Plinking

All I knew about pellet guns before our neighbor across the alley plinked out our back bay window last summer had come on one July night when I was eleven years old. A week-long, record-setting heat wave had made it to my town, Two Rivers, Wisconsin, disgracing its epithet: “The Coolest Spot in Wisconsin.” An editorial in the local newspaper advised parents to keep their children indoors during the day to avoid the danger of them becoming easily “overtired,” a syndrome characterized by nuanced behaviors such as talking back to parents.

So, I spent my day time quarantine doing various eat-up-the clock activities. One was leafing through Webster’s Dictionary looking for the right new word to use during evening parole. I’d spot a good one: “Precarious.” Another was flipping through my baseball card collection, fantasizing about, for example, playing second base for the Milwaukee Braves.

Thanks to Lake Michigan’s cooling breezes the temperature cooled swiftly after supper (supper is a Wisconsin term). Freed outdoors, us neighborhood kids gathered in the empty lot across the street from my home to play games such as “Red Light, Green Light;” “Spud;” and, “Pom-Pom Pull Away.”

I was the youngest kid (13 years old) and was always the first to have a mom call someone home. It always shamed me and the kids picked up on it with things like, “Time to go home sonny boy,” and “Momma’s calling.”

I tried to act unfazed until one night I was really hurt by, “Ha ha, bet you can’t sleep out with us at Daisy’s.” Daisy and Eddie G. lived next door and had a camper parked in their backyard.

To remedy the sting, I asked my mom, “Mom, there’s a bunch of kids sleeping in Daisy’s camper tomorrow night. Do you think I could sleep out there with them? I just can’t sleep upstairs: it’s ‘Precarious’ hot up there.”

“Precarious? Really? Your place is upstairs. Now get ready for bed,” she said.

Did mom know that nobody sleeps on a sleepover?

My bedroom on the second floor was a veritable heat trap. My dad had tightly insulated the house to withstand the barrages of winter while also making it a perfect capturer of heat in my room. There was only one window and my window fan just circulated the heat in the room. Worse, the fan’s whirring sound lulled me off to a half-asleep, half-awake state that conjured up fantastic imaginings like, for example, that I was snorkeling between the tines of a sharp and rapidly spinning fan or that I was weightless and locked inside my brain and couldn’t remember the combination.

The next morning I woke up to learn that the heat wave had broken. Things got back to normal. At 9:00 am I hustled out the back door to the garage and from there then sped off on my three speed Huffy bike. I sped off to a County League Baseball Game at Municipal Park where post heat wave restrictions were posted: “Games are only allowed on Field Number Two.” (That field was totally shaded.) And, another: “All games are reduced to five innings.”

I didn’t know that my dad had decided to check out my game. In the top half of the fifth inning, with the score tied, I saw him sitting at the end of the bleacher along third base. I was so proud and happy that he took time off of work to see me play. At that instant a sharply hit ground ball bounced across the parched infield toward me at second base and, with a very bad hop, hit me in the throat, right in the Adam’s apple. The sharp chop buckled me to my knees.

I clutched my throat. I looked through watering eyes to see my dad now standing. He looked very worried. I felt terrible to have scared him. I should have paid better attention, probably should have charged that grounder, knocked it down with me chest. I waved to him with a wan smile indicating that I was okay

But I wasn’t exactly okay.

The umpire called time out. He, along with my manager, and the field director, ran out to check on me.

They gave me a towel and water.

I wiped back the tears.

The water went down. The sting dissipated.

I tried to talk.

“I’m okay,” I said.

I got up and picked up the ball and handed it to the manager.

My hands had failed me. Me, with a dad who made a living by his hands, a tool and die maker.

“Play ball,” the umpire shouted,

The next ball, a clean grounder, came right to me and I fielded it as usual and we turned a big deal double play. That was more like it. I had been errorless the whole season up until then, proud to the best fielder on our team, and, two years in a row, a bona fide Tri-County All-Star at second base.

As fate would have it I was first up to bat in our bottom half of the fifth inning. We were behind 2-0, being no-hit by fireballing Terry Ruh, a lanky adult-sized pitching phenom. I took a deep breath, stepped into the batter’s box, crouched and waited. I sort of half swung at the first pitch, a fastball, and dribbled out a chippy, self-defensive grounder past the first baseman out to right field. Ruh scoffed at me from the mound. But now my teammates believed that if I could get a hit against TERRY RUH so could they.

I had broken his spell.

