Spin Cycles by Charles Coe

Author:Charles Coe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gemma Open Door
Published: 2014-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Six

My father lost interest in me as soon as he realized I would rather read a book than throw a ball. A few weeks after my fifteenth birthday, he decided I needed to learn how to shoot a gun. One Saturday morning he took me to a firing range. I have always been afraid of guns, but I was more afraid of what he would say if I told him I did not want to go.

Father brought along the Colt .45 automatic he kept in his and Mother’s room, the same model as the service revolver he’d had when he was an officer in the Marines. He rented a .22 pistol for me and bought ammunition for both guns. Then we went out back to a shooting lane. At the far end of the lane was a paper man with a target in the middle of his chest.

My father jammed a clip into the Colt, told me to stand aside, then fired until the clip was empty, taking in and letting out big breaths between shots. When he was done, he put the Colt on a stand and pushed the button that brought the target to our end of the lane. Three shots were bullseyes, and the other five were high scores. “Your turn,” he said, and loaded my pistol from a box of bullets. There I was, holding a gun with both hands, arms straight out the way I had seen on television.

But I couldn’t pull the trigger. I just stood there holding the gun, shaking. “Squeeze,” he said impatiently. “Don’t jerk. Just squeeze.” So I squeezed. The gun surprised me with a roar so loud that, even though I was wearing headphones, I yelled and dropped it on the floor. A man in the next lane turned our way and smirked.

Father said nothing. He didn’t even look at me. When he is angry, he doesn’t yell or throw things. He gets very quiet, and his face becomes completely calm. And he moves slowly and carefully, like he is underwater.

He bent to pick the gun off the floor and look it over. Then he turned his back to me, grabbed the Colt, and started walking away. He didn’t bother to see if I was following him. When we got back to the rental counter, he handed “my” pistol back to the clerk and said, “We’re all set.” He didn’t say another word as we walked back to the parking lot. And not another word on the drive home.

For nearly a week after I got out of the hospital, I never left my parents’ house. I hardly left my room. I counted the change in the coffee can seventeen times. I looked through old math textbooks and class journals. No matter what I did, I could not settle my mind. I could feel some energy from somewhere outside of me being beamed into my brain. I knew it was trying to track me, control me, so I started experimenting with ways to block some of that energy.

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