The Shooting (2 page)

RSA membership has since passed 1 million (she's just getting started—the NRA boasts 4.5 million). They have hired a full-time lobbying operation to camp out on the Hill. The board has increased her salary to $500,000 a year. The NRA's board, she's heard, pays LaPierre more than double that. So she wants double
that.
It's not greed—that kind of salary means you're winning the war, that you're the best. RSA has built a new state-of-the-art headquarters on 1-66 in Fairfax, Virginia, right across the street from the NRA's. Know about the NRA's National Firearms Museum—Pilgrim guns,
colonist guns, Civil War guns, presidential guns, cowboy guns, War on Terror guns—all the dusty, teary-eyed symbols of the American Myth? Well, the RSA built its own National Firearms Museum, containing not symbols but reality: graphic, bloody, heart-wrenching exhibits of JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Biggie, Tupac, Trayvon Martin. Of Columbine; Pearl, Mississippi; Jonesboro, Arkansas; Aurora; Newtown. Of the Beltway Sniper, Virginia Tech, DC Navy Yard, Fort Hood, Chiraq, San Bernadino, etc., etc., etc., and the rest of the dozens of mass shootings a year, plus an exhibit for all the women killed each year by a man with a gun (women in the United States are eleven times more likely to be murdered with a gun than in any other first world country), or raped by a man with a gun, or otherwise intimidated and abused by a man with a gun, not to mention (and no one else does!) the thousands and thousands of black and Latino children routinely and unremarkably slaughtered or permanently maimed by gunfire every year in Chicago; New York City; Los Angeles; Washington, DC; New Orleans; etc., etc., etc. It's a beautiful museum—for every war- and frontier- and horseshit-celebrating exhibit at the NRA's museum, there is an exhibit of reality at the RSA's: unspeakable heartbreak and ruined lives and death, death, death.
Mine eyes have seen the glory...!

Women like her. Part of why women like her is because she likes women. Few others seem to. The NRA certainly does not seem to. In the hallway outside her hotel room in Utah someone once left her a female mannequin that had been stripped naked and riddled with bullets. It had been shot so many times with such high-caliber rounds that it looked like it'd been hacked at with a dull hatchet. Not the worst thing they have left for her outside a hotel room. The worst was on this past Mother's Day, when they got
inside
her hotel room in Tennessee while she was out and wrote on the picture of her Michelle that she travels with and always hangs on her hotel room wall:
If only my teacher had had a gun!
She made sure to tweet the pictures of these, to send out press releases to the American and international media to ensure maximum humiliating exposure for the NRA by proxy.

She's cool about these things—once you've been through what she has, dolls and graffiti do not bother you as much—and cool in general, naturally beautiful, dynamic, throws
Scandal
references into conversations as often as possible, cries in public when she feels like crying, laughs at herself but can eviscerate dunderheaded conservative male Republican nemeses with an offhand joke that has women re-clicking and retweeting for days after, but she's authoritative, can and does quote Supreme Court precedents and constitutional texts and firearms statistics from memory, uses a teleprompter as often as she wears bulletproof vests, and could give and has given a barn-burning speech on the side of I-84 in the rain, has just enough intimidating alpha-female mean-girl energy wafting off her to make women trust her without feeling like she does not like them. She's Sheryl Sandberg meets Shonda Rhimes meets Judge Judy. She's a girl version of 2008 Obama.

It is vital that women like her. As every rock band knows, you get the girls to your show and the boys will follow. That is what will be the downfall of the NRA, she knows: no women. No love for half the population. Soon all those old white men will die. So will their "values" and "traditions." Which, when you look closely enough at them, are nothing but fear. And when they die, women and people of color will remain, eager for the future, not scared of it. Men versus women. As in every other arena, the women and people of color may not be winning (yet), but they sure have the momentum. Perfect. It is happening like it was meant to be. This was the meaning of Michelle's death, she has realized: To do this great thing for future little girls and boys. To do what the Founding Fathers intended for America, which was to change the Constitution, to change
ourselves
as needed, to protect our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

