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Shotgun Signs

Justin Hunter

    The movie theater played classics on Tuesdays for two bucks a pop. You had to get there before eleven, though. And they wouldn’t serve alcohol even though the goddamn bar is just as stocked in the morning as it is late at night. So, Daryl poured some coconut rum into a plastic bottle of Coke while still in the parking lot. He’d found the rum tucked in the bottom drawer of the dresser at the old motel he stayed at last night. He slid the bottle into his jeans pocket when he walked into the theater. Now, he was itching to pull it out as he waited for the 10:30 a.m. showing of The Jerk to start.
    His daughter’s first movie had been in a theater like this. Small, empty, playing classics like this one. Dani laughed and he laughed and What’s Up Doc? carried them through to the black-screen credits.
    That was before Daryl decided he didn’t want his daughter anymore.
    An usher walked past Daryl, looking down. Suspecting. Then, he came back and stood next to Daryl. “Sir, is everything all right?”
    Daryl kept his eyes on the screen, waiting for the movie. “What?”
    “You don’t look well.”
    “I’m not.”
    “Can I do—do you need anything?”
    “I need plenty.”
    The lights dimmed and the usher gave up and walked away. Daryl pulled the rum and Coke back out and sipped as the movie began.
    He wished he could say he was drunk when Steve Martin danced on the porch of that house at the end of the movie. But he didn’t feel a thing. He stood, knees popping, and walked out of the theater, past the concession stands, and into the parking lot where the sun had begun to bake the tar.
    He stood in the middle of the road before walking to his truck, and he tried to hold the sun’s gaze. His eyes burned after a second, and his eyelids shut after two. He used to tell his daughter staring at the sun would make her go blind, but that was when Dani was just a girl. Now, he didn’t know what he’d tell her.
    When Daryl got to his truck, he tossed the empty Coke bottle in the bed. The bottle of coconut rum in the glove compartment should get him through his day of driving. Johanna used to drink stuff like that. Bay Breezes made with Malibu, Hurricanes made with some other shit that tasted more like Kool-Aid than alcohol. She spent the summers sipping cocktails on the back porch, pretending it wasn’t a hundred and fifteen degrees outside.
    He and Johanna were still married as far as the law was concerned. But she wasn’t going to find anyone new with the way she was, and Daryl didn’t want anyone in his life besides their daughter.
    He climbed into the cab of the truck and started it up. Most days began like this now. Maybe not with a movie, but with a couple of drinks and too many memories.
    Dani had been eighteen when she told them she was moving in with Sharon. Johanna told her it was a great idea, told her she supported it. And that’s why Daryl’s wife still got to see their daughter.
    Daryl shut his eyes and tried to remember the exact words he’d said to Dani. “Ain’t no daughter of mine shacking up with a dyke.” That was it.
    Of course, if it had stopped there, he might not be driving up and down the empty highways of Southern Arizona just to keep from going insane. No, Daryl told his daughter that she was a piece of shit. Human garbage. That if she left his and Johanna’s home, there’d be no coming back.
    She left, and now all he wanted was for Dani to come back.
    But there wasn’t anywhere to come back to. Daryl’d been living out of his truck and cheap motels for months since Johanna’s thing at work. Somehow, the way Daryl treated their daughter didn’t do them in. It was something that happened on the job. From what she would tell him, Johanna had to use her gun and it messed with her head.
    He guided the truck onto the back road leading toward the state highway cutting west toward Tucson. Dani was living in a trailer with that same girl across the state line up in Utah. They must have wanted to escape the desert. He couldn’t blame them.
    Daryl had even driven up there once or twice. Long drive. He’d sat in the bed of his truck, drinking warm beer, and watching the light through the curtains of the trailer’s windows. He couldn’t just go knock on the door. He’d tried to come back from what he’d done, but Dani wouldn’t allow it.
    A cloud streaked in front of the sun, dropping Daryl into the shadows. When the cloud passed by and the sun lit the cab again, the light caught the edge of a piece of chrome on the passenger side floorboard. He leaned over and pulled back a rust-covered tarp and looked at the shotgun on the floor. The old 10-gauge wouldn’t do much in its current state, but it helped Daryl sleep at night.
    Sometimes, just before laying his head back in the reclined driver’s seat of the pickup at the end of the day, Daryl would slide the barrel of the shotgun between his lips, careful not to smack it against his teeth. He’d hold his thumb across the trigger, and he’d close his eyes and think. Sometimes about Dani—like how he didn’t care who she fucked now, probably didn’t care back then either. Sometimes about Johanna—how he missed her forgiving him for everything he’d ever done as they fell into bed together.
    And on these nights where Daryl let his tongue run across the cold steel shotgun barrel, he’d let his brain wander until he couldn’t stand it anymore. Then he’d pull the trigger.
