Gunfire

Saturday morning we woke to the sound of gunfire, a heavy explosive noise that somehow compressed and released the air in the room. Like a door slamming inches from your face, it was a sound that made you flinch and then take a inventory of your body parts for bruises and holes. It woke Sam, though he was probably already awake, lying on a small palette of pillows and sheets next to our bed. He is a night waker who seeks the comfort of our presence at two in the morning. He is also a twitcher and kicker whose has been banished numerous times from our bed, so the palette is a compromise. It allows him to sleep in the room with us when he needs to, but it does not require him to wake us. Unless of course, someone is firing a gun.

“Mama? What’s that noise? Mama, Papa. I heard something.”

He was reasonably calm, probably more calm than we were because he has little idea what it could be and because we hide our feelings better. It’s barely light outside, and soon Rose came in from the children’s bedroom too.  She is six years old, which is an age of intellectual rebellion, a foretaste of adolescence, and as a late sleeper, she is usually surly most mornings having not yet discovered coffee. But not this morning. With a tinge of concern she was about to ask what that sound was, when suddenly we heard it again. Four loud explosions, two close together and two more staccato, that echo off the houses, garages, and trees. I was fully awake now. They did not appear to be directed at us, but they were close enough to rattle the windows on the far side of the house. Could they be coming from the lake?

Aloud, we suggested hunters and left unsaid any other possibilities that might upset the children and frighten ourselves. After all, this was rural Indiana. What other possible explanation was there? A couple of months earlier, we heard a single gunshot down the road while driving home that proved to be a neighbor ridding himself of a undesirable rodent, but unless this was a near-sighted octogenarian with a persistent and deaf ground hog, there were too many shots for that explanation. A domestic dispute was hardly likely, even among the few remaining tough retirees who chose not to migrate back to Fort Wayne for the winter. It was early December, too early for cabin fever – the weather had barked more than bitten. There was a meaningless dusting of snow still frosting the lawn and a thin sheen of ice had licked the edges of the lake. Gang warfare was out of the question. Most of the people beyond the lake were farmers, half of them Mennonites. And I was reminded of a joke.

Q. What is this? “Clip clop clip clop clip clop. BANG! BANG! Clip clop clip clop.”

A. An Amish drive-by shooting.

I kept this one to myself.

Dawn got out of bed and walked to the front of the house, meaning the side facing the lake, not the street. When you live on a small body of water, with houses crowding the shore in French long lots around the entire perimeter, the lake itself is the center of the community, not the various approach roads snaking about like veins. I was fully awake now and I followed but turned to the back of the house, because the front of our house was twenty feet from the water, and, product of the suburbs that I was, I could not conceive of someone swimming out into the water to fire a gun.

“It must be duck season,” I heard Dawn call from the other side of the house, and we all headed to the lake side parlor to watch a canoe paddler in camouflage green glide past our window. He slowed down and picked up a dead bird which he casually tossed, the feathers streaming an arc of lake water into the air, before landing on a large pile of fowl corpses in the front of the canoe. Scanning the 180 degree view, we spied a large collection of decoys at the south east corner of the lake, laid out in front of the cattails.  The canoe headed slipped back into the cattails and disappeared behind a duck blind.

“Come on kids,” I said. “I’d like you to stay out of the lake room this morning.”

The lake room is the best room in the house, with a grand view, a CD player, the current peck of library books, and the most comfortable couches in the house, but the children made no fuss. Like me, they were paranoid of the unknown. The hunters weren’t aiming at the houses. Yet. I am a believer in not tempting fate.

I was also mildly peeved at the interruption to my sleep. Because of Jewish services and religious school, it we don’t get to sleep in really late on Saturday mornings, but at least we get an extra hour or two compared to the work week. Not that morning. And I liked the ducks, even though they pooped on the docks all summer, and I was sorry they were so near-sighted or love-sick or hungry or tired or just plain stupid to fly over Pretty Big Long Lake on a Saturday morning in duck season.

~ by Matthew on December 9, 2008.