Safety. John Bump E412 10/1/96

Its full name was the Colt 1911 A1 Mk IV .45 ACP, and it was an ugly, blocky, blueish chunk of steel and springs, that weighed almost three pounds. It lived in the large top drawer of the stained oak nightstand beside the head of the bed. It sat on the telephone book, beside the Kleenex, sometimes obscured by the blue box of Q-tips, but usually on top, to be taken out and put on the nightstand with a heavy clunk when someone needed to use the directory to make a phone call.
It was a solid mechanical gem of smooth movement and gliding, with a clip in it, and Jafe, who usually slept on the right side of the bed, said that he slept more soundly knowing that it was close to him. He always awakened quickly when the phone rang. Mary would come foggily to awareness, blinking through her hair, to see him sitting up talking, half-lit by the green numbers on the alarm clock, in silhouette. She would still be realizing that someone needed to get the phone, and he'd be speaking in quick, clipped tones, "Weyerhauser. Excellent, Andy, good work," gesturing with his left hand. The dark cross of his chest hair would stand out in the half-light.
Jafe's father had given him the Colt when he was 18, when he'd graduated from high school. Jafe wondered, sometimes, what this gift meant to his father, why it was a gun rather than a car or a savings bond. The older man had nothing good to say about his only son going into Business. "Building houses is a fine business," he'd say. "You have something when you're done. It's solid. What is Business?" Most of Jafe's sadness at the funeral was guilt (or shame) at the four years of total silence that preceded his dad's death. Jafe's mom was a quiet little wren-like woman and Mary immediately took to her, but no one ever took to Jafe's father. Mary wondered why anyone would mary the man.
He'd given Jafe a .22 rifle for Jafe's twelfth birthday, and had smacked him for being a bad shot, the same day. Jafe, at 18, tall and built as solidly as a hod-carrier in rural Ohio could be, was beyond physical reprimand. He took the pistol, the gift, and he went dutifully out to shoot with his dad, and he experienced a weird thrill in the sudden, high-frequency pops of the gun, of the kick and the huge ribbon of flame that obscured the target for a second, of the smell of gunpowder and the tinny granularity of spent brass beneath their feet, and his father had smiled as Jafe hit inside the circles.
Jafe still got the hell out of Ohio, to the university in Tulsa until he couldn't stand another Oklahoma Saturday. That took one semester. Actually, it took two weeks, but his transfer to UNM, Albuquerque, came at December, and he met Mary in a biology class. They served their sentences concurrently, and were joined in the holy bonds of matrimony when they graduated with the class of 1969.
The Colt went with them to Syracuse, where Jafe's job led them, and then, following their path, to Spokane. Jafe shot a lot while he was in college, but less so in New York, where guns were less common. Mary never shot it. Jafe thought, it frightens her a little. Mary thought, that could hurt someone.
The gun was always there, in a lesser or greater sense, though since they'd been in Spokane, he'd not gone to the shooting range, not stripped and cleaned it. Even those few tenative nights when there would be a faint click in the darkness, as he took the clip out, and then the cold weight of steel touched her chest, her thighs, and she'd laughed nervously, her heart pounding, even those nights had been left in Syracuse.

