Take the Cannoli (2 page)

It has been my experience that in order to impress potential suitors, skip the teen Debussy anecdotes and stick with the always attention-getting line “My dad makes guns.” Though it won't cause the guy to like me any better, it will make him handle the inevitable breakup with diplomacy—just in case I happen to have any loaded family heirlooms lying around the house.

But the fact is, I have only shot a gun once and once was plenty. My twin sister, Amy, and I were six years old—six—when Dad decided that it was high time we learned how to shoot. Amy remembers the day he handed us the gun for the first time differently. She liked it.

Amy shared our father's enthusiasm for firearms and the quickdraw cowboy mythology surrounding them. I tended to daydream through Dad's activities—the car trip to Dodge City's Boot Hill, his beloved John Wayne Westerns on TV. My sister, on the other hand, turned into Rooster Cogburn Jr., devouring Duke movies with Dad. In fact, she named her teddy bear Duke, hung a colossal John Wayne portrait next to her bed, and took to wearing one of those John Wayne shirts that button on the side. So when Dad led us out to the backyard when we were six and, to Amy's delight, put the gun in her hand, she says she felt it meant that Daddy trusted us and that he thought of us as “big girls.”

But I remember holding the pistol only made me feel small. It was so heavy in my hand. I stretched out my arm and pointed it away and winced. It was a very long time before I had the nerve to pull the trigger and I was so scared I had to close my eyes. It felt like it just went off by itself, as if I had no say in the matter, as if the gun just had this
need.
The sound it made was as big as God. It kicked little me back to the ground like a bully, like a foe. It hurt. I don't know if I dropped it or just handed it back over to my dad, but I do know that I never wanted to touch another one again. And, because I believed in the devil, I did what my mother told me to do every time I felt an evil presence. I looked at the smoke and whispered under my breath, “Satan, I rebuke thee.”

It's not like I'm saying I was traumatized. It's more like I was decided. Guns: Not For Me. Luckily, both my parents grew up in exasperating households where children were considered puppets and/or slaves. My mom and dad were hell-bent on letting my sister and me make our own choices. So if I decided that I didn't want my father's little death sticks to kick me to the ground again, that was fine with him. He would go hunting with my sister, who started calling herself “the loneliest twin in history” because of my reluctance to engage in family activities.

Of course, the fact that I was allowed to voice my opinions did not mean that my father would silence his own. Some things were said during the Reagan administration that cannot be taken back. Let's just say that I blamed Dad for nuclear proliferation and Contra aid. He believed that if I had my way, all the guns would be confiscated and it
would take the commies about fifteen minutes to parachute in and assume control.

We're older now, my dad and I. The older I get, the more I'm interested in becoming a better daughter. First on my list: Figure out the whole gun thing.

Not long ago, my dad finished his most elaborate tool of death yet. A cannon. He built a nineteenth-century cannon. From scratch. It took two years.

My father's cannon is a smaller replica of a cannon called the Big Horn Gun in front of Bozeman's Pioneer Museum. The barrel of the original has been filled with concrete ever since some high school kids in the '50s pointed it at the school across the street and shot out its windows one night as a prank. According to Dad's historical source, a man known to scholars as A Guy at the Museum, the cannon was brought to Bozeman around 1870, and was used by local white merchants to fire at the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians who blocked their trade access to the East in 1874.

“Bozeman was founded on greed,” Dad says. The courthouse cannon, he continues, “definitely killed Indians. The merchants filled it full of nuts, bolts, and chopped-up horseshoes. Sitting Bull could have been part of these engagements. They definitely ticked off the Indians, because a couple of years later, Custer wanders into them at Little Bighorn. The Bozeman merchants were out to cause trouble. They left fresh baked bread with cyanide in it on the trail to poison a few Indians.”

