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Description
The Pumpkin
Daniel Gill
My father's a gun collector.  Far back as I can remember, he's spent countless hours on the weekends at gun shows, talking shop with old men with mustaches and hustling the deal with other collectors.  In our country farm house, the bedroom that he and my mother shared was flanked in one corner by a deep hued mahogany gun closet.  The doors were glass and wood, the etchings of a hunting dog and his master in pursuit of a wild pheasant etched deeply in the lead crystal panes.  I never understood why my father had a scene like this, as I'd never known him to hunt in his life.  But what fascinated me were the firearms inside.
My father was a gun collector and amateur trader, but there were four rifles and one pistol that he would never part with for the world.  A Winchester 1894, a Remington .22 singleshot, a .308 Enfield bolt-action, a Remington 870 shotgun, and a Smith and Wesson Model 65 .357 revolver.  They were the world to me.  I would spend hours looking at those wonderful guns, my nose pressed to the glass.  The well-oiled stock of the war-scarred Enfield beckoned me, it's blackened steel as smooth like satin.  The Remington, veteran of countless cop shows, called to me like the sirens to Odysseus. They weren't weapons; they were bright shiny toys. So much in appearance like the plastic popguns I played with, but restricted, forbidden.
I should probably describe my father, to give you a picture of what sort of man he is.  A Vietnam veteran, my father is a strange creature.  With his nearly handlebar mustache and face pockmarked with acne scars, along with the slight paunch he's developed in his years of inactivity, he always looked like a wild-west sheriff to me.  I sometimes imagined him walking through some one-horse town, wearing wool suit with six-gun slung on his hip, hat tipped to the ladies.  My father normally is a loving person, with a wit as sharp as flame.  He is slow to rile, but once done, he's a fury to frighten the devil.  His face goes bright red, and his voice gains severe intensity.  A drill sergeant in the National guard for most of my life, I'd seen my dad bring a man to his knees with just the sound of his voice one time when me, my mom, and my sister were visiting him on Drill weekend.
I love my father, but that same fury scared me, and I guess I wasn't as close to him as he would have liked. The things he liked to do, I was always too 'cool' to go out and do with him.  Dad loved to canoe, loved to shoot rapids in a boat and paddle furiously to keep from falling over.  I was simply too lazy to ever find this interesting, gauging my days by what was on television. In the morning, it was Leo the Lion, Jace and the wheeled warriors, and the Littles.  By afternoon, I'd faded into talk shows, when I wasn't rotting my brain and my fingers on Seaquest on the Atari 2600 in a vain quest to dethrone my sister's high score.  Maybe I'd go and mow part of the lawn or weed my mom's garden, but for the most part I just vegged.  In the afternoon, it was Jem, GI Joe, Transformers, and Voltron all the way up until my folks returned home from work to reclaim the television for the wonders of news.
When the television held no interest, I investigated the house, poking and prodding through everything.  I would spend hours curled up in my parents' master closet, reading my father's stack of Playboys.  Or I would scuffle through the cupboards, looking for something odd to eat.  Straight molasses is pretty tasty.  But over and over again, I came back to that gun closet.
Oh, how I wanted in!  The ultimate coolest objects in the universe.  My imagination danced, my fingers aching to caress those wood and steel masterpieces. All that stood between them and me was the lock.
Oh, it wasn't too difficult of a latch, simple key in lock design.  However, I am not a lockpick, and the only key that I know in existence was on my father's keychain. So they were forever outside my grasp. I entertained every possible scenario, from taking a screwdriver to the cabinet and pulling the doors off to 'accidentally' breaking a window pane.  I never did work up the nerve for that.  Then one day the situation changed.
My sister and mother were going to a mother/daughter banquet at the local Methodist church, leaving me and my dad to watch the house for the afternoon.  We worked outside most of the time.  He pushed a lawnmower through the thick green grass, forcing the machine to do his bidding. I walked with a  power cord slung over one shoulder and the weedwhacker held like a mighty weapon in a never-ceasing battle against the encroaching vegetation. I worked my way around the concrete slab that made up our back porch, moving a rusting grill and a couple of rocks that had tumbled off the crumbling concrete.  All the while the ever-present humming of the lawnmower was in my peripheral.  Of a sudden I noticed it was gone, and then my father showed up with two tall glasses of iced tea. The sun had been particularly vicious that day, and dad was bright red.  I accepted the glass gratefully, and then finished up the trim.  I unplugged the weed eater and wrapped up the orange power cord, trotting back inside after my father.
He'd already curled up on the couch, our small daschund assuming her customary spot in the crook of his legs.  Dad locked the television on Headline news, finished his tea, and asked me to wake him up in a few hours.  I nodded and watched a little television, sitting in a big comfortable recliner beside the couch. I heard his breathing steady and slow, and he drifted off into a nap. So there I was, with my dad in the living room, and his keys.