Having a child stresses a relationship. Brenden was an object of wonder to them. Jafe's mom said, "He should be the light of your life." He was, with an obligatory 'of course' to reassure people. He was also three years old, and that meant two years of sleep-deprivation for Jafe and Mary, and changes in their comfortable routines. They'd stopped taking showers together in Mary's second month. They had only begun having meals together again in the last year or two; Jafe had been working for three, in his words. Now Brenden was in daycare and Mary was back at her job at the travel agency, and they had new routines.
New routines. Mary sat down on the bed, listening to Jafe brush his teeth in the bathroom. Her mother said that having a child made you look at the world in a different way. You put away the nice glassware. She opened the drawer to get a Kleenex, and saw the Colt, picked it up. It was almost invisible by its familiarity; it was like a big paperweight that she lifted and put down again. It had always been there. It predated her. She clicked the release and slid the clip out, looking at the massive bullet on the top, with the hole drilled in the center. Jafe had explained to her that they would mushroom on impact, like popcorn. She held the gun in her right hand, pointed it out the window, felt its more than physical weight. She scrubbed her feet in the rug, feeling the pile between her toes. The deep blue shag beneath the bed was long and wooly, like the carpet was when it was brand new. The rug beside the bed was beaten down, flattened to the floor by their feet, by daily wear, and didn't look like what they'd envisioned when they'd remodeled. That was only a few years ago.
She snapped the thumb safety off, pulled back the hammer, and aimed carefully out the window at a tree. There was a sharp, quiet SNAP as the hammer released. "Too easy," she thought.
"Mary, what are you doing?" Jafe stood at the door to the bathroom, shirtless, toothbrush in hand.
She knew it was bad for the gun, somehow, to dry-fire it. Messed up the pin or stretched the spring or something. "We need to put this somewhere else," she said.
Jafe blinked. He frowned a little. "What. Why?"
"We can't keep this in the nightstand any more. Brendan's too exploratory. We need to hide it or lock it up."
Jafe thought about it for a while. He came and sat down on the bed and put out his hand. She handed the gun to him and he looked at it.
"Wow. Somehow, I'd never thought about that." He grabbed the topslide and pulled it back, looking down through the ejector into the oiled mechanisms inside. "Brendan's a good kid. We tell him to stay out of our room."
"What if he doesn't?"
They both thought about popcorn, about dumdum bullets. Jafe held the gun up, pointing it out the window, and with his thumb on the hammer, pulled the trigger, and gently let the hammer down. He flipped the safety on again with his left index finger, and looked at the line of dusty grease it left on his finger. Unconsciously he moved to scrub it off on the white bedspread, then caught himself with a guilty look at Mary, and rolled over, reaching past her into the drawer to get a Kleenex. "So what if some homicidal maniac comes barging in here in the middle of the night?"
"What, would you shoot him? Right there?" Mary looked at him.
Jafe shrugged. "You want the truth? I don't like to think it, but if he were here and you were here, I think I would."
Mary shivered a little, looking at the Colt, and Jafe. In that order.
Jafe took the clip from her hand, slid it back into the gun, and dropped it into the nightstand. It whumped against the directory and stayed there.
Two days later, Mary left a clipping on the kitchen table. It was a three paragraph article about a kid in Redmond who'd shot his sister accidentally, while playing with a .22. The clipping stayed on the table.
Four days after that, she found a clipping on the table, about a woman in Kentucky who had shot her ex-boyfriend after he'd violated a restraining order and broken in through a window in her house, late at night. She left it there.
They went to work, and their lives went on.

Mary at Travel King. Surrounded by posters of places she'd been, years ago, she spent most of the day talking to her coworkers. They all had pictures of their families on their desks. The economy was down, but not down enough to make people want to escape from their problems, so things were quiet. She asked Marni (nineteen, just graduated from high school) and Susan (38 and two kids in elementary school) what they thought.
"A .45? Wow. Those are huge. That's totally unsafe." Marni liked the idea, Mary could tell. She liked the thought of having a husband who would shoot to kill to defend her.
"Trevor ate Legos. He got into the workshop and cut himself on a covered X-acto knife on the top of a bench. I found Janie on top of my piano when she was only three. There is nowhere you can hide things from a kid." Susan was divorced. Her kids got home from elementary school two hours before she got home, two hours to beat the bejeesus out of the house and each other. She'd catalog the injuries, "Trevor cut his finger when the chair back broke," and Mary would sit and worry.
The manager, Frank, sat in the back. He was balding and always wore a hat, and he'd tap the brim of it with his pen when he was thinking. It was like having an ambulatory metronome. He'd been listening to them but hadn't said anything. He was older than any of them, and went out for lunch every day. Susan and Mary sat and talked about how badly children could get hurt, or could hurt each other, working themselves into a mild, amicable hysteria, while Marni listened and told them about all the dumb things she'd done when she was a child. Frank left wordlessly, came back from lunch five minutes late, and handed Mary a copy of American Sportsman, opened to page 4. Paragraph after paragraph of stories about Americans defending their homes with deadly force against hostile intruders. "I've got five guns in my house, and I taught my kids to shoot soon as they were old enough to stand the kick of the gun," Frank said. He walked back to his desk.
I'll bet you did, you old Pleistocene dinosaur, Mary thought.