And they drove me in and we scored twice more and won the game. My dad put my bike in our station wagon. “How are you son?” he asked.

“I’m a winner!” I said.

“You are a hero!” he said.

At home I felt great eating lunch and then I began my parent-mandated hour of rest after which I biked off with my basketball ball to St. Paul’s asphalt court. I practiced by myself, starting off with playing, “Round the World.” Then I’d dribble full court, back and forth, finishing each segment with a layup and a free throw, practicing against myself that way, preparing for a future slot on the freshman basketball team.

“I am not precarious,” I said to myself.

That night I again asked my mom about the sleepover next door.

“The heat broke so there’s no need for that now,” she said.

Two days later on Friday I asked her if I could have David Z. over for an overnight camping trip in our garage. I knew she liked David. His father was the Scout Master of our local Cub Scout Troop. She kind of shocked me when she said, “If it’s okay with his parents it’s okay with me.” But I sensed her decision was also good for her. It would give her a break from me. I had heard her on the telephone talking to friends about how the heat wave had made them all feel a little sorry they ever had children.

She called David’s mother who gave a thumbs up on it too. I talked a little to David on the phone. The plan was for him to come over the next day around six with his camping stuff.

Saturday dawned with no baseball games so I had as much time as I needed for cleaning the garage. My dad backed the car out of it and I got busy. I felt a big responsibility, kind of like owning a house I told myself.

I pried open the garage’s side window and put my fan in it. I used a broom to eliminate spider webs, a desiccated wasp’s nest. I scared up a mouse that was hiding in my father’s tool box. Then, I dusted every inch of that single car building. I laid down oil-dry to the concrete slab and swept up the gunk it collected. I laid down a heavy of Mr. Clean, hosed it down and then, using a shop vacuum, scrubbed the floor. Finished, I kept the fan on and left the garage door open to dry out the camp.

The garage was cleaner than my room!

I was filthy.

“You go straight to the shower,” said my mom. I showered and changed into clean shorts and a tee shirt.

When the garage dried I hauled in two chairs and a card table for board games. I got a step stool and put my Cub Scout lantern on it.

It sure smelled good in there!

It was nearly 2 pm. I made five peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, one of which I ate for lunch. I put cold milk into a thermos bottle and put everything in the refrigerator.

“Take a nap,” said my mom.

“Good idea,” I said.

Time for another word of the day: “Puerile.”

After supper I went out to the front stoop and sat and waited for David. I waved when I saw him riding up on his bike. He had his gear tied to the carrier rack.

We quickly bivouacked in the garage. “This is great,” he told me.

“Oh yeah!” I said.

“There’s no going back, no matter what,” he said.

I liked the sound of that!

“Agreed!” I said.

We made believe we were far away for a scout jamboree at Camp Sinawa. With the garage door and side window open there were enough flies and mosquitoes buzzing around to reinforce the notion.

There’d be no taboo against peeing in the bushes behind the garage.

David and I were about the same age but he was very physically advanced for his years. He had a whisper of a beard. Plus, being the son of our Boy Scout Troop Master, we all thought about him as the “Akela”.

It stayed light until around ten. The concrete floor under our bare feet felt cool. It was great the way the evening flattened out in the night breeze the way it did in the days of summer camp at Sinawa.

We played monopoly in lantern light and I looked forward to an all-night game of it: I never did that before.

After about an hour David got up and unrolled his sleeping bag to reveal his pellet rifle. He had smuggled it past his parents. I felt a rush of excitement but I didn’t know why. What’s that for? Was he expecting trouble from the older kids?

He rolled it back up and I just played along like no big deal.

When the lights in the back of my house went out from the one in the kitchen, to the one in the bathroom, to the one in my parent’s bedroom, I felt very, very adult about being wide awake.

Dave blew out the lantern.

Then he grabbed his pellet gun.

“Come on,” he said, and we slipped out into the night.

I think I knew a little about what was coming.

“Let’s get puerile!” I said.

“Huh?” he asked.

“Silly,” I answered.

My dad had taught me how to shoot one Sunday morning when I was eight or nine. After we had attended church and ate breakfast at home he went down to the basement and came back up wearing his hunting vest and carrying his rifle case in one hand and a holster with a pistol in the other. He set the holster on the kitchen table and reached into the top front pocket of his hunting vest. He shook it and smiled and I smiled too when I recognized it was the sound of ammunition rolling around in cardboard boxes.

My dad was a very good shot and he liked to hunt pheasants. (He had a pheasant feather cap made for my mother but I don’t remember ever seeing her wear it.)

