There’s a war coming. That’s what Brian’s mom said when she gave us some of the cookies she’d baked. We’d been playing in the fort Brian made in his basement, shooting each other in the legs with our BB guns. While we ate our cookies, Brian’s mom told us about the Book of Revelation and how, inside that book, it said there’s a war coming.
At suppertime, I told my mom and dad about this Book of Revelation and how it says there’s a war coming and how we need to be prepared. Mom looked at me with a funny smile on her face and said that’s just what you’d expect from Rachel and that nutty religion of hers.
— So we don’t believe in that stuff?
— Oh, honey, we’re liberals.
Dad said there’s more to the Bible than all that Revelation hoo-haw. Like the part about beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. What he wanted to know was how those apocalypse nutbars account for people like Isaiah who prophesied peace.
— I mean, they can’t both be right.
— So, if we’re liberals, it means we side more with this Isaiah guy?
— Exactly.
I didn’t tell my mom and dad, but I liked the stuff in the Book of Revelation. We knew, just from playing commando in Brian’s basement, that it’s a lot more fun to prepare for war than to turn all your stuff into tools for gardening. Growing vegetables is boring. I imagined Isaiah duking it out with the guy who wrote this Book of Revelation; I bet he’d get his nose mashed in.
To prepare for the war, Brian and me, we went to Soles Sporting Goods Inc. and bought ourselves bows and practice arrows. Because Brian’s older than me and stronger, he bought a bow with a forty-five pound draw weight. Mine was only forty pounds. Plus that was all I could afford. My mom and dad made me do chores to earn my money and I was too busy playing commando to earn much money. Brian’s mom and dad gave him however much he asked for. My mom and dad said if Brian got money that easy, then he’d never grow up to value his stuff. All my mom and dad taught me is how much I hate chores.
After we bought the bows, we spent at least a couple hours each day shooting arrows at targets we staked in the dirt down the slope behind Brian’s house. We practised until our arms ached, then we unstrung our bows and spent the rest of the afternoon making lists of provisions we’d need for when the war comes. My mom and dad worried we might hurt ourselves and they made us promise not to aim at one another.
Whenever we practised our archery, we had an audience. Marco d’Angelo would lean on his fence and watch the arrows to the targets. Mr. d’Angelo owned the property that ran behind Brian’s yard and my yard. He had kids that was older than Brian and me and they had nothing to do with us. Dad said Mr. d’Angelo’d just retired in the spring. He was an immigrant. Dad said retirement didn’t agree with him. Dad said Mr. d’Angelo was bored. He had too much time on his hands.
According to my mom, there’s three kinds of people in this world. There’s people like us—the normal people—aka the liberals. There’s people like Brian’s mom, aka the religious nutbars. And there’s people like Marco d’Angelo, aka the Italians. Once, I asked why an Italian couldn’t be both an Italian and a liberal or Italian and a religious nutbar, but mom said that Italians were just Italians and that was that. I have no idea what she meant.
Mom didn’t like Marco d’Angelo. I guess he was nice enough. But he kept a big vegetable garden full of tomatoes and zucchinis and grape vines and lettuce. There was nothing wrong with the vegetable garden, but he kept a great mound of compost against the fence between our yards, and in the summer heat, it sometimes stank real bad. He put eggshells in it, too, and that got the skunks coming around for a visit. There was one time, after mom got home from the supermarket with special shampoo for my little brother, that she called him a skunk-baiting wop. I know you’re not supposed to use words like that, and I apologize, but if I used the acceptable words and said that my mom called him a skunk-baiting person of Italian origin, it wouldn’t sound right. Plus it would be a lie. My mom said what she said and there’s no way around that.
After we’d had the bows for two or three weeks and were getting pretty good at hitting the targets, Mr. d’Angelo waved me over to the fence. I hadn’t noticed him standing there. For all I knew, he could’ve been watching for an hour. He wore a big floppy straw hat and was working a stem of long grass between his teeth.
— So what’s a coupla mangia cakes like you doing with bows and arrows?
I shrugged.
— It’s something to do, I guess.
I didn’t think it was such a good idea to tell him about the war that’s coming.
— Let’s see that thing. Zit hard to pull?
I passed my bow over the fence. I told him not to let the string go when you pull it back, not without an arrow, otherwise it could shatter the bow. That’s what the sales guy at Soles told us when we bought our bows. He said it has something to do with physics. When you pull back the bow, you’re giving it potential energy. And when you let it go, you’re turning all that potential energy into real energy. It can be the real energy in an arrow zinging through the air, or it can be the real energy of vibrations breaking up the bow.
Mr. d’Angelo tried to pull back the string but shouted mio dio and kissed his fingers. I showed him the shooting glove I wore on my right hand to protect the skin on my fingertips.
— For a couple skinny mangia cakes, you two must be pretty strong.
He passed back the bow.
— Hey, how’s about you shoot an arrow in the air. Straight up. See how high it goes.
— Uh, these things can go pretty far, you know.
I figured a clean shot could probably go three hundred yards if I was shooting horizontally. Straight up, maybe not so far, but still pretty high. I’d probably lose my arrow.
— Oh, come on. Just to see.
— I don’t think it’s such a good idea.
— Just an experiment.
— I don’t—
— You think I’m just some dumb wop, don’t you?
— That’s got nothing to do with it.
— See what I mean?
— That came out wrong.
— I know how your mom talks about me.
— No.