Jafe at A.G. Edwards & Sons, Inc.
"Hey. Charlie. What do you think about having a gun in the house?"
Charlie had worked across from Jafe for three years. They saw each other at work, but didn't do much outside of work. Charlie was gay. Jafe didn't mind, he just didn't relate. Charlie shrugged, looking up at Jafe from his clean desk, scrubbing at his neck, his thinning blond hair, with his long pale fingers. The 486 behind him flickered briefly. "I dunno. I've got an old Remington hunting rifle my dad gave me."
"You feel like you'd use it if someone broke into your house late some night?"
Charlie thought. Andy, the office's compulsory fast-track 24-year-old, walked up from his office to listen. "Well, I dunno," Charlie said. He sucked on a pencil for a moment. "I mean, when I'm sitting here in my office, I can say anything, but if he were there, yeah, I'd probably shoot at him."
He, thought Jafe. I never said that the intruder was a he.
Andy picked it up at lunch. Management brought food in for them, because it fostered good investment strategy to have them all communicating. They usually did talk about investments during lunch, but mostly about the personalities and quirks (and asses, if female) of their investors.
"I've got a Ruger Security Six, .357. Kick like a mule," Andy said. His short, stiff brown hair emphasized his chin, and he was wearing a maroon Arrow shirt, a narrow dark blue tie. "Also a Desert Eagle collector's. I had that one blueprinted. They lapped it out so the action is like silk." He grinned.
"You don't have kids who get into things," Jafe mumbled over swiss on rye.
"Damn tooting I don't. You know how much they cost? For someone in my income bracket, the cost of raising a kid, birth to college, is just over $200,000. You do the math. That's almost two million in a twenty year investment."
Russell, slow-moving guy, genius in options trading, sitting across from Andy, "When I'm not actually hunting, I lock my guns up. Got a big oak case for them to go in."
Andy, "But you can't get to them quickly." Jafe nodded reluctantly.
Russell sighed. "Yeah, but no one else can either."
Claire, their secretary, shook her head. "I wouldn't have a gun where my kids could find it."
Andy laughed. "You drive a Volvo, Claire." Andy had a green Honda CBR900RR, and in the winter he drove a Jeep.

Two weeks later, life just the same. Jafe was reading the Dick Davis Digest, and laughing to himself, and Mary was listening to Prarie Home Companion tapes. They had a TV, but they'd agreed to spend time together, reading. Active time, they called it, interactive. He sat on one of the wooden chairs at the low coffee table, with investment brochures spread out in front of him, half-listening to her tape as he read. She sat on the long, blue, linty, coin-filled couch, with its new stains and old, paging idly through mail order catalogs and wondering out loud why people would buy "a personalized Egyptian cartouche, gold-filled."
She heard a jingly sound and high laughter from the far end of the house, so she walked down the hallway, past pictures of parents and relatives, to see what was going on. Brendan wasn't in his room playing with Legos; he was standing in front of her dresser, looking at himself in her mirror, with all her necklaces on and an earring stuck in his ear, the hook somehow hanging in the folds of his earlobe.
"I look like YOU, mommie!" He grinned, and the articulated silver fish earring with blue enamel dropped into the rug.
"Jafe, you have GOT to see this. Get the camera," she hollered.
Brendan posed for them, and they snapped away, laughing and ruffling his hair. He knew he was the star of the evening. A reel of film later, it was bedtime, and necklaces off and earrings recovered, he went to go peepee. Jafe and Mary finished cleaning up.