I couldn’t believe how excited he made me feel when he said, “Let’s go shooting.”

“Take that gun and holster off the kitchen table!” said my mom as she lit up a cigarette.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll see you later.”

Dad put the guns in the trunk and we waved to my mom as we backed out of the driveway. We drove east towards Lake Michigan and then south out of town and past the last entrance road to Silver Creek Park. Then we turned left onto a dirt road and parked on an embankment above the beach. My dad opened the trunk and strapped on the holster with the pistol and pulled the rifle from its cloth case. We descended the embankment to the beach.

We walked south along the lake for maybe 10 minutes. Every now and then he stopped to bend over and pick up some driftwood sticks.

We didn’t see anybody on the beach or out on the lake.

Then he stopped.

“Hold this,” he said and he gave me the rifle. “The pistol and the rifle are both 22’s. The rifle is called a long and the pistol is called a short.

The rifle wasn’t as heavy as I expected.

He paced off about 25 steps. He was creating a firing range for us, at the end of which he stuck the sticks into the sand in a line at a right angle to the lake.

When he came back to me he said, “That’s the enemy and they want to capture us.”

He took the rifle from me and switched off the safety and said, “Now this is ready to kill.”

The word “kill” just stands out by itself I thought.

He turned towards the enemy and aimed the rifle and squeezed the trigger and the shot snapped out and the stick on the right broke and fell over dead.

“See? Now it’s your turn.”

I missed everything every time.

“We’ll try this again sometime,” he said.

Now, my use of, “Puerile,” was one thing. But larger, was David was going to see that I was a terrible shot?

I followed him. He walked like he knew where he was going. David led me to Shady Lane Rest Home, a big castle-like facility two blocks long and one half block wide. It was set of from the streets and surrounded by old oak and chestnut trees. We slipped inside the property. To the side of an oak tree David said, “Here we are.” He crouched with the pellet gun and pumped it up. He pointed it at a street light lamp that hung between two telephone poles over the middle of the street. He motioned me to kneel at his side.

He winked at me and aimed the gun at the streetlight and pulled the trigger.

“Plink,” was the sound from the collision with the glass.

“Got it!” he whispered.

But, no breakage.

“Shit,” he said.

He pumped the action and shot again.

“Plink,” again.

No breakage.

He repeated the ritual two more times.

The street lamp held its own against the pellet shots.

“Damn it!” he said. “I think it’s up too high.”.

“I think we better get back to the garage,” I said.

“Do you want to give it a try?” he asked.

“I better not.” The next summer David asked me the same daring question, “Do you want to give it a try?” We had biked to Manitowoc Rapids and were fishing for bluegill and crappies on the Manitowoc River. We sat on a stump of a weeping willow tree and watched our bobbers. From his knapsack he pulled out a paper bag. Inside was a quart of whiskey that he had brought along for our “enjoyment.”

“You want to give it a try?” This time I said, “You bet!” I downed a mouthful of a slurp.

It was awful. I had never tasted whiskey before.

“That was great!” I ballyhooed.

He looked at me with surprise.

“Wow!” he said.

I had done something to impress the “Akela”?

He grabbed the bottle away from me. He took a swig and set the bottle down on the tree stump between the two of us.

When we caught a fish we’d have a sip.

Our bobbers kept bobbing along.

We did that until our stringers were full of fish. There was a quarter of the bottle remaining. I said, ”David, I don’t feel any different.”

“You need some more,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. I trusted that he knew what he was talking about. So I grabbed bottle and just like that chugged down five or six gulps.

He looked at me – clearly impressed.

We called it a day.

It hit me on the way home. I don’t know how I made it there. I dropped my bike with my stringer on the driveway and wordlessly passed my mom in the kitchen and hustled up to my room. My mom knew something was wrong.

She called up to me.

No answer.

She came upstairs and found me passed out on my bed, my face planted in my puke. She pulled my head up by my hair and I roused some. I staggered to the shower and vomited there too.

She took me to the hospital.

“Your son could have died by aspirating on his vomit,” said the doctor in the emergency room.

I didn’t feel better until two days later.

“You are never to play with David again,” said my father.

This all came back to me forty years later when my neighbor across the alley was shooting his pellet gun at squirrels, trying to rid the beasts from the neighborhood and ended up plinking a pellet through my back window.

