AiRMail 6/2/24

Part 1, mostly true, related in reverse order
Part 2, about half true
Part 3, all fiction except for the fact of the Highland Park parade events of July 4, 2022
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                                     ​Three for the 4th of July
                1. Independence Day, 19th Century Retrospective  
Thomas Egan, proprietor of a general store in Harpers Ferry, ended his days in an asylum. For many months before being committed, he’d wandered aimlessly, in search of something to ease the pain that war had brought. His wife, too, died of a broken heart after all that happened. Perhaps it was no coincidence that on the 4th of July, 1864, a union soldier who’d been at the Egans’ store deserted his army regiment and enlisted in the US navy. The soldier was trying to escape something only half apprehended and wished not to be remembered. Earlier that day, another military man -- Colonel James Mulligan, commander of the Illinois 23rd -- when passing by the Egans’ store and learning of a fatal shooting on the premises, gave orders that the perpetrator be taken into custody on a charge of murder. Mulligan was in no mood for loose carbines and careless brawls. A thirteen-year-old girl had been shot and killed. The girl was standing at an open window of Egans’ store, calling to a soldier and waving a cap at him. She’d found the cap on the floor of the shop’s storeroom and had retrieved it with the intention of returning it to its owner. The Yank that lost it  – the very one who hours later would desert the army and join the navy -- had been in a scuffle with the girl’s father, the store proprietor. He was unceremoniously shoved out the door and onto the street by this store owner, Thomas Egan. A longtime resident of Harpers Ferry, Egan hadn’t taken sides in the Brothers’ War. He was a kind and generous man but he didn’t tolerate thievery. What precipitated the dust-up was the soldier’s refusal to pay for a plug of tobacco he’d taken. The scoundrel was probably drunk. Or he was well on his way to being drunk. Had he been in battle that day, the day before? The fighting never seemed to end. Here along the Potomac, the boundaries were never clear. It was the 4th of July, 1864, and federal troops were evacuating Harpers Ferry. Confederate forces were driving them out. Again. It was a grim business. Just the day before, with a miniscule fighting force, Colonel Mulligan had slowed the advance of six Confederate infantry divisions, five brigades of cavalry and three battalions of artillery. Only a year before, in July 1863, after Robert E. Lee’s goose got cooked at Gettysburg, the newly designated West Virginia town of Harpers Ferry was occupied by the Union army. It had remained in Union hands until the 4th of July day when a young girl was gunned down in her father’s store by a soldier wandering the streets in search of something to ease the pain that war had brought.

                           2. An Intimate Account of Gun Violence  
The Orlando Pulse Nightclub massacre brought to mind my 30th birthday.
My boyfriend Chaz, a lifelong hunter, his best friends Matt, a cop, and Cheryl, a park ranger, decided, as a birthday gift, they’d teach me how to shoot. And though I’ve never again dared to pull a trigger, that day I was stoked. At an outdoor range outside of town, the three of them provided excellent instruction. I proved to be an avid pupil.

I liked the physical sensations. For example: the rocklike stance. For example: the exquisite tension in my legs. I liked how everything below my spine was finely balanced in a slingshot. Liked the smooth cool comfort of plated steel between my palms, how instinctively I knew it would respond to a light touch of my fingers. Liked how my heartbeat was suspended. Breathing checked. That sweet orgasmic focus.

The specifics are a little vague. I can’t quite picture the surroundings. Don’t recall the gun, what it looked like, never mind the make, the model, or what caliber. But I know I liked the thrill of competence as bullet after bullet zeroed in, drawing ever closer to the target. I liked this game. I liked that I was good at it. I loved the power. The whole experience something like good sex.
So many times I’ve called upon that edgy rush in casual conversations about gun control. How I get it, this love affair with guns. But what I recalled on June the 12th, two-thousand and sixteen was something else. It was the subtext in a look that Matt and Chaz had exchanged years before, at my birthday outing, rolling their eyes like “what could we expect from her, a lefty liberal bleeding heart, not a clue about firearms,” their playful macho-guy contempt mixed in with relief.

Relief, yes, because what had passed across their faces in the seconds before this had the gleam of terror. I’d been talking, with my hands, as I am wont to do. So psyched. Oblivious of the weapon in my palm. Chaz approached me from behind, I picked up his body odor, animal sweat. He slid a hand beneath my forearm: steady there, he said, that thing’s dangerous. Gentle, quiet words, but, in his tone, unmistaken gravity.

Those are the details I remembered on June 12, 2016. Chaz’s grip, his words, the glance that he and Matt exchanged that telegraphed their fear: just one slip, a casual flick, a loss of concentration or awareness, and Cheryl, several yards away, could be toast, half-severed arm left to sag like shredded pork, or maybe a red geyser shooting from her abdomen, her sturdy skull split apart like ripened cantaloupe.

It would have been so easy.

                                          3. It Starts with the Flag  
If I told you the story about that 4th of July in 2022, I would have to start with the American flag. The flag I’m speaking of was one of many, about 8 inches by 5 inches and attached to a slender round wooden stick, a little more than a foot long. A boy was handing out these patriotic souvenirs to spectators along the suburban parade route. I remember thinking the boy would probably be starting school come fall.
     “Happy Fourth of July,” he said as he offered Old Glory to me.
     “Happy Independence Day,” my partner, leaning over my shoulder, replied.
    “Greatest country in the world,” said a grandfatherly man accompanying the boy.
     Feet in sandals and running shoes, arms holding babies and picnic blankets, butts in canvas camp chairs and on cement curbs, hands grasping water bottles and miniature flags, as bands and amateur floats passed by, we all waved those flags, same as people all across the nation, in cities and small towns, were waving these flags, as we in American towns and cities have been doing, come wretched heat or steady rain, every Fourth of July for two and a half centuries.
     On this day, the flag in my hand, courtesy of a six-year-old boy, wriggled then slipped from my fingers as I turned involuntarily toward the sound of erupting firecrackers, too close by for safety. I smelled metal, like imminent rain. I thought a storm might be coming.
     Only later I remembered the screams, I remembered pushing and sirens and frantic voices on cell phones. I remember scanning the road in search of the boy. Then the hand of love was on my shoulder. I remember my partner guiding us home, the sidewalk under my feet, littered in red, white, and blue, me fixating on one small flag in particular, like the one I’d held, on the grass near the entrance to the elementary school, splattered with blood.