WAITING FOR RED DAWN by Jesse Goolsby
I’m twelve, asleep in a room I’ve wallpapered with posters of NBA basketball players when my father shakes me awake, hands me a revolver, and snap-whispers, “If something happens, shoot for the body.” I’m all heartbeat and dizzy in our narrow, dark, predawn hallway as I scoot forward, left hand on my father’s back, right hand gripping this heavy gun – a loaded gun – and as we glide past my infant sister’s bedroom I hear knocking. Someone’s knocking on our front door, and everything jumbles together: shoot for the body, murderer, knocking, are we shooting through the door? what criminal knocks? I don’t have shoes on, how big is a bullet? And my father’s disappeared so I crouch down on the floor in a flood of fear and close my eyes, then open them, but there’s no difference in the darkness, and still this feverish knocking, and I wait for the shot, for my name in the night, and I feel the worn carpet on my feet, and I wait. The standoff’s taking too long, and now a deep, slurring voice filters through the door, the voice hurls my father’s name – John – and it comes to my ears in the same plead-scream my mother sang seconds after dumping boiling water on her feet. Then: lights on, door open, and our drunk neighbor spits out, your fucking backyard’s on fire.
As dawn reds up, I watch my father direct the small water stream from our garden hose onto a smoking pile of leaves we’d left for Glad Bags later that day. We’ll never know what lit them, and I don’t know why, but my father still grips his gun, and so do I. I feel small, but strong, like a half-trained sentinel. I look the silver gun over, and I see the brass backings of bullets waiting their turn. I can’t tell if the revolver’s safety is on or not, and it’s something I should know. It’s answers like this why father gave me the combination to the safe in his bedroom. So I do this slight tug on the trigger and watch the revolver’s hammer start its backward ride, but I stop early and everything slides back into potential. Beautiful. I do the tiny tug again, and the minuscule movement of the hammer intoxicates my limbs. My father shakes the morning cold out in his shorts and night shirt and old slippers and stares mesmerized at the water flow, intent on snuffing out our smoldering mound of natural debris, and for some reason, all at once, I realize that I could shoot him, right there. Not that I want to. It’s that I could, with minimal effort, and I’d kill him if I aimed straight enough, and without prompt I stroke this strange rush of power and alarm that people must feel when they realize they can do absolutely anything they want if they have the nerve.
* * *
Growing up, my relatives would argue about which of them would be targeted first in a nuclear war. There was some sort of prestige to it all. An uncle in Colorado Springs claimed that NORAD would be the Russians’ first target. “Mountain can’t hold back a nuke.” He was somehow proud of his proximity. My father said he would drive toward Colorado Springs because the “Rooskies’ ” technology was so poor, but somehow he argued our logging town of 1,500 near the California Oregon-border put us right in the USSR crosshairs. “There’s an Army depot within a hundred miles.” When Aunt Debbie brought up Fairfax, Virginia, everyone joked that the Soviets would want to keep the crooks in power, so D.C. would be spared, so they could argue and tax the cleanup workers.
* * *
If you ask most people what they fear now, how many would say nukes? My cousin called me after his last airline trip. There was a fully-bearded, sturdy, Arab-looking man seated in front of him. My cousin had a confession: he knew the bearded gentleman was probably a saint, and my cousin watched him read a People magazine then sleep most of the way. My cousin hated himself, but he had to wage war against his senses. He had to say, Don’t smell for smoke. His shoes are shoes. His shoes are shoes. On the phone, he didn’t ask me: “Am I a bad person?” What he asked was: “What does this mean?”
