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Mom isn’t smiling anymore.
Barry tears open the last present, the big yellow truck he wanted so badly, and shrieks, hugging it close before he even finishes pulling all the paper off. The camera bulb flashes one last time, blinding Barry for a brief moment. When he blinks and looks up to say Thank You to Mommy, like he was taught, her mouth is smiling, but her eyes aren’t. She has her Frowny Eyebrows on, as Daddy calls them, some dissatisfaction unknown to Barry pushing her forehead down into an angry V.
“Thank you, Mommy,” Barry says, because he is an obedient boy.
“That one is from Uncle Fuches,” Mommy says. She nods toward a man Barry has never seen before who stands in the entryway of the house. He is round in the middle, with dark hair like Barry’s; tall but not as tall as Daddy, who is standing up very straight and stern, as he always is, next to him. The man smiles at Barry, and Barry, suddenly shy, hides his returning smile behind his new truck.
“Uncle Fuches is Daddy’s friend from work,” says Mommy, and Barry picks up on a new tension in her voice. He looks at her for guidance; the Frowny Eyebrows are still there, but she gestures between Barry and Uncle Fuches, indicating that Barry should go introduce himself. Barry doesn’t want to, but he does what he’s told. He’s a good boy, Mommy always says so. He carries the truck with him, almost too big for his arms to grasp. The man crouches down so that he is as tall as Barry.
“Hi, Barry,” the man says cheerily. “How old are you today?”
“Five.” The truck is mashed against his lips from hugging it so tightly.
“Wow,” the man says in awe. “That’s so many! That’s a whole hand!” Barry nods.
“What do you say, Barry?” Mommy asks him.
“Thank you, Uncle Foos,” Barry says agreeably.
“You’re welcome,” Uncle Fuches says quietly, like a secret between the two of them. Barry shivers; he loves secrets. “Have fun with that, you hear? Don’t share it with anybody, that’s just for you.” Barry nods as Uncle Fuches ruffles his hair.
That night there is a whisper-fight between Mommy and Daddy, but Barry only vaguely registers that it’s happening. He’s too busy playing with his new truck.
---
“Mom?”
“Yeah, kiddo?” She sounds harried, harassed.
“What’s a contractor?” He pronounces it carefully, making sure the syllables are in the right order.
“What?” Distracted, only half listening, practically running between folding laundry and stirring the soup on the stove that is to be their dinner. “Where did you hear that?”
“I asked Dad what he did for a job,” Barry explains. “Cuz Janie’s dad is a policeman and Little Steve’s dad is a commisher--”
“Commissioner,” Mom pronounces, and draws an arc in the air between the two of them to express that it is Barry’s turn to try the word out again.
“Comm-ish-on-er. And Menda’s dad--”
“Her name is Amanda,” Mom corrects.
“Whatever, Mom, she likes Menda better. Her dad’s a deliveryman. And I know what those are but I don’t know what a contractor is.”
“Her dad is a deliveryman, huh?” Mom says, deftly folding a pair of jeans and tossing it onto the growing pile. “What does he deliver?”
“Iunno,” Barry shrugs. “Stuff.”
“Okay,” Mom says, thoughtful. “What kind of stuff gets delivered, do you think?”
Barry thinks about it. His six-year-old mind forgets entirely about the thing that started the conversation. “Food? And toys?”
Mom nods, encouraging. “What else? What do we do every afternoon when we get home from school?”
“Oh! the mail gets delivered!”
It takes several hours for Barry to realize that Mom never told him what contractor meant.
---
Barry’s father drags the family to Mass every Sunday morning, like clockwork. He is fervent about it, urging Barry to stand and sit and kneel at all the right times, sending him to CCD each week so he can learn the prayers and all the saints and how and when to pray and who to pray to. Barry is a dutiful child, and does these things with the solemn piety of a cardinal of fifty years, but he does them without understanding why. His father seems disconnected from his faith for most of the week, throwing curses freely at the tv when it breaks down, at the toaster when it burns his toast, even at Barry if he gets underfoot at the wrong moment. But on Sundays his father dresses up, ties Barry’s ties for him, zips up his mother’s dresses, and drives them to St. Francis’s. He touches the holy water to his forehead upon entering, crosses himself; he genuflects before entering the pew and kneels for several long minutes, eyes tightly closed, brow furrowed. Sometimes his lips move silently, and Barry wonders what he’s saying. Wonders if anyone hears him.
