By the beginning of my fifth-grade year, a sort of bold insanity had settled over me. I was an out-of-control thief. I was stealing food and clothes, and money, things I needed but which never seemed plentiful enough at home. But I also stole bicycles, pencils, plastic airplane and car models, paints, Halloween costumes—anything that struck my momentary fancy. I had little compunction about bringing my stolen goods home. By now, Mama had grown tired of questioning me about such things. Whenever she did, I’d make up something about a generous friend lending or giving me whatever new thing I had, and that seemed to satisfy her. If it didn’t, she kept it to herself. Looking back, I can’t imagine she didn’t know exactly what went on. But I also think she was at a complete loss as to what to do about it, with the ultimate result that she did nothing at all.
One day, I stole a gun.
It was early fall, and the weather was still warm enough that I often went down to the beach after school—usually stopping along the way to lift a fruit pie and a carton of chocolate milk from the nearby Safeway—and sat on the cool sand and watched the surfers. Most of the time I went alone, but today I had Mike Cherry with me.
I admired Cherry (everyone I knew just called him Cherry). He was a skinny, clean-cut sort of kid from a good family, a year older than me, and a whiz at arithmetic and science. He planned on being a physicist one day. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out why he liked hanging out with me. I thought it might be because I stole things for him. I guessed being from a good family didn’t always mean you had a lot of money. I wasn’t particularly bothered by that. The fact was, I didn’t have a lot of friends, and I was grateful for his company, no matter what his motives might have been. But, looking back, I think it equally possible he liked being with me because of the wild, audacious, and sometimes even stupid things I did. Maybe a part of him wanted to be like me. Some people have to live part of their lives vicariously, through others, I think.
Cherry lived in a duplex apartment right on North Beach, so it made sense that we should go there. We also had to pass by the Abbott Street Market, which was one of my favorite places for ‘kiping’ a snack. Today I bagged a fruit pie for myself and a small package of sugar doughnuts for Cherry while the clerk was in back stocking beer. I pulled the packages from my pants as soon as we rounded the corner from the store, and we tore into them and ate while we walked.
We took a shortcut down a narrow walkway between two side-by-side duplexes. That’s when I noticed one of the apartment windows was cracked open. I stopped and stood on my tiptoes: I saw what looked like a bedroom inside. This was too much of an invitation. I stood for several seconds outside the window, trying to figure out a way to get inside and look around. I wasn’t particularly worried about anyone being home: when I put my ear to the open window, the only sound from inside was the ticking of the alarm clock on the bedside stand.
It wasn’t as if I was hungry, which was still the primary reason I stole things. Sometimes I was in the mood to steal something, just to do it. One time I remember breaking into a garage where I’d often seen an old man sitting at a brightly lit workbench building model airplanes. He’d spend weeks working meticulously on the same balsawood model, trimming and gluing the tiny pieces together, stretching the fabric over the wings and fuselage, patiently doping and painting it so it looked like a miniature version of the real thing. He’d hung several of the finished models from the garage ceiling with clear fishing line, directly over his head, a static air-to-air combat display. I’d always liked airplanes, so I snuck into the garage one afternoon and climbed up on the workbench and pulled a couple of them from the ceiling. My friends, who remain nameless and faceless in my memory, ran off with me and we played with the models in the street in front of our houses. That is, until they broke: smashed into a million pieces when we threw rocks at them, pretending they’d been hit by antiaircraft fire. We laughed and didn’t think much of it. (My mother, as usual, never thought to ask where in hell we’d got such finely made models.) Years later, when I considered all the work that went into those planes, I was nearly sick with guilt.
I convinced Cherry—who at first argued about it with me—to give me a boost on his back and be a lookout in case anyone came around. Seconds later I’d crawled through the open window into the bedroom. My heart beat rapidly. Cherry immediately started getting nervous. “Hurry up!” he hissed at me. “What the hell are you doing in there? Hey! What am I supposed to do if someone comes? What if it’s the people who live here?”
He’ll probably run, I thought. I wanted him to shut up. “I’ll split whatever I find with you, alright?” I hissed back at him. That quieted him a little, though I could still hear him whining on the other side of the window.
I didn’t have any idea what I was looking for, just something, anything to make it worthwhile. I started going through the drawers. Not much in them, some cigarettes, condoms, tie tacks, cologne, and toiletries. I thought maybe the cigarettes would be cool: I’d already thought of picking up the habit. And then, in one of the bedside stands, I found something really cool: a small-caliber handgun, possibly an automatic. I picked it up and it felt heavy in my hand, a lot heavier than they looked on TV. My heart beat wildly. I stashed the gun in my pants and looked around some more, but after finding this treasure, nothing else looked to be worth taking. Just a couple of bottles of liquor, and a bunch of clothes I couldn’t possibly wear.