    The dry click of an empty chamber made his blood go cold and his skin tingle.
    He’d picked up the shotgun at a gun show after he got tired of passing road signs torn apart by birdshot. If people loved shooting up metal signs on the side of the highway, he might as well give it a try. But he never got around to buying shells.
    When Daryl made it to Interstate 10, he went south then caught Interstate 19 toward Mexico. He ducked off I-19 at the first state highway he could find, and he set the cruise control. Yesterday, he drove five hundred miles back and forth across Pima County, Santa Cruz County, and Cochise County. He hit a coyote in the last hour of driving, and that told him it was time to call it a night.
    By one in the afternoon, Daryl was fifty miles outside the city. He passed trailers and ranches. A fireworks stand stood a few yards off the highway. When Dani was twelve, Daryl tried to impress her with a fireworks show on the Fourth in their backyard. Johanna had told him not to do it, but she was gone to work when he sat Dani in a lawn chair out back. He lit the first firework without any trouble. The second one, though, exploded on the ground, caught Daryl’s arm on fire. He got it put out with just a few burns, but Dani cried the rest of the night.
    He’d take that night over any other he’d had in the last few years.
    How he’d made it this long was a mystery. Dani was thirty now, had two kids she adopted. That Sharon girl—woman, now—worked at some crisis management company. Didn’t make much as far Daryl knew since they were still stuck in that trailer. But Johanna told him their daughter seemed happy.
    For the first couple years after Daryl told Dani not to come back, he stayed angry. Couldn’t look at a picture of her without wanting to hit a wall. He’d shattered every picture of his daughter they had lined up on the dresser after Dani moved out.
    Daryl spun off the cap on the rum, took a drink from the bottle, then closed it up. He watched a storm build to the south. All show, no go. The clouds puffed and darkened, but when it came down to action, the storm would back off. Like a bully forced to fight for the first time.
    Daryl had been fighting for some time now. Fighting himself. Fighting Johanna. Fighting the pain after he got hurt on the job. He broke his back in six spots when that wall came down on him. Now, Daryl wasn’t supposed to lift anything heavier than ten pounds. He was supposed to be taking Vicodin to numb the pain. And he was living off the settlement the company gave him.
    That happened four years ago. Maybe that’s what changed his mind. Made him realize what a piece of shit he was. Or maybe it was Johanna leaving him.
    The first time Daryl tried to apologize to Dani, to beg her to let him back in, was three years after she left. Johanna gave him Dani’s number, and Daryl called. Sharon answered and even begged Dani to come to the phone, but Daryl heard his daughter in the background.
    “I ain’t got a daddy,” she’d said to Sharon. Then the phone went dead.
    Daryl tried once more after the accident at work. From his hospital bed, he scratched out a letter. Said he wasn’t worth the time she was taking to read the letter, but he hoped she could forgive him. Said he loved her. Said he might even love Sharon if Dani would give him another shot. He wrote about his own father. No excuse, he’d told her, but his own daddy hated everything. Hate flowed through blood, but Daryl should’ve been better.
    When he got an envelope back from Dani, his heart about stopped. He was out of the hospital by then, laying on the couch at home. He tore it open and found his original letter shredded. He dumped the tiny pieces of paper to the floor, laid his head on the couch, and closed his eyes. He hadn’t tried to reach out since then.
    Daryl passed a few trailers, some slump block homes, a gas station serving as a grocery store, and a post office. He watched the hawks high in the sky, circling, waiting. Waves of heat rose from the tar ahead of him, and he imagined the rain coming, cooling the road. He passed the shell of a burnt-out car and an old mattress tossed to the side of the road.
    Then, he passed a gun store and hit the brakes.
    Daryl pulled to the side of the road and looked at the store in his rearview mirror. It was looking back at him, daring him to break eye contact. He threw the truck in park and stepped out into the dusty hard clay lining the highway.
    He walked back to the store and pulled open the door. An old Indian with close-cropped hair nodded then went back to watching daytime television on the black and white mounted behind the counter.
    “You got 10-gauge shells?” Daryl asked.
    The Indian didn’t look up, but he pointed at a wall toward the back.
    Daryl looked at the rifles on racks along the wall, the handguns under the glass. He could look all day, but he wouldn’t be able to walk out with one of those guns until passing the background check, and that would take too goddamn long.
    He picked up a box of 10-gauge Remingtons from the shelf along the wall in the back and walked up to the counter. It smelled like sawdust and whiskey in the shop, and it reminded Daryl of working out in the garage when Dani was little. He built her a rocking horse from wood he’d picked up in the neighborhood. She watched him, clapping when each new piece was finished. And he got that thing polished to a shine while he drank cheap booze from a styrofoam cup.
    “What’re you drinking back there?”
    The Indian looked up. “What?”
