Last Day on Earth Read Free

and hit him in the back. Luckiest shot of my life, and today had been the unluckiest.
    I put my finger to my lips to ask Ned to keep this a secret, then ducked into the shed to place the BB gun and ran back inside the house.
    The van pulled up, the neighbors pounding at our front door. Did I open the door and talk with them? I remember their yelling, and I remember what they looked like, two older boys in high school, stoners with long hair, and I remember feeling frightened, but I could have been watching through the peephole.
    When my mother came home, she believed in my innocence. She wanted to clear my good name. So we drove around to the neighbors and sat in their living room next to that shattered, missing door, and she laid into them for how their sons had frightened me. She was aschool counselor, an authority of sorts. But they knew I had shot at their dog, which pissed them off even more than the glass.
    My mother then took me to Ned’s house. I remember sitting down with Ned’s parents. Ned had squealed on me already about hiding the BB gun, but his father said something like “we know David’s a good boy,” and Ned’s mother pursed her lips and made it clear she knew that wasn’t true. My mother looked at me then, a curious look, as if I were some new kind of monster.
    Then we visited our other neighbors. They reported seeing me on the roof with a pellet gun, said they were tired of me shooting all the doves off the telephone wires. They liked doves, and no doves came here anymore.
    My mother called the police. I was still maintaining my innocence, and she wanted the truth. I thought it was bad form, personally, to call the police on your own son, but she cared only about truth and justice, not distracted at all by blood.
    I lucked out, though. The cop who arrived was the daughter of “Green,” our neighbor at our previous house, an older woman who became like a grandmother to me and my sister.
    The three of us stood at the fence right where I had stood to fire the shot. “Can you trace the angle the BB was shot from, some sort of ballistics?” my mother asked. She seemed ready to pay for the test herself.
    “It must have come from up the hill,” I said.
    We went into the shed to look at the BB gun. “It’s broken,” I said. “It doesn’t even work. I thought about trying to hide it because I was scared, but then Ned saw me, so I just put it back.”
    Green’s daughter tested the gun, and it was indeed broken. My mother didn’t know about the other BB gun. But she told Green’s daughter about my pellet gun stunts and everything we’d learned from the neighbors.
    Green’s daughter thought for a while, then said I was a good kid, I got good grades, I shouldn’t be shooting BB guns or pellet guns, but we’d never know what happened to that sliding glass door. It wasn’t possible to figure out the angle of fire with a BB. She said we should just assume I was innocent and let it go.
    So nothing happened, and I continued shooting. From
Survivalist Magazine
I ordered a converter kit for the .300 magnum that allowed me to shoot .32-caliber pistol shells in the rifle. They were much quieter and could be mistaken, even, for firecrackers. They were very accurate through that long barrel, and I could hit streetlights right from my own backyard.
    I ordered the converter kit with my mother’s knowledge and blessing. This was the time of nuclear holocaust fears, of
The Day After
and
The Beach
, and she liked the idea of squirreling away some food and water. We had long excited talks about how I would be able to hunt and provide for the family in times of Armageddon, and this converter kit was a part of that plan, would allow me to kill small game with a rifle that could also snipe bad guys with its full .300 magnum shells. These discussions put us very close to the Michigan Militia that Steve admired, put us dangerously close to his libertarianism, to the primacy of the individual or small clan over the