Shooting Jerry

Elvis hairdo, 6’4”, tattoos everywhere, daggers, dolphins, hearts, peacocks, dragons. Touring as black market mess sarge on Essex Battleship in South Pacific during Korean War. Visitting Jap ink dens & brothels doing R&R. A true criminal at heart. Youngest of 15 from 80 acre farm in Ozarks. Ruled the roost at Augie’s Tap in 1957 Davenport Iowa downtown strip. Barrel-of-Fun Tix gambling, fencing stolen watches & guns, selling Bennie’s & downers out of the back bar, dart competitions, high stakes poker, paying off local cops every Friday after lunch, landed in jail only once launching a mouthy off duty through the front plate glass window. Loved the guy. Stepfather #2. Gerald LeRoy Simms.

Hunting rabbit one 7am winter morn in Ottumwa, 15” of snow, walking a fence line. Maybe 5 to 10 below. Crunchy gloves & stiff pants. Jerry down wind in the gulch cruising the crick to the left, out of sight, ice cracking at every turn. Barb-wire fence to my right running downhill. Carrying a 12 gauge pump. 10 years old, but tough, having shot pheasant, quail, squirrel, dove, blackbirds, and more than my share of Brylcreem slogan signs, bean cans & ratdump vehicles, feeling my grits & chops.

Bunny pops up before I can lift a barrel, leaps through the barb wire. I swivel & fire blind at the brief puff of snow in its wake. Instantly a scream in the distance, branches breaking, a splash of ice splitting, then nothing.I barge through the gate, almost dropping my Remington, fully believing I had offed my teenlike Dad.

The beebies had indeed bounced off the frozen manure trail & lodged in Jerry’s forehead & cheek, invisible to me below the lip of the crick’s ravine. Calling me every name in the book, bleeding, not dead & promising to never take me hunting again. Chagrined, years later, same gun, threatening to shoot Stepfather #5, a true psychopath, for pounding my poor drunk Mother’s head on the living room floor, sisters crying & begging me not to. Truth be told, despite jail time,part of me still wishes I had.