The Tarnished Shooter

  “Holy, shit!” I didn't know what to say or think to that display of cold-blooded meanness. Something in my mind suddenly clicked. I knew it was a life changing moment for me. If I had even an ounce of love for the man it drained right into the ice cold ground beneath me that very minute. The whole experience left me feeling isolated and numb. If my own father felt that way about me, I wondered what others thought of me. He’d finally broken my spirit. If nobody cared for me, then why was I expected to care or have feelings about anyone else? In that small despairing moment, I lost myself almost as if in a dream. I thought about aiming that rifle at his head and pulling the trigger. One shot probably would have blown half his head clean off. As much as I wanted to, there was something holding me back.

  I was wounded emotionally, but not to the point where I actually wanted to see him lying on the ground bleeding to death from a fatal gunshot wound that I would have inflicted. And there was also that fear that he was bigger than me and would actually wrap that rifle around my neck if the bullet had misfired. Maybe, at the time I didn’t have enough courage within me. But I also felt a change in my way of thinking. Things like that happen so fast and unexpectedly it sort of knocks one into a different dimension and it takes time to evaluate what had just happened.

  During the rest of the day, I wished he was dead. I was thirteen years old and thinking of ways my own father might end up dead. What had happened to me? After his uncaring comment, I had nothing but contempt for the man. I only went deeper into anger and despair. Deer hunting season came to an end and I was glad I didn’t get a deer just so he could have something more to bitch about.

  Chapter 8

  In the summer of 1968 my non-conformist uncle Seth came to stay with us. He fixed up a place to sleep in the walk-in attic adjacent to Jack’s and my bedroom. He wanted to hang out at our place for a couple of weeks until he left for the Army. Seth was about seventeen years younger than my father and five years older than me. He was a cool guy who stood over six-feet tall, good looks and a degree of charisma that enabled him to attract friends easy. He was also a bit of a troublemaker. Some of the stunts he pulled drove my grandmother and grandfather nuts. Seth was the kind of guy who went out and bought firecrackers on the Fourth of July just to throw them at us and then laugh about it. When Seth wasn’t around Jack and I snooped and found his stash of Playboy magazines and showed them to our friends when they came over. Page after page we drooled over the pictures and thought it would be cool to have a Playboy bunny for a girlfriend someday. They looked all sophisticated and seductive wearing nothing but lipstick, a smile, and high heels. We thought, what more could a man ask for? We had our eyes on some of the neighborhood girls, but they couldn’t compare to the pictures we saw in those magazines.

  There wasn’t much for Seth to do while he stayed with us, so to keep himself busy he helped my father fix up an old wooden boat they bought at an auction. The boat needed a new transom and new plywood for the deck. Seth wasn’t much of a carpenter and my father could barely see, but together, despite their differences, they managed to get along with each other and cobble the boat together into seaworthy order. When they finished with those structural repairs they gave the little boat a new coat of varnish. A week later when the varnish had set—my father, Uncle Seth and I went for a test ride up the river.

  After the two big men and I jumped in the boat, water darn near came in over the edge because the two of them were so heavy. The rim of the boat was so close to the water level, one wrong move and the boat would have taken on water and flooded. We would have all ended up in the drink. I wasn’t wearing a life jacket and neither were they because my father didn’t believe in wearing them. I sat on the edge of my seat expecting the boat to fill with water and capsize or sink any minute. When we got out to the middle of the river my father looked at me and asked, “Frank, do you know how to swim?” “I don’t know,” I replied. In that instant I had a twinge in my gut and visions of him tossing me overboard—my little head poking up out of the water struggling and gasping for air. “Maybe I should throw your ass in the drink to see if you can swim.” Before the word swim came out of his big mouth I was flying overboard and in the water. To those two big apes sitting comfortably in that boat watching me trying to hold my own in the water must have been a hilarious site. I heard them laughing as I dog peddled trying to keep my head above water. “What an asshole, that fucker actually threw me in.”

  Most who’d ended up in that river without a life-preserver drowned because of the current. I was terrified, but relieved I managed to swim to shore. I walked home pissed off in an adrenaline daze and vowed never to go out in any boat with him again. I thought about grabbing the 380 automatic and taking pot shots at him out in the boat.

  After spending a few weeks with us, Seth went off to Army boot camp down in Missouri. Eight weeks later he came home on leave for ten days before being shipped to Vietnam. As soon as I saw him wearing his uniform I wanted to join the Army when I got old enough. A couple of months after he was in Vietnam he started sending my father letters complaining about life over there. The letters revealed a different side of Seth my father couldn’t figure out. Then two months before he was to be rotated out of the combat zone, his letters made no sense at all. He had been in-country almost a year when Grandma called and informed my father, Seth was in the stockade for being AWOL and refusing to obey orders. Seth was all finished being a soldier—the army sent him home a couple months later with an undesirable discharge. Once back on American soil, he ventured out west and lived on the road like a hippy—hanging out in communes. The next time I saw him he had long hair, a beard, and a marijuana bud made into an earring that dangled from his left earlobe. I liked to think of Uncle Seth as the older brother I never had.