She is in Kentucky—small town in the mountains called Brownmore. A three-year-old girl played with the little shotgun-for-kids left leaning like a broom in the corner of her trailer while her mom cooked dinner and, wouldn't you know it, the little girl shot herself, took off half her little head, and the reaction from folks around here was
Well
,
it's a tragedy, but guns are our tradition, you
see, so whatcha gonna do?
So See-You-Next-Tuesday goes there to raise hell and exacerbate the media coverage to highlight the casual horror of gun culture, to try to convince the mom to do an ad spot supporting the ammo tax in Kentucky, and to maybe even, if all goes well, get herself shot at again. That is the Triple Crown—viral news coverage, ad spot, shot at—whatever it takes to fortify the story so it does not rinse out in the one-hour news cycle, so
something
meaningful comes out of such a meaningless,
stupid
tragedy, be it money or membership or media or all three of what she calls the three M's—and when her work seems to be done in Brownmore, she hears about a new shooting, this one in New York City. A teenage boy knocked on his neighbor's door and his neighbor emptied his gun through the door, killing the boy. Was the boy black? Duh. Was the shooter white? Double duh. Was the shooter rich? Triple duh. Was the black boy poor? Sold! And is the ammo tax on the ballot in New York this fall? I said,
Sold! Sold, sold, sold!
The Brownmore mom seems like she's going to be amenable to the ad spot and no one seems to be planning to take a shot at See-You-Next-Tuesday and the media is all over this, two of the three goals met, so she entrusts Kentucky to her deputies and heads to the airport.

As she waits at her gate a man walks up to her. He is tall and thin and dark-eyed and serious and white, wearing a Carhartt jacket and an old worn baseball cap. He says, —Ain't you...?

Before she can deny it, he lunges toward her and she screams and puts her hands to her face and—

2

THE GUN

A screeching gaggle of children comes roving through the park—dozens of them, big red faces cleaved by open-mouthed grins, all their breaths bursting out in gobs of fog, and their short arms pumping and swinging, fists balled to bone in their mittens, as the gaggle careens in their winter coats, scarves flapping behind them. The herd of little boys and little girls—brown, white, tanned, pale, black, yellow—all strangers to one another, none knowing another's name or who they are, knowing nothing about each other but that they too have been brought here and plopped down, and that they too saw the puppy scampering free off its leash through the playground where the children swing. Their nannies and mommies first laughing and following slowly, then, their calls unheeded, jogging and crying out, demanding the children return—but the puppy must be chased, the puppy is fast and little and they are gaining no ground, but they are not tiring, especially not the largest boy ambling after the rear, his nanny calling his name with dwindling amusement and increasing concern as the gaggle roves on into the distant trees in the horizon:—Lee! Lee Fisher! It's time to go home.

A house on a mountain. The house is grand and new and still smells like sawdust and paint. It is cavernous, mostly empty except for expensive things he may not touch or sit on. His footsteps echo
off its high naked walls. His voice calls out and comes back to him alone. And like the house, the mountain is grand and it is new—though he wonders at how a mountain could ever be called new. And the mountain smells too, but not like the house, and only when it rains—an almost imperceptible stink sitting on the wet wind that no one but he can smell, because every time it comes and he asks them,
There, don't you smell it?
they always say no. It is his mother he asks, or the staff. To see anyone else on the mountain is a special occasion, and to see a stranger is nearly unheard of. But to be sure, he can look out his bedroom window and watch for anyone making their approach on the one road leading to the house. Which he does every morning. Maybe someone will come, and maybe it will be his father.

All fathers are myths and so is Lee Fisher's. All fathers are myths and all mothers are actresses. Lee's mother is an actress—a onetime actress who since she met Lee Fisher Sr. does little but stay alive and wait for her husband's return. She assures little Lee his father is real and will return. He has a lot of money, a lot of responsibility: it is the family's money, but people tried to take it and his father had to do certain things to keep it from them; he had to go away because of those things they made him do, and it is a lot of money, and God forgives, and he kept it safe, and one day it will be Lee's.
Your inheritance,
she calls it.
One day it will be up to you to keep it safe for your children too.

Lee is on the floor cross-legged playing with his soldiers.
A gift, babu! From him!
Five years old. His mother's Elvis records play over and over on his bedroom's record player. He has become deeply infatuated with Elvis Presley after seeing him on television. Violet and all the other staff have, to an individual, rounded a corner or exited a bedroom they have just finished cleaning or barged in through the service entrance of the home with crates of groceries to find the young master enthusiastically, if weirdly, shaking and convulsing for them—something approaching dancing—having waited sometimes hours to surprise them like this, alone in a dark hallway, breathless and giggling with swelling impatient
anticipation. He knows many fascinating things about Elvis Presley and he will visit Elvis in Memphis, Tennessee—he has asked his mother if they could, she said yes (he had to wait to ask until she was off the phone with his father and did not have the meanness in her mouth anymore, the same meanness that is her mouth when she sits in a rocking chair at night alone in the dark staring out the window murmuring,
He's coming back, he's coming back).

