House Hunting, with Guns

This morning, it being rainy and cold, I decided to wear my new hat (courtesy of the husband of my sister-in-law) to school. It wouldn’t hurt, I figured, to wear a bit of both blaze orange and camouflage, to build a bit of comradeship with my rural, deer-hunting students.

Most of the day the hat hung unnoticed on a jutting screw beneath the mounted TV set in my classroom, but after school I eagerly donned it again for the drive home. It was a sunny, comfortable afternoon, and I decided to swing by a house I’d learned was for sale.

This house was perched on a southern hillside, a very cute, affordably little place with a garage and a quarter of an acre, fenced, on a country road just where it changes from paved to gravel. The surrounding pastures glowed autumn green in the afternoon sunlight; a few nearby houses tastefully marred the serenity. “Super-sweetly potentially suitable,” I thought, and turned my truck around to go get M to show her this new find.

As I was pulling away, I looked down in the pasture below the house, and noticed what looked like a permanent target. “Hmmm,” I thought. “Did that belong to the previous residents, or the neighbors?” Without fondness I remembered that, back in an earlier house hunting era, we had checked out a fixer upper just down the valley from a conservation club. We didn’t realize the shooting dimension of “conservation” until our second visit to the house, which happened to be during a veritable shootout. I would have gone mad if we’d have bought that place; if this property bordered even an informal gun club, I knew it was off-the-charts in a not-for-us way.

The target belonged to the neighbors, I found out. As I pulled into the next-door driveway of the neat-as-a-pin property, where I’d seen a four-wheeler’s taillight flash from inside the garage and so thought I’d just drop by to see what I could learn, a man in a camouflage jacket stood from where he’d been crouched over a piece of cardboard, can of spray paint in hand. Painted onto the cardboard was a life-sized human chest, a yellow mark over its heart, and on either hip of the man was a holstered handgun.

Now, I grew up around people some might consider gun fanatics. I’ve been addressed with aggressive speech emphasized by an out-thrust, holstered hip owned by a man who had been “basically a mercenary” for an oil company in Central America and who decided that during my sister’s wedding (outside at our parents’ house) was a good time to cut loose with his rifle, just over the hill from the ceremony. The time he pointed his hip at me was when I test drove my newly carburetored K-car down the nearby dirt road at 55 miles per hour, which he wasn’t too happy about.

So I said, happily, “Hi, I was just looking at the house next door, and wanted to learn more about the neighborhood. It’s really beautiful out here.”

He had a wild look in his eyes–a sort of deranged post-Vietnam shock even though he didn’t seem to be old enough for that, so maybe it was from the first Gulf war–but he spoke quite pleasantly. “Yes,” he said. “It’s great. This is my parents’ house, over there lives my uncle, and my brother lives down there. We used to own the mill just down there, too, but we sold that. You’re looking at the place next door? They used to be shitbags, who lived there. Where do you work? Have a family?”

I told him where I teach–it was where he’d gone to middle and high school–and said that yes, I have a family. Then I said, “I noticed a target down in the field. Is there a lot of shooting, often? I see you have guns.”

“I was just getting ready to shoot some,” he said, jauntily hefting one of the handguns from one of the holsters. “Want to lay some out?”

“No thanks,” I said. “How much shooting is there? I don’t know how well the baby would sleep, with shooting.”

“Oh, when I have friends out every couple weekends we shoot, but not past seven or eight o’clock–it gets dark then–and once in a while during the week I shoot, but not usually more than half an hour at a time. You can hardly hear it, though, from inside. Say, they usually leave that house unlocked. I’m just about to do some shooting now, so why don’t you go in the house and you can see how loud it is. It usually doesn’t get much louder than this”–and here he motioned towards a picnic table behind the house–“since I’m using my M-16.”

As I drove back to the vacant house, I wondered if perhaps he was just looking for a chance to accost an intruder, but I strode to the front door anyway. It was locked. I looked in the windows, to a floor that appeared wet, although I couldn’t see any signs of rain having leaked in anywhere.

But while that put a damper on the house’s cuteness, what really stopped me in my tracks was the Bang! Bang! BangBangBangBangBang! that just then echoed across the valley. I got back in my truck and drove home, not even stopping to let the man know I was finished.

M innocently put the icing on the cake for this story, though, for as I stepped into the apartment in my new hat, she asked me, “Did you wear that hat on the road so you wouldn’t get shot?”

I guess you just never know.