The Cabin at the End of the World(14)
He says, “Taurus snub-nosed .38 special. If you try to break in here, you’re going to have some problems.” Andrew gives his voice as much of an edge as he can muster, which maybe sounds like the-schoolteacher-is-upset, but in his own ears, he sounds too much like a stereotype of a comic book nerd. His voice isn’t Eric’s slow, calm baritone of reason and authority. Andrew heard Eric before he first saw him. They met at a mutual friend’s BBQ, fifty people crammed into a comically small, square-shaped, postage-stamp backyard. The partygoers’ excuse mes and pardon mes were the jokes that never got old. Andrew was part of a small ring of friends and coworkers, laughing at something, he no longer remembers at what, but he remembers laughing, and he remembers it as a pleasantly drunk, slightly unhinged, completely happy laugh. Then he heard Eric talking, no, orating behind him about some European soccer team and their outlandishly expensive player transfers. That voice of his vibrated at some golden frequency, rising above the giddy and tipsy chatter of the blissful summer revelers. Andrew couldn’t have cared less about soccer, but he thought, Who is that?
Leonard says, “Please. Don’t do—”
Redmond interrupts. “Show us what you got. Put it in the window, dude.” His inflection on “dude” is both dismissive and threatening.
“You’ll see it when I point it at you.”
Eric sidles next to Andrew and whispers in his ear, “Did you actually bring it? Do you have it?”
In their apartment, Andrew keeps the gun locked in a notebook-sized safe on a shelf in their closet. The safe is new. He bought it eight months ago. Battery powered, he can open it with a touchpad combination or the new biometric palm-print reader, and if the battery dies, there’s a safety key.
Andrew grew up with guns. His father used to take him out hunting all the time, whether Andrew wanted to or not. When he was ten, his father gave him a .22 Huntington rifle. Andrew didn’t enjoy hunting or shooting animals (though he shot two deer and more than his fair share of squirrels), but he liked target shooting, and he spent a good chunk of his early teen years shooting at a withered gray tree stump about one thousand paces behind the farmhouse. When Andrew moved to Boston, he renounced all things Vermont, including guns. After the attack in that bar near the Boston Garden thirteen years ago, Andrew took self-defense and boxing classes, which helped him to feel more empowered and the nightmares stopped occurring as frequently and his general anxiety decreased to near normal levels (whatever those were), but it wasn’t enough. Within a year of the attack Andrew got his Massachusetts gun license/firearm identification and joined a shooting range. Eric strongly resisted having a gun in their apartment initially and they’d had the gun talk a second and third time before and after adopting Wen. Andrew insisted he wasn’t reacting or giving in to fear. He’d explained to Eric that the attack left him feeling unmoored; the beer bottle smashing into the back of his head broke off some part of himself that had yet to return. Shooting a gun was a part of who Andrew was as a child and teen and maybe if he could reclaim that small bit of who he once was, he’d feel more whole. Andrew knew he wasn’t explaining himself very well, but he also knew it sounded better than admitting his squeezing the trigger once a month at the range while imagining the silhouette on the paper target as his attacker felt so damned good and right.
Andrew says, “Yes and no.”
“What do you mean?”
“The safe is in the side panel storage compartment, in the SUV.” Andrew bringing the gun was an impulse decision made only minutes before leaving for the cabin. Eric and Wen were down the street getting coffee and donuts for the ride and Andrew took a last walk through the condo, making sure they weren’t forgetting anything important. It suddenly occurred to Andrew the gun was important. During their week on the lake Eric would worry about bears and wild animals, and Andrew would worry about being in the sticks of not-so-socially-liberal New Hampshire. Andrew briefly imagined a pair of don’t-tread-on-me types seeing him, Eric, and Wen buying food at a supermarket and then following them out to the parking lot spewing epithets and threats, or maybe the fucking rednecks would follow them out to their remote cabin to actualize their homophobia and hatred in more than words. Andrew chastised himself for imagining and dwelling on worst-case scenarios (but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t or couldn’t happen; he knew this from experience) and he hummed “Dueling Banjos” in an attempt to make himself feel silly for wanting to bring the gun. It didn’t work and he stashed the safe in the side panel. Andrew didn’t tell Eric he was bringing the gun, and he knew he wasn’t being fair, but he didn’t want to have to deal with that conversation. Eric has been as understanding as he possibly can about Andrew’s gun ownership. Still, he would not have been happy at all about the gun coming with them on vacation. Even though they already had a long family talk about the gun and safe being off-limits to Wen, it would’ve made Eric even more neurotic about her playing unsupervised in the cabin and he would’ve obsessed over scenarios in which she finds the safe and somehow opens it.
Redmond says, “Hey, come on, now. We all like show-and-tell out here. No? Nothing? That’s what I thought. Lying through his teeth. He doesn’t—”
Leonard shouts, “That’s enough!” his voice deep, percussive, slightly unhinged, as shocking as an explosion of dog barks from a once-presumed empty house. Wen whimpers and slaps her hands over her ears. Andrew is reminded that as threatening and Cro-Magnon as Redmond sounds and looks, this guy Leonard standing a foot or two away on the other side of that door is a big fucking boy.