* * *
I’m twenty-six, teaching my Canadian wife how to throw the slide back on a Berretta 9mm pistol in the high desert outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s taken me four years to convince her that we should own a gun and keep it in our home. This is the first time in her life she’s touched a lethal weapon, and the slide proves problematic because you really have to crank it back in an odd pinch and pull motion, and her face snarls and her eyes narrow behind shooting glasses, and I know I have about fifteen seconds left before she gives up, makes me sell the gun, and refuses to broach the subject for the rest of her life. So I grab the handgun, ready it, and hand it back to her, handle first. After a deep breath, she rolls through the entire magazine of ammunition, and in the end she’s punched a nice little bunching of holes in the human silhouette target twenty feet away. She should be proud, and maybe she is, but she hands over the gun with head-tilt finality which tells me that I never need to ask her to prove her marksmanship again. On the ride back to our home she asks me again why we need a gun. I tell her all about home protection, intruders, and lethal force, the “don’t mess with the Goolsbys” mountain upbringing I was privy to, the end-of-days scenario where we play out Red Dawn, and for levity, something about zombies. She doesn’t challenge me, and it’s a good thing, because I have no idea what the percentages are for home break-ins, not to mention Russian invasions.
* * *
Red Dawn premiered in 1984, and it gave people something else to fear besides Cold War nukes. In the film, Russian paratroopers land at a rural Colorado high school in the middle of history class. When the instructor attempts to confront the evil parachutists they greet him with AK-47 fire. In the resulting student scramble, a group of friends band together, raid a sporting goods store for survival necessities, and head for the mountains. Over the course of months, the small student group forms a resistance unit – they call themselves Wolverines and manage to wage an extremely successful and violent retake-over of their small town where their parents sulk away in razor wire re-education camps. At the time it was released, Red Dawn was considered the most violent film by the Guinness Book of Records and The National Coalition on Television Violence, with a rate of 134 acts of violence per hour, or 2.23 per minute. Overall, the violence didn’t get to me. What I feared was that the Russians decided to start with some hick, rural town. Not New York. Not Los Angeles. They started with a town just like mine. It seemed plausible. My history teacher was a bony, well-educated man scared of his own shadow. So what would happen? Would he let them walk right in and take care of business?
* * *
I’m an English teacher. I’m also in charge of the anti-terrorism measures at my school. It’s an odd combination. I speak the virtues of Shakespeare and I educate students and faculty on what to do if we have a shooter in our midst. Here are the answers: 1. Hide 2. Lacking an appropriate hiding place, do anything to survive.
* * *
Tim, my best friend in high school, had a small cone-like lump of cartilage protruding from his neck. It was one of those odd biological missteps that you couldn’t look away from once you noticed, not that it was incredibly obvious, except when Tim would get embarrassed and the party of rogue cells would go a shade whiter than the rest of him. One high school afternoon Tim was shot with a pellet gun by his younger brother. The pellet lodged 4 mm away from his left eye, and left Tim in a hump in his living room, clutching his face as blood gushed onto the carpet. The ambulance came and Tim’s brother was a mess for a month. I was there the day Tim took off the bandages revealing a newly healed temple. I noticed his neck lump had disappeared. When asked, Tim replied, “The docs said it would go where it was needed.”
* * *
In a hunting magazine I read a story about an 80-year-old woman, home alone, sucking on an oxygen mask wishing the seizures away, who pulls a .357 on a burglar and blasts him through the shoulder. Then while he begs, puts another through his temple. The elderly woman suffered a broken wrist due to the recoil. The write-up was under the section title: Heroes in our Midst.
* * *
I believed Red Dawn. In the winter of their resistance, two young men from the Wolverines hunt deer in the woods not far from their hideout. After knocking a decent buck dead they approach the animal and the seasoned hunter turns to the virgin, younger hunter. “You drink the blood of your first,” he says, and offers a mug. After minor bickering, the new killer raises the mug to his lips and gulps the still-warm blood, and smiles like the fluid is the one thing that has been missing from his life.
