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In the afternoon, I found the shooting range online and called to ask about when I could come — and if there was anyone who could help me figure out the Big Iron.

There was, the guy said, and as luck would have it they had some open range time that very afternoon.

I called Anthony and told him of my plan after dismissing the idea of not mentioning it. Anthony is the kind of partner who pretty much needs to know everything I do and where I am at all times. Taking an hour after work to shoot a gun without telling him would just about be grounds for divorce. As it turned out, Anthony saw my decision as something close to that.

"Why? he said, exercising his annoying habit of attenuating that particular word when he knew he wasn't going to like the answer. "Why would you... throw that in my face like this when you know I don't like guns?"

"I'm not throwing anything in your face, Anthony," I said, my voice level and even (or so I imagined).

"Don't get pissy with me," he said. "I'm just asking."

_You're never "just" anything_ , I thought to myself, but I didn't say it. Instead, I offered this:

"Look, Anthony, I don't understand the gun thing anymore than you do, but it was my father's dying wish that I have this stupid thing, and it just seems logical that I should try it out. I mean, if someone wills you a piano, you'd play it, wouldn't you?"

"A piano never killed anyone," he said.

"Sure they do," I said, feeling the conversation taking that hard left into inane argument territory. "They're always falling on people in those old movies."

I thought I'd have to endure more of this when I stopped home to get the Big Iron after work, but amazingly Anthony wasn't home. Probably, he went to "that odious Starbucks" around the block rather than endure another confrontation with his gun-toting husband. In Anthony's bloated imagination, I probably now appeared in his mind like some Sylvester Stallone character, a machine gun in each hand, bandoliers full of bullets across my chest.

To hell with it, to hell with him, I thought, going into the shed to retrieve the gun. I made it to the shooting range just a few minutes after "open range" time and sat outside in the car feeling, for some reason, like a man about to rob a bank — or perhaps visit a prostitute. But people shoot guns all the time, all over the place, I told myself. It's a perfectly legal activity, perfectly safe in a controlled environment. There's no reason why a grown man, blah, blah, blah.

Inside, the guy at the desk's gay-dar went off like an air-raid siren, the alarm manifesting itself in the dude's bushy monobrow — which twitched and arched like a landed mackerel when I opened my mouth and said I needed help with a .45 pistol.

"Sure," he said. "First time?"

"Ever, for a handgun."

I put the gun on the counter in its little sack and gave him the brief 411 on why I had it.

"Very cool," monobrow said, turning the Big Iron over in his hands. "Don't see many of these anymore, but it's a damn good piece. Even one this old, it'll shoot fine." He looked up at me. "Man you need is Jay."

Jay turned out to be roughly the exact opposite of the crew-cutted martinet/former drill sergeant guy I'd imagined. He had long hair tied back in a ponytail, a thin, pock-marked face and the posture of a whooping crane. As he led me back to the range after monobrow supplied me with bullets, I noticed a bulletin board with a flyer for a women's shooting class to be taught by Jay.

Ahhh, I thought. OK, whatever. Turn the gay guy over to the women's instructor — it probably made sense in some weird way to the guy at the desk. Either way, Jay turned out to be a supremely patient and kind instructor who didn't appear to mind walking me through the very basics. When it came time to step up to the shooting platform, I slapped in the clip the way he showed me and flicked off the safety. The target looked a million miles away, but Jay walked me through the proper way to hold and sight the weapon and then said, simply: "OK, let 'er rip!"

The first shot surprised me with its kick and power, but it was nothing short of intoxicating — to have that much power in one's hands. I fired the remaining six in quick succession, perhaps channeling the way I'd seen movie actors do it. When Jay reeled in the target, every shot was in the 7, 8 or 9 area, with two in the bull's eye.

Jay whistled.

"You do that again and I'm gonna call you a liar — or the most natural marksman I've ever seen."

I had nothing to say to this. I felt a swoon, as if I'd just been told I'd won the lottery or the Nobel Prize. My throat felt closed up and I couldn't speak. Jay took the gun and slapped in another clip.

"Let's see that again."

This time, I had one in the 8, two in the 9 and four bull's eyes.

Jay whistled again, and called over some guy named Bob.

"Check it out, Bob. This here's Thearn, says he's never shot a pistol before and here he is, shooting like this first time out."

Bob took the target and examined it closely, as if looking for evidence of cheating. I just stood there, surrounded by a weird glow of competence I'd never really experienced before.

I was special. I had something special going on.

"He's shooting an old M1911? What, your granddaddy leave it to you or something?

"Something like that," I said.

"Do it again," Bob said.

So I did, with similar results. By this time, a small crowd had gathered, and Jay kept loading and handing me clips and I kept turning in the kind of results, Bob told me, that usually took years to achieve. He said if I were in the Navy, where he served, it'd earn me a marksmanship ribbon — if I'd shot it with a Beretta M9.

