I knocked on the broken screen door and it violently hit the door frame. The flimsy door flapped loosely creating a clacking noise that landed heavily in the muggy Pee Dee air. I usually didn’t knock, but this time was different. I held my 10-gauge shotgun loosely in my left hand allowing the barrel to point down into the split wood steps leading up to the weathered trailer. I heard heavy footsteps and unintelligible cursing coming from deep in the darkness as he made his way through the trailer.
“Oh it’s you…what do you want?” The growled question was enough for me to know he knew why I was here.
“If you ever, I’m going to…” I roared into the darkness of the trailer.
“Why you little…” a dark weathered hand reached into the darkness next to the door. I flung the screen door open and brought my shotgun to my shoulder just as his own shotgun appeared from behind the wall.
Fear flickered across the haggard face who was one of many men I sometimes called father. He gripped the barrel of the rusty old shotgun his father gave him brand new on his seventeenth birthday and stumbled backward into the darkened hallway. I followed with my own birthday present to myself pushed firmly into my left shoulder, looking along the barrel at the old plaid shirt with a tobacco stain just left of center.
I was the lead and he an unwilling follower in a lurching dance through the trailer past a small bathroom and two bedrooms into sudden brightness. We shuffled past Anna who stood with her back to the sink and her hands wrapped in her apron. Light from the window above the sink highlighted the dark wisps of hair that escaped from a tightly wound bun. Her pursed lips resigned but unafraid.
We continued through the kitchen past the table where three faces looked up expectantly at me. One of the three I thought looked hopeful, the other two quickly looked back toward their cereal bowls half-full of cream of wheat.
We entered the living room where light poured in from several windows on the three walls that arrested our movement. His closing pose left him leaning against the wall between two windows. My closing pose left me standing with my back to the west and two windows next to my left shoulder. The hopeful face followed us and now stood upturned, face glowing, eyes dull with doe-eyed innocence.
I tapped the glass of the window next to me with the barrel of the shotgun and then shoved the end into the tobacco stain. The rusty gun surrendered and fell heavily into the carpet.
“I’m sorry.”
It was too much to lose and I felt my own unyielding anger ebbing away, receding back to the maelstrom of regret and unfulfilled dreams.
I staggered forward and wrapped my arms around him and wept for what I had lost.