When the first bullet hit the plastic radio, a snapshot was created. Plastic chunks floated in the air, as though they were weightless and suspended. The second bullet penetrates this still life, releasing motion, releasing the left speaker of its assigned duty. Shot number three sent bullet number three into the earth, a few feet away from the radio, shredded plastic, and the last of Tamara. When the crack of the third gunshot had drifted to the open air, what was left, a growing silence. This is Halloween weekend. Kenny and I play with guns. Bradley parts ways with Tamara.
Kenny and I watch Bradley send the last items of his and Tamara’s relationship off into the sloping ground of an abandoned utility road somewhere at the shallow bottom of the San Bernardino Mountains. With Bradley’s Pontiac Firebird, we brave miles of wet dirt and open cliffs to come to the “shooting spot” that Bradley thought would be sufficient. We have a plastic bags filled with Tamara’s clothes, her radio, a chest of drawers, an electric fan and assorted other objects with us. Bradley brought these things. They were left in his room, he tells us. They were Tamara’s, he tells us.
Bradley parks on a cliff, which overlooks a dried riverbed. There are hawks circling us. Beyond that, a ravine. As Kenny and I throw rocks into the canyon, Bradley sets up an altar to Tamara. He stacks the lighter objects on top of the drawer, and places the bags of clothes on either side. He works at this arrangement for a time, tweaking and removing until everything is in a symmetrical mound. He looks at these objects. He looks at what’s left of Tamara. Kenny and I watch him. We nod to each other in silence.
“So whose taking the first shot?” Bradley says, smiling. He loads the magazine for the 22-caliber pistol. He takes his time doing this.
“It’s all yours,” Kenny says. He met Tamara first. He warned Bradley.
Kenny loads the black security shotgun. I don’t know why he brought the thing, but it’s here with us, black and shining, ready to pump shells into the stack of Tamara. Kenny loads his shotgun, Bradley inspects his pistol, and I sit on the trunk of the Firebird and watch them. Kenny and Bradley are rough around the edges: they wear shorts in Autumn, they listen to rock and roll from their father’s era, they don’t shave, they shoot guns at objects to cope with pain. I’m here for the spectacle.
Bradley is ready. He stands at a distance from the pile, legs apart, back straight in a shooters stance. I’m supposed to emulate this stance when it’s my turn. I’ve never shot a pistol before. I’ve never shot the memory of someone before either.
“I take shooting serious Mike,” he says. “This is how it’s done.”
He takes his three shots. And that brings us back to the silence. Dust settles around what is left of Tamara’s things. Bradley stares at the dirt foothills beyond the canyon cliff we sit on.
“She’s probably going to ask me for this stuff back,” he says. “And I’ll tell her to come down here and pick it up.”
He says this as though it was a joke, with a pause and emphasized punch line. I don’t know if really finds this funny, I certainly don’t find it funny. Kenny finds it funny to pump shell after shell into a dwarfed burnt tree. The tree falls after a time. Bradley shoots the plastic bag of clothes and lingerie spills out like entrails. A choir of shots fills the canyon below us, sending a coyote from a bush into twists of the riverbed before it disappears into the landscape. When they finish, the same silence follows the ringing in my ears.
“Let me shoot that radio,” Kenny says.
“Give Mike a turn first,” Bradley says.
“Fine, then I’m using the next box of shells.”
Kenny works the gun over the trunk of the car. He whistles an odd tune.
“You ready?” Bradley says, holding the pistol out to me. “Shoot it just like I did.”
I take the gun in my hand and walk to where Bradley stood. I aim at the untouched bag of Tamara’s clothes. These clothes probably don’t fit her any more. They were her pregnancy clothes, Bradley tells me, the flowing tops and spandex she left at his apartment. She was pregnant when I met her; this was the only time she became tangible to me, more than a bad story or a bad joke. More than gossip.
