A person only gets to make this broad-cloth, life-rending choice once. Even if there is divorce, and a second or third or fourth husband, there is only one time in a life that anyone gets to have that muzzle-flash new first husband. And, at that time, in that instant of hitch, a healthy body thinks this will be my soul mate forever. Every courting woman knows, down to the over-stretched crease of her two-sizes too small jeans, that there is no way she is going to turn out to be one of those sad shells whose first marriage attempt came down like thin paper practice targets in a thunderstorm downpour: for years after limping her way half loaded into conversations and social events, looking no longer for the perfect armament, but instead pining for the acceptable, and likely to enter into the next union like a steel-stock business woman: pros and cons laid out on the nightstand, and maybe an even balance between the good side and the bad side of a union striking the flash plate as being good enough. No. At this point, it is all good. Good competes with better. Better competes with saintly. Saintly competes with downright wicked. A primed courting woman’s trigger finger knows the right time all by itself. She will know her prey when he displays his full magazine and unwavering barrel.
The room is full of ammunition mindful of the common mating dance. With a polished stock or not, a woman set loose in the gallery has fair chance of getting a hit.
With dark rim-shot hair and eyebrows a shade lighter, the fellow with the AK-47 right now seems to lead the pack. He keeps an eye on all the other cocked potential suitors, rubs a thumb along the spine of his weapon. It is a bit on the unusual side, selecting a weapon made in another country, having to be wearied with keeping the seldom department store available ammunition in stock. But it is the most popular assault weapon in the world, and the selection puts his judgment in line with some of the best train wrecks that can be seen on television news. It gives him a mysterious, international appeal. His boots look like they have seen mud in successful defense of property, are almost certainly worn not simply for Sunday and courting. His rifle he probably chose in order to cement his anywhere/anytime image. A slim lean and a bit of a cock to one side, he looks like he could fly into a final, no-holds-barred answer to any question at the drop of an idle invitation. Makes a woman wonder what else he has done to puff and polish his self-esteem. His elbows could hold out a while.
The curved clip hangs elegantly below the signature rifle; and he has taken the shoulder strap off, preferring to hold it by the main mechanism with just one sure hand: the fingers spread like each could do unsponsored damage, alone. The wooden stock recalls antique days of natural materials, of recoil filtered through tested fibers. Bent into his own comma, he looks like he can calculate the weapon’s walk when it thunders to fully automatic, and the indefatigable machine starts to concentrate on firing rather than on hitting. The barrel at times in the not too distant past has certainly left a bare trace of dirt and oil on his pants legs. He probably fires the piece mostly from the side.
Across the room, in the ghost of his own smoke, the suitor with the AR-15 is thinner, has a filet of blond hair streaming across his speckled forehead; has the straight, jagged edged news-reel style ammunition clip; and leaves the shoulder strap laid out for support. The fact of the rifle’s carrying handle says he is practical, used to doing business as business. There is a creeping wiriness to him, a bubble to his shoulders that hints that his brand of thin is not a limitation. The composite stock requires him to take a bit more in the kick back, and it does not take much imagination to suspect he fires from the shoulder, letting the world know he can take it. He can keep the barrel nearly flat with a three-shot burst. Imagine him with the M80 grenade launcher installed underneath! Imagine him crouching, shirtless, the sweat of commitment dragging itself across his neck and onto his chest. That gun is American made, or almost so, and he wants the whole room to know it. Better or worse is not a question.
You curl your lips under, spreading thinner the ruby lipstick. You check to see that your shirt button puckers the way it did in front of the mirror an hour before. You stop yourself from smoothing your jeans at your hips. You have not eaten all day to fit into these jeans, and you can feel the tiniest tug on your focus, the lack of a bit of sugar at the edges of the brain. There are excuses for letting go.
The AR-15 boy pulls his air in through barely parted lips, regulating his soulful breathing to firing advantage, even for standing at a social. The dip of his chin proves he sees his world in terms of targets and non-targets. All business. You could be that business. If he puts a hand in his pocket it is because there is something in that pocket he wants. If a woman could get him to dance, she could probably see the barest tip of a loose round left in his frayed breast pocket – maybe a hand-loaded, over stuffed one: the special project he keeps with him all his waking time, and on the bed stand at night.