Sometimes Uncle Fuches is there, and those are Barry’s favourite Sundays, because Uncle Fuches gives him little candies called Sprees and doesn’t take the homilies very seriously. They will sometimes play hangman while the priest is talking, which Barry feels a little bad about, but not bad enough to stop and pay attention. His mother gives them the Frowny Eyebrows, but Uncle Fuches always manages to smooth it over after church. Uncle Fuches never makes Barry go to confession with the grizzled old priest like his father does, the priest who has kind eyes but still scares Barry deeply. He has a face you could tell a secret to, and Barry imagines that his head must be completely full of them.
---
Uncle Fuches picks Barry up on the first Saturday morning of the month, as has been their tradition for a few years now, and drives him out to a farm Barry has never seen before. It's a few weeks before Barry's twelfth birthday, and the country is alive with birds and the last drops of dew. A stately old house sits at the beginning of a gravel driveway, its white clapboard peeling and old but still somehow dignified, like a grandpa in a rocking chair. To the left of the driveway is a long low building, a regular door on one end and a garage door on the other. Both doors are closed. A bedraggled towpath leads from this building to a small chicken coop, then loops back up a slight hill to the biggest building on the property, a large white barn facing east. Behind the barn, a crude fence cuts the land into two pieces. Beyond the fence the land is flat and open, a huge back pasture surrounded by woods; a good place for target practice, says Uncle Fuches, and they park at the mouth of this unfamiliar pasture. They have gone to the arcade, to the mall, to the movies, and even to the occasional Indians game on their monthly outings, but this is the first time they’ve ever been here. Barry stretches stiff legs and looks around, mildly confused and more than a little curious. Fuches looks pleased and comfortable out here, like he belongs to the open air.
“Wouldja look at that sky!” Uncle Fuches says with arms spread wide. Barry tips his head back; the sky is a bright, bruised blue, with huge white clouds blowing across it, shifting shapes and wisping into nothing. Barry smiles and closes his eyes for a moment.
“Do you know why I brought you out here, kid?”
Barry opens his eyes and looks at his uncle. He shakes his head. There’s a dark twinkle in his uncle’s eye, and he’s not entirely sure he likes it. A seed of disquiet plants itself in Barry’s chest.
“I wanna show you something.”
He moves around the car to the trunk and pops it open. Barry joins his uncle and the disquiet disappears, replaced with awe.
“Whoa,” he says softly.
“I know,” Uncle Fuches agrees.
There are several unfamiliar things packed in the trunk: moldy looking glass bottles, a stack of paper with rough bullseyes drawn on them, scraps of cardboard. But the thing Barry latches onto is a set of guns, cradled in a black, deadly looking case. A rifle, two huge handguns, and a revolver. They lay perfectly placed in their foam moldings, looking almost expectant. Just waiting to be held and used. Barry’s hand reaches out, almost of its own accord, to touch the silver revolver. Inches away from the handle, he stops, looks to Uncle Fuches for permission. Fuches nods and makes a go on motion. Barry strokes the cool metal like one would stroke the feathers of an injured bird.
Fuches snaps the case shut, nearly slamming Barry’s hand inside.
“Hey!” Barry says, surprised.
“A few rules before we start,” Uncle Fuches says. Barry looks up at him, eyes wide; Fuches’s face shows no trace of a smile now. He holds up one finger. “First. Always remember that these are not toys. These are incredibly dangerous. These are killers. Understand?”
Barry nods.
“Second. Always treat a gun as if it is loaded. No matter what. I don’t care if you just personally took it completely apart and put it back together with no ammo in it, the gun is always loaded. Respect that.”
Barry nods again.
“Third. Never point a gun at anything you aren’t willing to shoot. Never.”
Barry nods a third time. He writes these rules on his heart.
