Gun Work

Worse still, when Mano returned, the old man acted like it was all no big deal, calmly righting Barney and cleaning up the mess. Mano actually liked this lost soul, for absolutely no reason Barney could see. Perhaps Barney had become a project. Perhaps Mano got some unspecified satisfaction he could not reap from his many relatives. Perhaps he was a genuine samaritan, although Barney’s experience admitted no such largesse, dismissing it as a weakness. Barney’s life had largely coalesced around compensating for the weaknesses of others; doing the jobs others could not bring themselves to do. Being taken care of was new to him, and slightly scary. Uncharted terrain. It disrupted all Barney thought he knew about human nature.

He wondered what he could do for the old man in return, if he regained the capability to do anything, ever again.

“Mano, do you have a gun?”

“A gonn?” He said it like cone.

“A firearm. Sidearm. Pistol. La pistola.”

Mano produced the rickety shooting iron used during the spectacularly misconceived attempt to rob his store. Barney examined it gently with one unbandaged, three-fingered hand.

It was a short-barreled, seven-shot .32 caliber Omega revolver with two bullets still asleep in the cylinder and nodes of rust on the trigger. The top left side featured a stamp of Mercury or some other Roman god. It was a fifty-buck junk gun, a real Ring of Fire special, as likely to explode in your hand as drop the hammer shy of the primer. A lot of crap similar to it had floated through the shooting range’s repair and sales department even though such safety-last weapons had been illegal in California since the Gun Control Act of 1968, a misfired piece of legislation that provided a handy loophole by which the parts for such guns could still be shipped into the state. It was the kind of randy hot-pocket pistol a junkie would steal and try to pawn; inaccurate, cheap, easily concealed and totally dangerous. It had probably never been cleaned.

Good .32s were still classic ankle guns for law enforcement, who used the revolvers to backstop the semi-autos that were now pretty standard sidearms. Barney recalled reading that in the early 1920s, police officers in the deep South switched to .38 caliber carry guns from .32s because they believed cocaine made Negroes impervious to the smaller rounds.

Barney dumped the shells — pirate loads of disreputable manufacture — and carefully threaded his right middle finger through the trigger guard, grasped, and tried to cycle the hammer. It stuttered back about three millimeters, then relaxed as his hand gave out and began to bleed. It stung and throbbed like hell. Forty trigger pulls in thirty seconds, dry-firing... and Barney could not manage a single one, with his stronger hand.

“Who you wish to shoot?” said Mano.

“Nobody,” said Barney, omitting the yet. “This used to be...is... my specialty. Like you with rocks.”

“Estas un malhechor?” Mano asked this with an utter lack of guile; his inflection made it clear that what he was really asking was: Are you a criminal, an evil man, or are you misunderstood?

Barney almost smiled. “Depends on who you ask. I was once a soldier. I know a lot about guns. But no, not in the way you mean.”

“A great wrong has been done to you that might cause you to become a bad man.”

“A criminal, perhaps, but not a bad man. I would not harm a man such as yourself, for instance. Yes, I wish to do harm to those who harmed me. But it’s bigger than that. Mas grande. Besides, look at me, Mano. Mirame. The only person I can harm is myself, if I sit up too fast.”

Blood was trickling down his wrist.

Mano tended the hand and let him hang onto the “gonn.” He obviously did not want to look at it, and would probably dispose of it after today.

Another ritual that divided the calendar was the twice-weekly trip to the clinic to check in with Dr. Mendez, accomplished by Mano choreographing his assorted relatives. Nothing awaited them this time but bad news.

Dr. Mendez was dead.

The account, which unfurled in Barney’s mind much like the telling of another myth, went that Dr. Mendez had left the clinic two evenings earlier, stopped his car for reasons unknown (or was carjacked), suffered a gunshot wound, was abandoned or somehow managed to drive his vehicle three miles closer to his home before crashing into a tree and bleeding to death. He was not found until the following morning.