His keys! God, how tantalizing, so close yet so far.  I wanted them, lusted after them, the keys to the kingdom, to my father's guns!  My heart thundered as the plan formed in my head. Today I was going to get them.  My father's a notoriously heavy sleeper, but it still was going to take all my stealth to get those keys from him.
Slowly, ever so slowly I slipped from the recliner, taking off my shoes.  I crept across the floor towards the endtable where his keys rested, watching my father carefully. My nerves were alive with fear and anticipation, a knot of apprehension in the pit of my stomach.  There was a small voice in my head telling me this was a very, very bad idea, but I quelled it easily. Seconds were hours as I moved across the floor, shuffling my feet to counteract the old house's creaky wooden floors.  When they did creak, it sounded as cannonshot in my ears.  Finally I hovered over the end table.  I looked at my father, he was sleeping peacefully. The dog was still awake, but gave me the lazy eye that all sleepy dogs have, and I went for the keys.  One hand on the ring, the other on the keys, and I lifted slowly.  Not a clink.  I grinned to myself, and then slid across the floor to the upstairs stairway. I was so very close.
Cocky in my victory against the prohibited, I trotted up the stairs and down the hall to my parents' bedroom.  I knew the key by heart, had studied it so many times before, and fit it into the polished brass lock. With a satisfying click the handle released, and the vault was opened.
I was in awe.  Here they were, my father's most prized possessions.  Four rifles and one pistol.  In my youthful fearlessness, it never occurred to me what they were for, their deadly intent.  They were adult toys, and I wanted to play.  I lifted the shotgun with shaking hands. I never imagined it would be so heavy!  I racked back the slide.  The loud noise made me jump, and I glanced around with guilty eyes.  But I was still alone, and I pressed the butt to my shoulder, shooting imaginary bad guys.  Blam! Blam! The pretend sounds jumped from my lips.  The detective Hunter and I were shooting it out with drug dealers, the 870 taking down one after another bloodlessly.
I slid the shotgun back into its cradle and turned my attention to the lever action Winchester.  Now I was a cowboy, shooting it out with the rustlers on the high plains.  I pumped the lever as fast as I could, dry-firing the rifle.  John Wayne and I tagged the men in black hats, sending them sailing off rooftops.
Then I heard him.  The door downstairs opened and my father began walking upstairs.  My legs went numb. This was more then being caught reading playboys or poking through the family antiques; this was in my father's gun closet. My mind raced like the Indy, how could I get out of this one? I immediately jammed the Winchester back into its slot and shut the door, glancing around wildly for an escape.  I thought about my room, down the hall, thinking I may be able to make it before he was fully up the stairs, but it was too late, and I suddenly found myself facing my father.
With his sunburned skin and fierce eyes, he looked like a demon from hell to me.  I shrank back, tried to talk, but the words couldn't come, the lump in my throat blocking any sound. I felt displaced; I couldn't find my legs. My father just looked at me for a long moment, looked at his keys in the gun closet door.  Then he opened the closet and pulled out the .308 Enfield.  I was certain he was going to shoot me.
But he didn't. He didn't yell, he just glared with a sight that could scorch metal. "Follow me." He said, not in his drill sergeant voice, but in a deathly still voice that sent shivers through me.  I followed, still trying to operate my feet, and he paused in the attic for a long moment. He emerged with a box of ammunition, something I'd never known about.  Somewhere in my head my curious nature was trying to figure out where that came from, but was immediately burnt to the ground by the basic need for survival. He walked downstairs, and I followed.
In the kitchen, my father picked up a big fat pumpkin that my mom had bought for halloween.  It was my pumpkin, with a happy skull I'd painted on the front. I tried to tell him not to take it, but my father just slung it under one arm and went into the backyard. I followed, feeling like a man walking to the electric chair.  I kept expecting that voice to emerge and reduce me to tears, to tear the flesh from my bone and leave me a whimpering puddle. But it hadn't come, not yet.
My father walked to the furthermost point of our property, past the trees he'd planted with careful patience, a windbreak against the bitter Ohio wind. With a tennis shoe toe, he kicked up a stump next to a mulberry tree at the edge of our yard, and meticulously balanced the plump pumpkin on it, skull facing outwards.  He came back to where I stood on the back porch, not once looking at me.  He jacked back the bolt action, pushed a fat brass shell into the chamber, and closed it up.  He pressed the well-worn butt to his shoulder, and carefully sighted on the melon.
The shot sounded like a thunderclap in the sleepy town, bouncing back from the neighbor's house.  The pumpkin jumped and exploded with spectacular results.  Orange pulp and seeds sprayed the mulberry tree, the entire top of the pumpkin sheered clean off.  Sticky juice dripped down on the stump, pale seeds lying around like fallen soldiers.  The jack o'lantern's grinning face was nothing but the lower set of teeth now.  My father operated the action, sending the spent shell flying off into the yard. He looked down on me, eyes hard like flint. "That was your head." He walked back inside without speaking another word. I looked at the pumpkin I had painted, one I had spent an hour carefully tracing the eyes and teeth, and fell to my knees and cried.