“And last one.” Fuches cracks a tiny smirk, the secret smile that usually accompanies a just-between-us wink meant to exclude everyone except Barry, creating the special club that only has room for them. “Don’t tell anyone else about this. Especially old mom and pop.”
---
Uncle Fuches keeps up the lessons, not often at first; once every few months, with a casual toss to his parents that they are going to the movies or to a church league softball game. He starts Barry out slow, the targets relatively close and relatively large, the weapons smaller and easier to handle. They set up big glass bottles on rotten nightstands taken from the seemingly infinite tangle of junk in corner of the back pasture, clumsy hand-painted targets on scraps of wood that rest lazily against tree trunks. Fuches teaches Barry how to take apart and clean just about every kind of gun that is available for regular sale and some that aren’t; Barry never asks how Fuches acquires the ones with the serial numbers sanded off, and Fuches never speaks of it. Barry loves shooting, but he loves those days even more, days where they sit with their backs against a rusted-out truck from the 1960s, the sun glinting off of a broken piece of mirror, disassembling and reassembling guns until Barry can do it in his sleep. They’re good memories, warm memories, made sweeter by the fact that no one else in the whole world knows about them. “You’re a steel trap, Barry,” Uncle Fuches says of his secret-keeping skills, and Barry never forgets the glow of that admiration.
Slowly, slowly does Barry learn. He does not balk when Uncle Fuches brings out silhouette targets and nails them to the trees; he breathes in sharply when Fuches pulls the half-dummies out of the trunk, but, not wanting to disappoint his uncle, buries his unease and helps set them up. He learns what different calibers of bullets can do to a piece of carboard, then to a tree trunk, then to a live animal. He learns how to kill humanely and with mercy; then he learns how to kill slowly and painfully. With each new piece of knowledge he masters, he looks to his not-quite-uncle, and each time, Uncle Fuches smiles and pats his shoulder. Occasionally, though, that smile is tinged with some calculating darkness and it casts a strange shadow over Barry’s heart. In thoughts so deep-down he is almost unaware of them, he sometimes suspects that Fuches is attaching a thread to everything he says, everything he gives; and that if Barry makes a false or wrong move, the threads will pull taut, and Barry will discover that, unbeknownst to him, the other end has been tied to his own soul.
---
The first time the rage comes over him, he is unprepared. All the subsequent times he is also unprepared, but the first is a deep internal shockwave, the inward impact of it flooring him, leaving him gasping and totally adrift.
Barry is never bullied in school. He’s tall enough to be imposing without really needing to do anything, and quiet enough to blend in and disappear when he wants to. It’s a fairly easy existence, and he coasts through with his small group of friends, who are not cool enough to be popular and not uncool enough to be picked on. So when the football team grabs Barry’s best friend Little Steve and tosses him in “the freshman cage” during spirit week, they are caught completely flat-footed.
“Hey, come on,” Menda says. Her fire-red ponytail bounces with nervous impatience. She and Barry have reached the safety of the stairs, which are out of bounds for spirit week shenanigans. “He’s got Mr. Mackinaw next period.”
“Ooooooh,” the three seniors say in unison at the name of the most feared teacher in the school system. One of them cuffs Little Steve on the back of the head rather hard, making him stumble forward into the flimsy cardboard-and-glitter-paint barrier of “the cage”. “Enjoy your Saturday school this weekend, kid.” The same senior grabs Little Steve’s bookbag and tosses it to his friend, spilling worksheets and notebook paper with doodles scrawled over them onto the dirty tile floor. Janie, who had moved away in sixth grade, still mails little homemade pins to them on every birthday and every Christmas, and Little Steve always sticks them on his backpack like tiny trophies, still just as in love with her as he had been since age six and just as proud; the pins are scattered on the tile now too, as bent and bruised as Barry’s heart. The senior dunks the bookbag into the trash can. Little Steve is half-laughing, making aw shucks, come on guys motions with his hands, as though he can reason his way safely out of this, as though this is just a fun joke. His eternal optimism would bite him in the ass someday, Barry had always said that, and Little Steve always dismissed him with a wave of his hand and a carefree smile.
