The drug dealer pulled into the alley from the left, lights off, crunching broken glass and aluminum cans under the tires of his powder blue Caddy. A cigarette’s orange glow punctured the darkly tinted windows as he inhaled inside. I watched from the kitchen window. It was the third time this week.
Around us, other poor people huddled inside houses that were once desirable suburbs. Drug dealer visits were becoming more frequent and Leroy, our dog, was becoming less tolerant of their midnight meetings in the tight lane behind our house between the fence and a cinderblock building.
Another car, a Lincoln, eased up in front of the Caddy and parked three feet from the bumper, lights off. I knew the drill. I had seen it at least twenty times that year.
The Caddy drug dealer got out. The Lincoln door opened next. Our dog charged the fence. Both men, startled, turned to face his barking. Flicking his cigarette at our dog, the Mr. Caddy laughed and strolled toward Mr. Lincoln. Anger rose inside my stomach watching the scene, two men, dealing drugs twenty-five yards from my back door, tossing lit cigarettes at my dog. Mr. Lincoln squatted, picked up a flattened can, and threw it at Leroy. That was it. Something inside me turned sour.
I grew up in the Deep South with more than a few weapons around. I am no expert, by any measure, and I am not prone to violence except under extreme circumstances, but the mechanics and usage of firearms are not foreign to me. We used to load our own shells in my uncle’s basement, and while I’m fairly liberal in my political opinions, I know my way around a trigger. The urge to pick up old habits soaked me in dark thoughts.
Walking past my nervous wife and opening the closet door, I extracted a 12-gauge shotgun given to me by my father when I was 12 years old. Its operation is simple. Load and shoot. Then reload. Pulling four shells from the box, cracking the lever and sliding in a fifth shell, I moved quietly toward the back door and turned off the porch light, my grandfather’s words rolling in my minds, “Don’t take a gun nowhere you ain’t willing to use it.”
Casting a shadow from the streetlight a block away, Mr. Caddy handed Mr. Lincoln a package. Leroy was leaping and barking and backing away from the fence, springing on his haunches with each sound coming from his mouth. Adrenaline replaced the anger in my churning stomach as I walked calmly into the night air through the leftover bugs flying around the bulb I had just clicked off. The men saw me coming. I did not care.
Stupidity mixing with bulletproof youth might explain my actions, not that it made them legitimate by any means. Perhaps nothing can explain my actions. Family history and more than a little DNA compels me to reject attacks on my family, and I saw the behavior towards my dog as an attack, so that may be the best reason for what I did next.
I may have said some things. I really don’t remember them. My wife pleaded with me from the door. I did not listen. It hardly matters after all these years. What I do remember was leveling the barrel between the two men, putting the bead between them, and pulling the trigger. The two drug dealers dropped, cursing, to the ground, a burst of flames leaping into the darkness and slamming pellets into the cinderblock building. There were feet and hands and knees scrambling beside the cars. An envelope was retrieved. A package was grabbed. No returning fire came my way.
Ejecting the spent shell, I reloaded behind the mesquite tree ten yards from the vehicles, leaning heavily into the truck as if it would hide me. Brain function descended to a slow blend as I leaned out and fired into the Caddy’s back door and quarter panel, paint evaporating behind the impact, leaving a circular bloom of BB-sized holes. I reloaded again.
Someone was yelling, could have been the men. Could have been my wife. Could have been me. It was not the neighbors. Not in this neighborhood. When people heard gunshots around here, they did not come near their windows.
Mr. Lincoln’s tires were spinning dirt and gravel in reverse, kicking up a cloud of gray dust. Mr. Caddy was in the car and peeling rubber backwards as well, splaying dented trashcans and discarded corrugated boxes akimbo in the alley. They were gone twice as fast as they had arrived, and with much less care to conceal their arrangement.
I picked up the two shells and put them in my car trunk, tucked inside a McDonald’s bag with a Styrofoam Big Mac container and a wad of napkins. I drove them to the corner all-night store and dropped it into a fifty-gallon drum trashcan. My wife went with me. I expected police officers when I returned. None came. They never came, even when we called them. And if they did show up, it would be two hours after the incident. It was that kind of place.
To my knowledge, no more drug deals went down in the alley behind our house. Our neighbors never spoke of it. No one was injured. It was if it never happened.
We moved a year later. We’ve moved ten times since. Distance from calamity heals the rawness. It stayed in my head, though. A couple of months ago, I made a long trip down memory alley, back to the old neighborhood that now looked more like a third world country than the slight slum it had been when we lived there, the scar still gouged into the concrete wall behind our old house, now worn by two decades of weather and violence.
Shotgun blasts now, as then, would not be noticed at midnight in this place. Driving away, I wondered where Mr. Caddy and Mr. Lincoln ended up. Considering their lifestyles, I figured their graves were probably just to the east, maybe south, but near. I had missed them. I doubt, however, that they avoided the next few shots. That is how it is in every tough neighborhood in the world.