Kentucky Rifle.

Harold C. Jones

Joshua Grayson was just dozing off, laying in the long grass on his blanket in the welcome spring sunshine. He was pale, and a bit bloated after being totally sedentary over the winter and then a long and indifferent spring. His body wasn’t all that good, and that was just a fact.

The weather had turned at last…all round came the buzz of insects, the chirp of birds and the soughing of the wind in the fresh, small green leaves of late May.

There was one hell of a bang, so loud and so nearby that he nearly jumped out of his skin. He was squatting in the underbrush, heart pounding. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the ripples of an impact fifty yards down the creek, followed by the splashes of something big skipping along the surface until it hit the bank at the next turn with a smack. 

Somebody up there had a real big gun.

Worse, he’d been unable to stifle a squawk, and now the surrounding forest had gone very quiet.

“Hello! Hello?” There was a voice up above, in the thick brush of the state forest.

Shit.

Joshua, keeping as low as possible, dropped onto his butt and started desperately pulling on his underwear and shorts. He zipped into the cotton T-shirt, and then, with shaking fingers, started on the socks. He listened intently, trying not to make any noise of his own.

Fuck.

“Hello?”

There were snaps and the whip of branches as someone came looking. They must be wondering.

Joshua had his boots on, laces jammed down inside rather than tied. He rolled up his towel and stuffed it into his small khaki day-pack.

Looking around, there was a water bottle and an empty beer can. He stuffed them in and then stood up, the flap on top still unfastened. He was as ready as he was going to get.

There was a patch of something golden moving through the trees, grass and brush at the top of the steeply-sloping bank. He stood up while the getting was good, a flattened patch of grass the only clue to his attempt at nude sunbathing.

“Hey—hey. Don’t shoot.”

Feeling extremely guilty about something, Joshua got away from the flat patch, heading to his left and out into the open. 

The way the trees were up there, there was a rare gap. He turned up the slope and started climbing.

“Hello.”

“Ugh—hey.” There was a guy standing at the top of the bluff, with a gun that was a good six feet long and Joshua’s jaw dropped.

The guy was clad from head to toe in buckskin—fringed along the arms, embroidered in beads and quills, and wearing the most outrageous beaver hat he’d ever seen.

“Sorry about that—”

“It’s all right. I was wondering if I had hit someone.” It was a bald statement of fact, the face imperturbable, which was more than Joshua could say.

Joshua was already out of breath.

He’d just remembered that he wasn’t on park land after all—he’d gone past the little sign indicating the park boundary and followed deer trails upstream along Rattlesnake Gorge. It’s not like there wasn’t a trail or anything, because there was.

Joshua grabbed a small tree trunk with the one hand, saplings with the other, and pulled himself up and over the lip where the bank had fallen.

“I, uh, I guess I must be a bit lost—this is your land, isn’t it.”

“Uh-huh. Yes, it is.” The gun in the crook of his arm was really something.

The state park boundary was a hundred or a hundred and fifty metres to the southwest, but the guy didn’t seem all that upset. He was the one with the weapon, after all.

Joshua hesitated.

He grinned from ear to ear.

“You just about scared the shit out of me.”

“Yeah, sorry about that—” Finally the guy smiled. “Where were you, exactly?”

“Ah, just at the water’s edge. You were nowhere near me, I guess.”

The guy was about six-foot three, a good two hundred and forty pounds. He made an impressive, even fascinating sight, with the soft, knee-high moccasins, and if Joshua wasn’t mistaken, a genuine (or replica) Bowie knife on his belt.

“Are you going to fire it again?”

“Yeah, I was thinking about it—want to watch?”

“You’re damned right I do. I got a camera, incidentally. Would you mind if I took a couple of pictures?”

“Sure, why not. What the hell.”

As Joshua dug into a side pocket for the iPhone, his new acquaintance put the butt of the weapon on the ground outside of his left foot and pulled up a powder horn, hanging on a long cord around his neck.

“So what’s your name, anyways?”

“James Logan. And you?”

“Joshua.”

Logan poured a generous amount of the grainy black powder down the barrel.

“Okay.” Putting the stopper on the horn, he let that drop and then pulled a ball out of another pouch.

“Don’t you need a wad?”

“No, this is a rifled barrel. You’re thinking of a musket.” He gave Joshua a look of assessment.

It was a fairly good question.

“Right.” Joshua watched as Logan rammed it home.

He put the ramrod back in and turned the knob to lock it into position…

“Okay. It’s still safe as I haven’t primed it.” To Joshua’s surprise the fellow took a good look at him and then handed him the weapon. “Check the weight of that.”

Joshua shoved the phone into his hip pocket and took the gun. He’d been shooting pictures like crazy.

“Holy.”

Bringing it up experimentally, he took a bead on a white plastic object on the far side of the creek, probably a foam coffee cup or something. He took a stance, rotating through the hips, holding the weapon at the ready. The sights were all right, he supposed…it would depend more on eyesight and knowing the weapon intimately. It was big, long, heavy, and had a tendency for the end to drop if you relaxed for a second.

“Nice.”

“Here.” Logan had the powder horn.

He let Joshua hold the weapon.

Using his thumb, pulling back the striker and showing him the bowl. He shook a little powder in.

“So what do you think? Do you want to try it?”

Joshua’s jaw dropped, but there could only be one answer to that.

***

“So what am I looking at?”

“This is a Kentucky long rifle of point-four-oh calibre. Basically, just a cheap, mail-order replica. I buy the balls, I don’t have to make them.”

Logan had primed the weapon as Joshua held onto it, and then they chose a target.

