EDITOR’S CHOICE AWARD
By Billie Pritchett
My father owned several rifles, three of which he assembled from used parts: the M65, the AR-15, and—the one he prized most—the AK-47. He started building rifles only after he stopped hunting, several years after, in fact. Using Mossy Oak oil and elbow grease, he polished his toys on the living room floor in front of the squat entertainment center (prefab, composite wood, available at Walmarts across America). As a man in his late fifties who couldn’t hear well, he ran the television set at full volume. Sonic intrusions, explosions of war. Death Wish 4, Rambo: First Blood Part 2, Movies for Guys Who Like Movies. From 1997 until the collapse of One and Two World Trade Center, the old man maintained a self-contained presence, unlike my mother, my younger brother, and me, who were porous beings. While the rest of us interrupted one another in our respective rooms, no one was to disturb Father. The living room was his sleeping quarters, his workshop, his rec room, his fortress of solitude.
Only once did he let me in on his machinations. He requested I sit away from him to stay out of his light. I positioned myself in a recliner perpendicular to his motile, cross-legged body, the flame-shaped bulbs in the plastic tulip light fixtures of the ceiling fan casting heat upon the man’s head. He called me over, said he’d show me how it was done. All rifles were rifles you could build yourself at home, he said. He said to check out his handiwork. I focused only on his artless form. He rubbed, tugged, rubbed. Sweatlets rolled down the long, sharply angular bridge of his nose as he applied the rifle oil generously down the length of the barrel, his slick palm sliding up and down, overhanded, underhanded. I was twelve, and these were gestures with which I had already grown familiar, crouching by myself in our overgrown backyard, among the dead dandelions, watching in musty silence as strong winds catch the tops of the blowballs and disperse the white fruits.
The old man seemed to be a mind-reader. He looked up from his polish, his face overwhelmed with disgust. He had caught me smiling, bucktoothed. Fine, he said, be a candyass, and shooed me away. I hated him for that. He must have known I was considering his own onanism in light of mine. Of course, I don’t know what he was thinking, or what he was trying to show me. I wouldn’t have been able to hear what he said over the TV volume, anyway. Ears ringing and blurry-eyed, I stumbled to my bedroom and fought off a headache, face-first down on the sofa (my bed), a pillow gripped taut around the back of my skull. It wasn’t my fault nature made me a creature whose forehead filled with sebum, whose mind festered with the nascent prurience of adolescence. Harmless. He was the one who was harmful.
He threatened many times death by suicide. Because, he said, we didn’t love him. We treated him like a dog. We treated him like a god.
I remember him on the living room floor in blue underwear, his mouth around the AK, his lips bogarting the barrel’s sight block, as his big, hairy toe struggled to click the trigger. At some point, he got me and my younger brother and mother all wrapped up in the drama—rushing him and pushing him over, sobbing with the man, thanking him for not taking his life. When he died of kidney cancer, I think he was happy. My mother said he lived for disaster.