Reckoning

"Welcome to the Wild West, young pardners! After striking gold, you and your band of prospectors were robbed and taken hostage. You managed to escape but the robber rigged the saloon with all sorts of tricks to keep his loot secure. Your mission: break in and steal back your gold. Yee haw!" 

I usually spoke that part with gusto- my shoot-em-up not-too-hokey Western accent, grazing my hand against my pretend holster, tilting back my head just so, a machismo wink- this time to a group of young boys- while I drawled, “You got it, pardners?”

But then I saw him. My swagger faltered a bit. Coach Bowie, standing in such a familiar pose- arms crossed, staunch, glowering- that I was thrust back into high school; twelfth grade speech. His gut had grown considerably, and he appeared stouter, shorter, than his giant-sized persona back in high school, but still imposing. 

I pushed a button on my Ipad and the iconic sound of wind rushing through the sagebrush whistled from its tinny speaker. I snuck a quick glance on my device to look at the kid’s name (much could be gleaned from digital waivers) but it pulled up right away: Bryce Bowie, aged six, birthday Wild West Extravaganza. Thoughts skittered- this must be Coach Bowie’s grandson; Colton Bowie’s son, had to be. Colton would be..what, 28, 29? He was four years older than me, had graduated by the time I started high school, but Coach had a daughter two years older than me- Carissa? Christy?- and a son my age, Jacob Bowie. 

Flustered though I was, I had to keep the show going. “Saddle up!” I clapped my hands and the boys squealed in delight. I led them into the saloon, wondering if Coach recognized me, but then immediately dismissed the thought. Of course he didn’t. I was a drama kid. Not that I tended to parse the variances of human nature into categories, compartmentalizing them into some Hollywood version of high school: meaty jocks, ditzy cheerleaders, nerdy brainiacs. Football players could be sensitive too, right? Didn’t High School Musical already cover that ground- upending the status quo and all that?

Everyone knew who Colton Bowie was; not because he was the football star (he’d started strong: varsity quarterback his freshman year, reduced to second-string his sophomore year, and then to JV his junior year, and then dropped out completely by his senior year). These days everyone had a psychology degree from Google University and could see that the relentless pressure his dad put upon him had withered away soul. By his senior year, Colton had grown his hair long, had a dramatic relationship with a girl, where he’d punched a few walls (misplaced anger, obviously) and then had gone of to a four year university (a mid one, nothing to brag about), married young, had a kid young….

Wait a hot second. Was this the kid? 

As expected, the boys didn’t look for clues but manhandled all the props, they went straight behind the bar- cheap plywood with fake liquor bottles. I sidled up to Bryce and said with a wink. “Got an ID, pardner?” He grinned at me and his friends clamored around me. At this age, reality blurred with fantasy, and so most of them thought I was a true cowboy straight from 1880’s dusty New Mexico. 

I jostled with them a bit, while Coach looked bored from the sidelines. “All them rattler bites get to your brain, pardner?” I said to Bryce, tapping him on the side of the head. I was straying too far from my comfort zone. Except for a few stock phrases, I didn’t know much beyond basic cowboy lingo. I wasn’t supposed to touch the guests, especially kids, but I was feeling reckless, Coach Bowie stirring things up like a mean ol’ viper’s nest.  

Depending on the age group, the Wild West escape room could be a real head-scratcher. The management wanted to keep the script versatile, marketing for all age groups (to line their pockets) which meant adapting from the intricate to the simple. Such as: How much was the bounty on the wanted poster? The liquor bottle dates. The sheet music on the piano. The deck of cards. The menu. It all added to clues which led to a code which ultimately led to the safe. 

For the young ones, the clues were so basic that I’d basically let them whoop and holler around the room until they found the code by me hinting at the clues in some Barney-like, Western-style yippee-yay in which I’d always let the birthday boy become deputy to allow them access to the jail, where the safe held their “gold.” But dammit, Coach Bowie. 

I swaggered over to them, loose-limbed, and slightly bow legged, tilting my hat. “Okay young cowboys. You don’t want the robber to come and getcha!” I flourished this by lunging at the boys while they squealed and darted away. I pulled my fake gun from my holster. (The management thought guns, even fake ones, might cause some controversy, but ultimately decided that this being the Wild West, they warranted that they be props, always sheathed, not brandished about. I was of the anti-gun mindset myself, but this was a learning moment. And Coach Bowie the intended audience.) 

The kids wanted to hold it. I put it into Bryce’s hot little hands, glancing over at Coach. Byrce immediately pointed it into the air and tried to fire. He whined, “But it’s not real.”

I said more angrily than I intended, “Whatcha doing, Cowboy? Your granddad there not teach you about gun safety?”

This got Coach’s attention. He narrowed his eyes at me. The bullet had found its target.

