By Len Kuntz

We never talked about his brother, though everyone else did. Small town speculation is all some folks have, especially if it’s dark and familiar.

Gordy’s favorite place to hang out was an old tree fort that lurked behind our two trailer parks. Those who’d come before had carved names, slander and pornography into the warped sideboards, but we ignored all that. We’d become good at disregarding most things, and now that we were both fourteen, future days held all of our promise and intrigue.

 A few people believed us twins, not because we looked alike, but because we were inseparable. The things we had in common were too numerous to label, like the ways in which both our home lives rattled on askew.

Gordy arrived up the ladder with four canned beers stuffed in a gunny, and two exploded like pissed-off cats when he opened them, foam slipping down the glistening tin.

Gordy’s dad was gone, his brother, too, of course, but one of his cheeks was bruised and his ear swollen candy apple red.

Gordy took a hardy gulp and I could tell he was trying not to wince from the bitter kick. “I was thinking,” he said. I felt my thoughts consider his latest bruise. Though my mother was no more lively or dangerous than a stepstool, Gordy’s could spark in all the wrong directions.

“So whaddya think?”

“About what?”

“Stupid ass. Us saving up for that used Mustang in Schwimmer’s lot. We could fix it ourselves, paint her candy apple red.”

Candy apple red. That happened with us sometimes, a twin thing, where it seemed like one of us had just read the other’s mind.

“If he’d sell it cheap enough,” I said.

“Yeah,” Gordy said, gulping the rest before struggling to belch the way we knew real men did.

The third can cracked open like a branch snapping off, and for a moment, I thought the fort was finally done in and collapsing.

“You drink that too fast and we’ll be dry before we know it.”

Gordy fished inside his coat pocket and produced two saviors. “Ta da!”

“You were holding out.”

“I wasn’t.”

But he was, not just the extras, but about his brother’s girlfriend who’d got that lawyer and jury to believe it was rape instead of plain old sex.   

The wind was up, hugging and jostling the fort as if we were inside an uncertain cloud.

When I finished my beer, Gordy took the empty and tucked it in his coat for recycle money later. “I was thinking,” he said.

“Yeah, you were thinking?”

“About bagging high school.” He glanced over my head, knowing I’d be startled.

“You got plans, huh?” I asked, nervous for his answer.

When Gordy reached into his jacket, I expected a seventh beer and not the pistol.

“Holy fuck!”

“It’s heavy. Wanna hold it?”

“Hell no. Where’d you get it?”

“My brother. He left it.”

“Left it?”

“Well, I found it.”

“The fuck you say. What’re you going to do with it?” I realized how chickenshit I sounded; my face burned.

“Don’t piss yourself. It’s not loaded.” But I knew he was lying. His lip twitch always gave Gordy away.

We both understood what I said next, decided the gun’s fate, if it remained out in the open, or stuffed away with Gordy’s other conundrums.

“Maybe someday we could target practice,” I said. “If you got shells.”

Gordy’s smile was fake as the doctored report card he turned into his mother. “Yeah, that’s a start.”

I grabbed the stubby wooden table and centered it, sat down cross-legged and started shuffling cards I’d brought. I let my eyes skim off the card corners for a sly peek but couldn’t see the gun anymore.

“The thing I realized,” Gordy said, “is we have to make our own future.”

“Took you a while to figure that one out, did it?” I said, trying on a smirk.

“I mean, everything here is shit. It’ll always be shit.”

I dealt. “You shouldn’t think so much.”

“We got nothing and you know it.”

I thought we had each other, thought we always would, but Gordy was scaring me, gun or not. 

I wanted to ask how he thought he’d get away with stealing that beer from his old lady. How a pistol could change our circumstances for the better. I wondered if he really found it, like he said. If he believed his brother did that to his girlfriend or if she was just vengeful as his brother proclaimed. 

Instead, I tossed two Oly caps on the table and tapped my cards while the wind kicked hard outside. “Ante in.”

Gordy added his two beer caps and corkscrewed his right eye like I’d seen him do right before a migraine ambushed him.

For a stretch, we played in silence, each of us taking turns losing without trying. 

Finally, I nodded toward Gordy’s head. “Is it a bad one?”

“The thing is, it feels like we’re fucked if we do nothing.”

“A gun’ll change things, huh?”

“We could win the fucking lotto, buy brand-new wheels and people’d still think we stole them.”

“I thought we were going to get that Mustang from Schwimmer?”

“It’s not about that. People like us, you know how it is. Good things could happen, no one’d believe it was genuine.” 

I wanted to mention our part in things: our fraudulent report cards, the filched playing cards, the beer Gordy stole.

“People can fucking say anything they want about us and that makes it true,” Gordy said, rubbing his forehead. “They can make up shit. Get us locked up.”

“It’s not always so.”

“Hell it ain’t,” Gordy said, the pistol to his head before I knew it, the tree fort breaking apart around us, one board falling, then the next, us losing our grip on the wind.