Larry and I were ROTC cadets in high school in El Paso. When the mood took us, we would go plinking with our .22-caliber rifles in the desert north of the city. It was a huge expanse, fifty square miles crisscrossed with dirt roads and trails, but no buildings. We could hear in the open distance the sounds of other plinkers and their .22-caliber rifles and twenty-gauge shotguns and four-ten over-and-unders. This was America, West Texas, and we were young and free. We plinked at tin cans, lizards, small birds, desert cottontails, and jackrabbits. Mostly what we hit was tin cans, though we did hit a cottontail once.
Our parents didn’t just give us rifles and tell us, “Go on now, run along and play.” We were trained, by our fathers and in ROTC, in how to safely handle firearms. And we stuck to long weapons—rifles, not pistols. Anyone who’s ever tried it knows how difficult it is to hit anything with a pistol unless you are within a few feet of your target, and where’s the fun in that? At ROTC Summer Camp we got to fire the .45-caliber Colt pistol. It was heavy and hard to aim and about jumped out of the hand from the recoil. We each fired eight rounds at a man-sized target twenty-five meters away. I hit the target twice and told Larry, “I’d a‑done better just throwing the goddamn thing.”
With our rifles we could hit things. I would borrow my mother’s station wagon, for this was back in the station wagon days, and Larry and I would head out—and we always got permission first, “Hey, Mom, going plinking,” “Okay, honey, be careful”—and we’d find some spot off the main highway and stop and get out and shoot things, generally in directions away from the city and the highway. As careful as we usually were, there was one evening when as we headed back to the city, I let Larry drive while I sat facing forward on the raised tailgate and shot at billboards as we passed them. As far as I know, I didn’t hit anything downrange of the billboards. Other times we drove on the desert dirt roads and the one of us who wasn’t driving would shoot at any rabbits we scared up as we motored along. We never hit any of them that way.
One evening around sundown we parked the car and were on foot, looking for cottontails. They were hard to find in the middle of the day but come evening, they began coming out. We saw some and shot at them. They were skilled evaders, quickly running one direction and zigging off another direction and zagging back a third direction and disappearing into large clumps of mesquite where the entrances to their shallow burrows were protected beneath thorny branches. They were impossible to hit until I hit one. I hit it in the saddle just back of the loin and down it went.
“All right!” Larry said. “Good shot!”
“Yeah! Let’s go see.”
We walked among the mesquite and creosote and over the gravelly sand in the gloaming. The rabbit lay on its side. It was still alive and breathing rapidly and the eye facing us was open and it looked to me to be quite frightened.
“You gotta finish it, man,” Larry said.
I raised my rifle and I looked that rabbit in the eye and I lowered my rifle and said, “I can’t. I can’t do it, man. Can you do it?”
“Yeah,” he said, exasperation in his voice. He raised his rifle and took aim and shot the rabbit in the head. I remember that the rabbit’s eye was still open and a jagged part of its skull, about half the size of my thumb, was gone and underneath was glistening blood. I dug a shallow grave with the butt of my rifle, rolled the rabbit into it, covered it with the dirt, and Larry and I went back to the car and went home.
We weren’t hunters. We were teenaged suburban boys playing with guns. Wasteful, casual killers, we wouldn’t have known how to skin and gut a rabbit and cook it over an open fire of mesquite and creosote if someone had held a gun to our heads and demanded we do it. At least Larry knew what had to be done and could do it when I could not. All I could do was watch and see and dig a grave. It was the least I could do.
When I remember looking at the rabbit after Larry finished it for me and before I buried it, I remember the jagged hole and the glisten and I remember something that cannot be, that the rabbit was looking at us as though to ask us a question, the answer to which neither it nor we would have understood.
~
Tetman Callis is a writer and artist who lives in Chicago. His stories and photographs have been widely published, and his photographs and other artworks have shown in galleries in New Mexico and New York City. He is the author of the memoir, High Street: Lawyers, Guns & Money in a Stoner’s New Mexico (Outpost 19, 2012), and the children’s book, Franny & Toby (Silky Oak Press, 2015). He can be found online at https://tetmancallis.substack.com.