I took the gun from Bryce. “Guns kill people. 

Bryce was undeterred. “I’m going to kill the robber!” 

Coach Bowie was the high school’s football coach, and he was a legend. A legend. But as legends go, they tend to lose their luster if they don’t eventually vacate their perch of greatness, because nothing lasts forever, right?  And it was clear that Coach Bowie, as most egotistical pricks, never thought his number with the football gods would be up. He’d led the school to three state championships, won two of them, but by the time his son came to high school, his star began to wane; and maybe because he’d lost that razor-sharp detachment, and with Colton’s lackluster performance, the public began to see the rage monster behind Coach Bowie’s facade.  

But damn, isn’t verbal abuse, especially among youth, passe by now? Don’t we know so much more now? About emotional needs and sense of self and all the wisdom and knowledge amongst Tik Tok shorts and Youtube gurus? Aren’t we all so much more enlightened now? 

Like I said, no surprise, I was a drama kid. And for some reason, as though my guidance counselor enjoyed tormenting me, she sprinkled the outliers (and only in a football state was I considered an outlier), a theater kid, a band kid, a chess club kid- just a few, and tossing us, like a garnish, into a whole class with athletes. 

Bryce handled the gun with deftness, alarming, in my opinion, for a six-year-old. It looked like he was trying to open the chamber (there was no chamber on this cheap-ass fake gun). “Where are the bullets?” he asked me?

“Where are the bullets?” I said in mock outrage. “Where are the bullets?” Then I winked at them. “You gotta find the magic bullet.” I told them that it was a magic bullet, a gold bullet, and that we were going to shoot the bad guy with it.  

Whoo-boy that stirred them up. They went hollering all around the saloon. I was thinking on the spot. I was changing the rules. Screw the clues and the code. This was about a bullet now. This was about a gun. 

Colton Bowie shot someone dead the spring break of his senior year. He’d gone to a shooting range with his buddies and accidentally shot a woman (just a girl, really, nineteen years old), just an employee. No one knows if it was a misfire, or him being reckless, or a little of both, but truly no one thought it was intentional. It was clearly an accident. No one could fault him for lawyering up, for the coach wanting to protect him by getting the best lawyer; no one could fault him for that. But what we could fault him for was the fact that his own family- his dad and mom and sister- pillars of the community- did not give a damn, for this young woman, for this human being. And yet, his younger brother, Jacob, the same age as myself- he did care. During the time we spent together in high school, he looked gaunt, miserable, keeping to himself, looking pained to be associated with his father, especially his brother. These days, from my social media stalking, it’s clear he’s estranged from his family. (I say this facetiously- stalking- just an expression. Let’s just say I kept up an interest in Jacob.) He lives a more granola lifestyle, living in Seattle, committing the cardinal sin of being a liberal, liking all sorts of posts against guns and school shootings and so forth. 

I hadn’t hidden the gold bullet. In the mayhem, I’d rooted around in a drawer for a tarnished old bullet that we’d kept among other “Western” knick-knacks in a drawer behind the bar. “Maybe it’s by the piano!” I said, to misdirect them. The bullet was real, an antique, belonging to an old shotgun that we didn’t keep on the premises. The coach still stood there, scrolling through his phone, underwhelmed. He was probably only waiting for the birthday cake in the party room. I edged by the coach and he looked up long enough for us to have eye contact. I smiled at him- a genial Cowboy smile, and he gave me a curt nod in reply. 

One of the bottles behind the bar table knocked over but luckily didn’t break. The boys looked in every nook and crevice. A golden bullet! Under normal circumstances this would be a terrible idea. I managed to catch Bryce’s eye and give him a quick shake of the head. Over here. Luckily, like the sly little devil, he got the hint. Behind my back, I pointed to the drawer.

“I found the bullet!” Triumphantly Bruce held it up, not knowing that it wasn’t exactly gold. You couldn’t bite down on that nugget- it would break your tooth. 

“The birthday boy found the bullet!” Luckily the boys were too young to notice the game was rigged; that the boy of the hour had coincidentally found the prize. I took my hat off and gently set it on top of his head, in which it wobbled and slid low on this face. “I hereby declare, as the sheriff of Wild West Extravaganza, that Bryce Bowie, six years old, is now my deputy.”

“Does that mean I can shoot the robber?”

I kneeled before him and said soberly, “Bryce, what do bullets do to people?”

“They kill bad guys.”

There was a short gruff laugh from his grandpa. A ‘that’s my boy’ kind of chuckle. It pissed me off. 

I uttered with all the sanctimony I could muster, “That’s true, Bryce, but bullets also kill innocent people too.”

This got the reaction I expected. “What the hell did we pay for?” Coach groused. “This is supposed to the Wild West!"

I stood up and stared him in the eye. “Boys, I just spotted the bad guy.” I retrieved my handcuffs- real ones, also a prop- and dangled it before them. 

