialized instantly in his hand. He aimed his gun at me as casually as if the gun barrel were his finger.
“Hey, sport,” he said in a baritone voice. “Get over here!”
On instinct, I turned and ran. There were two quick booms from his gun as I ran full-tilt down the twisting narrow trail. My arms were pumping; my feet seemed to barely touch the ground as I sprinted past tree branches that slashed my face and forearms. A hundred yards before I reached the clearing I heard the big pistol fire behind me again, and I went off the trail into the tangle of brambles, ivy, wild grass and fallen tree limbs. I smashed through the undergrowth until I collided with a tree branch at chest level. Knocked flat, I lay on my back with the sunlight cutting ribbons of gold through the dusty a
ir above me.
I rolled onto my hands and knees and crawled across the carpet of dry oak leaves. As I reached an area where the undergrowth was less dense I rose to my feet. I’d lost track of where I was headed, and I exited the forest onto the game trail a dozen yards past where my hunter stood. Lucky me, though. His back was to me. Then he looked over his shoulder at me and smiled.
I turned away from him and ran towards the circular opening in the forest, going hard for the protection that the oil well could provide. The gun boomed once more as I reached the far side of the well’s motor.
I pressed my back against the motor housing as it huffed its irregular heartbeat. The smell of the oil was intense, the sun beat down remorselessly, and the oil well’s black surface radiated heat like a chef’s griddle. I took a deep breath before running flat-out towards the trees on the far side of the clearing.
The gun thundered behind me with gut-shattering force as I neared the hole that I’d dug for the solar still. I threw myself to the ground and then rolled into the hole, buying myself a few seconds of safety.
In frenzy, I pulled the backpack off and grabbed at the zipper.
I heard him yell “Hey boy! You hiding from me? Come out and play.”
The air stank of oil, dirt, and hot plastic. My heartbeat hammered in my chest as my hand scrabbled against the rough fabric at the bottom of the backpack. I felt the familiar heaviness of my father’s Colt as my fingers wrapped around the butt of the gun. I pulled it free of the backpack and gripped the pistol with both hands, holding the metal in a vise-like grip. I flipped the safety off with my thumb. The moment had an air of hallucinatory unreality. Was I actually here? Was I dreaming, or was I about to die? From above, I probably looked like I’d been buried with a pistol to hold against my chest instead of a small bouquet of posies.
I heard his deep baritone voice again. “Aren’t you the clever one?” he yelled. “Found a hole to crawl into. Good thing I’ve got your shovel to dig you out.”
His revolver was holstered when he stepped to the edge of the hole. He brandished my shovel over his head as if it were an axe. I guess he’d planned to beat me to death with it.
His eyes went wide when he saw the gun in my hand, and he dropped the shovel. The movement of his hand towards his holster was a blur. I’d seen his hand move that fast in my driveway, though, and I already had a gun in my hand. My forty-five went off with a force that nearly ripped it from my hands. Then everything was very still. My ears rang with a tone like the inside of a dinner bell, and my face was peppered with burnt gunpowder.
I stayed in the hole for a while. The passage of time felt heavy, slow, and foreign. Eventually, I stood up and looked to see where he’d gone. He was about ten yards away from me and resting in a sitting position with his legs fully extended. With his head tipped forward and his gun hand lying on the dirt, he looked a bit like a discarded rag doll. His tan tee shirt was stained above his belt buckle with blood that leaked through the fingers of his left hand. We made eye contact, and he opened his mouth to talk.
“Your mom begged me not to hurt you,” he said. His head drooped a little, like he was falling asleep. Then he pulled his head up again and used his gun hand to push against the dirt to try to sit upright. The cephalic veins on the outside of his cantaloupe-sized biceps were as thick as pencils, his forearms as big around as the calves on my legs. His face was framed by his hair hanging forward, and his eyes were as black as coal. “I guess that ship has sailed,” he said.
He smiled with a curled upper lip, and I saw the barrel of the pistol coming up fast off the dirt.
I don’t remember pulling the trigger. What I do remember is the thunderous, heart-stopping sound of a cannon going off repeatedly as he tumbled backwards, the metal in my hands seeming alive on its own, the butt of the gun jerking with ferocious power with each report, his body spinning and thrashing as if connected to cables like a marionette.
I emptied the gun into him. Then I sat down and cried until I couldn’t cry any more.
I gradually began to feel an odd sort of mental clarity. I knew that I needed to take action. I knew that killers went to jail, and I felt haunted by what my brother had said about me being committed to an asylum. Above all else, I didn’t want to be locked up in a padded cell. People never came out of places like that. Taking care to avoid the blood on his clothing, I grabbed hold of the man’s boots and dragged him into the hole. He was bigger than I was, but it wasn’t difficult to pull him across the loose, sandy dirt. He landed in the pit atop the plastic tarp and the backpack I’d left in the hole. I tossed in my gun and his chrome revolver, and after staring at his broken shape in the bottom of the pit, I covered the body with the dirt that I’d dug from the hole.
I don’t recall walking home, but I do remember that the car that had been parked in the driveway was gone and the garage door was still open. I wanted to act as normally as possible, so I kept to my routine. I cleaned up on the back porch with the water hose and bar soap, and then put on a clean pair of jeans and a clean shirt from the stack my mom left outside for me. I tossed my dirty clothes in the hamper after I scrubbed the blood stains from the jeans with soap and water.
I couldn’t find my parents downstairs, and I wondered if they’d gone for a walk. As I made my way upstairs to the bedrooms I began to smell the powerful odor of gun smoke. I walked down the hall to my parents’ room and found both of them sprawled on the floor by my father’s side of the bed. The nightstand drawer was open, as if my father had been looking for his pistol. The gun would have been there if I hadn’t taken it that day, and they would both still be alive.