The biggest senior, a hulking brute named Bo, picks up one of the notebook pages, glances at it without much interest, and rips it neatly down the middle. They’re silly little doodles that Barry and Little Steve pass back and forth in class, nothing hugely important, but Barry loves them and guards them as jealously as he does all of his secrets. Bo’s careless touch, the casual way he destroys the paper without even bothering to look twice at it, feels like someone taking a spoon to Barry’s guts and scooping them out, and it sends him over a cliff he never knew was there. All sound drops out; it is the breath-stealing silence of the moment between a lightning strike and a thunderclap. There is a quiet, whistling exhale like wind sighing on a moor. Barry’s vision sharpens, angles and colors standing out bright and edged, as if some filmy lens of humanity has been lifted away for the first time. Strange things catch his eye; individual flecks of glitter in the paint, the date scrawled in Little Steve’s awful handwriting at the top of a piece of homework on the floor. Little Steve’s hands, uncurled in preemptive defeat. The lazily confident glint in each one of the senior’s laughing gazes. A peculiar sucking-in feeling settles in the hollow under Barry’s throat, between his collarbones. Something twisted up tight, ready to spring forth when let go, like the neck of a balloon.
Barry steps up to Bo. The older boy has at least seventy-five pounds on him, but Barry, even at fifteen, is tall enough to look him almost directly in the eye. He shows no outward emotion, no shakes, no curled fists, not even a furrowed brow. The only indication that he is feeling anything at all is his eyes, dark and intense and opened wide.
“Let him out,” Barry says. The first bell rings, indicating that everyone has four minutes to get to class. Bo startles minutely at the loud noise, but Barry doesn’t blink.
“Or what?”
There are no thoughts in Barry’s head. It is empty of everything except a dark red fury like clotted blood and the instinct of a hunter with his prey in his sight line. He lines up Bo’s smirking face like a silhouette target at the end of a barrel, coldly noting weak spots and vulnerabilities. Killpoints, Fuches calls them. The twisted thing between his collarbones releases. He punches Bo in the throat with all the satisfaction of a bullet shattering a glass bottle. Bullseye, he hears Uncle Fuches crow. Bo stumbles back several feet, completely stunned, eyes bulging, hands scrabbling at his neck.
Steve hops over the cardboard barrier and starts grabbing his stuff. The seniors advance on Barry, murder in their eyes, all pretense of a joke gone.
It is Menda who saves them from serious trouble. “Oh hello, Mr. Mackinaw!” she says loudly, looking down a hallway that she can see from her angle on the stairs, but is blocked from the seniors’ perspective. Whether or not it’s the slowly emptying hallways or Bo’s brand new inability to speak or actual fear of the named teacher, Barry will never know, but the seniors decide suddenly that they have to get to class right then and there. They scatter in all directions. It would be funny, Barry thinks in a detached sort of way, at any other time. Seniors running from freshman half their size.
The cold, clear fury steals away as quickly and quietly as it had come upon him. He drops to his knees, ostensibly to help Little Steve pick up his homework, but also to hide the fact that his legs are shaking so badly he isn’t sure how long they will be able to hold him. Because he does not have Mr. Mackinaw next period, only study hall with a teacher who could not care less where her students are, he practically runs away from Menda and Little Steve and spends the next twenty minutes in the bathroom with one hand over his mouth, trying to keep his panic silent.
---
Barry’s father dies just three months shy of Barry’s eighteenth birthday. It’s a long, drawn out death that steals his father’s vitality, curls his ramrod straight back like wrapping paper, hollows out the stern lines of his jaw into sallow empty folds of skin. He dies in pain, scorched from the inside out by cancer that no medicine could touch. The old priest who took his father’s confession every Sunday, an ancient crust of a man now, comes to the hospital bed and gives him the last rites while Barry’s mother looks on, tears streaming down her blank face. Barry doesn’t cry. It is almost too cruel a death, too wrong and awful and dirty for tears. Barry almost expects God to enter the room, shaking his head; A cosmic mistake has been made, so sorry about this, and reset everything.
