TARGET PRACTICE

With a handle on my stealing, I tried to squelch any visions of wickedness, but like the springtime that was blooming all around me outside, a terrible restlessness seemed to match it in my insides. My curiosity about living all of life that could be lived was eating away at my decency.

That’s the only logical explanation for my response to Carla’s mentioning the noisy chickens in the hatchery behind her house: my trigger finger suddenly got strangely itchy. The next thing I knew we were ensconced in the bushes behind the post office with our b-b guns drawing a bead on the hens all stacked up in crates across the street. (At that time, Shelby County was the poultry capital of the world.) Our idea was not to shoot the chickens themselves but to see if we were good enough to bust the eggs beneath them when the hens would stand up and stretch their legs or whatever that is they do when they prance around in circles the way they do. And we were. Mostly. But I’ll have to say that it’s a good thing that we weren’t strong enough to pump up our air rifles a few more times or we’d have laid out a few of those unsuspecting chickens. As it was, we’d either bust an egg or pop a hen just enough to shock a sudden squawk out of her. Of course we had to be sure not to fire when a car was coming up the street, and sometimes that took a lot of waiting since this was right downtown just barely off the square. You have to wonder what the men running the place thought to find all of a sudden this one day a bunch of busted eggs under their hens when this was never the case before. After the redbugs and the ants started pestering us, we decided to do something that didn’t require lying in the grass, so since it was after five and the courthouse was closed, we went around to the front for a while and shot at squirrels in the sycamore trees, and then we went across the street to the courthouse.

For some reason, probably the square dances they used to have up there, there were lights strung all around the whole area on all four sides of the square. Unlike the tough-skinned squirrels, the light bulbs succumbed easily to our b-b’s, much like the eggs but better because we could get closer, and we didn’t have to wait for hens to stretch or cars to pass. Totally disregarding the washer-pitching, tobacco-chewing, whittling old men who were camped on the benches twenty feet away, we began systematically destroying each light bulb with one of us shooting while the other would pump up her gun for the next shot. I don’t know what took them so long —probably for some sheer shock and for others pure delight — but we had almost made it to the third side when a couple of old codgers finally sauntered up to us and asked us our names.

The Bible says that there is no greater love than one who will lay down her life her friends, and that is what happened next when Carla opened her mouth and answered them: “I’m Carla Nations, and this here's my friend Mary Nell Bobbitt.”

Why, if she was going to lie anyway she didn’t just go ahead and lie about her name, too, is a mystery for the ages, but even though she put her own life on the line, she did manage to kill two other birds with one stone. First of all, Carla was jealous of Mary Nell, and I guess she mistook my pandering to her out of fear that she’d reveal that I was a thief for the desire to become her best friend, so she took shrewd advantage of this opportunity to cause her some trouble, and that was the first bird. The second bird was that she showed me loyalty by protecting me from the consequences of having the county judge, who was my cousin and right up there in his office thirty feet away, call my daddy and tell on me.

One thing you need to consider in all this is that Carla’s parents were pretty loose on disciplining her ever since her brother, Nicky, had gotten killed a year earlier in a car wreck when he was just sixteen. They seemed to think the best way to live without regrets would be to leave Carla to her own designs and let her live life to the fullest as she saw fit just in case her life was snuffed out prematurely too. What they might not have figured on was that by giving her all this slack she could wander into dangerous territory — maybe so dangerous that she might not even make it to sixteen. Carla also knew that my daddy believed in a little tighter rein and that I was likely to get worn out before dark if he had found out.

And maybe it was the Great Whisperer again, but somehow, my cousin the judge did find out, and he did call my daddy. He said, “Pep, you need to come down here and get Jen and her gun off the square.” When we got home, he bent me over Julie’s bed and gave me a lickin’ with his belt, but I noticed that as I was telling him the story, and even as he was lightin’ into me, he had a smirk on his face that looked a lot like pride. I think he was thinking that even though on July 3, 1951, I came out a girl instead of the boy he was hoping for, I was going a long way in satisfying his need to have a son to follow in his footsteps.

(From Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights by Jan Doke, Chapter Fifteen)