  He drifted out to Scottsdale, Arizona where he stayed until he came to live with us again. He continued experimenting with drugs and getting arrested for protesting against the war. He also started working on getting his discharge upgraded to honorable, claiming he had been railroaded out of the Army. Seth was supposed to be a truck driver over there, but claimed to be in many firefights with the enemy.

  My father had to take several trips to Arizona to get him out of jail and try to straighten him out. When he wasn’t in jail, Seth stayed with their sister Muriel; she was an Arizona transplant from Wisconsin. In her thirties and an accomplished artist, she painted desert landscapes. Many of her previous paintings hung in our county social services building.

  Chapter 9

  Everyone has a mom. My mom was a small woman, with an easy-going, almost passive nature; she grew up on a farm outside a little country town and went to a small high school where she knew just about everyone. Her mother was the sweetest person I ever knew, but my grandfather was an alcoholic who seemed to hate us kids. We called him Pups for short. Maybe he just hated my father and that alone gave him reason enough to hate us. When we went to visit Grandma, Pups would start swearing at us and tell us not to dig in the drawers and to go home. Grandma would then tell him to go out in the bunkhouse and mind his own business.

  Pup’s bunkhouse was a small building about the size of a fishing shanty out in back of their house. Inside there was just enough room for a cot and an end table. The bunkhouse was where he could swear and nurse his hangovers or smoke his pipes. About the only thing we liked about him was the smell of burning tobacco as he smoked his pipe or when he played the accordion. Even missing a couple of fingers, he worked an accordion like it was his mission in life. He had been a farmer who worked for one of the paper mills in town and always stopped at a tavern at the end of his shift. One winter night on the way home from the tavern—drunk—he tripped—fell in a snow bank and passed out. He lost two fingers that night from frostbite.

  I remember him as a thin and fair to handsome looking man with dark greying hair. He always marveled at a picture of himself wearing his Sunday best when he was a younger man. Most of the time, his bark was louder than his bite so we just
snickered at him when he bad-mouthed us. We were always told he had been kidnapped and brought over on a boat from Denmark when he was just a little boy. He had been smuggled into this country under a women’s dress.

  My grandfather Barker was a building contractor. He built custom homes for doctors and lawyers.

  Pictures I saw in photo albums of a younger Grandma and Grandpa Barker, drinking, smoking, sitting around a big dining room table and playing poker with others shows everyone having a good time. But I mostly recall seeing my grandfather sitting at the small kitchen table humped over, drinking a glass of brandy while playing solitaire. He seemed tired and worn out. Telling me about the things he wished he had done when he was younger. He whittled away his last days on Earth just waiting to be taken home by the good Lord. His choice of words and tone of voice made me think there was something he’d missed out on; he said he wished he could have another chance at life. I never got very close to him or my grandmother. He eventually died of cancer at the age of eighty-five a couple of years after my grandmother had also died of cancer.

  When he finally succumbed to the cancer, my greedy, narcissistic aunts and uncles rifled through his belongings—selling everything that wasn't nailed down.

  We never knew what kind of a life my father had when he was growing up because he never talked about it, but I heard it was a very religious and strict upbringing with Grandma talking about him someday becoming a priest. Grandma and Grandpa were such religious fanatics they bequeathed most of their savings to the Catholic Church they attended—which infuriated my aunts and uncles. I would think with all the time my father spent in a Catholic school and church he would have had a more understanding nature. But he never went to any seminary; instead he ended up in the National Guard as a machine gunner, earning the rank of sergeant then getting busted to corporal, before he was honorably discharged. When he got out of the National Guard he ended up doing all sorts of other jobs to make ends meet.

  When we lived near the river, before he became a machinist, he was the grounds keeper at our grade school in winter. His job was keeping the ice rink in working condition by occasionally spraying it with water to keep it glass smooth. For Christmas that year he bought me an old pair of hockey skates so I could learn to skate. I think he had visions of me becoming some sort of hockey great. Sports never interested me; I only played those silly games to appease him. When I was at the skating rink I had my eyes on all the good-looking girls.

  At the same time he worked at the school, he owned and operated a piano store where he rebuilt and tuned all types of pianos. There were grand pianos and upright player pianos. In the days when he had that store, I helped him with miscellaneous repairs to the pianos. I learned a few things about the construction and the mechanical workings of many musical instruments he sold at his store. I had learned how wood, metal, and the ivory from hunted animals ten thousand miles away could be made into a piano and then fine-tuned to produce some of the most beautiful music ever heard by the human ear. My father didn’t have perfect eyesight, but he had the ear to perfectly tune those instruments. Maybe I was a fool to think he was blind. Maybe he saw sounds; maybe he had a keen sense of intuition. The piano store shut down after a year or two because times were changing and pianos didn’t seem as important as they once had been. With new stereo systems available, beautiful music could be listened to for the cost of a plastic disk.

