Riding with the Ghost by Justin Taylor

Author:Justin Taylor [Taylor, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

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I went to the range on March 22 at 10 A.M. for their Introduction to Handguns class, which got me the instruction I needed, a gun to use, range time, and a dozen bullets—all for one tidy package price. It turned out that I was the only person who’d signed up for the session, and so the “class” became a private lesson. The instructor was a local kid, twenty-five or twenty-six, an Afghan war vet, honorably discharged after an injury that may or may not have been suffered on the field of battle but was in any case not visible. Something about his back, I think he said. I thought about the experiential and psychic gulf between what he was doing at twenty-three and what I was doing at that same age, between his life and mine.

I marched against the wars he fought in back when he was still too young to fight in them. We had tried to stop them before they started but the wars came anyway and they never ended so he came of age and went to fight, and they were still being fought without him now as he sat in a windowless classroom tucked between the storefront and the firing range, teaching an erstwhile Jew from Miami the right way to hold and load a Sig Sauer P226, the standard-issue infantry sidearm, same as he had carried in the desert.

It wasn’t a real Sig Sauer I was holding. Not yet. This was a dummy gun. He was teaching me how to load a clip and work the safety, the correct overlay of fingers in the two-handed grip. He taught me a breathing exercise that I recognized from yoga. I did not tell him this.

When he deemed me ready for the real gun, we went out to the range. He had warned me about the kickback on the Sig, which is an automatic pistol, but I didn’t understand what he was saying until I squeezed off the first round. The gun bucked like a mule and I found myself pointing its lightly smoking barrel at the ceiling, the spent shell having spit itself back at me, bounced off my glasses, and fallen into the collar of my shirt. My teacher took all this in stride.

Slowly I got steadier, less skittish. I put some holes in the orange silhouette on the target.

I asked if I could switch to another gun. He said the AR-15 was a lot of fun but I didn’t want to spend that much money on bullets, so I asked for a .357 magnum (the only other gun I knew the name of), which was heavier than the Sig, but for that reason easier to hold steady. Without the automatic’s fierce recoil to reckon with I did a better job of maintaining my aim. A half dozen holes appeared in the target. And sure they were low and to the right, hardly kill shots, but there they were within a couple of inches of each other, clustered like a constellation in the belly of the silhouette.

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