I heard the noise from the front room. I thought a bird had hit the window. I was pissed when I saw the spent pellet. I called 911 and made my report. I was told they would send a SWAT team over. I said I didn’t think that was necessary because the guy was a retired EMT, a decent enough fellow when sober, not a criminal, and that when he drank too much he shot at squirrels.

They sent over two officers. I had a window open and could hear them confronting my neighbor. He said he was just shooting at squirrels: “They are pesky devils.”

They told him to stop shooting at squirrels.

He agreed.

I decided to research “Pellet Gun.” (Kind of like a new word for the day.)

I didn’t know that there’s a lot of romance wrapped around pellet guns.

Lewis and Clark (1804) carried an air gun along with them on their expedition to the Pacific Coast. Lewis and Clark’s gun evolved from prehistoric lung-powered blow guns. Their air gun held 22 round balls in a tubular magazine that could all be shot out in one minute. The butt stock of the gun served as the air reservoir and had a working pressure of 800 pounds per square inch (PSI) that produced a speed for the projectile, depending on its size, from anywhere between 650 and 1000 feet per second.

(A Rottweiler’s jaw can close with the pressure of 800 pounds PSI. You have to dive down to about 1900 feet in the ocean to feel 800 PSI. “It’d be pretty rough without a submarine,” said William Trubridge who, on April 10 2009, held his breath for 3 minutes and thirty seconds in setting, “The “Constant Weight Without Fins Free Diving World Record” with a depth of 288 feet. )

Lewis and Clark used pellets to kill deer and wild boars. A pellet from their air gun could pierce a one-inch wooden board at 200 feet, an effect roughly equal to that of a modern street version 9 mm caliber pistol.

By the late 1800’s pellet guns had not only proved themselves in warfare and carved out chapters in military history but they had also demonstrated some significant advantages over firearms of the day.

They were about the same size and weight and cost as their powder-dependent cousins.

They could be relied on for firepower in wet weather.

They could volley off shots much, much faster and much quieter than muzzle-loading guns. And because they gave off neither muzzle flash nor smoke upon discharge they were invisible when they were fired, and for one hundred years they gave snipers a special advantage.

When the powder weapon technology finally got the upper hand, air rifles were consigned to common sport like target shooting. Clubs sprung up in rural areas and shooting matches were held between teams that were formed by the same tavern businesses that sponsored formal bowling and dartball leagues.

Prizes were not as important as the camaraderie.

But improvements in valve designs and reservoir strength once again catapulted the pellet gun back into the adult-sized urban big league of the mainstream gun.

Today, high-powered air rifles can propel a pellet well beyond 1125 feet per second (FPS), the speed of sound, and some spring powered pellet guns can blast through the sound barrier with a muzzle velocity of 1600 fps.

Ads for air powered pellet rifles tell you how important it is to select a pellet gun with a, “Hardwood Stock,” and a, ”Bull Barrier,” and an “Extra Large Power Plant,” all to provide, ”Maximum Take Down Power,” in order to kill quickly, and humanely, with a minimum number of shots.

There’s a lot of neat customization for the asking too.

You can get a laser scope, and a raised scope trail, and target turrets, and rings, for greater accuracy at distance shooting.

You can add a raised cheek piece, and cheek pads, and a thick rubber recoil pad, for comfort, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Then there are a bevy of pistols for the quick draw response to a blue jay nibbling on the sunflower in your backyard garden or to a cawing crow, stretching its wings, on the roof of your garage. There is the .22 caliber pellet pistol designed for experienced shooters who appreciate maximum firepower, offering a 900 FPS velocity, which, please note, is similar to the explosive .38 special, the police issued revolver.

And you can personalize your own air gun like you can groom your own pet.

You want it to look like it’s a part of your family? There’s custom engraving: You can you have your name or your sweetheart’s name engraved on your air gun.

Or you may even want to consider an engraved pellet gun as a gift for someone else, a message for someone you really care about. You can do this on the cheap too, sometimes for less than $50.00.

Some examples out there are: Happy Father’s Day Dad! Happy Birthday Mother!

Now imagine what would happen to terminal ballistics if you’d add the weight of a word, or a phrase, or a picture, to one of the homing pellet projectiles like, “This one’s for you God!” It just wouldn’t get the job done. The thing would never get to the target. It’d hit someplace, or someone, else.

Intentional killing would be impossible. The neighborhoods would be up for grabs and the emergency rooms of cities would be filled with the innocent.

The pellet that plinked out my big back kitchen window cost me $425.00.

It was purchased for less than $0.02.

For that price, it could have been a homicide.