  Father also worked part-time for a fence installer and part-time for a soda pop distributor right down the street. On hot summer days, when he was working at the pop distributor, Joanna and I walked down there to get a free bottle of root beer. It doesn’t seem like a big deal getting a free bottle of pop, but when we were kids it was a big deal.

  In contrast, my mother never worked outside the house; she mainly took care of us kids. I remember the times she went up and down the stairs bringing me food and sometimes soda-pop when I was too sick to get up out of bed. She bore a heavy load taking care of all of us kids and at the same time trying to do what she could to keep my father from blowing his top on us. She was also the designated family driver because my father never had a driver's license.

  Chapter 10

  The old man strikes gold. He buys a trucking company. Father borrowed the money from Grandma and Grandpa and a week later we had a big 1963 International truck parked in the driveway. It was strange because he hadn’t spoken to my grandparents in nearly two years. Now suddenly he was borrowing money. I guess the money was more important than pretending they didn’t exist. He was as proud as a peacock strutting around like a big boss man. He finally had a way to make some real good money. He told me the truck had to be repainted and then washed once a week. I was given the job to wet sand the paint off the cab of the truck for a buck an hour. He insisted I keep my money on the books until I wanted something. That arrangement didn’t make much sense to me because it meant I had to ask him for the money. I was supposed to be independent. It must have been another control tactic. But at the time, it sounded easier than shining drunk’s shoes. After the truck had been repainted, I washed it every week, changed the oil, and gave it a grease job once a month.

  Now I was getting somewhere, I had become the family’s chief hunter, grease monkey, shoeshine boy, handyman, and scapegoat. There was nothing I couldn’t do. I was a renaissance man. When I worked on the truck I listened to my favorite music—all that radical and anti-war stuff by Bob Dylan, The Doors, Neil Young, Buffalo Springfield, and a list of civil rights activist singers. With the war in Vietnam raging, I was becoming as anti-establishment and anti-conformist as a young teen could get. I hated all forms of rules—regulations—and control. As soon as I turned eighteen, I had my heart set on flying the coop and being a free spirit. Like every kid, early on I saw myself as a free thinker or an artist and believed someday I would find fame and fortune as a result of my God given talents.

  It didn’t take long before the cash came rolling in from his trucking business. After a few months, I had become proficient at preventive maintenance. I also found and then repaired mechanical and wiring problems on the truck.

  A year after he bought the trucking business he purchased four more new trucks a month before we moved into a big house on the lake. There was talk about becoming the statewide trucking company for the retailer that he’d contracted with. As the trucking company expanded, more room was needed to park the five trucks. The new three-acre spread had plenty of room for the family and the business.

  The big house had expanding views of Lake Winnebago. On a clear day we could look out the living room windows and see miles away to the other side of the lake. It was a large and stately looking house anchored on the piece of manicured lawn that surrounded it. A breezeway attached the two and a half car garage to the house. Attached to the garage was a metal staircase that led up to the flat roof of the breezeway and garage. From these flat roofs one could access the unfinished attic area of the house through an exterior door.

  There were two other permanent little buildings on the property. One was a twenty by twenty masonry building we called the bomb shelter, because it was solid masonry with a concrete roof. It was where the spare truck tires and other yard work tools were kept. It was an unimpressive little building with two windows, a couple of big wooden doors and fading red paint. Parapet walls extended two to three feet above the roof surface. A rusted steel ladder attached to the building made for easy access to the roof. Beside the bomb shelter my father had two five hundred gallon fuel tanks set up for convenience.

  The other little building was used for a workshop. It looked more like a doll house until it was jammed with tools. There was a third structure we called a contractor’s shack that was constructed of plywood and built on a wooden base. We could move it anywhere on the property by attaching a chain and dragging it. This was the building I eventually turned into a clubhouse for my buddies and me to hang out in.

  Right in front of the house, on the edge of the lake, the contractor had built a
concrete breakwater that ran the entire width of the property. It made a nice place to sit and watch the boats go by. A crescent shaped harbor had been carved into the property to support a wooden dock that was big enough to tie up a twenty-foot boat. Just to the north, was a public park with a beach and to the south was a marina.

  The new house had five bedrooms and enough room for all eight of us kids. Upstairs were three bedrooms and an empty unfinished space that I eventually helped my father convert into an apartment to rent out after we kids were gone. Jack and I shared a room upstairs. Tony, Joe, and Leland bunked in another room and Joanna had a room to herself. Jake, Jenifer and my parents slept in downstairs bedrooms.

  Beside the bedrooms downstairs, there was a galley kitchen, dining room, living room, utility room, office, and one bathroom. I thought it was a cool house.

  Jalousie windows surrounded the living and dining rooms offering clear views of the lake and boat inlet. Those windows leaked air making the house cold during the winter, but in the spring and summer they provided a refreshing cool breeze.

  On close inspection some of the interior doors of the house didn’t seem quite right. Those in the downstairs bedrooms had little vents in the upper portion of the door; strange for a bedroom door where a person would want maximum privacy. They also had numbers painted on one side, which we found to be rather odd. We wondered where they came from.