Gulliver Road
By John Cotter

The green smell of rain about to fall swept into the junk room. Filled with old boxes, the spare rooms seemed less eerie with Taylor over.

“What could we make this thing be?” Paul asked, pulling out a plastic spatula. “It could be a gun.” A hammer would have been better.

“Why don’t we just use your father’s guns?” Taylor said. “They’re real.”

“Sure,” Paul shrugged. “But what about when we can’t?”

“When can’t we?”

“Well,” Paul said. “Maybe when he’s shooting. He goes into the woods.”

“When does he shoot them?” Taylor asked.

Paul’s father never touched the guns in the mess of the basement. They’d belonged to Paul’s grandfather, who’d died just before they moved. He’d also left them rich-smelling lacquered furniture. “We’ll show you how to shoot ‘em,” the old man said, jabbing his fork at Paul.

“He ever let you play with them?” Taylor asked.

“All the time,” Paul lied.

“I’ve never shot a gun.” Taylor said. “I probably never will.” Taylor always seemed to speak with certainty, yoking his facts in place. They were both nine that year, but Taylor was older.

***

Paul and Taylor met on the school playground shortly after Paul moved to Gulliver Road.

“I thought that house was too old. I didn’t think anyone could live there,” Taylor said. Paul told him about how he and his dad were lucky to find such a big place after the divorce. The last people who lived there – an ancient couple retiring to Maine – left rooms full of abandoned junk: moth-mouthed cushions, cardboard trash boxes. So it was only in the least empty rooms where he and his father camped.

Paul said he was afraid of the unused rooms.

“How can you be afraid of nothing?”

“Shut up. What are you afraid of?” Wrapping himself around the monkey bars at recess, Paul liked having someone to talk to.

“I don’t pretend stuff, you know? I get scared of things that might actually happen. I don’t know, real stuff. That my parents might fight and break up.” Taylor watched Paul try to hang upside down on the backs of his knees. “Be careful. You’re going to fall off.”

Paul fell, but he picked himself up before his head was clear. He started telling Taylor about how he jumped from tree to tree in his new backyard. The backyard was mostly woods. “Four acres,” he said, his father’s favorite words. He said the highest, oldest maple was right next to the house, but that it stood alone, and he couldn’t think of a way to jump onto the closest branch.

“Tell me how far the jump is,” Taylor said.

“About as far as that fountain,” Paul told him, pointing ten feet away. “The hard part’s landing on the branch, ‘cause I don’t know if I could grab that quick and make it hold me.”

“Show me how to jump the small little trees,” Taylor said, unembarrassed, “because I’ve never done it before, and I’ll help you do the big one.”

***

Paul grabbed the shotgun before Taylor could get his hands on it. Taylor took up the pistols, “Colt model Ns.”

The boys heard what sounded like a slam from upstairs.

“It’s just the heating,” Taylor said.

“No,” Paul told him, “Dad’s home from his route.” He listened for his father’s steps across the ceiling. Paul’s father was working as a mailman, temporarily, and the route was more walking then he’d been used to in his life. First he’d set down his bag and pour a glass of water and wipe his face. Then he’d call Paul’s name to see if there was any chance Paul might smell the pot smoke he lit while he settled back in one of the old couple’s floral-patterned easy chairs. An hour later his father would barbecue something – usually chicken legs on the grill. During dinner, he seemed quieter lately and he looked at Paul in the eye less and less when he talked to him. It made the house feel bigger.

Paul’s father married his mom when they were both still in high school. As soon as they graduated, Paul was born. Then, as his father put it, “Things started going south. Your little brother was DOA, and the money she said her parents had…uh…” The more distant his parents grew from one another, the closer his father grew to his father-in-law. His dad would call the old man in the evenings to complain about the woman they shared in common and her difficult dreams. She wanted to be an actress and said now that she was getting older, two pregnancies passed, she was rapidly losing her shot at the big time. A shot that, if you asked Paul’s father and grandfather, was as distant as the end of the world. But she couldn’t be persuaded from moving out to LA. If Paul was to stay in school back East near to his grandfather and dad, divorce seemed like the only thing. “Amen,” his father said and cried on the weekends.

***

Without being told, Taylor set the table with the blue and white plates. Paul’s mom let them keep the nice ones, but they didn’t use them.

“You get your work done alright?” Paul’s father quizzed Taylor at dinner. “It seems like Mrs. Greenfield ladles it out.”

“Dad gives me help,” Taylor said. “He does math for his work.”

“Oh, yeah? What does he do for a living?”

“He builds submarines,” Taylor said. “He works at the base.”

“He a supervisor?” Paul’s father asked, a little oil on his lips.

“Designer.”

“Ah. Mom?”

“She’s a landscaper,” Taylor said, carefully pulling meat from the bone. “But she mostly works on our yard cause she said there’s not a lot of work around here. We may be moving soon.”

“Well, maybe when you go to Taylor’s place,” he looked at Paul, “you can get some ideas on how to fix up this old house. In fact, if your parents want to stop by any time and give us some tips . . . I’d . . . I’d like to take a look into some of the other houses on the street.”

***

“Don’t fuck with me,” Taylor hollered, pointing the unloaded Colt at Paul and kneeling in the crotch of an old oak.

“I’ll blow your head off,” Paul hollered back from the ground, arching the rifle up at him. “I’ve got shields to resist you.”