"Ok. Ok. We need to tell him that he shouldn't dig around in our stuff." Jafe finally said. They both knew exactly what he meant.
"We just gave him some pretty heavy reinforcement, you know."
Jafe nodded. "I don't know. Maybe... maybe I can explain to him how dangerous a gun is. Show it to him, tell him that it's not a toy."
"He's seen people with guns on TV," Mary said. "If he finds it, he'll know exactly what it is."
"Maybe I could shoot it, show him the effects, show him how dangerous it is."
"Jafe Alan Anderson, there is NO way you are showing a three year old how to shoot a handgun." Mary stomped her foot, thinking to herself what a petulant gesture that was.
"Ok. Ok. That's a dumb idea. Ok."
"We don't use it any more. There isn't any point in having it where we can get to it quickly."
"But we might need it quickly!" Jafe was insistent. "I should -- it's my job to..." He faltered.
"Protect me? It's OUR job to protect Brenden. When was the last time you used that thing? You probably wouldn't even hit someone you were shooting at."
Jafe laughed quietly. "I remember the last time I used it, actually. Don't you?"
Mary blushed suddenly and grinned crookedly at him. "That doesn't change what I'm saying."
"No, you're right. Damn. I don't know. Um. Maybe I'll get a locking box for it or something."
"Why are you so insistent on keeping it here?"
Jafe scrubbed his palms on his pants, looked at her. "I don't know," he said, quietly. "I just don't know."
Mary looked at him, but he didn't say anything more.
The gun went back in the nightstand.

The next morning, Saturday, Jafe got up, made pancakes (blueberry, from Bisquick) and before Mary and Brendan were finished, he told them he was going over to the range for a while. Mary sighed and poured more blueberry syrup on her pancakes. Her plate was chipped, as was Jafe's. They were from the wedding set. Brendan had a plastic plate with Peter Rabbit on it. It was unchippable.
The house had a concrete driveway, bounded by two long strips of flowerbed, where Mary planted daisies and tulips. She'd decided to put yellow tulips in the front, and fade to red up near the house. Tulip digging was oddly satisfying to her, although she thought maybe she did indeed need a gun to work on the cats that sewed their offerings in her carefully tended beds.
They'd cleaned up the table, brushed their teeth together, and now Brendan was assiduously working on some massive civil engineering project in his sandbox. Jafe and Mary were horrified by the blasphemy of plastic Tonka trucks, but Brendan thought they were keen, so plastic road graders and caterpillars shaped his view of what a properly deconstructed mountain should look like, as Mary started digging her red tulips in.
The garage door began to rise; it was Mary's early warning system. Jafe drove up the street quickly, pulled into the driveway and the garage with a chirp of brakes, uncharacteristically abrupt. The driver's door slammed and he walked quickly into the house.
It had been less than an hour since he left. Mary didn't know where the shooting range was, but couldn't believe that he was back already. She put down the trowel, and hopped over the planter bed to the driveway. "Brendan, stay in the sandbox." Brendan didn't even notice.

Their Vanagon had no passenger window.
She walked up and looked. The window was gone.
The cream-colored, boxy car was unscratched, but there was glass all over the seat and in the footwell.
She walked inside the house, into the bedroom. Jafe was looking through the phone book.
"Jafe, uh, what happened to the Vanagon's window?"
He looked over at her. His fingers turned the pages quickly, not bothering to smooth them, occasionally ripping an edge as he riffled. "I went to K-mart to get some ammo. While I was in there, some bastard smashed the window and took the Colt off the seat."
Mary bit her lower lip as she looked at him.
Jafe slammed the phone book down on the dresser. "Damn it!" He sat looking out the window for a moment, and looked over at her, sideways. A tiny, sheepish grin grew on his lips. "Damn it!"
She started giggling, and he tried to glare at her.
"Damn it," he said, softly.