I killed my first deer while hunting with my father in the Jarbridge Wilderness in Northern Nevada. I was thirteen. We hadn’t talked about Red Dawn, but it was with great trepidation that I approached the felled animal. My father was jovial, but I think he sensed my apprehension. He snapped a few photos while I held the deer’s head off the ground. I managed to smile while I looked my father over for hidden drinking devices, but there were none. When he mentioned dragging the buck back to the truck all of a sudden I felt as if I would miss the blood milestone because he had forgotten about the ritual, or perhaps he thought I wasn’t up to it. Either way, I was simultaneously thrilled and disappointed. I overcame my nervousness.
“When do, when do I drink blood?” I stuttered.
I’d confused him, and he opened his mouth but nothing came out. When I mentioned where I’d absorbed the idea he simply shook his head.
He hadn’t seen the film.
* * *
My father let my mother go deer hunting with him once, and he told me that husband/wife hunting would never happen again. She wouldn’t slather the camo make-up on. She refused to sit still in the blind. And when a buck finally showed up, ready and willing to be punctured, my mother began to cry.
* * *
Every now and then we’d go practice shooting the variety of weapons my father kept: various gauges of shotguns, rifles, revolvers and pistols – one of which was “the kind James Bond uses.” I enjoyed shooting up our spot in the woods. The explosions were vicious among the soft trees and their echoes rattled off the hills. My father’s favorite gun was his Winchester 300 Magnum rifle. He’d always wait until dusk to shoot it because when the light faded enough you could see fire spitting out with each blast.
Once, my mother was out with us, and my father must have dared her or promised her something, because she suddenly crouched, and using a stump as a brace, pointed the 300 Magnum at a painted paper plate. The gun roared and we all looked at the paper plate, holeless and mocking. When we glanced back to my mother the gun was on the bare ground – a sin in our family – and my father rushed over to pick it up, but instead, he stepped over it and took my mother’s face in his hands. It was then that I noticed she held her fingers to her right eye, and then the blood slithered through her finger slits and raced down the backs of her hands. My father shouted to let him look, but she wouldn’t unmask her eye, and she wept while my father cussed and slapped his jeaned thighs and picked his favorite gun up out of the pine needles and dirt.
On the way back I know he wanted to tell her that you never put your eye right on the scope on account of the recoil. He was mad she needed stitches, and she was mad that she shot an elephant gun at a paper plate. They were in love, but wanted nothing to do with one another, and when we ran out of gas, my mother cussed for the first time in years and made my father stay with the 4Runner and my little sister as she and I walked the last three miles of dirt road together. She was quiet for awhile – the bleeding had stopped – but she looked like she’d lost a one punch fight. I wondered if the doctors would ask her what happened, all the while looking at my father’s knuckles. Mother was a valley girl at heart. She was a singer – a damn good one – and she starred in the local community chorus where my father reluctantly sang baritone. She’d made me take piano and trombone lessons, but I was about to quit them both for sports. A cool dusk settled around us, and in the distance logging trucks downshifted on the causeway into town. Our rutted road winded back and forth, and when I suggested a more direct route through the trees my mother ignored the proposal by humming. I recognized the melody and guessed its origins from one of my mother’s favorite films: The Sound of Music or that Streisand movie where she dresses like a Jewish man. She didn’t look at me, but I guessed that she wanted me to sing along, so I did, softly, occasionally glancing at the now crescent bulge-cut where the hunting scope did its work. And when we reached the paved road I saw that we were dirty and my mother had wiped blood all over her arms and pants. We were zombie-like, wading out of the hills. I think of this bloodied image of my mother when I recall her answer to the “dream job” question. “Broadway,” she said. “Got the voice. Begging for the looks.”
Later, after we’d hitched into town with a shell-shocked couple on their way to the Redwoods, my mother took a shower and got herself stitched up at the hospital before driving back out for my father and little sister. I didn’t ask, but in the small Emergency waiting room where we waited an hour to be seen she said, “If they get hungry, they’ve got guns.”
* * *
I wonder if my children will fear the same things I fear.
