The Death of Minor Characters continued



        "Don't make me laugh." Brendan rose, ready for Nick's innate craziness to burst out.
        "You'll be sorry," Nick said.
        "You couldn't even kill your dad with a rifle. Put it down."
        He swatted the poker from Nick's hand. Brendan worked with his carpenter father, building houses. Nick wouldn't match Brendan's teakwood strength. He hoped the poker wouldn't be turned against him. Relieved when Brendan dropped it, Nick sat back on the couch, taking hatha-breaths.
        "I downed a bear with one," Nick said.
        "Ned and you shot simultaneously," Brendan said. "We wanted you to go first, kill it, but the bear ran up the hill."
        "Ned said we both were in on it."
        "We only found one spent shell. It wasn't yours."
        "I could've been somebody if I hadn't missed." Ironic? Nick hadn't a clue.
        "Russell has the 30.06 now." Brendan explained that Russell was schizophrenic, getting monthly disabilty benefits.
        "Schizies shouldn't have guns."
        "If I took it away from him, he'd lose trust," he said. "He eats food with lots of Omega-3 fatty acids."
        "Pharmaceuticals get all the raves."
        "Hanging with animals, going hunting, smelling trees," he said. "The farm's best," Brendan said. "Environment, how society's organized causes mental illness." He played the professorial CD, becoming an intellectual sociologist.
        Ole Karl's buried in Highgate Cemetery. His statue got beheaded long ago. John Denver's CD track, "I'm Just a Country Boy," whirred in Nick's mind, mirroring Brendan's.
        "Russell's more bonded than I am to reality."
        On the claim, starving, sleeping on sagging chicken wire strung between two fir poles, Nick dropped three feet to get into "bed." Before sleep one night, he decided to slaughter everyone: people, horses, ducks, goats, dogs, cats. Then he'd torch the cabin and barn. An old, loaded rifle hung on a nearby tree. Nick had no idea what came after his apocalypse, so it never happened. But he compressed undefineable aggression. A murder gene lurked inside some ancestor in the family tree. Tracing back to nobilty was just another cliche, a delusional reflex motivated by self-loathing. Nick figured he carried that family gene. Or was it mental illness, Nick confusing murder with psychosis?
        "Anti-gun liberals have it all wrong." Brendan said.
        "Like me?" Brendan spat into an empty soup can Nick gave him.
        "Russell served in Iraq, you know."
        "No mental disqualifications?"
        "They have to lower standards with a volunteer Army."
        "They'll bring back the draft. Did he come back whole?"
        "Yeah, but with a little PTSD."
        "Most never get that," Nick said. "Only 3% in WW II."
        "He keeps telling me something over and over," Brendan said.
        Nick used to have compulsive thoughts about baseball, striking out in a crucial Eagle's League game. Sub-trivial, but it required medication for a few months.
        "Flashbacks?"
        "Not the war, but death flashbacks." Repetitious thoughts were concrete and specific, not abstract like death.
        "Too amorphous, death-visions."
        "More like killing, actually."
        "War's all about that. Must be PTSD?"
        "He and I know it's not that," he said. "It's more murder than killing.'
        Nick hadn't ever known a real murderer. Once, he overheard a guy in a bar tell drinking companions, "I've done lots of shit, but I never killed anyone," he drink-talked. Nick understood the declaration the opposite of his words.
        "I think homicide's a better word." Nick watched re-runs of TV's "Homicide," Baltimore streets blanking his memory better than booze ever had. Never retrieving memories, the tube blurred then shredded them.
        "You think?"
        "A man pushed someone over the edge."
        "Everyone's been pushed over the edge." Nick recognized his voice sounded artificial, sort of like flavored ice he'd slurped long ago.
        "The real edge."
        " 'Simulacra,' Baudrillard's word for real."
        "Bullshit."
        "Over the abyss?" Nice and Nietzsche.
        "Precipice. Bouncing down the embankment."
        Like a dieback, a tree started dying from the tips of its leaves or roots, Nick felt death from his fingertips and joints. It had no reverberation, nothing plangent about being dead. Under The Volcano:  Damn Lowry's beloved fucking literary word. Nick choked back the allusion.
        "He saw something?"
        "Witness, like in the courtroom that time." The jury ruled Brendan's friend not guilty on a trespass charge during a small anti-war gathering. Neither had been inside one since.
        "Russell saw it, pushing her over the edge." For Nick guilt and death were interchangeable, thought and deed indisguishable.
        "All those toxics, my system went into overdrive."
        "You never went to the funeral." Nick read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Wouldn't that count as a funeral? "Me and Russell are Christians now."
        "That doesn't sound like you at all."
        "People change. Russell's outside in the truck."
        "Invite him in why don't you."
        "We're going to a Christian gathering from here."
        "They're rallies in the most secular big cities now," Nick said.
        Brendan turned off the light near him, reaching into his jacket pocket.
        "You sold it to me. The student loans hadn't kicked in." Nick had no use for the over-and-under .38 Derringer, buying it on a whim.
        "It helped get me through."
        "When Russell found it, something clicked," Brendan said.
        The shibboleth in the backcountry had been the Prudent Man Theory. A prudent man needed a reasonable prospect of success to stake a claim, according to an old mining law.
        "Prudent men think about the future," said Nick.
        "You remembered. You don't have one."
        He put the Derringer against Nick's forehead. Afterwards, bits of Nick's cartilage, grey matter, splattered on Brendan's hands.
        "Always cheeky," he said to Russell in the pickup. By two am they arrived in the Big City, parking on a humungous tarmac. They slept until sunrise, then streamed inside with other worshippers. The multitude soon prayed. Salvation and repentance echoed through the stadium.

END