I was raised in the deep south, in a small town that no one outside my county will ever hear of. It’s about as generic as a rural American town can get. I won’t bore you with details, imagine the town center being an intersection. The only businesses in sight are a dilapidated convenience store with four gas pumps, a dive bar, strip club, and an adult “mega-mart.” Everyone knows everyone, but that isn’t surprising when the only thing to do on a friday night is get drunk and watch someone you went to grade school with try to pay their bills.
I always found the people here strange though. You see, even growing up I didn’t exactly fit in. Maybe that’s because I wasn’t born here. I was born in the nearest metropolis, now two hours away. I had no say in the matter of moving here. I was only three when it happened. I recall one day coming home from school with the realization that those kids in my class were born here, and likely would die only miles from where they were born. You may realize that’s a dark thought for someone in middle school at the time.
I asked my mom a few days later why we lived here, and not back in the city. Her answer was something to do “your dad had a job opportunity out here, and so we packed our bags and moved.” I didn’t know what my dad did for work, and to this day still don’t. The only answer I was used to hearing was “contracting” before being met with a heavy silence. The seeming futility of that question exhausted me to the point I stopped caring.
here was only one thing my dad had in common with the other dads here. Guns. Kids in my class as early as I could recall were always touting that “their daddy let them shoot his gun!” As if that made them some kind of hero. In second grade it did, maybe. I always saw everyone else in this town as careless with their firearms, however. Every year there was a new rumor relating to local gun violence. So-and-so came home from work and found his wife in bed with the neighbor. Neighbor had his bowels eviscerated with buckshot. Or a local mother finally had enough of her drunk husband beating her, and the husband was found with eight forty-five rounds in various places.
My father was different though. He never let me touch his guns when he wasn’t actively watching me do so. Some of my first memories about guns relate to what he always called the four rules of gun safety. Long before I was allowed to lay hands on my dad’s pistol, those four rules were hammered into my brain. “treat every gun as if it’s loaded, never point the gun at anything that you don’t want to kill, keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot, and to always know your target and what’s around it.” This was taught to me as if it was the one and only word of god. If I had to choose one thing to thank my father for the most, it’s my intimate knowledge of firearms. Before I learned to shoot I learned how to render any gun safe. I was given a crash course on local laws, and my state’s “stand your ground” statute.
My dad always told me the only reason I was to ever shoot another person was if I felt my life was in imminent danger. And if that did happen, god forbid, I was to call him before anyone else. The last part didn’t make sense. My dad was knowledgeable on this topic though, so I didn’t question it.
If I had to guess, my graduating class was about fifty students. I’d gone to school with these students since kindergarten. We lost a few along the way. One was hit by a drunk driver. One overdosed on their older brother’s narcotics. One found small town living depressing, and turned himself into a statistic. I wasn’t happy with where I lived, but I never thought about killing myself. The day I found out about that incident is forever ingrained in my mind.
It was the end of tenth grade, and a typical sunny day. One of my classmates wasn’t at school, but that wasn’t unusual for them. It seemed like they weren’t in attendance more often than not. The principal had called an assembly, and awkwardly announced the tragic event.
In reality the memory is one of disgust, and not at the news I was given. My shock was at my classmates’ reactions. It was not unanimously somber. One kid scoffed. Another chuckled. After a few minutes of quiet, one asked.
“Can we go back to class?”
I would have expected there to be more emotion, or care shown. Afterall, these children were godly beings, and they made it known. Every monday I’d overhear stories of the lord, and gospel from their sunday church trips. It was a stark contrast from the conversations I overheard directly prior about their favorite playboy magazines, or how they’d stolen some of their parents’ vodka and replaced it with water.
Like I said, this was the deep south, and churches were abundant. In my travels in any direction, I had to pass by at least two different white buildings claiming some flavor of christianity. I was never religious, and my parents weren’t either. It was just another thing separating us from the local culture…
I mentioned prior I wasn’t suicidal by any means. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t want to escape this hell-hole of a town. I dreamed of getting out since the first days of kindergarten, when it was painfully obvious I wasn’t one of them. That’s a while from the idea’s inception to execution, but I was sure it would happen one day.
