“Crock o’ shit,” she said. “I bailed yuh out’ve how many jams with my shootin,’ an’ it was you the y put on TV! You! Iss you, who got on Jack Parr, Mike Douglas an’ Joey Bishop! Alla talk shows…you, fuggin’...if’n I was on with Mike Douglas, know whud I’d say? Ah’d wait ‘til he said ‘tell me about what it was like growing up,’ and I’d say…well, start with…

#

My Pa.

We all got one. Mine was good to me, an’ around, which’us more’n we can say about a lot of ‘em these days, huh? Mine? Well…

Pa had been a good and [mostly] kind man who’d have done better if he’d been working steady jobs as much as he’d been trying to strike it rich with his gadgets. My Ma, she gave up on life early in their marriage but realizing that Pa was the best she was likely to ever get on a full time basis, withdrew into herself more and more, her best friend eventually becoming Jack Daniels or whatever bottle she could snooker out of a local or a traveler.

Pa had made some fairly decent money for a little while as a traveling photographer, and found it cute when I'd taken a stance like a shootist in a traveling, two-bit circus that had blown through town. He snapped a shot of me in a tough gunslinger’s pose, and had pasted it on the wall of the shack home we lived in.

Ma’d gotten angry, livid that Pa would waste photography supplies like that. But Pa had weathered the storm. He’d started a new business that way for some of the better-off folks in town, snapping their pictures while they were dressed up to look like old-west figures. Costumes had been almost ridiculously easy to procure, hitting up the thrift stores and charity places for their cast-offs.

Me, though, I'll never forget how I felt while her father had me wearing a cowboy hat just a little too big for me and holding an empty-chambered six-shooter.

For most of the ten years I'd been alive on the planet, I'd remembered feeling helpless, worrying that we'd run out of money and have to live on the streets or as vagabonds, or [worst of all, in her mother’s eyes and oft-repeated speeches], they’d have to submit to the charity of the papists, since the Presbyterians and the Methodists and even the little clap-board Church of God with the Reverend Jimmy Phillips had gotten tired of helpin' us out.

Now, truth-be-told, I really wouldn’t have minded being in the care of the Catholics; the priest was a young, chubby, moon-faced fellow who often smiled and had been kind to me every time she’d tried to talk to him.

But on the day Pa took my picture, I felt different. For the first time I could remember, I wasn’t worried about making the rent payment, or the food bill, or any of the other worries that her mother would have tirades about.

On that day, holding the gun, I felt powerful.

And later, about a week later, when I was aimlessly roaming about the five or six intersected streets that formed the ‘downtown’ of our small, podunk hometown, I found something in the gutter that would change my life forever.

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It was a bullet.

A single, solitary bullet.

I’d heard the stories from the other kids at school; a stranger had come through town, tried to rob the local drug store while more than half-crocked on some stolen hooch, and been shot by the store owner as he tried to exit. As if to confirm the bullet’s origins, I saw a dark stain the color of rust in the sandy dirt of the gutter, next to the sidewalk.

I picked up the bullet, turned it over in my hand several times, and looked out among the respectable folks ignoring me.

Later, when Ma and Pa were asleep after their nightly fight, I crept out and found the rusty six-shooter hanging with all the other costume props in the storeroom. I popped open the chamber on its hinge, and slid the bullet into the chamber with a small, satisfying click that I never forgot.

Fear gripped me suddenly, fear that something could go seriously wrong. I turned the gun around and pushed the tip of the bullet from the other side, watching it fall to the thin rug we'd gotten for free from some Methodist church charity.

Carefully, I picked the lone bullet up and hid it.

Later, maybe a week, I'd been earning a few pennies running a message from the feedstore to the local sheriff at the bar when I saw his gun belt hanging on the sheriff’s favorite chair.

The barkeep was distracted by the town floozy screaming about something, the other men in the bar were either halfway or fully crocked, and the sheriff himself was in the bathroom relieving nature. And I, little Jane, little Plain Jane Gives Me a Pain as one particularly cruel boy had taken to calling me, had slipped over to the chair and popped a half-dozen bullets from the belt and into the folds of her dress before anyone even thought to look in my direction.

The sheriff returned, wobbling from his recently quaffed bribe-drinks like a tenpin about to fall; I gave the message and ran, out of the bar and all the way back to the shack me and my folks called home.

Ma was already asleep, but Pa had been up and worried. He’d been worried a lot lately; something about money and the large, dirty men who hung around the bar playing cards every night. I'd seen Pa talk to them a few times. And after that, for a while things had gotten better. The men from the bank had stopped coming around, and Pa had come home with a new dress for Ma and a doll and a stick of candy for me. But after a few weeks, Pa had gotten to looking more worried than before.

Life went on; I hadn’t had to work, so I went back to school at the little one-room schoolhouse in town. But when I come home one day I seen the dirty men from the bar outside our house. They had Pa backed up against a wall, surrounded. I counted four of them, all with decent clothes but thick beards and hands greasy from the bar and the grime of life.

Pa looked scared.

He’d been worried, but I’d never seen him look scared before.

I knew what to do; I’d read enough nickel novels to know that talk or promises wouldn’t make the men leave Pa alone.

I ran into the house, pulled up the rug and the loose board beneath it.

I pulled out the gun, put the first bullet in my sock, and loaded the next six I’d stolen from the sheriff into the chamber. I was more focused on that day than I’d ever been in my life, maybe since. An old-West shootist with a decade of gunslinging under his belt couldn’t have been quicker or more efficient. I spun the chamber and slid the bullets into the spaces smooth and quiet as streamwater in a spring thaw.

Outside, I saw Dirty Pete land a punch on Daddy’s face. Two of his no-account friends were holding Daddy by the arms while two more sat on the log near our fire and laughed like they was having a good-ole’ time.

I saw Daddy’s mouth started bleeding and I got mad, so mad the world looked for a second like there was a little bit of red fog laying down over everything.

Now some folks, when they get mad they almost get funny. I saw the teacher like that once when the kids wouldn’t shut up, and she grabbed Billy Watford and started hitting him with a switch. She was so mad, and Billy was such a mean cuss, we all started laughing.

But that day I was mad as a hornet what whose hive ‘been used for kicker practice. And the funny thing was this:

For most folks, gettin’ mad makes you lose focus.

For me, it were the opposite.

TO BE CONTINUED....