— I know what you’re thinking.
— You do?
— He’s just a goddam wop asking me to do some goddam thing like you’d expect from some goddam wop. That’s what you’re thinking.
— No I’m not.
— Then prove it.
— Fine.
I braced the arrow, drew the string to my right ear, raised my left arm to the sky, and released. There was a rush of air and the arrow was gone. There was a hum from the string. Mr. d’Angelo stared into the sky until he lost his balance and had to steady himself against the fence.
— There, it’s gone.
— Jesus, that’s really up there.
— Yeah, I lost my arrow.
— Hey wait. Where you going?
— Back to practice shooting.
— You not even gonna wait for the arrow to come back down?
— What’s the point? It’s gone. You saw with your own eyes.
I took my bow and walked back to Brian’s yard. Brian had unstrung his bow and was using the back of a target to work on a list of supplies for when the war comes. In between the arrow holes: back pack, matches, waterproof match case, hunting knife, soup stock, canteen, hatchet, tent, bug spray, sun tan lotion, comic books, bubble gum, baseball cap, compass, watch (the kind with hands), mini shovel (for burying poop), twine, beans …
— Jesus Christ. Jesus Mary and Joseph. Goddam mangia cake. Come back here you skinny mangia cake prick.
I turned and saw Marco d’Angelo thrashing in his compost heap. His straw hat flew off his head and floated into our yard. Chunks of rotten zucchini sprayed across the fence. He flailed his arms like a sick bird trying to take flight. When he spun around to face me, I saw how his left shirt sleeve was soaked in blood. My arrow had gone clean through his upper arm.
— You shot me. Jesus, you shot me.
— I didn’t mean to.
It sounded a little thin, but hey, I was just a kid; whaddyexpect? Besides, he’s the one who kept pushing me to shoot the arrow. Mr. d’Angelo’s arm really hurt, and the more it hurt, the more he yelled, and the more he yelled, the more the feather end of the shaft waggled back and forth, and the more the shaft waggled back and forth, the more it hurt. It was a vicious circle. And being Italian, Mr. d’Angelo couldn’t help but talk with his arms, so he wasn’t about to break the vicious circle any time soon.
When Mom and Dad heard the screaming, they ran into the backyard to see what was up with the angry wop. Mom’s real quick when it comes to thinking on her feet and as soon as she saw the feathers and the arrow shaft and the blood, she yelled for me to unstring my bow, which I did, and she used the string to tourniquet Mr. d’Angelo’s arm. When she was done, her hands dripped red, but she laughed and said it was worse than it looked. Most of it was rotten tomatoes. Marco d’Angelo had made a mess of himself thrashing around in the compost.
— Your boy shot me, he screamed.
— Is that true, son?
Dad glared at me with those stern day-of-judgment eyes. Given that I was holding a bow and there was an arrow sticking out of Mr. d’Angelo’s arm, it was kind of hard to pretend I had nothing to do with the situation.
— Uh, I guess.
I tried to explain that none of this would’ve happened if it weren’t for Mr. d’Angelo pressuring me to do it, but any way I tried to put things, my dad kept coming back to the fact that I shot the arrow and the arrow ended up in Mr. d’Angelo’s arm. I tried to explain that it was his idea, that I was the one who didn’t want to do it.
— Then why didn’t you not do it?
— Huh?
I hate arguing with my parents; they always make things so confusing.
— I expect consequences.
I had never heard a human voice so loud. When dad assured him there would be consequences, oh yes, indeedy, and looked straight at me, d’Angelo exploded: He knew how these things worked. We’d go away and sit around our mangia cake dinner table and have ourselves a good laugh about the stupid wop their boy had shot. And then they’d do nothing. And he’d—meaning me—he’d get away with it.
Dad tried to calm the man and told him that no, indeedy, that’s not how things would work.
— You see, Dad said, we’re liberals, and that means we’ll make sure things get handled fairly.
— I can’t believe you’d even let a boy have a bow. That’s just asking for trouble.
I tried to object by asking why, if he thought it was such a bad idea, why he told me to shoot the arrow in the first place, but my dad wasn’t hearing any of it. He had his own idea of how things should be handled and there wasn’t a thing I could say that would ever sway him. He went to the tool shed, and after rummaging for a couple minutes, came back with a hand saw.
— Son, he said, Mr. d’Angelo’s right. We can’t be letting you shoot arrows wherever you please. You need to take responsibility for your actions.
He passed me the hand saw.
— I need you to cut your bow in half.
That’s the toughest thing I ever had to do. So far. I mean, something harder might come along when I’m older. Like I might have to pull the plug on a dying parent someday. Actually, that might not be so hard. Anyways, I set the teeth against the wooden grip of the bow and drew the saw back and forth and felt how the teeth chewed through the wood and I thought of all the money I’d saved up and how it was turning into sawdust in the grass.
I was never so angry as I was when my bow split down the middle. I didn’t know who made me angriest. There was Marco d’Angelo for asking me to shoot the arrow. And me for listening to Marco d’Angelo. And there was my dad for his stupid ideas about being fair. And my mom for worrying about whether or not we might offend Italians and nutbar religious types. And I was angry at Brian, too, because he’d seen everything but just stood there with his mouth shut.
Yeah, there’s a war coming all right. I can feel it getting close. I’m a bow in the middle of it. And I’m gonna make sure I have a quiver full of arrows. Because I sure as heck don’t wanna vibrate ’til I shatter.