When I met Tamara, Bradley had given away two pints of his blood then drank heavily. He was in a stupor at my parent’s house. He wanted to leave. With risk of calling his older or younger sister, we called Tamara; hers was the only number he could recite without his cell phone. They weren’t together anymore, they hadn’t been for years, say an off chance sexual encounter that left a part of him with her when he went away for medical school. She was pregnant.
When Tamara showed up on the doorstep of my parent’s house. She looked uncomfortably pregnant, swollen.
“We’ll come back for his things in the morning,” she said.
Kenny and I watched them go. What was this “we”? They weren’t a couple any more, but she was living with him. He dropped out of medical school to raise their child. But Kenny and I agreed that this “we” wasn’t savory.
But that was before she had the baby.
“Line up the sight with anything in the pile,” Bradley says. “Then shoot.”
I line up the sight and pull the trigger. The bag of clothes is untouched. I shoot again. Still nothing. I shoot three more bullets at what’s left of Tamara and litter the ground around the pile. The dirt swirls. I don’t have any real animosity towards her, so shooting her things proves to be challenging. That and I’m a bad shot. I give Bradley back the pistol.
“You’ll get better at this,” he says.
Kenny is throwing her CD’s into the air and shooting at them as they whistle back to the ground. The disc he hits detonates mid air, electrifying the bare sky. Another snapshot of floating dust, plastic pieces, shiny undercoating. These bits of compact disc are suspended above the dry riverbed, just above us, just below the circling birds. Then the pieces scatter into the brush.
Bradley’s kneels over the altar to Tamara, or what’s left of it. He riffles through the chest of drawers, which boasts two or three puncture wounds from his shot. There are still belongings inside the drawer; he holds something in his hand, it shines in the sun. He pushes the drawer shut. Wood splinters fall around his feet.
“Trade me guns,” he says to Kenny.
They trade guns, I watch from the hood of the car. Bradley stands three feet from the pile, shotgun in his armpit, one eye clamped shut. He fires. The second bag of clothes explodes; the skeleton of the radio is sent up into the air, the chest of drawers collapses on itself, the electric fan cracks in half. After all eight shells are fired; I can only hear my tongue moving inside my mouth. Kenny is yelling something, clapping his hands. Bradley let’s the gun hang slack in his arm.
This miasma of wood clippings, paint chips, metal and fabric is smeared across the dirt road. This is what’s left of Tamara. Bradley is silent as he walks back to the Firebird.
“You okay?” Kenny asks.
“I’m great,” he says. “You want to try the shotgun, Mike?”
“Sure,” I say.
“I’m going to take a picture of you,” he says.
“Shooting the gun?’
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s going to look awesome.”
I shoot a couple rounds into the pile, tearing what appears to be a pair of jeans into shreds. Bradley takes a picture of me, then of Kenny, whose is shooting the pistol with one hand.
“I’m going to send these to her,” he says. “And say: ‘hey, here’s the rest of your stuff. If you want it.”
He laughs after he says, almost as though it’s a joke. Her picking up her clothes in the middle of nowhere must be the punch line. Kenny and I laugh. I laugh out of pity. Kenny might to, or to him it’s entertaining. He didn’t like Tamara regardless. He didn’t after Bradley converted for her. Bradley became the drunkest Mormon we would ever know.
Bradley snaps a few more shots, of the pile, the guns, Kenny throwing CD’s, me incorrectly handling a deadly weapon, the sky, the hawks, and the ravine. He hands Kenny the camera and picks up the pistol.
“Take a picture of this,” he says.
He walks back to the pile and kicks through the framework of a drawer. There, inside, is a stuffed animal. It’s dirty and missing an arm but mostly intact. The stuffed animal looks like a gift for a newborn, a blue bear. He throws the toy into the air and fires at it. As the bullets hit, wisps of dirt escape the center. The thing falls to the floor in pieces. He keeps shooting at it.
“Is he going to be all right?” I ask Kenny.
“I hope so,” Kenny says. “It’s a pretty a fucked situation.”