She sweeps into his room, glowing, singing. She looks young and dangerous, her white perfect teeth flashing from behind her lips that are covered in bright paint, her hair a different color and shorter now, wearing clothes he has never seen her wear, and her body sweet-smelling and fruit-smelling but strange and foreign.

—Babu, she sings. —There is someone downstairs for you!

He smells him before he sees him. He smells like the mountain. The house is now filled with the stink, dispelling the sweet scent and fruit scent of his mother.
There it is,
he thinks. The first time he sees him he is taking down one of their pictures from the wall—a framed photograph of his mother holding an infant Lee in New York City—and hanging a new one in its place: a scene of dusty war and Indians and white men killing the Indians in the war and fire and blood and cannons and guns and dead horses. Lee stands there halfway down the stairs watching him, scared of the new picture, hating it. His father wears jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, cigarettes in the breast pocket, his jaw grinding as he chews his tongue and straightens the new picture and stands back to admire first before turning to Lee and saying, —Well, howdy.

Lee does not answer, turns to look up at his mother on the stair above him. —Why does he say howdy?

His father says, —Just the way us cowboys talk, I reckon.

Lee silently mouths the words:
Cowboys... reckon...

—Why did you take our picture down?

—Ah, well, because this is a better picture. Look at these guys. These are men. There were just twenty-three of them against four hundred Indians. They and their families faced imminent death against the enemy but did that stop them? Hell no. They kept fighting and they
won.
These guys are heroes. Don't you like it?

Lee says, —No.

His mother hisses through her teeth, —
Lee.

—He's not a real cowboy.

—Lee Fisher.

His father silences her with a wave of the hand and comes over. He climbs up the stairs until he's eye level with Lee. —Pardner, one thing about me? he says. —I'm as real as they get.

A party for him, to welcome him back. The house on the mountain is now stuffed with people. Among these intellectuals from the city with their jewelry and suits and hair and cigarettes and wine, Lee's father looks very alone. He is polite but quiet, listening to them talking about President Nixon; he stands beside his wife in her pretty dress kissing men and women, so many she cannot keep up, talking as fast as she can, it has been so long since she has seen them, there is so much to tell about her life and to hear about theirs. At the bar Lee overhears a bald man say to another man as they pour more wine into their glasses, —Good God, when did he turn into a
Klansman?

Lee's mother is so proud of his father, Lee can tell, the way she clings to his arm. She says to him, —We need to take you shopping. Will somebody please take him
shopping
? Look at what he's wearing now!
Look
at this! She tugs at the flannel shirt. —It's filthy! It has
sweat
stains!

She and the people they stand with laugh, bending over with their drinks, Lee's father smiling with his lips tight and watching them. —I like my shirt, he says, no one hearing but Lee.

—You have to try acupuncture, someone is now shouting, apropos of nothing.

—Oh, it's
amazing,
the bald man from the bar says, joining them. —It's Japanese.

—
Chi
nese, Lee's mother corrects him. She turns to Lee's father. —You have to
try
it.

He shakes his head. —Not for me.

—How do you
know
? You haven't
tried
it.

—Believe me, I know.

—Well, how do you relax then? the bald man says to him. —How do you clear your head and get
centered
?

—Masturbation, someone mutters.

—He hunts, someone else suggests. They all groan and roll their eyes.

—Never! Lee's mother cries, her glass sloshing, Lee's father catching her at the elbow to steady her. —I wouldn't allow it.

Lee's father shrugs and smiles blandly.

—So what's with all the guns then? the bald man says. He turns to the man next to him. —Downstairs? In the basement? He has
all these guns.

Lee's mother is trying to silence him but he does not see her. Lee's father says to him, serious, —When did you see my guns? Who let you down there?

She says, —Oh, I did, darling. They're
interesting.
They're
dangerous.
She turns to the bald man. —Weren't they
interesting
and
dangerous
?

Maybe Lee alone is the only one who can see the darkness in his father's face, how clearly furious he is with his mother though he is not looking at her. But the bald man, not answering Lee's mother, is asking Lee's father, —Well, if not animals, then what do you shoot? People?