I climbed back out the window and closed it so it wouldn’t look like anyone had been there.
We ran from the apartment to the open sandy area behind it and I showed Cherry what I had. His eyes grew wide. “Wow,” he said. I looked at him, taken aback by his genuine awe. I had spent much of the time we’d been friends trying to impress him, to make him see me as important. I could tell from the look on his face he was definitely impressed. Maybe even a little frightened. It occurred to me then that few people—especially people like Cherry—would have done what I had just done. I beamed proudly.
We had a little hideout, a sort of cave, really, formed by the lucky placement of some giant boulders which were part of the huge jetty at the extreme north end of the beach. The jetty extended a quarter mile or so out into the Pacific Ocean. North of the jetty lay the deep-water channel that led into Mission Bay; and beyond that, Mission Beach. Some of the kids around the neighborhood occasionally went to the cave to smoke cigarettes or just hang out, away from the prying eyes of their parents. I recall now that a kid—probably someone I knew—had been killed under the jetty in a similar cave just a few months earlier. The jetty shifted, and he’d been crushed by one of those huge rocks. The incident didn’t deter the rest of us from going to the hideout, and in fact, lent it an attractive air of danger. “C’mon!” Cherry yelled, sprinting across the sand toward the jetty.
I stood where I was on the sand, mesmerized by the gun. I held it in my hands, passed it back and forth, awed by the heft of it. I had never held a real gun in my hands before. I felt an odd sense of power I’d never felt. I wanted to shoot it, to see how loud it would be. I looked around. Besides Cherry, who would soon be at the far end of the beach, I was alone. I put my finger on the trigger, pointed the gun into the sand in front of me, and squeezed.
Nothing. The trigger didn’t budge, no matter how hard I pulled on it. I wiggled my finger in the trigger housing, figuring there had to be a way, some secret way of making it work. (I didn’t yet know what a safety was, or that the hammer had to be cocked in order for the gun to fire, or that my fingers might simply have been too weak to pull the trigger.). Again, nothing. A frustrated rage welled up in me, and I almost started crying. Across the sand, Cherry stood on the rocks of the jetty, waving at me. A sharp pain stabbed at my stomach. I had wanted to impress Cherry even more by firing the gun.
I did something stupid then: I raised the gun, slowly and dramatically—and pointed it at Cherry. I had no intention of actually shooting Cherry, of course, or firing the gun at all in his direction. But I wanted to scare him, to have him believe I could shoot him. By my way of thinking, it was a next-best way to impress him. It did. Even from the distance that separated us, I could see the instant terror on his face.
“Jesus!” he cried, holding his hands out in front of him. “What the fuck are you doing!?” He was standing on some rocks that were difficult to get up to, and even more difficult to come down from, especially if you knew someone was pointing a gun at you. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” he screamed. He looked then as if he’d started crying.
I watched Cherry’s antics on the rocks—and started laughing. I laughed so hard I started to stumble until I almost fell over. He was afraid of me! I watched as he searched frantically for a way to get down, laughing all the while, until he finally disappeared on the other side of the jetty.
I got bored with the situation pretty quickly after that. I found myself alone with a toy I couldn’t get to work. I laughed out loud to myself again when I played the scene over in my mind, how I’d managed to scare Cherry. When the humor of that waned, I lost interest in the gun altogether. I chose an area of open sand in front of me and heaved the gun toward it with all my might. It didn’t go very far, of course, and disappeared in the sand.
I trudged over to the jetty and scrambled up the rocks to the other side where I knew the opening to our hideout was. But when I went inside, the place was empty. I stuck my head out of the darkening cave and looked around. “Cherry!” I called out. “Where are you?” The only answer was the muted hiss of the nearby surf.
I went home. When I came in the door, Karen was lying on the floor in front of the TV, watching Popeye. “Mama, Billy’s home!” she called without looking at me. I could hear Mama in the kitchen making dinner. The delicious smell of frying hamburger and onions filled the air. I hadn’t realized I was so hungry. “Where have you been?” Mama called from the kitchen.
Before I could answer, a knock came at the door, a hard rap.
“Jesus, who could that be?” said Mama. “Get the door, one of you?”
