danny

Chapter 1:  Danny, Get Your Gun

Danny knew where his dad kept the gun, he’d stolen it once before.  That had just been to show Ricky Fallon what a glock looked like, though, and he hadn’t fired it that day.  Partly because he didn’t want his dad to know a bullet was missing, and partly because he didn’t want to accidentally shoot and kill Ricky Fallon.  That would’ve been moronic.  Plus, Ricky was his best friend.  At least, he had been in the Summer of 1985.

So, Danny had slipped the gun out of his dad’s sock drawer and tip toe’d down the steps (even though he knew the house was empty of people) and met an over-excited Ricky Fallon waiting outside.  They’d decided that the best place to examine the piece was down in the forest behind Danny’s house.  Danny had held the gun out before him, clasping it in his right hand, while staring down the barrel at an unsuspecting tree.

The glock was lighter in his hand than he’d thought it would be.  He’d kept the safety on the whole time, but when he dropped his trigger finger onto the cold metal he’d still felt something tingle inside his head.  They sometimes talked about “the itch” in old cowboy flicks, Danny thought.  Trigger finger.  The urge to pull.  Up until that moment - Ricky Fallon standing to his left with a dumb look of awe plastered on his face, the dull coolness of the forest surrounding them on the scorching day, the soft whisper of the river which ran behind Danny’s house, the cold hard feel of the 9mm safe action in his right hand, with his left arm for balance - Danny would’ve said that trigger itch was a load of shit.  Up until that moment, Danny had never held a gun.
Ricky had asked to hold it after Danny had his turn.  It wasn’t that Danny didn’t trust him, it’s just that the glock was his for now.  His private exhilaration.  Also, Ricky could be a fucking moron.  So, Danny said: ‘Dream on mo-ron,’, and then laughed (as he always did when he said that particular rhyme).  He knew it’d upset Ricky, and that’s partly why he’d said it.
‘You’re a dick, why’d you even bring me? Just to show off your daddy’s gun?  Bet you don’t even have the balls to fire it,’ God, Ricky could be an asshole sometimes.

‘Maybe I will fire it, right in your dumb head, Ricky-Dicky dumb-shit,’ Danny was laughing even before he finished speaking.  Damn if that wasn’t a good one.  In all fairness, Ricky laughed too.
They had spent the morning out on their bikes with their third amigo, Martha, and it had taken them the whole day to build up the courage to pinch the gun.   By now they were both surely full of youthful adrenaline - or maybe it was the loss of their resident voice of reason, Martha Willis who went home an hour earlier, that finally pushed them to action.  Either way, they were now standing in the darkening hours of the afternoon with the mythical glock in hand.
And the day really was beginning to darken around them, the first cold of evening approached and sent a ghostly shiver down Danny’s back.  Infact, it was the first shiver of the whole Summer.  In a sad moment Danny realised that they were no longer in Summer’s peak.  The days when you could set off on a voyage of discovery at 10 in the morning in your shorts and come back at 10 in the evening without even a single thought of being cold, were almost gone.  It had been the kind of Summer where you forgot it even got cold at other parts of the year.

And, for Danny and Ricky, it was the kind of Summer where you forgot your Dad got home at around six.
‘Shit, Danny, isn’t that your Dad’s Ford?’  It was, and Danny’s entrancement with the glock was shattered in a moment.  The hard pop of loose chucky stones under his Dad’s pick-up truck pierced through the forest.

The waistband of Danny’s jeans became home to the muzzle of his Dad’s pistol.  He didn’t really have time to think about how cool that was, although Ricky would point out later that it was kind of badass.  Danny didn’t say a goodbye, he just scrambled up the hill back to his house.  Neither needed a goodbye anyway as it was Summer, obviously they’d be hanging out tomorrow.  Ricky’s house was across the water and up the other side of the forest, about five minutes away.  His house was bigger than Danny’s, and his dad drove a five-door sedan.  His dad didn’t own a glock though.