Tamara and the baby, being the situation. When Bradley dropped out of medical school, he got back his old job at Costco. He found an apartment with two rooms, one for him, one for her; the baby would sleep in the living room. Him and Tamara had left each other on bad terms, infidelity, he told me. Now they were living with each other in even worse terms. She was pregnant and said it was his. Bradley said he wanted to do the right thing with the baby, even if he had stopped loving it’s mother a long time ago. He said he wasn’t going to be the bad guy. He had his doubts though; he said he couldn’t trust her. But he was ready to be a dad until then.
When the baby was born, Bradley was there, next to her, ready to be the father. In the photograph at the hospital he showed for those few months, he is smiling. Tamara looks incoherent. The baby resembled dried fruit wrapped in blue blankets. But that was just a photo, a snapshot of a moment that would pass. In Bradley’s case, it would come raining down like the bowels of the stuffed teddy bear.
“Let’s finish these boxes of bullets up,” Bradley says. “I didn’t buy all this ammo to stare at.”
He hands me the pistol, a freshly loaded magazine.
“Then we’re gonna go party,” he says.
I take a few shots at the ravine in the distance. The bullets don’t appear to hit anything or land anywhere, they absolve into the panorama with each echo. Bradley is shooting more of Tamara’s CD’s as Kenny volleys them into the air. Mid afternoon is creeping up on us with dim clouds and low winds. The hawks have gone.
I start to get the hang of this shooting ideology. Bradley and I stand by the trunk of his Firebird, loading our guns.
“How did you find out?” I ask him.
“I had them do a blood test right after the kid was born,” he says. “They said it would take a little while.”
He’s building up to it.
“They call me one day and tell me the kid isn’t mine,” he says. “So I came home and moved her shit out of my house. Called her and said ‘your stuff is sitting on your parents lawn, don’t ever fucking talk to me again.”
“How’d she take it?” I ask.
“She cried,” he says, his voice raises. “Best five hundred bucks I ever spent.”
Boom, there’s the punch line again. Bradley speaks in one-liners about the Tamara situation. He says he was ready to be a dad, but he had to make sure. I don’t really blame him. I wonder though, as we finish loading our guns, what it was like to not be a dad. I don’t ask that though. We go back to shooting shrunken trees in the distance. Kenny watches us sleepily, cigarette hanging from his mouth. We shoot until the bullets are gone, and so is Tamara. Bradley wants a picture to take with him back to medical school.
“I’ve got this thing set on auto timer,” Bradley says. “Hurry up!”
We pose against the sunset for a picture: Kenny pointing the shotgun at the camera, Bradley with his pistol cocked toward the sky, I give a “thumbs up”. This is bonding time for Bradley, therapeutic venting with high-powered weapons and minor destruction. They pack their guns and talk about the party we will go to later. I hear Bradley laugh and say something about his fake son. He refers to the baby as that, not giving it a name.
Bradley doesn’t talk about the three months he spent with Tamara as a family. Tamara is little more than “she” or “that girl” in casual conversation; the baby is “fake son”. The ride home we talk about our costumes for the party we’re attending, not the last bit of Tamara and the baby, not the things; the memorabilia that was riddled with bullets and whatever it is Bradley kept locked inside of his.
The three of us arrive at the Halloween party, Bradley doesn’t tell us what his outfit is on the way there. He wears a suit, a tie, dress shoes. His hair is combed. The gun grease and bullet shavings are washed from his hands and face. Someone asks us to pose for a picture when we walk in, we oblige them.
“Let me finish my outfit,” Bradley says. He pulls a paper connected to a piece of green yarn from the briefcase he is holding. He hangs the sign around his neck, which says:
“Bradley Cirullos’s Resume:
· Hardworking
· Ambitious
· College Graduate
· Not “Your” Baby’s Daddy”
This is the punch line, to what might be the best joke of his mid twenties. This picture was the end of our day, after hours of guns, cameras, bad jokes. He keeps this picture with him at medical school, he tells me; it’s framed on his desk. This picture we pose for is a snapshot, and in it, is the last of Tamara’s things.