“It’s the same as any gun, really. Take a breath and let it out. Relax a bit, and this one’s got a hell of a kick, incidentally. Like, ah—a double-barreled twelve-gauge firing buckshot. You might want to lean into it.”

“All right.”

“Any time you’re ready.”

Joshua pulled gently on the trigger, aware of that bit of white at the water’s edge on the far side.

Ka-Boom.

The world disappeared in a ball of pungent smoke, smelling just like fireworks. The recoil was strong, but he thought he had managed it well enough, not to fall over and all of that sort of thing. He might have a bruise later, but maybe not.

“Awesome.”

“Nice shot, by the way.”

Joshua took a look, as the haze of blue smoke cleared, and was surprised to see that his patch of white had been more or less obliterated. It must have been a foam coffee cup, nothing else would have shattered like that.

Handing the weapon back, he indicated the pack on the ground.

“I might still have a couple of cold beers in there.”

Logan nodded, intent on attaching a cleaning worm on the end of the ramrod. A few shots and the barrel would be foul.

He’d only spent a few hundred dollars on the gun, but it was best to look after things. He looked up at the young fellow.

“Sounds good to me.”

Reaching into his capacious side-pocket, he pulled out a plastic bag of jerky.

“Hungry?”

***

Editor's Note: I know this sounds weird, ladies and gentlemen, but we're sort of expecting something gay here. Hopefully Harold will work this through to some sort of logical conclusion... > ed.

 

Acceptance: a new word for the old school.

Joshua S. Kelly, USA Today Sports.



I had one of those fly-on-the-wall moments lately. My bug-like antenna was all a-quiver. In my work I’ll often end up grabbing a sandwich and a coffee and either sit in the truck, sit inside the eatery, or sit at a picnic table outside if the weather is good.

Jason Collins, an openly-gay basketball player, recently came out. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, in an interview appearing in The Advocate, is quoted as saying that openly gay players “would be accepted in the NFL.”

Yet the talk in that donut shop was anything but accepting. Sports is pretty easy to talk about. Issues aren’t so much. A guy in the next booth used every pejorative term for gay men that I have ever heard and some I hadn’t. There were three or four of them and a couple of them had things to say, and the others didn’t.

Only one of them mentioned something about Collins’ game, his skills as a player. That guy was probably a real basketball fan. The other guy, a loud one, was just talk, and one of his favourite subjects was no doubt gay-bashing. I mean, really.

It was fascinating, a glimpse into some people’s attitudes, and the anger was astonishing. That sense of absolute disdain for another human being. The sheer threat of it, like it somehow affected the quality of his own life.

Would an openly gay football player be accepted? What if he came out first, at training camp?

I guess we shouldn’t do hypotheticals…

But once in the league and under contract, I think he would be tolerated. Not that he wouldn’t get everything from outright hate talk, right up in your face in the line of scrimmage, but heavy-handed humour, the remark from a friend that slips out by accident, the endless questions based on ignorance…we live and die by our words.

And the words for homosexuality are words of condemnation. This is ingrained from an early age. In a sense we’re lucky: we can still hide. Black men couldn’t hide, Jews couldn’t hide, but we can hide. It is all too easy.

The top three issues for gays at this point in time are not so much about marriage rights, not so much about the right to adopt, or whether gays should be in the military.

The real issue is what we think of ourselves. Do we buy into the terms of condemnation? Do we see ourselves that way, or have we truly escaped the graffiti we read as children on a wall in some urine-smelling alley downtown or on the pavement in a local park.

Our unconscious attitudes are instilled in us from a very early age. My dad didn’t know when I was eight or ten that I would turn out to be gay. Would he have altered any of his remarks if he did know? All our dads had something to say on the subject, none of it particularly enlightened or enlightening, because they were old school. They had no other words and so no other thoughts but what had been instilled into them.

They had all the same words too.

The word we need to focus on right now is ‘acceptance.’ That’s it, just acceptance. Not for them so much as for ourselves.

Before we can change the world we must first change the way we look at it. Those answers will come from within.

The Words.

Erotica can have strong literary values. Some of the themes, which are part of the content in a book, are universal, and some are more specific to gay literature in my work.

In The Virgin and the Troll, Andre has fantasized for his whole life without doing anything about it. The themes are pretty simple. They include the need to be loved, or liked, or wanted. They include the need for friendship, and acceptance by others as well as ourselves.

One of the themes is about not judging yourself too harshly, or adopting someone else’s terms and agenda when going about labeling ourselves, something I would caution the reader to refrain from as much as humanly possible. One theme is about trust, and another is all about conquering our fears and in so doing achieving some mastery over self. The author had to be pretty comfortable in his own sexuality in order to write this sort of material. That’s not to say he didn’t learn something from it.

It led to a kind of revelation, and that is also reflected in the work. It’s in the bit about words.

One of the themes is words. That’s it, just words. And we all know the words. We learned them in the schoolyard, waiting for the bell to ring on our first day of kindergarten. It was quite a shock at the time. Other kids talked like this? We never did that at home…

Words like shit, piss, fuck and damn. Words like slut, bastard, bitch, and cocksucker.

The sort of descriptions we would prefer not to put on our resume because of the extremely negative connotations associated with them.

But is that who we are? Are we those words?

As a six year-old waiting in the schoolyard, I had no idea of who I would ultimately turn out to be as a man and a human being.

I adopted those words unthinkingly just as you did. The question is, can we drop them and let them quietly die the cold and lonely death they so richly deserve?

The story was fun to write. So much so that I wrote a series of three novellas, so the reader could follow the growth of the characters and even the writer to some extent.

Thank you for coming along on my journey.

The Virgin and the Troll. 

Throwing It Down.

Resolution. (Coming soon.)