The boys spun wildly around. “Where’s the bad guy?” 

I smiled at the coach, a gleam in my eyes. “Right there, that old guy there. That’s the bad guy.”

“That’s my grandpa!” said Bryce.

“That’s not your grandpa.” I widened my eyes at him, with a wide grin, appealing to Bryce's sense of fun. But I was dead serious. This was a reckoning. “Go get em Cowboys!”

A little mob of six-year-old boys, attacking the old man, grabbing his hands, clutching at his legs. He didn’t look pleased, huffed a bit, but what was he to do? He wasn’t expecting, however, for me to pull his arms back and flip open the handcuffs, to lock his wrists in place.

That set him off, but he managed to stifle his rage. Only a matter of time though. And I was here for it. 

The girl’s name was Alexis Fernandez, and she was the granddaughter of the shooting range, part of a larger property that had been in the family for generations. They weren’t wealthy, didn’t have the resources to pursue both a criminal and a long drawn-out civil suit. But they loved their daughter, and the public responded. The story, as it goes, is predictable: the criminal suit was ultimately dropped, not because there was no fault, but because culpability was so buried under legalese, the Fernandez lawyer didn’t have the means to excavate. But buried there, a jewel, a simple truth. That Alexis Fernandez was a human being, and she didn't to deserve to die.  

Everyone speaks of shame like it’s the hot lava core of emotional pain. Food shaming, body shaming, sexual shaming. But for Colton and Coach Bowie, they could have used a nice dose of shame, in its purest form, shot to the core of their black hearts. Because they felt none. And boy did we try. And by we I mean the social media swarm, where we fought valiantly to support the Fernandez family, trying and failing to appeal to the justice system, and then to the community, posting pictures of Alexis, appealing to their humanity. Our hive grew, the outrage grew, surely the Bowie family would cower in shame; surely Coach would quit; surely Colton would go into hiding. Only Jacob kept quiet; only he kept his head down; only he felt mortified. As for the Coach, it’s not hard to feed your ego when you know where to look. The audience might have been smaller- some sycophants at a smaller watering hole- but it could be a puddle and he’d find a place to drink. Colton went to college and posted shamelessly on social media- his buddies, his fraternity, his girlfriend, now his wife, his child, his church, his upstanding morality. No matter that the hive swarmed his comment section, reminding him, cajoling him, it did nothing. It did not penetrate into that part of the soul called conscience. While I was at school, his daughter was a cheerleader, flaunting her good looks, and charming the teachers. Again, it didn’t matter that most of the student body despised her. She would only look to where her ego needed nourishment. That’s what the Bowie family did. 

“Let’s take him to the jail!” I hollered and the boys crowed. 

I was so off script, there was no script. I shoved him into the jail, the final room, where typically the boys would find the clues- for the young ones, they just needed to count the “scratch marks” on the wall to produce the key- in order to open the safe where’d they’d find the cheap bars of gold. But not this time. “As my deputy, slam the door, Bryce. You’ve got the robber!” Bryce slammed it so hard it clanked open, and so I had to help him lock it.

“All right, all right, let me out,” the Coach said warily. “Let’s get this over with.”

I put a hand to my chest. If drama kids irritated him, I would be Oscar-worthy. “You are the worst kind of blue-bellied, grass-feeding, bottom-feeder devil in all of tarnation.” The boys laughed so tauntingly, it reminded me of the novel, Lord of the Flies. 

He was getting angry, but it wouldn’t take much for him to barrel his way out of the cheap jail, past me to my manager, where’d he’d take pleasure from getting me fired. 

Fired? This was beyond getting fired. I knew how to get him. I sidled up to the bars. “Hey, Coach, do you remember me? I was in your twelfth grade class ‘bout...oh say, five years ago.”

“I don’t care who you were, you get me out of here, or you’re gonna get your ass served.”

“No problem, Coach, sorry for the trouble. Thought I’d give your grandson a little show, right?” I gestured to the sweet child, who was still holding my gun and going “phew phew” around the room. I called the boys over and announced the code to the safe, told them now that they had their robber, they could open it. Bryce shoved his way to the front, demanding it was his birthday, but all the little boys were trying to shove their fingers onto the key pad. 

I turned back to the coach. “Say, you heard from Jacob recently?” 

Coach glared at me. “Get me out of here you good-for-nothing scum.”

“Of course, of course.” I dramatically patted my pockets. “Well shoot….I thought it was here.”

The temperature was rising. The joint was going to blow. I only needed to throw the match. 

“You know, Jacob and I were friends in high school.” I leaned in, said conspiriatorily, “Special friends, if you catch my drift. Let’s just say…we liked to play cowboy and robber.” And then I winked.

Implosion. I tapped the record button on my Ipad.