our trespasses

On Sunday I ducked out of a Mennonite hymn sing to go stand in the rain and shoot pistols. There was a man wearing an oilcloth duster and matching Stetson and the air was thick with gun smoke and spent shell casings. The gunslinger fantasy was a bit difficult to sustain at the sight of our safety glasses and industrial-grade earphones, and dissolved completely when considering our targets, which were bowling pins donated from a local bowling alley.

The Tri-County Sportsmen’s League hosts monthly bowling pin shoots, and has been doing so every summer for over ten years. The signs order you to check in at the clubhouse, but the men at the bar wearing camouflage baseball caps tell will just tell you to head to the range—“they’ll get you sorted out down there.” They are shooting rifles on the hillside and the dogs hunched against the fog think nothing of the persistent reports. I’ve unconsciously pulled a red rain jacket from the closet, leftover reflex of a childhood measured by hunting seasons and men wandering through the back woods despite the orange and black rebuke of our neighbors’ No Trespassing signs.

I’ve just finished a book about the Haitian revolution, and guns have been much on the mind, particularly the trick of keeping gunpowder dry in tropic climates, or the logistics of moving firearms over steep mountain trails. When the French Commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax passed out muskets to former slaves, he declared, “Here is the liberty which Sonthonax gives you; whoever would take this gun from you means to make you a slave again.” The politics behind this 18^th century soundbite are ambiguous—by this point the slaves had already been freed, and while Sonthonax was a noted abolitionist, he expressed as much enthusiasm for killing those colonists who were against slavery as he did for abolishing it.

Thinking of this, of our equally ambiguous right to bear arms, of how one might shoot through the paradox at the heart of “a militia being necessary to the security of a free State” and manage, unlike Raskolnikov, not to mangle something genuinely resembling freedom, I take a .44 and shoot down five bowling pins in 7.62 seconds.

Except Edd, who works at Cabela’s in the firearms department and wishes he could buy the .44 Smith & Wesson semi-automatic with its red dot sight and retails for over $1,000, which essentially makes it the Cadillac of pistols, although you can purchase a custom engraved replica of Smith & Wesson’s 1917 Cenntential for $7,500—Edd tells me to count the pins and shoot them in a circle because that way I won’t think so much, and this does work, at least as far as time is concerned: the next set goes down in 6.34 seconds and by then I’m pretty much hooked.

They give me a .44 special and a 460 Smith & Wesson revolver and then a tiny .22 which feels, in comparison, as light and harmless as a songbird. For never having handled a handgun, it is amazing how much I know after 27 years of murder scenes, military invasions, and bank robberies. There is that moment, standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, where you grip the metal rail, listen to the stones under your feet, and contemplate tossing your body down into that stretch of vertical space. Shooting pistols, the line between imagination and homicide is horizontal; I aim for the pins, albeit poorly, never doubting that any member of the league would hesitate to shoot me down should I suddenly decide to turn towards them and pull the trigger.