Authors: James van Pelt
Pandora's Gun (2 page)
Peter and Dante started preschool together, and they’d been best friends since. They learned to ride a bike on the same day. They built tree houses and buried forts. Any book Peter read, he leant to Dante, and Dante did the same, although Peter leaned toward history and biographies, while Dante mostly read horror and true crime.
They’d walked to school together for ten years. Peter would sling his backpack over his shoulder, cross the street, and then walk two blocks to get to Dante’s house. He’d stand on the sidewalk until Dante bounded out, grinning, ready to tell a joke. Peter remembered the day that Dante had looked at him, full of concern. It might have been when they were in second grade. “Your epidermis is showing,” he’d said. Peter glanced down at his zipper, embarrassed, which set Dante to laughing. “Epidermis is your skin, you goof. Everyone’s epidermis is showing.”
They trick-or-treated together in the fall, and signed up for the same swimming lessons in the spring. They joined T-ball on the same team and played long games of one-on-one basketball on Peter’s driveway.
Both were tall for their age and slender. Dante’s blond hair framed a face that smiled often, and dark eyes that laughed seldom. Peter kept his red hair short, and was the more serious of the two, although Dante could make him laugh.
They synced their first smart phones when they were twelve so they’d know where the other was. A month into 6
th
grade, Peter caught bronchitis and missed two weeks of school. He’d taken comfort in watching the dot on the map that represented 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 holding this same shoe, wondering about him? Had he lived in this room? Did he have big dreams about the money he’d make from mining? Maybe he’d been a foreman. This wasn’t a worker’s shoe. Or maybe this was his Sunday go-to-church shoe. A shoe like this could tell a hundred stories.
That’s what he liked about the dump in the woods. Every scrap hinted at some story. Everything broken once worked and was vital. An abandoned house had once been new and filled with dreams. When he dug through the dump, he uncovered histories. This old house held echoes of the people who used to live here. Peter shivered in delight while looking at a closet filled with boxes waiting to be cleaned out.
He brought the shoe into a beam of light coming through a dusty window. Where he would have put his foot, if he were going to put the shoe on, a film of spider web covered the opening. Hanging to the underside, bouncing a little as Peter moved the shoe, clung a black widow, its red hourglass vividly visible.
Good thing I’m not arachnophobic, he thought as he put the shoe in the trash bag, along with the magazines.
He went to warn the rest of the class to be careful what they picked up.
At 6:00, the clear skies had given way to a storm front coming in from the west. The sun hid behind the dark clouds, and lightning flicked in their depths. The air had taken a damp, autumn feel, like winter emerging. Peter wished he’d brought a jacket. He and Dante cut through the high school’s practice fields to the break in the split rail fence that separated the fields from the woods behind. On the school side of the fence, neatly lined soccer fields and mowed grass had a military order. On the other side, the wildwood defied pattern. Elms, willows, low, scraggly brush, haphazard weeds, and rotted leaves still piled from last winter, created an untamed woods. Their trail to the dump started there, although it wasn’t much of a trail. Spiky brambles tugged at their sleeves as they pushed through.
Dante told a dirty joke that embarrassed Peter, who laughed, even though he didn’t like jokes like that. Dante had been telling more of them lately and saying things like, “Check the rack on that girl.” Peter purposefully wouldn’t look, although sometimes he’d see what Dante was talking about before he could glance away. Dante snuck beers out of his stepdad’s refrigerator, and offered to share with Peter. Dante had started smoking a month ago. But it wasn’t just the change of habits. They’d sworn to each other that they would never do those things—Peter wished to remind Dante of that, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud.
Maybe all could be forgiven, but they didn’t talk like they used to either. Conversations that would never stop now dwindled to uncomfortable pauses. Who do you talk to when you don’t know how to talk to your best friend?
“We’ve never found anything that worked,” said Dante. “Busted stuff, sure, but not a machine.”