    “Smells like something I’d drink.”
    The Indian shook his head. “You’re on the reservation, so you assume we’re all drinking, all the time. That it?”
    Daryl shook his head and placed the shells on the counter. “Nope, just smells like whiskey. That’s all.”
    “Well, you smell like rum.”
    Daryl shrugged and pointed at the box of shells. “How much?”
    “I’m not selling these to you when you’re drunk.”
    “I ain’t drunk.”
    “Well, you’re not right either.”
    Daryl shook his head. “Just sell me the damn shells.”
    The Indian looked Daryl in the eyes. “Anything else you want to say to me? Maybe you want to ask me to do a rain dance for you, huh?”
    Daryl thought about the storm building out to the south, and the Indian went back to watching the television. Daryl pulled out his wallet. He grabbed a twenty and laid it on the counter. “I didn’t mean no offense. This should cover the shells.”
    Daryl grabbed the box, but the Indian slammed his hand down on Daryl’s hand. “Watch your mouth next time.”
    Daryl nodded and slid his hand and the shells out from under the Indian’s hand. When Daryl was back outside, he opened the case of shells and looked inside as if he was worried he’d just bought an empty cardboard box. He found five rounds stacked in a line inside. Satisfied, he closed the lid and walked back to the truck.
    He should have been angry. And maybe he would have been in the past. Maybe he would have been if he were still at home feeling sorry for himself. Or, maybe that old Indian made some sense.
    Daryl drove on for another twenty or so miles. He drove until he stopped seeing homes. When he was surrounded by saguaros and mesquite trees and open desert, he searched for a road sign. He found a sign warning drivers that the bridge ahead would ice before the road. He couldn’t remember the last time it iced anywhere around there.
    He pulled to the side of the road ten feet from the sign. Daryl lifted the shotgun to his lap, grabbed the box of shells, and climbed out of the truck. He went to the tailgate and popped it open. He slid the shotgun into the bed and set the shells on the side rail. Daryl climbed up, feeling his back try to pull apart as he did so.
    He picked the shotgun back up and grabbed the shells. Up front at the cab of the truck, he laid the 10-gauge down across the roof and opened the box of shells. He’d seen Johanna clean and load her guns a million times, but she never wanted Daryl to have one of his own. That’s why he kept his daddy’s old bolt-action at the job site, tucked under a ventilation duct. Until the accident. He never did get that thing back.
    When he and Johanna got married, she’d been out of the Air Force for six months. She didn’t know what to do next, and Daryl suggested she try to catch on with the sheriff’s department. And after all that time, she was still there.
    Daryl loaded a round into the shotgun and held the gun across the top of the cab. He aimed for the sign in front of the truck, squinting under the late afternoon sun. He laid his finger alongside the trigger and sucked in the hot air coming off the top of the sheet metal.
    When he was young, Daryl’s family had big get togethers. They didn’t have a name or a reason for them, but his grandparents had a lot of kids and those kids had kids. He could remember driving from Arizona out to New Mexico with his parents and pulling into the dirt lot of the ranch house. There’d already be six or seven other cars there, and when they’d get inside, the house would be an echo that just wouldn’t end. Laughter, shouting, cheering, crying. All of it rolled into one.
    He’d taken that away from Dani. He didn’t think before he spoke, didn’t even think before he thought. Daryl squeezed the trigger.
    The birdshot tore a hole in the top-left part of the sign, but he knew about half the pellets went sailing past the sign, cutting through the humid air. He looked out to the south and the storm clouds were getting darker. Getting closer. He loaded another shell.
    Daryl started thinking about where he might sleep tonight. He figured he’d be best sleeping in the truck, but if the storm hit, he’d prefer a real roof over his head. He took aim at the sign again, but the stopped. He laid the shotgun on the roof of the cab and wondered what Dani would be doing right about then.
    Daryl realized he didn’t even know what she did for work. Didn’t know what she did for fun. He made a decision years ago—one that he couldn’t even understand anymore. He just said things, spoke too much. Didn’t listen enough.
    After a moment, Daryl slid the remaining shells from the box and tossed the box into the brush off the side of the road. He counted the three shells in his hand, rolled them back and forth. Then, he threw them to the side of the road, leaving the one chambered in the shotgun. He climbed down from the bed with the gun leaned against his shoulder.
    He wondered if Dani would have come to the funeral if that wall had killed him. Probably not. He wouldn’t go to his own funeral even if they had an open bar.
    Daryl climbed into the truck, laid the shotgun on the passenger side floorboard, and cranked the engine. He watched the storm swirl overhead and heard the first rumble of thunder. The storm might have a little go in it, after all.
    He put the truck in gear then flipped a u-turn in the middle of the highway. It was a half-day drive up to Dani’s trailer in Utah, and he wanted to get as far away from that storm as he could.

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