And it did.
My first car was nothing special, but it had one thing going for it. It was as generic as it could get. A gray-ish sedan, with no special qualities other than its reliability. It was a similar concept that I applied to my first gun. A Glock, the epitome of boring reliability. Chambered for the ubiquitous nine millimeter parabellum, it was known for just simply working. didn’t care for flashy things. I didn’t care for bold. I care for function without flaunting how much I’d spent. It was in stark contrast to my peers, who threw themselves into debt for a lifted truck. Or maxed out their credit cards on “booze and bitches” as they so eloquently said.
It was a breezy night. Almost picture perfect by anyone’s standards. Partially cloudy around sunset at quarter to eight. In an unusual fashion I made an impulsive decision. I grabbed my car keys, stuck my Glock in its holster and threw an excess magazine in its holder and was gone. Maybe it was the night. Maybe it was the pent-up resentment from small town living, but something was different.
I started my car and without a second thought hit the road. I had no plan and only a few bucks in cash and was maybe forty miles away when I noticed an abandoned truck on the side of the road. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have stopped. But like I said earlier, something tonight was different.
I pulled up behind the vehicle, and shifted to park. It was an older pickup truck, with some surface rust. I could faintly smell diesel wafting in the air, so I knew it was recently left. Nothing struck me as wildly unusual until I heard a faint conversation. Maybe conversation was an understatement. From the distance I was at it was faint, but unmistakably an argument. A man’s voice seemed to cut through the humid air in an aggressive manner. It seemed to be coming from a little trail down the way.
Against my better judgement I decided to investigate. A short walk through a rarely traversed path led me to a small pond area. There I saw a man, maybe about five foot nine. He was pale skinned, and had a few tattoos on his upper arm. A short, unkempt beard, and a fiery temper. He was shouting something to a woman. Something aggressive, and something threatening. I didn’t hear the exact words, but got the sense it wasn’t just an argument.
The woman was slightly shorter than him, but not by much. Stoutly built, and mid length brown hair. I stopped a moment, just out of where I thought he could see or hear me. A closer look at the man didn’t reveal any further information, but the machete on the ground by his foot did.
I can’t forget the feeling that I felt then. A chilling fear, not for me, but for the woman in his path. I couldn’t tell if it was a lover, a sister, or even a daughter. It didn’t matter. What happened next sticks with me to this day. The man continued to shout, and I saw the fear in her eyes. I felt it in the air. Before I could consciously register what I did, my pistol was in my hands.
I approached the man from the side, leveled my sights at his chest and advanced. I was about fifteen yards out when I stepped on a twig and they heard me. His head whipped around. We locked eyes. For a second that felt like eternity, the fear I saw in that woman’s eyes was in his eyes. I’ll never forget it. He froze. Before he could reach for the blade on the ground I fired. Two shots through the right lungs, and the final in the head.
He was dead before he hit the ground. I stood with my pistol still raised and looked at the woman. The pure fear she expressed was palpable. I lowered the gun, and told the woman.
“Take the keys. Leave. Don’t look back”
She took one last look at me before she did what I told her. Within two minutes I heard the diesel engine roar to life and peel off. I quickly collected the empty brass casings, and walked to my car. Unloaded my gun, threw it in the glove box, and drove home.
When I got home, I dug a small hole in the backyard. The three empty cartridges, each equally responsible for ending that man’s life, were covered up by six inches of dirt.
To this day I never heard of a news report about what transpired. I don’t know if that woman is okay. I don’t know if I’m okay. I have no clue if his body was found, or if an animal ate it. I won’t know his name, and I won’t know if anyone misses him. The Glock stays in its case, buried under old laundry in the back of my closet. I never purchased another gun. I still have that gray sedan.
I don’t resent living in a small town anymore. Everyone knows everyone. No one knows that I looked a man in the eyes and struck him down. No one knows I played judge, jury, and executioner that night. The ignorant townsfolk drove me away, but they were the very reason I chose to come back.
And I wouldn’t live anywhere else.