The Gunners. Rebecca Kauffman
nodded slowly as he considered this. He had a compulsion to nod when faced with unpleasant information.
He said, “Please, let’s not tell my dad.”
When Mikey got home from school that day, his father stared at his left eye, the bad one, with a look of mild distaste; then he led Mikey through a series of his own tests, as though the school had exaggerated the condition. He made Mikey close his right eye and tell him how many fingers he was holding up. Mikey tried to answer correctly, fluttering his right eye open to peek. He begged his father not to make him wear a patch like a pirate, and his father said, “What in the hell would that accomplish?”
His father told him he must make the decision, right at that moment, whether the world would know about the left eye or whether it would be Mikey’s secret, and he seemed relieved when Mikey quickly answered that it would be his secret. As though the condition, if known by others, would in some way reflect poorly upon both of them. They didn’t speak of it again.
Mikey’s father worked for the meatpacking facility in Eden, several towns over. He always smelled of blood and had red in the corners of his fingernails, carrying with him the insinuation of violence, brute force. His face was lumpy, as though it had been stuffed full, his eyes drooped. For Mikey’s entire childhood, the two of them lived in the first floor of a townhouse on Ingram Street in Lackawanna, a depressed suburb of South Buffalo. Only half the homes on their block were occupied. The others had boards for windows, liquor bottles smashed into the front porches, stray cats shitting in overgrown lawns. The upstairs tenants in their townhouse wore slippers to the store and always smelled vaguely sulfuric, and they engaged in monthly screaming arguments with the landlord over late rent and threats of eviction. Mikey’s father always paid rent on time, but sometimes he forgot about the utilities, and a man in navy would show up demanding a cash payment—saying that if they couldn’t pay, he’d pull the plug on their house, and then how would they see at night? What would they eat?
Mikey’s father ate four things: cereal, apples, white bread with cold cuts, and Chips Ahoy! cookies. Mikey was not introduced to other foods until he was offered them by his friends from their lunch boxes or by his friends’ mothers in their homes.
Mikey did not have a mother of his own, and because his father refused to provide any information on this matter, Mikey took it upon himself to search their home for clues. He looked for things he had seen in the homes of his friends belonging to their mothers: a ball of panty hose or a shoe with a pointy heel, long lists written in cursive, a little plastic basket filled with nail polish or a box of Tampax beneath the sink, an apron with roosters or reindeer embroidered onto it. He recovered not one piece of hard evidence in his own home.
On one occasion, however, Mikey discovered a single item that didn’t fit in his home; it wasn’t quite right. It was a small suitcase located in the corner of his father’s closet, beneath a stack of neatly folded sweaters in various shades of gray. The suitcase was tacky and bright—it was the only thing in their entire home that Mikey simply could not imagine his father purchasing. When Mikey opened the suitcase, the scent of the cobalt-blue lining inside tickled at a memory, as faint and faraway and indistinct as a single puff of smoke. Maybe a memory of a memory. Even so, Mikey began to wonder if he had not been born out of a lady’s peeing-hole (like his friends), but had simply arrived in this suitcase, which was perfectly sized to hold a small child and vaguely womblike in its shape. Mikey had no proof that this suitcase had produced him, but as a young boy it was his most persistent theory, and he liked to open the thing and stroke its strange synthetic fur and imagine that life had begun in this soft, blue place.
Mikey’s father was a man of dark and quiet emotions. Things were rarely horrible between Mikey and his father, at least not in the usual ways; things were not vicious or unbearable. But things were never easy. Mikey’s father had bad knees and bad moods, a shadowy disposition. He drank too often (daily), but rarely too much in a single sitting—Mikey never once saw him stumble or slur or fall asleep upright in a chair. When Mikey was a child, his father’s moods manifested in biting criticism over meaningless things and treacherous, silent evenings at home when, for no reason at all, he would refuse to let Mikey out to play with his neighborhood friends. On these nights, Mikey would put himself to bed early just to remove himself from his father’s presence. He would close his bedroom window so that he would not be pained by the faraway voices of his friends.
Alice, Sally, Lynn, Jimmy, and Sam became Mikey’s friends when they were neighbor kids, all living on the same block, all seeking playmates as well as an escape from their own homes. The children claimed one of the abandoned homes on Ingram Street as their official meeting place, and the rusted mailbox mounted to the front door of the house read the gunners in gold Mylar stickers. The house had been vacant for as long as any of them could recall, and they knew of no Gunners in the neighborhood, so they took the place over and assumed its name as their own. They furnished the main room of The Gunner House with items found on the side of the street: mildewed mattresses, throw pillows with cigarette stains, three-legged patio chairs, eyeless baby dolls, an artificial Christmas tree in such a tangle it took days to reassemble. They hung a flashlight from the center of the ceiling in this room, and it was in here that they invented jokes and games and secret languages, made plans, made trouble, bad-mouthed their parents, played cards, gambled, told stories, plotted against bullies, bickered, made up, luxuriated in boredom, and dreamed of the lives they would one day live, far from
Lackawanna.
As children, The Gunners could not have imagined that by the time they were sixteen years old, one of them would turn her back on the others, and the group would be so fractured by the loss, the sudden and unexplained absence of this one, that within weeks the other friendships would also dissolve, leaving each of them in a dark and confounding solitude. Mikey Callahan became a sinkhole; everything inside sort of loosened and then just collapsed.
Chapter 2
It was springtime, April, with one month left of her junior year of high school, when Sally Forrest cut herself off from the rest of The Gunners. She stopped speaking to them at school, never again set foot in The Gunner House, would not answer them when they called to her in the hallway or when they tried to approach her as she walked down Ingram Street. She would quicken her pace and lower her eyes and change her route. She would not answer phone calls to her house. The rest of them finally went directly to her home to seek her out, where Sally’s mother, Corinne, said that Sally was unwell, and she would not allow the children to enter.
Sally did not replace the group with new friendships at school; she seemed altogether uninterested in the company of others, taking her lunch outside or to a classroom that was not in use. She never raised her hand in class. Her pale eyes went cool, and her posture was hard.
For several weeks, the others puzzled over the situation together, replaying recent conversations, devising theories, formulating vague and uncertain but genuine apologies. When they could not reach any single conclusion as to what might have caused Sally to turn on them, they began to turn on one another, with accusations and assumptions, resentment and suspicion. The Gunners found themselves behaving like strangers toward one another in the halls of school and the streets of Lackawanna for their remaining months of high school.
Mikey was one grade behind the others in school, and the only one, aside from Sally, who remained in the area.
Mikey moved out of his father’s home after graduating high school, into a tiny ranch house twelve miles north, so that his commute to General Mills, where he worked on the maintenance crew, would be ten minutes instead of thirty. He rented the ranch home from an elderly woman named Louise who had just moved into a retirement center. Louise explained to Mikey that her daughters had both married weasels and she didn’t have any plans of leaving the home to them, so Mikey should go ahead and do as he liked with the place, paint-wise, plant-wise, and pet-wise. Mikey brightened the dull gray-pink walls to a warm cream and planted a forsythia bush out front. He got a black kitten one Friday, and named the cat Friday.
After moving out of his father’s home, Mikey made a habit of going to see his father every Sunday. His father would pour him a beer and they would stare tensely at the TV for a few hours, then his father would get up to take a piss and say, “Lock the door