After an hour of shooting, flushed with success and delighted with my new skill, I excused myself to take a leak. Standing there reading a flyer about all the upcoming classes and events at the range I might take, I thought of sharing all this with Anthony and then felt the whole thing deflate like a failed soufflé. All this I was experiencing would be meaningless to Anthony; offensive, even. He would not share this triumph with me. It would only be this horrible thing Thearn was doing in which he'd have no part. My shooting career, in short, was over pretty much as soon as it had begun — at least if I wanted to stay with Anthony, which I very much did.

Feeling oddly light on my feet, I went back into the range and found the guy who'd offered me $500 for the gun minutes earlier. Among protests from Jay and Bob and the other guys who'd enjoyed watching me shoot, I told them I was going to be like Muhammad Ali and go out on top. I thanked them, shook hands all around with my fleeting fraternity of shooters and went out to my car.

Back home, an icy Anthony asked me how I enjoyed my "little escapade with weapons of mass destruction."

"It's not for me," I said. "I sold it to some guy there for 500 bucks. Not enough for new countertops, but a good bump for the vacation fund."

I tried to act casual, picking up a magazine as if the matter were closed. But Anthony came over and took my hands in his and looked me in the eye and said "thank you."

"You're welcome."

Later, he asked me if I ever divined in my mind why my father had given it to me in the first place.

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe he did think it would make me less gay. Maybe it was a genuine act of giving, of something he valued highly. And it might have been an attempt to teach me something, or say something to me he could never say in life."

"So, maybe you would learn something, from beyond the grave," Anthony said, with a small laugh. "And did you?"

"I did. I learned that if we're ever caught up in a firefight, I'd be a good guy to have around."

"Really?"

"Really. I'm like Dirty Harry with that motherfucker. And I guess one other thing."

"Which is?"

"Despite the history of that thing, at the end of the day it's just a piece of metal — a weapon of destruction, as you say. When I saw what it was doing to us, what it _could_ do to us, well. It wasn't worth it."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

###

### Crouton: A Love Story

The crouton appeared on Ted's white ottoman, perfectly centered on the quarter-sized leather button that formed the nexus of stitching that held it together.

The ottoman was one of four pieces of furniture in the room, a one-bedroom place right above the bagel shop on Main Street, Breckenridge. It was purchased for him by his mother, along with the matching recliner, just after his graduation from the university in Boulder nearly a decade ago.

"I think you're crazy to have all white in a mountain town," she'd told him. But she wrote the check all the same. "Price they charge for furniture these days, it's criminal. Are you sure it's that much?"

A small glass-and-aluminum end table sat next to the chair, and a similar piece, slightly larger with one white-cushioned chair, served as his dining table. The 56-inch Sony plasma hung on the wall, along with three framed exhibit prints from the Denver Art Museum.

Ted noticed the crouton immediately upon entering his apartment. Everything else was exactly as he'd left it that morning before going to his office, a small graphic arts firm within walking distance of his home. A man with, say, several children could come home and not notice an errant crouton for weeks. But for Ted, it was the same as if he'd come home and found the place ransacked, searched by thugs, infiltrated by zombies.

He froze.

It was easy enough to see that whoever had left the crouton was no longer present. The door to his bedroom was open, and there was no place to hide.

Except the closet.

Slowly, he removed his sno-mocs and jacket. The shoes went on one of three shelves dedicated to just that purpose; the jacket, a white Marmot, went on its peg. He moved quickly to the bedroom closet and flung the door open. Greeted only by his typical winter wardrobe of turtlenecks and dark cords, he took a quick peek under the single bed, then went into the other room to contemplate the crouton.

Ted was not a crouton eater. He rarely ate salads, for starters, since the bag always went brown before he got around to making a second bowl. Even then, purchasing an entire box of croutons to go with his infrequent salads would have represented something of an extravagance. A typical box of Pepperidge Farms croutons probably held several dozen croutons, and figuring only half a dozen or so, max, would go on a salad every few months, the box would go stale long before he could finish it.

Store-bought croutons were also, he suspected, pretty high in sodium. Ted had mild hypertension, and he was cautious about his salt intake.

A box of croutons was the kind of thing that would sit in his cabinet for a very long time, plaguing him with a silent insistence that he come up with some way to use it. At one point he owned a box of Rice-a-Roni, pilaf flavor, which he'd bought on a whim. After noting that the sodium content per serving was over 1,000 milligrams, the box sat accusingly on his shelf for an entire ski season before he finally donated it during a Christmas food drive.

Standing about three feet from the crouton-inhabited ottoman thinking these many thoughts about croutons, Ted felt the old pre-Lexapro ball of dread welling up in his chest. It had been a good two years since he'd felt it – about the time that had elapsed since his doctor had prescribed the little pills that took the anxiety away and flattened him into a being who counted stairs and ceiling tiles and spent an inordinate amount of time every Sunday making his sock drawer just so.