They’d walked about half the distance to the dump. In another quarter mile, they’d be there. The sky darkened even more, and a sudden rain pelted them. They took shelter under an elm, waiting for the squall to pass.
“Let me see,” said Dante.
Rain pattered around them, but the thick canopy worked as an umbrella.
“Let’s get to the burnt tree first.” Peter felt the gun’s weight in his pack and a reluctance now to show it.
“Did you find anything else? Anything we could sell?”
“I stopped looking after the tree blew up.”
“I thought you said it burned.”
Peter shrugged. “Whatever. The rain’s stopped. Let’s go.”
Dante whistled when he saw the tree. Steam hissed out of a deep crack where water seeped in. The bark still felt warm. “You weren’t kidding! That’s awesome.”
Peter put the backpack on the ground, opened it, and handed the gun to Dante.
“So, I pull the trigger to turn it on?” he said.
Peter pushed the gun away from him. “And be careful where you point it when you do.”
The screen flared into view. Peter moved behind Dante so he could look over his shoulder. “That upside down Y with the apostrophes on either side was the one I pressed.”
Dante ran his finger across the screen. The twelve icons vanished and were replaced by twelve new ones.
“It looks like Chinese,” said Dante. He replaced the set of icons twice more before they saw the first set of symbols again. “Wow, forty-eight choices. Do you think any of them are Netflix?”
Shadows dominated under the trees, and where the day had been cheery earlier, Peter felt nervous, like they should be hiding, like someone must be watching them. The duffle bag filled with oddly heavy bricks and this . . . whatever it was . . . made him think about those movies where some poor schmuck ended up with a Mafioso’s drug money. The gun . . . tool . . . device could be many things, but it clearly wasn’t his. Just like his mother had said, it belonged to somebody.
Dante touched an icon. The gun clicked as the screen vanished. “Here goes,” Dante said as he held the gun at arm’s length, pointing it at the already burned tree.
Peter wanted to cover his ears.
“Damn,” said Dante, a tinge of surprise in his voice. “The forest is gone.”
The trees stood as they did before, water dripping off the leaves. Overhead, thunder rumbled.
“It looks there to me.”
“No, on the screen, the trees aren’t there.”
The screen had reappeared. Peter looked over Dante’s shoulder. It showed a bare landscape. No trees or grass or brush. Just dirt and rock. Dante swung the gun from one view to the next. On the screen, all plants were gone.
A brown blob in an upper corner caught Peter’s eye. “Go back. What’s that?”
Dante squinted at the screen. “I think it’s a squirrel.” He moved his finger toward the screen, as if to touch it. “Oh, wow.” When his finger grew close, the image magnified. It was a squirrel, one of about a dozen within view, all floating, it seemed, without support. They also found birds and a snake. Peter didn’t know that snakes could be in the trees.
He looked away from the screen again. The forest stood unchanged, but now he knew the animals were hidden in the branches.
Dante turned so the gun was pointed at Peter. He laughed, hard. “You’re naked, bud. Whew, you really should get a tattoo.”
“Let me see that.” The gun erased clothes! “The TSA would like this, I’d bet.” Peter swung the gun up so he could only see Dante from the waist up. He moved his finger toward the screen to see how much it would magnify. Instead of growing larger, though, Dante’s skin turned red in the screen, revealing meat and pulsing veins. “Whoa! I might not have any clothes, but you don’t have any skin.” When his finger got close enough, the image of Dante’s face in the screen peeled away so that he became a sculpture of muscles and tendons. A little closer, and the bone surfaced through the fading flesh—an animated skull that stared back at him—and closer yet revealed the throbbing wet mass of Dante’s brain.
Dante wasn’t looking at him now, though. He bent to study the trail. “Somebody else has been here.”
Peter released the trigger, turning the gun off. In the mud between Dante’s feet glistened the footprint of a smooth-soled shoe. “That’s got to be recent.”