“I don’t play like that!” Taylor said. “I’ve got a knife in my boot motherfucker and I’ll fucking use it on your pussy face.”

After Taylor jumped onto Paul from the tree, just like Paul taught him to do, Taylor fixed him into a headlock that lasted straight until Paul’s eyes pricked.

***

Later that night, in one of the largest rooms, the one leading out to the ledge by the giant maple, they smuggled the unloaded guns back inside. The light faded fast, made the room turn green. There was no way to make it brighter.

“Like right now,” Paul said, thinking he could teach him. “Imagine you’re on the flight deck of a spaceship. Close your eyes.” The sound of traffic carried from the road beyond the trees. Paul’s dad would be in bed by now but not asleep, thinking whatever he thought when the lights were off.

“Ok,” Taylor said.

“Alright, open your eyes. The window is a window. What’s coming toward us?”

Taylor stared so long the light turned dark.

“I want to try jumping the tree,” he said.

“It’s too dark.”

“It’s not all the way dark. Let’s just go out and take a look at it.”

Cracking the window open showered paint chips on the sill. Paul crawled on his knees with Taylor behind him, onto a narrow, shingled ledge two tall stories over the front door. The tree was far away as ever, but smaller in the dark.

Taylor pulled the Colt from the back of his waistband. “Inside the house, motherfucker,” he exaggeratedly whispered.

“Damn,” Paul said, ducking back inside. He wanted to play along but he was still worried about the real gun, his father hearing.

“We’ve got you motherfuckers covered from all sides around,” Taylor said in a radio muffle.

In the roomful of dark boxes, Paul pulled the rifle from the corner by the door. If he’d convinced Taylor, it would be loaded in their world.

“I’ve got this,” Paul said, extending the barrel out of the window onto the ledge. “And you’re fucked.”

“Not if I escape,” Taylor shouted. Paul leaned out.

“Where would you go?” Paul asked. “There’s only the branches to hide in.”

“That’s what you think.”

Paul heaved himself on his elbows out of the widow and onto the roof. He kept the rifle steady, kept it pointed at Taylor. “Bang,” he shouted as Taylor dropped to his knees. Paul knew that had it been a real shot, he would have missed. “Bang!” he shouted again, and Taylor jumped in the air, landing back on the roof grinning. Taylor turned his head around, casting for where to jump next, and Paul used the moment to level the shot at Taylor’s back. “Bang!” he shouted, “you’re dead!”

Later, Paul would remember it was a exactly that moment Taylor took the running jump Paul feared for himself, along the ledge through the air and into the leaves and limbs of the tree.

He vanished instantly. Paul could hear the branches rustling but it was too dark to see where Taylor found a place to land. He just pointed the unloaded rifle in the air and took more shots, clicking the empty trigger, celebrating his kill, bold and hollering. He kept at it longer than he thought he would. Eventually, the usual feeling of lightness yielded to the stifling quiet that surrounded him. He’d been hearing that quiet intrude more and more when he was along, playing a game he was sure no one else understood the rules for. He had pictured a day when he’d tire of his imaginary world. He even rehearsed it, pointing to the spatulas and power drills, and pan-lids and saying, “You guys are stupid, you aren’t real,” and seeing what might happen. Would they stop being weapons? He hollered to Taylor that it was time to come in. He heard his heart. Eventually, Paul felt cold and climbed back through the window, still shouting to Taylor as he went. The junk room that seemed eerie that morning was a comfortable as a home base now. He carried the rifle down to the basement and slipped it into its bag.

***

Paul found Taylor twenty minutes later. The fact that Taylor leapt off the ledge so hard with his arms thrown up to catch the far limbs meant they hit the concrete first. His arms broke from the impact with the driveway and so did the bones in his hands. There was a hairline crack in his left knee-cap and also a mild concussion which, combined with the shock, resulted in the unconsciousness he was in when Paul kicked him accidentally with his foot, after walking to the tree so that he could shout up into it, rifle safe in the basement.

Paul’s father called the ambulance, and Paul ran off to tell Taylor’s family, hot with sweat. Their number was unlisted but Paul knew the place and Taylor’s mother opened the door in a green silk bathrobe. Their house – or what he saw of it from the entranceway – was filled with the same sort of lacquered furniture Paul’s grandfather left. That, and a tiny crystal dish filled with candied strawberries on the coffee table.

***

Paul’s had time to go back and hide the Colt the next day, after he’d located it in a patch of fallen leaves. It took half an hour to scrape all the dirt out of the gun, clean and polish it, but in the end, no one discovered the boy’s had been playing with guns. Even so, Paul’s father suffered plenty of big accusations on the phone that night. Taylor’s parents were frantic and Paul’s father had to put in another call to the lawyer who’d handled his divorce, gearing up for the lawsuit he expected from across the street.

The house on Gulliver road was tense as a trial for the next few weeks. It wasn’t just because of Taylor, either. Paul’s mother was starting to appear on TV pretty regularly by then, and his father was edging for a fight.

John Cotter’s poetry and fiction appears in Volt (The War Issue), Tarpaulin Sky, Coconut 3rd bed, Word for/ Word, Absent, Goodfoot, Hanging Loose, and Pebble Lake. In 2007 his work was anthologized in Oh One Arrow, the premier anthology from Flim Forum Press. He is the poetry editor of the critical review site Open Letters Monthly and is reachable online through johncotter.net.