* * *
I have a distant relative who owns three thousand acres in Nebraska. He farms alfalfa, soybeans, and the type of corn not meant for eating. He has a couple hundred head of cattle roaming the far reaches of his property. One summer we rode horses toward Wyoming. My crotch hurt on account of my lack of conditioning, and he could sense my unease.
“Let’s hop off for a minute up here,” he said.
Coming down off a plateau above the prettiest wildflower meadow you can imagine we came across a concrete pad enclosed with fence. It appeared maintained. He didn’t say anything, although I had the impression he wanted to.
“Something special?” I asked.
“Nuke,” he said, anxious to answer.
“What?”
“Nuclear,” he said. “Bomb.” He stroked his horse. “They lease the space.”
Later, over lunch, I had the gumption to ask him how he felt about having a fuelled-up, ready-to-go nuke on his property.
“I imagine it running out of fuel over the Pacific,” he said. “Maybe it takes out Southern California. What would we lose? Hopefully, they’ll collide in midair and give us the damnedest fireworks show, and we all take a deep breath and agree to use swords.”
The next day, we ran across coyotes in the distance. His rifle was up and active before I placed my hands over my ears.
We didn’t ride over to the coyotes, but we did find a half-eaten calf.
“I wish they’d put more nukes out here,” he said.
I thought about that. What do you say?
“I wish it was harder to kill,” I said.
I’m proud of those words, but evil exists, and I often find reasons to take them back.
* * *
A new Red Dawn film is in production. This time it’s Chinese paratroopers.
* * *
I own weapons. They’re locked up. In time I’ll teach my children how to shoot them. I may give them the combination to the safe. If my wife asks me why they need to know how to shoot, I’ll tell her it’s a skill everyone should master. I don’t know if “everyone” is the correct word, but I pray my children will be prepared to do more than hide and wait.
* * *
A couple years ago I bought some acreage in Southern Colorado outside Fort Garland. It’s in the middle of nowhere, around 9,000 feet up overlooking a yellow-grassed valley. On rare, clear days you can see three different mountain ranges holding snow in July. We go up there once or twice a year for a picnic, clean air, and let the kids get dirty. Guns and ATVs aren’t allowed. My wife wants little to do with the parcel, and I understand. It’s cold and windy for most of the year, and the elk we were promised upon purchase rarely settle within view. We bought it mainly for investment, but it hasn’t valued over the years, and maybe even lost a bit. But she lets me keep it because she knows I relive my childhood among the aspen and pine and the horseflies that turn picnics into swatting wars. She knows I love to see my children negotiate an unpaved world that allows them to feel small and overwhelmed, yet filled with a joy they can’t name. So, that’s all logical and above board. What we don’t talk about is my belief that this is the safest place to be if a nuclear war ever heats up. I don’t bring up my odd little fantasy where [insert evil country]’s parachutists fly in and take over our suburban paradise, and it happens to be a Saturday so we’re all there at the house and we have 15 minutes to grab everything we need and get out, and we haul ass down to our sanctuary mountain land in Southern Colorado and we unload the Honda and survey our mound of –50 degree sleeping bags, clothes, hand-pump flashlights, a solar radio, water, and dried food. We’ve said screw the rules, and brought enough guns and ammo to give ourselves a nickname that’ll stick. Our young children don’t know any better, they don’t know to be scared, so they play in the high mountain air while my wife and I set up camp during the warm season. That night, after the kids go down, the stars blast out like goddamn spotlights because we’re so close, and we look around us, and, Jesus, if this isn’t the best place you could be during an invasion!
So yes, I’m waiting for Red Dawn. And it may scare my wife, but that scenario sounds exciting to me, but only if the invasion peters out after a week, and only if my wife doesn’t have to raise my rifle and scope her target, and only if she doesn’t pull the trigger.
That way, no one will ever get hurt.
Jesse Goolsby’s work has appeared in Epoch, The Literary Review, Harpur Palate, Blue Mesa Review, and Storyglossia.