We went to the shooting range together a few times, and on the ride back, it was always good conversation. I grew up shooting, and afterward, it’s always a weight lifted – it’s been that way ever since I was a kid. It’s my nature. Him, he was what my wife calls a water baby, he grew up swimming and around water. In high school, he swam the breast stroke, set a state record. He bought weed off of me even then, but we became friends in college, and we would sometimes go up to his dad’s lake house, take out the boat, fish from the dock, and always – on Sunday before going back – race across the cove freestyle. I only beat him one time, and then, he emerged from the water holding his side, though he wouldn’t admit he had cramped.
To me, shooting is swimming.
It’s getting out of the pool on a summer evening, how for a little while you feel you left some of your weight back in the water, making it easier to talk about real things. I tried to explain this to him once, and he said he understood, even felt it himself. Once, on the way back from the range, he asked if he needed a gun to kill himself, would I loan it to him. It was entirely philosophical, it didn’t worry me. We went pretty deep, were proud of ourselves for being able to do so, and I remember he was trying not to grin.
He wasn’t your average snowflake, he understood logic too. He never had any problem that I own enough firepower to hold off the ATF indefinitely. He just wouldn’t own one, he said, believed peace mostly propagated peace – though, admittedly, not always – but when not, he was prepared in a different way than I was.
Like at peace with G*d? I asked him.
Him too, he said.
I felt bad when I heard about his kid, I really did. I wondered if I should call him after I heard, tried to think about whether I would want a phone call or just some space.
I couldn’t make up my mind.
When he asked that about borrowing the gun, I said I would. I said that I believed it was a man’s right to die, and who was I to judge if he was better off alive. So you can imagine what I’m thinking when he calls me, from out of nowhere after four years, says he needs a favor, but he can’t talk over the phone, and it’s all around about how his little boy drowned in the neighbor’s pool. I said come on over, let’s talk, hoping he just wanted to buy an eighth of weed, like old times. And the whole time he’s on his way, I’m trying to decide: what’s the thing to do? How to be a friend, what I’d want, knowing how I would feel if it were my boy, who is about to turn four himself. Also, thinking about how I’d feel if my boy were grown, and some man loaned him a gun. It was hard, and I knew I might not make the same decision twice, but I loaded the 9 mm, put on the safety, left it on the coffee table.
When he got there, I had him come in, sit down.
My wife was at the store, my son off in his room playing. We danced around it, talked about the NBA draft of all things, no one wanted to mention it first, but the whole time he looked about to cry. We both kept looking at the muted TV, which had some kid’s show on it where my son had left it a while ago. Finally, I looked at the gun on the table, said I had to take a leak.
In the bathroom, I sat on the toilet and prayed, though I’m not a believer.
When I came back, he was gone. My son had come back in the room, was standing, staring into the TV. The gun was still there.
I breathed deeply, went back to not believing in G*d.
Daddy! my son said when he saw me, then he looked over to the coffee table.
You left your gun on the table, he said, pointing.
I did, I said. Then: You know not to touch that!
He just looked at me.
Right? I said again.
They found him a few weeks later, full of liquor and pills, washed up on the shore of the lake where his dad had the house. It was on the local news. When I heard, I wished I had thought to take him shooting that day, maybe make things lighter for him for a while. But it’s impossible to be sure the right thing to do in those moments, and I guess that’s why he said he wouldn’t own a gun.