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John Ball

Johnny Get Your Gun

1

It was close to the summer solstice, so that all day long the sun had hung high in what had been a cloudless sky. Throughout Southern California, in spite of approaching evening, the heat was still thick in the air. The morning smog had been long since carried away by the Santa Ana wind so that the mountains surrounding the Los Angeles basin stood out with sharp and brilliant clarity. Because there was still no real rapid transit in any part of the city, the rush hour traffic clogged the freeways almost to a standstill. As they sat and sweltered, the motorists could look up and see the early-rising moon three quarters full in the sky.

In common with uncounted thousands of other housewives in the vast metropolitan area Maggie McGuire was making iced tea to serve with the dinner she had prepared. At one time she had been called Margaret, but in the section of Tennessee where she had grown up very little attention was paid to formalities. As a consequence she had been dubbed Maggie well before she had started in school and Maggie she had remained during the almost forgotten days of her formal education. Now on this hot and oppressive evening, she was far from the home in which she had grown up, not yet adjusted to her new scheme of living, and Maggie still. Mike, her husband, never addressed her in any other way.

She moved about mechanically in the cramped kitchen of the little apartment. They had rented the place when they had arrived here because it had two bedrooms and was still within the price which they had felt they could afford to pay. To Maggie calling the little cubicles which had been provided “bedrooms” was a misuse of the word. They were both so small that each could hold a double bed and little else.

The bed in her young son’s room was a single, which allowed him to have a cheap little dresser and a wobbly table which held a confused pile of his boyhood treasures.

Maggie glanced at the clock. Mike would be home shortly and she hoped, as always, that he would be in a good mood. She had no special reason to expect trouble, but she never knew. Their venture in coming out to California, undertaken with such hope and aspirations, was not starting out well. Perhaps they had expected too much too soon, but she had noted that for the past three weeks Mike had seemed to be coming steadily closer to the raw edge of discontent.

Her own life had molded itself into a pattern of preparing food, looking after clothes, accommodating herself to her husband’s sexual wishes, and looking after Johnny. She loved her son almost desperately, despite the fact that lately Mike had seen in her boy a smaller fragment of himself and had all but taken him over.

Through the thin wall she could hear that Johnny, in his room, was listening to the ball game on his little Japanese transistor radio. It had been the only gift they had been able to manage for him on his ninth birthday, three weeks before. Already he seemed old enough to understand that for unstated reasons they had less money to spend, as a family, than did some of the other people who lived around them.