The Shooting. James Boice

his father says, —I want you to experience this, this is important.

      At midnight they are still there, in their folding chairs in that conference room, cheering for heroes and booing sacks of shit. God, how he would love to go running on the deck of the pool and take off from the edge and fly in the air above the blue water, pulling his knees to his chest, and splash. How he would love to race those boys from end to end. He is trying to keep his eyes open. —Wake up, his father says, nudging him, —you’re missing it.

      Lee looks at what he is missing and he is missing more speeches and they are the same speeches, and he is missing men in orange hats standing around the edge of the crowd with walkie-talkies, and he is missing other men, these in suits, walking quickly from group to group and talking and nodding and pointing at the men in orange hats and talking.

      —Can I have a Coke? Lee says.

      —No, the machines are all empty. The bad guys did it on purpose to try and weaken us with dehydration.

      Lee is crying.

      —What the hell’s the matter?

      —I’m tired.

      —Christ Almighty.

      Lee knows he is disappointed in him, even disgusted, but he must sleep, his face burns with exhaustion. Gets up, walks out past all the energetic men in orange hats and frazzled, confused men in suits, carrying all his stickers and pins he has collected—his favorite sticker bears an image of a skeleton clutching a wood-and-iron rifle and the words You can have my gun... when you pry it from my cold dead hands. It is proud and manly and heroic. He passes the pool. There are no kids playing in it now, it is dark and empty and the water is still and the door to it is locked. Goes to the penthouse, there are two suites; he and his father have both, each his own. Lee falls instantly, embryonically asleep, shoes still on.

      His father is nudging his back. —Lee, Lee. Wake up. Ice clinks in his father’s glass. Now it is he who is weeping. —Wake up, Lee. We did it. Me and Harlon, we did it. We won. We saved the country. We took it, it’s ours. No compromise! Never any compromise! Things will be good now, Lee. And know what Harlon said? He said Daddy was essential, that he played a vital role in our success. That’s what he said, Lee: Essential. Vital.

      He listens to his father on the phone with the General. —Where is everybody? We said oh-six-hundred hours and it’s damn near eight. He listens, says, —General, this is the third time we’re rescheduling this muster. It’s like herding cats. I understand people have prior commitments but we’ve got to commit to this. This needs to be the prior commitment.

      When he hangs up, his face is red and tight, but he looks more sad than angry. He scoffs to Lee, —General! He’s not a real general. Never fought in a war. Never served a single day in the military. He’s a daggone junior high school math teacher.

      And soon the army men stop coming to the mountain and Lee and his father are not soldiers anymore.

      For ninth grade he has to go to a special school for the stupid, because his father homeschooled him for seventh and eighth grade and he did not learn anything. After the special school for the stupid, his mother wants him to go to an elite boarding school in New Hampshire where, she says, people go on to Harvard and become senators and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and Academy Award winners, but his father says Abraham Lincoln went to school in a one-room cabin in the woods of Illinois and went on to teach himself how to become a lawyer and then a great president; those people at those schools think they’re better than everybody and above everything even though they haven’t earned their station, and he won’t raise Lee to be like that, he won’t have Lee thinking that way about himself, he will continue to be self-taught at home. His mother says the authorities won’t allow that because what Lee’s father seems to consider homeschooling they consider neglect. They fight about it through the lawyers. As compromise, Lee has to go to the local public high school. His father says it is an ultra-liberal hellhole, the machine of machines. —Just don’t let them brainwash you, he says. —Don’t let them corrupt you.

      The school is terrifying. These strange people all seem so much bigger than he is and live in a chaos of unwritten social codes and arbitrary rules. How is he to know not to wear his Remington hat inside? Where was it stated that he would be laughed at for his clothes, which are mostly military-issue camouflage? Why is it considered any of their business that he prefers eating lunch alone in the back stairwell reading military histories instead of braying in the cafeteria with the other sheeple? Everyone appalls him with their frivolity and inane cheerfulness—what the hell are they always so daggone happy about when the country, the world, is how it is?

      His first year there he does not say a word to anyone except in class when they make him. Joey Whitestone is the only one who is friendly to him but he does not like Joey Whitestone being friendly to him. He tells Joey Whitestone to leave him alone but Joey Whitestone does not leave him alone, so Lee Fisher tells him if he does not leave him alone he will blow his head off—and now Joey Whitestone knows to leave him alone and the rest of them know too.

      It feels good to drive them off, to control people in such a way. You have no control when you let people change you. Blast them with coldness and it solves the problem, keeps them from hurting you. All people will hurt you. You must guard against them. When he gets home and is alone in his bedroom, he lies on the bed sobbing. He is so lonely but does not know what to do about it, he wants people but he hates everybody.

      In English class where they are taking a test on To Kill a Mockingbird, Joey Whitestone passes him a note: I stole my uncle’s smokes, we’re meeting at the railroad tracks after school, want to come? Yeah, right—it’s a trick, Lee can see that, payback for what he said. Who knows what they have planned for him when he shows up? Humiliation. In some form or another, humiliation. He knows how to handle this: he raises his hand for the teacher, waving the note in the air. Joey serves ten days’ suspension, the school administration tells Lee he did the right thing. It feels good. Right. He wants that feeling all the time. He will be a police officer, he decides, when he is eighteen and may leave. He will go to New York and be a police officer. With his mother. His mother is not there anymore and has not been for a long time but that does not matter, he does not need her, he needs no one. He will be in New York, alone. Far away from here.

      The principal recognizes him as one of his own kind, not just another moron student. Here is a boy with responsibility and virtue and values, a boy I do not have to worry about. —If only I had a school full of Lee Fishers, the principal tells him, in his office, splitting a Coke, excused from that period of algebra class.

      Lee takes it upon himself from then on to collect intelligence on all illicit activity perpetrated by students on school grounds during school hours—drinking in the bathroom, weed in the parking lot, cigarettes in the woods, sexual activity in the stairwells, unauthorized absences, cheating on tests—and deliver the evidence to the principal so that justice may be served and Lee may feel love. The other students start calling him McGruff the Crime Dog. They taunt him, threaten him, but most important, they stay away from him.

      Someone writes on the mirror of the boys’ bathroom: LEE FISHER IS A CHOAD. Lee sees it when he is in there washing his hands, sees his reflection looking back at himself through the insult, his hair close cropped with electric shears, done himself like a self-sufficient soldier. Does his face not reveal that he is unmoved, his eyes that he is unshaken? Is this not the reflection of a good guy being persecuted for his soundness of character, mocked for his having done the right thing?

      Joey returns from suspension, does not look at Lee, does not invite him anywhere ever again, is always surrounded by friends, is always laughing or making them laugh, does not seem to have the problem with life that Lee has. Lee’s problem with life is everything, everything to do with life and living. Lee sees Joey blowing smoke from a joint down Tamra Riley’s throat in the parking lot one day after school. She is the prettiest girl who ever lived—Lee has been in love with her since the first time he saw her. He hates Joey even more than ever, for how he has taken advantage of Tamra Riley. He waits until they leave, goes and picks up the joint, and writes down the date and time and types