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Daisy snipers
An episode from my childhood:
This happened in one of the summers that fell between my elementary school years (fourth grade through sixth). At the time I had a good friend named Wyatt. Wyatt and I haven't been in touch since, give or take, 1994. I don't think it has anything to do with the incident I'm about to tell you about.
So if I remember right, I was between eight and ten years old when this happened. If I had to stretch, I would say eleven at the oldest. By then I had owned a Daisy BB gun for over two years, and had exhausted my enjoyment of shooting at birds (only to cry when they died) or popping my sister when she least expected it. Wyatt also had an air rifle.
The two of us would stand in this big empty field behind my house. In Texas, no matter where you live, there are always big empty fields around. Live in the projects? Guarantee you that within four blocks is a big empty field. So anyway, Wyatt and I would stand out there and fire our BB guns straight up into the empty sky. Wyatt started this little trend, I think -- he fired his gun into the air once out of boredom, waited a short moment, then grabbed his head and cried, "Ouch!" From then on, we pretended we were being hit by our own falling BBs. On occasion a formation of ducks would zip by, and we'd aim and fire over and over, shouting, "I got the leader! I got the leader!" when the ducks dispersed.
But on this particular day we were bored with those little tricks, and we'd already shot out all the windows of Mr. Owens' workshop. So we traipsed through a half-dozen backyards until we came to a narrow ravine about twenty, thirty feet deep. The sides of this ravine sloped, then leveled briefly before falling away to a shallow creek, creating a short ledge we learned to run quickly on, never falling into the water (which we always suspected was laced with raw sewage -- the smell was horrible). The gully bisected our neighborhood and eventually was sucked into a large pipe that ran beneath Interstate 10. But far short of that abrupt end of our territory was a bridge that we liked to run up beneath. The bridge was small, but it was dank and dark beneath it, and we liked to pretend there were always junkies hiding out, shooting up.
From the far side of the bridge you could stand out of sight and look straight up at a house with a big driveway that was owned by some guy I never met. Apparently he ran some sort of trucking business out of his house, because there were always delivery trucks there. And he had a son, or two, but I don't remember them. They were big kids -- probably sixteen or seventeen.
That was the day Wyatt said, "Let's put a scare into em."
We pumped our rifles, counting to fifty though we knew the rifles were pumped to maximum capacity by the seventh squeeze. Then we took aim at a moving van and fired.
Of course, on this day there happened to be a sleek black car in the driveway, and of course, the two big kids were busy waxing it, and of course, our BBs ricocheted off of the moving van and whined right past their ears (they told our parents this later). There was a shout and suddenly Wyatt and I realized we were in trouble.
Thankfully, we'd escaped from enough imaginary bad guys in this gully that getting away from some real ones wasn't a huge undertaking. We shot off like rockets, leaping exposed roots and skidding through brambles and jumping from one side of the gully to the other. The two big kids were right behind us -- well, probably fifty yards behind us.
Wyatt and I scrambled up the side of the gully, past some small watermelons that inexplicably grew on a vine right next to the ravine, and began trying to shake our followers. We ran behind old aluminum barns and jumped fences and even ran through the field behind the other old Owens place, where we knew for a fact there were thousands of rusty nails sticking out of the ground waiting to give us lockjaw. We cut through all of the yards until we hit a street parallel to our own, then made a circle and jumped over my backyard fence. We crept along the fenceline, out of sight, then darted into the house.
I displayed my true leadership abilities here.
"Let's change shirts," I said. "They won't recognize us then."
I gave Wyatt an old T-shirt of mine, and changed into an obscenely bright-colored one myself, and we casually walked through the front door.
Instantly there came a shout: "There they are!"
Now, you have to understand something. Even at this young age, Wyatt was a big guy. He studied karate -- the redneck version of it at least -- and was a first-degree black belt at this point (or third-degree, whatever comes first). He was a big proponent of the Miyagi school of karate -- only hurt people when they hurt you, stand up for yourself, don't look for fights, fight honorably, et cetera, et cetera. At age ten, this was serious business.
I knew we were caught. And I thought, well, this'll be when I find out if Wyatt's really my friend. Maybe he'll beat up both of em to save me. Cause at this time, I was incredibly skinny. I was the exact same size at age ten that I was when I graduated high school.
But Wyatt had another idea.
His sister, Summer, was at my house visiting my sister, Elizabeth. Summer's bicycle was leaning against a tree in my front yard. Before I could say anything, Wyatt was on his sister's bike and pedaling furiously away, his long legs bumping the short handlebars with each rotation.
I looked back and saw the two big kids running furiously right at us, and so I started running. What happened next is the stuff of redneck folklore: I actually outran Wyatt.
We got to the trailer that he lived in, darted inside and ran right into his father, Wyatt II (my friend was Wyatt III, but we always made the distinction by calling him 'Little Wyatt' and his father 'Big Wyatt'). Big Wyatt was perceptive enough to deduce that something was going on, and so we told him that we had been shooting our guns at the water in the gully, and the BBs must have ricocheted off of the water and zipped twenty or thirty feet straight up into the air, then angled horizontally toward these two big kids, who started chasing us and who threatened to kill us.
Big Wyatt called my dad, and the two of them, playing angry for our benefit, disappeared down the street to accost the kids. I suspect the two of them simply apologized for our behavior, offered to cover any damage, and left.
Another exciting day in the life of a kid. Maybe some other time I'll talk about how I once tried to beat the crap out of Wyatt, or how I found an armed homeless man on the back patio when I was home alone, or how Wyatt and I used to spook neighborhood kids by carving things like 'Freddy was here' or 'Jason's gonna get you' into the trees in the woods that bordered our neighborhood. Or maybe I should just forget my childhood altogether.
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