Danny was in his back yard, skulking his way across the lawn towards the back door.  His dad would have almost certainly cracked a rolling rock and planted his ass on the couch for the evening, breathing out a sigh of relief which he’d been holding in since the moment he woke up that morning.   But, to Danny’s panicked, pre-pubescent mind, the first and only thing that his dad would want to do when he got home from a hard day’s work would be to check and see that his beloved glock was still resting peacefully in his sock drawer.  So, without any real thought of what he’d do when he got there to find his dad examining a glock-shaped hole in his sock pile, Danny ran like a moron.

When Danny burst through the backdoor of the house, into their living-room-come-dining-room, to find his dad facing away from him and sitting peacefully in his spot on the couch, he almost collapsed with relief.
‘That you, Danny?’ the way his dad spoke, he said his name more like Danneh.  He’d always liked the way he said it, and never more than now.

‘Hi dad, gotta go quick sorry busy,’ the six words came out as one and the result was almost comical, as Danny rushed past.  Daniel Sr. smiled to himself and sipped his beer.  He was thinking of his own Summer, 30 years ago.  The kind of Summer that you remember every day of except the last.  If Danny’s father was a more sentimental man then he’d maybe remember more, but as it was he rarely reminisced about the good times.   His thoughts led him to where they always go, his life now.  His wife, his shitty car, Danny’s good-for-nothing big sister and, of course, his job.  Fucking logging.  His mind itched to remember the day’s he’d spent playing in the forest as a kid instead of stripping it for its lumber as a man.  There was something so inherently wrong about that life-cycle which no one ever fully articulated.  Maybe they left that thought undisturbed deliberately, just like Daniel left his memories to stagnate and decay.  He heard Danny’s footsteps rush up their wooden staircase in a flurry.  Enjoy it while you still can, Danny, he thought.  Then had another sip of his beer.



Chapter 2: Bedroom Limbo

After stashing the gun back in its sock hidey hole, Danny retreated to his room.  He’d stay there until around 8 when his step-mom got home to make dinner.  By then Daniel Sr. would be several cans deep into the drink, which was fine: it was Friday night.  He guessed that later that evening his step-mom might be going to Mrs Alistair’s house for bridge, or Mrs Grossman’s for book club.  It had been a while since she’d had the girls round herself, Danny thought.

Danny lay on his bed with his eyes to the empty ceiling, thinking.

It was one of those shitty in-between Summer nights.  Ricky wouldn’t come out again, and Martha was no fun on her own.  Danny felt the enormity of his loneliness in that moment.  Was it possible that he’d spend the entire night without speaking to another living soul?  He hoped that Patricia, his step mom, would maybe skip bridge for the evening.  Maybe they could rent a film?  He didn’t even believe it as he thought it.  The T.V. was Daniel’s on a Friday night.  In fact, the whole living room was.  And Patricia never skipped bridge.
Danny hoped like hell that Claire would come home tonight, and not for the first time.  When did he last see Claire?  Monday?  Last weekend?  It felt like weeks.  Especially in the time vortex of Summer.  He’d heard from Martha’s big sis that Claire’s been hanging around with Aaron Peterson and his friends.  Someone in their team owned a car and it was obviously the making of them.  A local wrecking crew on wheels.  Danny wasn’t the kind of guy to judge his big sister.  If she wanted to break bread with a group of guys who smash mail boxes and spray-paint dumb shit like ‘FUCK THE GOVERNMENT’ on the back of the local library, then she could be his guest.  That still didn’t change the fact that he missed his big sis.  Well, his big step-sis, technically.
Actually, Danny was still kind of unsure what she was.

Claire was his older half-sister, yeah that was right, his step-mum’s child with his dad.  She was born before Danny.  Before his own mum had split up with Daniel Sr.  His dad was a cheat.

To most people this would seem kind of fucky.  In fact, it was quite obviously a very fucky situation.  So why did Danny never think about the fact that his dad was a cheat?  And, why did it never occur to Danny that there was something strange about his sister’s age?   After all, the truth was simple and obvious.  But Danny was a boy.  He didn’t want there to be anything strange about his life.  He didn’t want there to be anything bad about his daddy.  It was his life, his family, and all he’d ever known.  So, he let it lie in the deep part of his brain where he hid the things he didn’t like.  He let it alone and it let him alone.  That was, until last week.
Until Ricky Fucking Fallon.