He’d been considering military service after high school, but his father’s death seals it. His father had never been a particularly affectionate man, but Barry had loved him with an almost painful sort of fierceness and unconsciously imitated him in nearly every aspect; the straight back, the sober Sunday morning piety, the quiet intention of every syllable he uttered, the steel-trap of his mouth with a secret caught inside. He tells Fuches (he had dropped the Uncle in his mid-teens) his decision on the way to the back pasture that has become theirs, and Fuches listens quietly and nods his approval. They set up a sort of training course that morning, with barriers for Barry to hide behind, dummies with only their heads peeking out from behind a tree trunk or only able to be seen through the window of a car. Barry runs through the course several times until he manages to hit every single dummy with only a flash of sight. At the last one, he unloads the clip on the dummy and cheers silently to himself, laughing a little at the puffs of cotton stuffing that still float through the air.
An explosion goes off right next to his ear.
He thinks he’s shouting, but he hears nothing except a high whine. He’s on the ground without knowing how he got there, one hand covering his ear and the other scrabbling at the grass, still brown and dead after a long, hard winter. Steel fingers grab his shirt and force him to stand: Fuches, his eyes black as pitch, not angry or even irritated, but as dead and flat as the grass. In his right hand is a black Walther, his favourite, the grip worn smooth to the shape of his fingers. Barry’s entire body goes cold despite the early spring warmth.
“This is no game anymore, Barry,” Fuches says in his low growl. Barry has to struggle to hear him over the residual whine of the gunshot. “No game,” he repeats. “This is real life now. You won’t be shooting dummies or rabbits in Afghanistan or wherever they send you. They will be ordering you to shoot real people and you’re going to have to do it. I’ve trained you as best I know how, but taking a life is something different. It’s something that not a lot of people can handle. Do you think you can handle it, Barry?” Fuches trains his black gaze on Barry, unblinking. Barry thinks stupidly that he is taller than Fuches now, taller by several inches, but it matters about as much as the price of tea in China. He feels like a child, like Fuches leaning down to speak at eye level the first time they met and held a secret between them. The threads that connect the two of them, their amalgam of secrets, begin to twist and constrict around his heart. He nods, because it is the only possible answer.
“Good.” A little bit of light creeps back into Fuches’s eyes, and he cracks a small smile, patting Barry on the shoulder. Barry barely suppresses a flinch. “Good boy.” Knees wobbly, Barry skirts around Fuches to clean up the pieces of the dummies he’d destroyed. Fuches wisely keeps his distance for a bit, then joins in the cleaning effort. “Your dad would be proud,” he says quietly after a few minutes of silence. Barry looks up sharply. Fuches is watching him, his gaze somehow warm and calculating at the same time. “For joining up, learning the ropes,” he gestures generally around at the pasture. “For all of this.” Fuches nods. “He’d be proud.”
For some reason, it’s those words that catch like a fishhook, tugging at a memory. Mom, what’s a contractor?
The knots tighten and the threads pull taut.
---
Epilogue
Fuches gets him discharged, somehow. Barry never bothers to find out how. He meets Fuches at the airstrip and lets him drive him to the apartment he has set up for him. Barry thanks him, says he can get his own bags, walks into the apartment and shuts the door.
He barely leaves at all for the next few months.
He doesn’t talk to anyone except his mother, who calls every other day; mostly on those calls he just lets her talk, says he’s fine, talks about where he is in the video game he’s been halfheartedly working his way through or the book he’s pretending to read. He lies occasionally and says he’s going out with some friends or a girl; even though he’s pretty sure she doesn’t believe it, they let the fiction lie between them as a kind of false bridge neither knows quite how to cross. He oscillates between sleeping far too much and not sleeping at all; he loses weight he didn’t have to spare and his clothes hang off him like he’s made of wire. He showers three times a day just out of boredom. He’s marking time and he doesn’t know why.
Four months after his discharge, Fuches shows up at his door.
“Hey, Barry,” he says, a layer of sympathy marring his gruff voice.
“Hi.”
“Got a job proposition for ya. You up for a road trip?”
And Barry lets him in.