It was definitely a packaged crouton, not a restaurant-made product. It was nearly perfectly square, with tiny flecks of what was probably identified on the package as "seasoning." It might be "Italian" style, he thought, or "garlic-herb" or even "Caesar." There were no crumbs or other debris around the crouton, negating the notion that it could, somehow, have been tossed in an open window or – even more unlikely – shot out of an air vent. It looked as if it had been placed there with a pair of tongs by someone who'd taken great pains to position it symmetrically, at the precise center of the ottoman.

In the middle of the button.

In his apartment, where he lived alone and never entertained. Even his mother hadn't been to visit since October. She never drove up to the mountains when snow was a possibility.

Ted silently formed the word "why?" on his lips, then reached for his phone. He could call his mother, but the thought wearied him. Her incredulity at the presence of the crouton would lead to a paranoid rant about the derelict ski bums who inhabited Breckenridge, followed by a plea to move in with her or "find some friends, maybe a nice girl." She would quiz him again about his sexual orientation, suggesting it was OK with her if he were gay if it meant he'd have someone to talk to. She would roll the crouton into an indictment of his mental health, telling him he was going "stir crazy," getting cabin fever from the long winters.

He could call the police, but even the cops in a small town don't have much patience for something as ridiculous as this. It was even more inane than the time last summer when he heard – or at least thought he heard – his doorbell ring at 3 in the morning. When he looked through the peephole, he saw what looked like a guy wearing an astronaut's helmet, peering right back at him.

The cop who showed up actually had a shotgun in hand, and he stalked around the building and up and down the hall before asking Ted to close the door and look again through the peephole.

The astronaut was still there, apparently some optical illusion caused by the glass of the peephole with the hall light.

The cop was pretty nice. He didn't laugh but acted as if it happened all the time. Ted could imagine getting the same guy to come investigate the case of the ottoman crouton. He'd get the reputation down at the police station as some crank loner, cooking up bizarre stories to get attention.

He slipped his phone back into his pocket. He squinted at the crouton and then walked into the kitchen. He opened every cabinet, every door and rummaged through the tiny closet pantry to see if somehow he had purchased a box of croutons, forgotten about it, and, while sleepwalking, perhaps, had placed one of the damn things on his ottoman.

He took Ambien, and he'd read stories about people doing weird things in the middle of the night under the influence of the drug. It was preposterous, though, to think that he could have driven to the store, purchased a box of croutons, removed one and placed it on the ottoman and then gotten rid of the rest.

For he could find no box anywhere in the apartment.

There was the cleaning woman who came in once a week. But she was very good — a woman who removed things like errant croutons; she didn't place them there. Besides, it wasn't her day to come clean.

Ted pulled out his phone again to check the time. It was already a good 20 minutes past the time when he'd have begun his evening rituals of uncorking a bottle of wine and preparing dinner.

"Damn!" he said, slightly stamping one foot. As a dramatic gesture, it was weak. He thought about stamping again, much harder, but he now felt the moment had passed. And what about the people who lived below him?

He walked back into the living room and glared at the crouton again. There it sat, unmoving, unthreatening except for the story – the _mystery_ , he supposed – behind its arrival in his apartment. Ted started to reach for the crouton, with the idea that he would simply throw it down the sink and grind it up in the food disposal. But his hand stopped about halfway, and he looked around.

If he discounted the possibility that he had installed the crouton in his apartment on an Ambien-crazed night mission, and that it hadn't somehow arrived by accident or been placed there by some insane prankster, then he had to accept its presence and the fact that he would likely never know the answer. Its idealized location at the center of the ottoman suggested that whatever force had put it there understood Ted's need for order. Removing it could disrupt some new equilibrium that now existed in his space-time continuum.

"That's the dumbest thing you've ever thought, Ted," he said aloud. Then he laughed an artificial laugh, crossed his arms and looked down at the crouton.

It was time to make dinner.

Knowing there was little chance he'd sleep with the alien presence in the adjoining room, Ted finally took a pair of cooking tongs and removed the crouton from the ottoman around 11 p.m. For a moment, he stood in the middle of the room, holding the crouton in the tongs out in front of him like it was a chunk of nuclear waste. He considered saving the crouton as some kind of "evidence" (they could do DNA testing on it, perhaps, and identify the crouton-placer that way), but ultimately he opted for the food disposal option, allowing the water to run for an extra minute after the grinding stopped to ensure it was washed away completely.

And when he returned home from work the next day, the crouton was there again, in the exact same spot.