Lightning cracked hard, and the clouds opened, soaking them. Dante surveyed the forest in the rain and the cloud-caused dark, now almost impenetrable. “That’s a recent print. Whoever made that could still be around.”
The woods were no match for the downpour, and there was no safe place to shelter. They ran through the trees to the high school before splitting up for their homes.
After dinner, after Dad finally quit asking him about how his school day went and how his studies were going, and after Dad finally retired to his bedroom for the night, Peter could inspect the gun once again. He rubbed a towel over the backpack, carefully mopping up the moisture before removing the gun.
Outside, the storm had settled into a steady drizzle. Occasionally thunder grumbled in the distance.
The icon Dante had pressed looked like an open box, upside down over a squiggle. Peter activated it, then grunted in surprise. In the screen, the furniture, house and all the vegetation vanished. It was if he was sitting in a warm, dry bubble during a rain storm. Light from within the house showed water sheeting off the roof to the invisible gutters. The streetlights were gone, but their globes of light still hung above the street like Earth-bound suns.
Peter swung the gun around. A cat on the other side of his bedroom wall sidled along the house, keeping out of the rain. Two birds, nestled side by side, hung suspended in the air where the big Maple that grew by his house stood. He panned the gun to reveal more. Twenty feet away, his father sat in his chair in his bedroom, reading. But there was no chair and no bedroom no book, and his Dad on the screen wasn’t wearing clothes. The gun seemed to remove everything that wasn’t landscape or living creature from the view. Who would need an app that did that?
Peter upped the magnification and saw into Christy Sanders’ house, his next door neighbor. Her parents floated in what must have been their living room, bathed by a television’s bluish and inconstant light. He didn’t magnify them. There are some things the human eye is not intended to see, he thought. He was pretty sure that a pair of naked fifty-year-olds would burn his eyeballs out.
Christy herself lay on her bed, back to him. She’d sung the lead in the spring musical last year as a freshman. She was the sophomore pom-pom team captain, and a shoo-in for to be a part of Homecoming royalty in a couple weeks. She was also the only girl in school who Peter could talk to confidently. After all, she was just the neighbor girl. He’d watched her wrestling the trash cans to the alley on trash day, and he’d seen her changing the oil in her car (not very successfully, if the amount of oil on her shirt was an indication). They’d known each other for as long as Peter had known Dante, but sometime after they turned ten, they quit hanging out. She made other friends, and Peter and Dante became inseparable.
Peter didn’t think of the implications of magnifying her image in time. She too was naked, partly silhouetted by her reading light that shone through her hair like a golden nimbus, and for a moment the way her bare hip curved into the small of her back stunned him.
He poked his finger at the screen twice to turn the gun off.
Later, after rehiding the duffle bag and gun in the back of his closet, under layers of old clothes and toys and school projects, he tried to sleep, but in the dark he kept seeing Christy on her bed. I’m not a creeper, he thought. I didn’t spy on her on purpose. Still, when he closed his eyes, he saw how she rested her bare foot on her calf, how her leg bent gracefully, how in the invisible house on the invisible bed, covered with an invisible blanket, she’d looked like a mythical figure floating. Something out of Greek mythology. She belonged in Olympus.
I’m objectifying! he thought. I’m not thinking about her as a person!
When he fell asleep, though, after what seemed like hours, he didn’t dream of Christy. What he dreamed instead were of footprints in the mud, and hosts of angry men searching for the bag in his closet. In the dream, they circled his house, then closed in. Nothing is truly lost, he thought. Everything belongs to somebody.
He woke before dawn and couldn’t fall back to sleep. After a while, he unburied the duffle bag and took the gun out again, looked in the direction of Christy’s house, but he didn’t turn it on. He thought about it though.
As the sun rose, Peter slipped through the back door, duffle bag in hand, and put the gun in the trunk of the 1958 Ford Fairlane Dad had been restoring for the last half-dozen years. He couldn’t think of a safer place to hide it.