Each boy knows the other is looking to feast on your heart. You lean in and out of the corner of their eyes, slipping into the knot and then out, a curve and a smell and a comfortable place on a game trail that could use a double-back. Each is randomly dressed in his finest camouflage, has his weapon clean enough to eat sushi with, sports an extra clip in a back pocket. They have the jaunt. They have the sass. For an hour they fixed themselves to look unkempt and casual, beating out details like nails into a show rifle cabinet’s frame. They move their display pieces from hand to hand, lean into the weight of the weapons, trying to maximize the stature each mechanism gives them. If any man doesn’t know what a particular gun brings out in him, he had best learn. No one wants to be making Smith and Wesson revolver moves when he is fondling a Bushmaster.
While the two of them compete for your attention, you have caught the eye of the stocky, street smart, soda jerk with the Colt 45. He lazily casts only one eye in your direction, peering through the picket of his hair. Sure, it’s only a pistol. But that 45 caliber bullet packs a lasting punch. The wind of a near miss can almost fell a man. And he wears it jauntily in a low slung holster that falls across his hip like your Chinese-proud hip huggers you wiggle into when you decide to look openly on the prowl. He eyes you with that one focused eye and lets his hand rest on the butt of his classic weapon and your bet is that in a closed space, distances short and not a fatal issue, he could work wickedly well with that old Colt. Firing from the hip there would be that deep throated whump whump that barks louder than the grooved chamber dogs of the other boys; the other boys whose rifles have an appeal and draw, but which do whine and snap: like their testicles are not yet fully out and tend to lie a little flat, even if they will do good work in a pinch. It takes a man to pull down the kick from a Colt and he looks like he could one-hand it, brace the brunt with the brutal muscle of his Saturday night leather clad arm. There is something to be said for old-fashioned strength.
Yet you don’t want to be seduced by the call of the past. The Colt goes back so many years it is hard to fit it into the currently proper concept of spit and swagger. These days, if you want to show you have manhood in your pants, you get an assault rifle. Small footprint, high impact. And would you want any sort of man who would be showing less? What they lack in hair on the scrotum, they can make up for with the number of rounds one lonely clip can hold.
But don’t get ahead of yourself. Let it get just a little darker and the beer cans a little emptier. Let the nervousness and unease work along the backs of their necks and edge into the quiver of their thighs. Wait for the night’s early erections of hope to go slack. When they run out of indoor tricks to play, they will challenge each other to an empty can shoot outside on the fence beside the parking lot. It will be a pop and a ping and their little brothers collecting brass; and you sitting on a car hood, your clothes as tight around you as a drunken chance game’s blue ribbon, watching the wood splinter and a legion of blameless cans get first one hole, then be mercilessly reused, and reused, and reused, and end up shredded into nothing anyone can make sense of: not quite recognizable as something enrolled as a target, or perhaps only something stray caught in the field brush cutter more than once.
And you will keep an eye on each of them. The stance. The steadiness. The victory dance, and the apologetic adjustments after a miss. Their breath, even looking to have less oxygen slipping in than galloping out. How long each of them can keep their aim straight, and how quickly they tire after the can has been filled with ecstatic nothingness. Then, what the game does to the can in the end: whether the beauty is gone when it is no longer a target, or whether the shredding itself makes for a different beauty; how long the loveliness of the can holds out, how quickly it has to be used to be effective. At the last, you let that puckering button go bust, and hope for the best.
Better to be a spent cartridge than a misfire.
Ken Poyner lives in the lower right hand corner of Virginia, with his power-lifter wife and a number of house animals. His 2013 e-book, “Constant Animals”, 42 brief but unruly fictions, is available at all the common e-book sites, and you should go buy it so more brewery workers will have jobs. Recent work is out in Corium, Analog Science Fiction, Spittoon, Poet Lore, Mobius and many other places. He webs at www.kpoyner.com.
–Art by Sagi Kortler