Ted froze, again, but his body's internal processes moved into high gear: The dormant anxiety bomb inside his chest inflated to the size of a softball – maybe even a basketball. He could feel various chemicals being released into his bloodstream: adrenaline, norepinephrine, god knew what else. Perspiration spiked all around, with a concentration around the back of his neck and collar. His mouth went immediately dry, and the phenomenon he'd always thought of as "principal's office stomach" hit him with the force of a jackhammer.

He felt his bowels twitch and hold, but his bladder let go completely. He stood there for several seconds before he even realized he'd completely wet himself. The pee was hot on his leg, and it was making an exit via his left pant leg onto his extremely clean white carpet. Moving quickly, an adrenaline-fueled antelope before the lion, he made a quantum leap into the bathroom, where he stripped off his pants and boxers in the shower, pulled his shirt over his head and turned on the water.

Normally, Ted was the kind of guy who stood outside the shower, monkeying with the handle to get the water to the perfect temperature before stepping in. It always made him laugh how, in movies, people always got into the shower first and then turned the water on. That would never work in Breckenridge, where the water entered the house at, it seemed, exactly 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

But that's exactly what he did in this case, and the resulting blast of frigid water caused him to jump backwards, slip, fall and crack his head on the tub. He was knocked unconscious, but only briefly. The water was jetting down his throat and up his nose, activating his gag reflex and reviving him, he later imagined, just in time.

He'd been out just long enough for the hot water to have reached the showerhead, so in addition to choking on the water, he was also being scalded. With a bizarre, inhuman croak he'd recall later with equal parts wonder and horror, Ted pulled himself out of the tub and onto the bathroom floor, bringing the shower curtain with him. Bleeding profusely from his head wound, scalded about the chest and face and still barely conscious, Ted lay there for a moment wrapped in the wretched plastic shower curtain, highly cognizant of the fact that he was all alone.

There was no one to call out to, no one to help, no one to give a damn that he'd just had all this shit happen to him. He had to digest all of what had just transpired and make it right all on his own, as he always had. The temptation was to lie there on the floor for some time, but there were several factors convincing him that he needed to spring into action. These were:

1. The hot water in his apartment did not last very long, and if he wanted a warm shower to wash away the blood, urine and shower-curtain filth that now coated him, he'd need to act quickly.

2. His head was bleeding quite heavily, from somewhere around the back; his face and neck were on fire from the hot water. This was something that needed immediate attention – possibly even a trip to the hospital and/or a burn center of some sort.

3. The crouton was still out there. Ted didn't believe it was necessarily doing anything that required further action on his part, but it bore close watching.

Struggling to his feet and extricating himself from the shower curtain, Ted first pushed the shower handle to the middle. He was able to get the bloody curtain more or less in place and step under the stream of water. He watched in amazement as the water circling down the drain turned bright red, but after a moment it lightened up a bit, giving him hope that a Band-Aid would do the trick. Where the hot water had scalded him still felt unpleasant, but he soon became reasonably sure that he hadn't been horribly disfigured and wouldn't need years of painful recovery. (As an avid watcher of medical shows on the Discovery Channel, Ted was all too aware of what burn victims had to endure.)

He skipped shampoo for fear that it would irritate his wound, but his faculties had returned well enough for him to clean and dry himself off properly and get into clean clothes. His head he wrapped in turban fashioned from a large towel. Ted knew how to wrap a turban because he'd had a Sikh roommate in college at Boulder, and he'd once had Dalip show him how to do it.

It always pleased Ted to be able to deploy knowledge he'd acquired, especially when it was knowledge that initially appeared useless.

Even with the towel-turban, though, Ted could tell his head wound was still bleeding and that he'd probably need stitches. That meant a drive to the clinic, which was no doubt full of skiers getting their torn ACLs and broken legs looked after. It was Christmas week, after all, and Ted could probably look forward to a long wait – unless he could somehow contrive to start gushing blood onto the floor. The though of standing there bleeding in his makeshift turban surrounded by gaping Iowa skiers made him chuckle in anticipation: Maybe a trip to the clinic would be more fun than he thought.

Laughing made the blood flow more freely, some of it oozing from beneath the towel and onto his neck. Grabbing a box of Kleenex off the night table, he stepped into the foyer and pulled his coat on while he stuffed some tissues up the back of the turban. As he zipped, he regarded the cursed crouton sitting there on the ottoman. It was oblivious to all the pain it had caused him, and it mocked him in the highly annoying way only non-sentient things can mock. Fear of the crouton and what had caused it to be in his apartment had been replaced, at least temporarily, by anger. This little piece of dried bread and spices was really pissing him off.

Of course, it must be a different crouton, Ted reasoned. But it looked identical: the little flecks of spice, the near-perfect rectangular shape and the brittle, porous surface just waiting to play host to some sickly bottled salad dressing.

"Screw it," Ted said, grabbing his keys. He turned once more to the crouton: "And screw you! Bastard crouton!"