The infinitely wise and eminent Ricky Fallon, that is.  Ever diligent and ever looking for new shit to tell his friends (Ricky was the guy who brought new swear words to class each week and told all the boys what a vagina was), Ricky had stumbled upon a doozy.  Being a parrot of his mother’s telephone conversations was a habit of his, and it was no doubt where he had gotten the juice about Danny’s dad.
So, lacking the context of the second half of the phone conversation, Ricky had told Danny that he thought it was ‘Typical of his dad to act this way.’  Typical.  What a dumb thing to say.

‘What’s typical?  Waddaya mean, act this way?’ Danny replied in his quick, mash-all-the-words-together kind of way which usually meant he was stressed or, in this case, angry.  Where did Ricky get off talking about his dad like that?  What did he know about his old man?  Apparently more than Danny did.  But Ricky wasn’t fazed by his best friend’s distress, and he continued in his matter-of-fact (holier than thou) way: ‘I dunno, his cheating and stuff.’

Danny was about to fire off another round of well-structured counter arguments when Ricky added: ‘Anyway, no one who knew him in school was surprised about when Claire was born.’

‘But you didn’t know him in school,’ he’d felt like saying.  He felt like saying a lot of things to Ricky.  But he’d mentioned Claire and now Danny’s reply was stillborn in his mouth.  What did Ricky mean by - or rather - what did Ricky’s mother mean by that stuff about school?  His dad wasn’t a bad guy.  He called him Danneh how he liked, and he worked all week for him and Claire and Patricia.  He liked his Rolling Rock on the weekend, sure, and his cigarettes any time he stepped outside, but who didn’t?  He wasn’t like Aaron Peterson.  Daniel Sr. never broke anybody’s mailbox.

But there was more to it now.

Ricky had provoked more than just his anger this time, and Danny went quiet.  This was how other people saw his dad, wasn’t it?  This is how they see Claire, too, he thought, with a sudden and shocking moment of clarity.  She’s just like him.  People said some real shitty things about Claire in school (mostly where Danny couldn’t hear, but he caught the backdraft sometimes).  It’s not all true, surely.  She didn’t suck off the entire football team before the big game.  That was pure horse-shit.  But maybe she sucked off Peterson in math class last year?  Maybe that one’s true.  Shit.

It felt like getting stabbed.  Hearing that about your big sis hurt, but believing it?  Danny wasn’t a moron, he knew that stuff didn’t come from nothing, he knew Claire wasn’t “as good as gold” like his mom - his real mom - used to say about him.
He told Ricky Fallon to fuck off, and he ran home and up to his room.  He lay on his bed and looked at the blank ceiling, just like he did on that Friday night where him and Ricky Fallon had stolen the glock for the first time.  Just like he did all through that Summer when he had something on his mind.  He lay there thinking about Claire and the shit they all say about her, about his dad and his Rolling Rock downstairs, and about Patricia and her fucking bridge game.  He thought about his mom.

Here is Danny, eleven years old and unravelling the fabric of his life in a single Summer.  He’s haunted by those invasive thoughts.  They’re a cancer on his mental, always there, and growing.  He tries to find a conclusion as he runs down the facts in his mind.  He tries to file all that he knows away in his brain and leave it there to lie.  But some things don’t rest easy.  Danny doesn’t rest easy.

Fucking Ricky Fallon.

But Danny could still deny it all, couldn’t he?  He could tell Ricky and the whole school that his dad is a stand-up guy.  A real family man.  A regular American hero.  He could lie to them all.  But could he lie to himself?  Can anyone, really?  He couldn’t.  Ricky Fallon was right, and that was the hardest part.

After all, Danny had admitted it to himself: He hadn’t known his dad in school.  And neither had Ricky, or Claire.  Or Patricia, for that matter.   Danny didn’t know if it did matter.  And with that final thought – the full stop on his bedroom existentialism – Danny fell asleep.