—No, Lee's father answers, trying to appear patient but, Lee can tell, bristling, —only targets. You know, for marksmanship.

One of the others, clearly oblivious, says, —So are you carrying one right now?

—Carrying what?

—You know, a heater! A Saturday night special!

The bald man says, —Can we see it?

Another one says, —Whip it out already!

Lee's father smiles in silence and his mother looks at him, touches his face, searching for something in it, then stands up for him. —You're being mean. Don't make fun of him.

Somebody changes the record to the Beatles and they talk about that as Lee's father breaks off from the circle and goes outside, Lee following, and stands on the back porch watching the stars and
listening to the wolves out in the trees and their human counterparts inside.

—Did your mother bring anybody around here when I was gone? Any new friends? Any new uncles? They are in the basement, his father bent over the worktable, his guns splayed naked and incapacitated before him, rubbing their holes and tubes with oil that smells like bananas. —Were there ever people here like there were people here last night?

—No, Lee says.

—Sure there were. Of course she brought them around. How many?

—None.

—You should know that your mother's a reckless person, Lee. She is selfish. And irresponsible. And she lies. Most of the things that come out of her mouth are a lie. She can't even help it. And it's dangerous. And people get hurt. She lies to you, you know. Do you know why I came back? I came back to protect you from her. His father falls silent then as he puts down the oil rag and lifts from the table the rifle he has cleaned and puts it against his shoulder, peers down the sights at the wall as though the rifle lets him see through the wall into another realm. He looks up at Lee, one eye still squinted, tanned flesh crinkling at the corners of it. —Now tell me the truth.

The truth. There were nights, late—there were the sounds of tires on the gravel drive starting at the bottom of their hill and climbing, climbing louder and louder still until they were so loud beneath Lee's bedroom window that he sat up in bed and turned to the window over his headboard and pulled the curtains aside to look down at a strange car, rattling idle with its headlights on, and there would be the doors opening on both sides and music spilling out—Bob Dylan, Gladys Knight—and on one side would emerge the bare white leg of his mother, its toes pointed out, no shoe on. And on the other side a man's leg would emerge, trousers on and a beautiful slim brown shoe. Then there would be laughing, then shushing. The headlights would turn off. Then the sound of the doors closing. Then
more laughing. Even though the lights were off and it was all night, Lee on his knees in his bed with face smooshed against the window could still see. And Lee would see the man, or some other man—skinny men, long-haired men, black men, even women sometimes who only looked like men; men who were men nothing like Lee's father was a man—Lee would then see this man waiting at the front of the car for Lee's mother, giggling and barefoot and stumbling against the car, drink in one hand, shoes in her other hand.
Ssssssh
, she would whisper, laughing, the man holding out his arm to put around her waist and walk with her inside and out of Lee's view.

Lee's father looks at Lee now with the rifle against his shoulder and the oil that smells like bananas. He looks like he can see through Lee's eyes to see what Lee sees—the cars, the bare feet, the men. His father just nods, puts down the rifle, picks up another gun, a handgun, an old revolver like cowboys have. He sighs, pours oil onto the rag, rubs it inside the gun's empty chamber. —She's ashamed of me. Embarrassed. After all I've done for her. Well, don't worry, you and I are going to spend more time together once she's gone.

—Where is she going?

—Doesn't matter.

—Why is she leaving?

—Because she has to.

—I don't want her to.

—She has to. She has problems. One day you'll understand. You're not safe with her here. All I want is you to be safe. Don't you want to be safe?

—Yes.

—I know it's hard, it makes your daddy very sad too. Your daddy's heart is broken, he's been crying. He'd like nothing more for us to be a family out here. It's all he ever wanted. But men like us know that sometimes the right thing is the hardest thing to do. Those men your momma brought around here ever teach you that? How to do what's right even if it's hard?

Lee says no.

—I didn't think so. He looks at Lee again, grinning. —Hey, you like this gun? I've noticed you looking at it. Of course you have been,
it's beautiful. It's a very special gun. If you're a good boy, maybe one day soon I'll teach you to shoot it. And then maybe one day maybe I'll give it to you. Like your granddaddy gave it to me. And his dad gave it to him. This is your inheritance, son. Your
real
one, I mean. Your momma's boyfriends ever teach you how to handle a firearm? How to protect yourself and your family?