I went to the door and opened it, and was surprised to find a man in a gray suit and matching hat standing on the porch. He looked at me curiously. Then I saw the uniformed San Diego police officer behind him, and my heart jumped.
The man in the suit reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out a wallet, which he opened to reveal a polished gold badge. “Hello, son,” he said. “I’m Detective Morton with the San Diego Police Department. Are you William Campbell?”
“Y-yes,” I stammered, chilled suddenly that he knew my name.
The man pursed his lips seriously. “William, is your mother or father at home?”
“Who is it?” Mama called from the kitchen.
“It’s the police, Mama,” I heard myself say.
“What the—?” Mama’s face appeared around the half wall that separated the kitchen area from the living room, twisted into that expression. “Oh, Christ,” she said, moving toward the door. She looked at the men on the other side of the screen door.
“Mrs. Campbell?” said Detective Morton.
“Yes? I’m Barbara Campbell. What’s happened?” She shot a look in my direction. “What has he done, now?” she said, venomously.
I stepped back as Mama opened the door and let the detective and the uniformed officer inside. It didn’t take long for the detective to tell her the story: how Cherry had admitted to his parents everything we’d done earlier that afternoon; how I’d stolen the gun; how I’d tried to shoot Cherry. Cherry’s mother had called the police immediately. Mama’s face turned white, as if she’d just learned she had a terminal disease.
I felt like I wanted to throw up.
The detective turned toward me. “William, where is the gun now?” he asked.
“I—threw it into the sand,” I said haltingly.
“At the beach?”
“Yes.”
Something dark crossed his face. “We need to find that gun before it falls into the wrong hands,” he said. “Can you show us where you threw it?”
“I think so,” I said. A glimmer of hope trickled into my brain. If I helped the police find the gun, maybe I wouldn’t be in as much trouble.
Mama was silent as the uniformed officer put a hand on my shoulder and guided me out the door. We got into a squad car parked out in front and drove the six or so blocks to the beach. Along the way, the detective radioed the station they were going to need a sand-sifting machine. When we got to the area of beach where Cherry and I had been, we got out and stood on the sand and waited. Several more police cars arrived. Soon the whole beach seemed crawling with khaki uniforms.
“Whereabouts did you throw the gun?” said the detective.
I tried recalling where I’d been standing, the direction in which I’d thrown it. “Over there,” I said, pointing.
Several officers converged on the spot and began kicking at the sand. Someone else showed up with some rakes, and they spent the next several minutes dragging these around the area. At last the sand-sifting machine showed up, looking like a trash truck but with massive, knobby tires and a huge rake hanging from its rear end. The machine drove right onto the sand and made several passes over the area. More officers arrived. They kicked, sifted, and raked. But they never found the gun.
We were there perhaps an hour before they finally gave up, assuming the worst: someone else had already found the gun. There was nothing to do but take me home.
Mama was at the front door, seemingly in the same spot she had been when I first left. Karen had apparently eaten already; she was gone, but already a sort of fog had started gathering around me, and it didn’t occur to me to ask where she was.
“We didn’t find anything,” I heard the detective say. There was some further talk, most of which I didn’t hear—along with a string of profuse apologies from my mother and her emphatic promise to “take care of” the situation.
She closed the door and we heard the police walk away. “Get to your bedroom,” she said quietly. “I’ll be in, in just a minute.” I didn’t really see the expression on her face. I was too afraid to look at her. I knew what was coming.
She had the belt when she came into the room, as I knew she would. She looked tired, as if opening the door to my bedroom had drained all the strength she had, as if she’d rather have been anyplace in the world besides my bedroom, making ready to beat her child.
“Get off the bed,” she said hoarsely. “And take off your pants.”
“Mama!” I croaked, my throat already thick with fear.
But Mama had gone. In her place stood a red-faced machine that looked like her, but whose ears and mouth had been plugged. She didn’t hear me; didn’t speak. She pointed to the foot of the bed. Like an idiot, I complied (I didn’t know what else to do; it never occurred to me to run). I got off the bed, turned to lean over the side of the bed and pulled down my pants. And waited.
I’d never known my mother had such strength in her arms. The first blow from the belt knocked the wind from me, and each successive blow did only more of the same, until I hadn’t the breath to scream, to plead with her to stop, or the presence of mind to turn, to run, to throw up my hands.
“Don’t you ever, ever, EVER even THINK of taking something that isn’t yours AGAIN! she screeched. “DO. YOU. HEAR. ME?” Her words were timed to the blows of the belt. “DO. YOU. HEAR. ME?!”
I heard, but try as I might, I couldn’t tell her so.