Pandora's Gun Read Free

Dante’s position. Peter could see when he switched classes. He saw when he went to lunch, and he knew when Dante was walking toward his house to bring him homework and share the day’s news.
    Until last year, they talked about the same movies, complained about the same classes, liked long, philosophical discussions about the same topics. Peter was the better student, while Dante was more athletic, although he didn’t play sports for the high school.
    Lately, though, Peter found himself looking at this best friend with surprise. Dante argued more. He wanted to go places that didn’t interest Peter. He hung out with kids Peter didn’t know. Sometimes Peter wondered what happened. Maybe an alien replaced him with an exact duplicate. Did I hurt his feelings? There were times when he felt like they were on slick ice, sliding apart.
    Two months earlier, Peter had waited on the sidewalk in front of Dante’s house for ten minutes before he went to the door and knocked. Dante opened the door, wearing an old T-shirt and sweatpants. His eyes were bloodshot. “Not going to school today,” he’d said. “A little too much of Dad’s Johnny Walker last night.” Dante started drinking on the sly months ago, but he hadn’t confronted Peter with the evidence so clearly before. Peter turned the significance of that news over and over as he walked the rest of the way to school. He remembered when they’d agreed a couple of years past that they would never do something stupid, like drink or smoke or do drugs.
    A year ago, Peter would have shared his discoveries with Dante without a thought. They moved like a pair of birds linked with a silver strand, but a year is a long time when you have just entered your teens. In a year, Dante faded a little, became fuzzy in Peter’s mind, and when Peter looked at him, he didn’t quite see his own reflection. They hadn’t walked to school together since that morning.
    So Peter carried the heavy duffle bag home, hid it under his bed, and put the gun in a backpack to meet Dante.

The day before, Peter spent the afternoon with Student Senate, cleaning out an abandoned house near the school. They had to log 100 community service hours in the year, and this was the project they’d chosen for November. The house represented the last remnant of a subdivision that went up when the coal mine opened on BLM land nearby, and was abandoned when the mine went out of business after a few years. The cheaply-made houses had no resale value, so over time the city had been razing them to keep the drug dealers out. Now the property was lined by streets and sidewalks, but the lots were scraped clean except for this last house.
    Peter liked abandoned houses, just as he liked landfills and the secret dump in the woods. Treasure is everywhere! he thought. Standing in a back bedroom, he filled a trash bag with water-soaked National Geographics . A girl complained from another room that the house smelled funky, and she worried about spiders. Peter smiled. He liked the community service hours for Senate. In a couple of weeks, they’d be raking leaves from old folks’ yards, and after that they would spring into action with shovels and buckets of road salt anytime it snowed.
    Sometimes the old people would give them tips, but they lived on fixed income, so it might be a plate of cookies, or once, memorably, three delicious lemon meringue pies.
    But as much as helping out felt good, he liked digging through refuse. It’s an odd hobby, he thought as he picked up a moldy shoe from behind the magazines. He looked at it critically. At one time, it had been a brown businessman’s shoe. Now, the toe had separated from the sole, and the sole itself had a hole in the bottom. He’d heard somewhere that bums would line the bottoms of their holed shoes with newspaper to protect their feet. How many miles had this shoe seen? What was the person like who’d bought it? Did the man picture that one day a high school kid would be