Because my father's sarcastic American history yarns rarely go on for long before he trots out some nefarious ancestor of ours—I come from a long line of moonshiners, Confederate soldiers, murderers, even Democrats—he cracks that the merchants hired some “community-minded Southern soldiers from North Texas.” These soldiers had, like my great-great-grandfather John Vowell, fought under pro-slavery guerrilla William C. Quantrill. Quantrill is most famous for riding into Lawrence, Kansas, in 1863 flying a black flag and commanding his men pharaohlike to “kill every male and burn down every house.”

“John Vowell,” Dad says, “had a little rep for killing people.” And since he abandoned my great-grandfather Charles, whose mother died giving birth to him in 1870, and wasn't seen again until 1912, Dad doesn't rule out the possibility that John Vowell could have been one of the hired guns on the Bozeman Trail. So the cannon isn't just another gun to my dad. It's a map of all his obsessions—firearms, certainly, but also American history and family history, subjects he's never bothered separating from each other.

After tooling a million guns, after inventing and building a rifle barrel boring machine, after setting up that complicated shop filled with lathes and blueing tanks and outmoded blacksmithing tools, the cannon is his most ambitious project ever. I thought that if I was ever going to understand the ballistic bee in his bonnet, this was my chance. It was the biggest gun he ever made and I could experience it and spend time with it with the added bonus of not having to actually pull a trigger myself.

I called Dad and said that I wanted to come to Montana and watch him shoot off the cannon. He was immediately suspicious. But I had never taken much interest in his work before and he would take what he could get. He loaded the cannon into the back of his truck and we drove up into the Bridger Mountains. I was a little worried that the National Forest Service would object to us lobbing fiery balls of metal onto its property. Dad laughed, assuring me that “you cannot shoot fireworks, but this is considered a fire
arm
”.

It is a small cannon, about as long as a baseball bat and as wide as a coffee can. But it's heavy—110 pounds. We park near the side of the hill. Dad takes his gunpowder and other tools out of this adorable wooden box on which he has stenciled “PAT G. VOWELL CANNON-WORKS.” Cannonworks: So that's what NRA members call a metalstrewn garage.

Dad plunges his homemade bullets into the barrel, points it at an embankment just to be safe, and lights the fuse. When the fuse is lit, it resembles a cartoon. So does the sound, which warrants Ben Day dot words along the lines of
ker-pow!
There's so much Fourth of July smoke everywhere I feel compelled to sing the national anthem.

I've given this a lot of thought—how to convey the giddiness I felt when the cannon shot off. But there isn't a sophisticated way to say this. It's just really, really cool. My dad thought so, too.

Sometimes, I put together stories about the more eccentric corners of the American experience for public radio. So I happen to have my tape recorder with me, and I've never seen levels like these. Every
time the cannon goes off, the delicate needles which keep track of the sound quality lurch into the bad, red zone so fast and so hard I'm surprised they don't break.

The cannon was so loud and so painful, I had to touch my head to make sure my skull hadn't cracked open. One thing that my dad and I share is that we're both a little hard of hearing—me from Aerosmith, him from gunsmith.

He lights the fuse again. The bullet knocks over the log he was aiming at. I instantly utter a sentence I never in my entire life thought I would say. I tell him, “Good shot, Dad.”

Just as I'm wondering what's coming over me, two hikers walk by. Apparently, they have never seen a man set off a homemade cannon in the middle of the wilderness while his daughter holds a foot-long microphone up into the air recording its terrorist boom. One hiker gives me a puzzled look and asks, “So you work for the radio and that's your dad?”

Dad shoots the cannon again so that they can see how it works. The other hiker says, “That's quite the machine you got there.” But he isn't talking about the cannon. He's talking about my tape recorder and my microphone—which is called a
shotgun
mike. I stare back at him, then I look over at my father's cannon, then down at my microphone, and I think, Oh. My. God. My dad and I are the same person. We're both smart-alecky loners with goofy projects and weird equipment. And since this whole target practice outing was my idea, I was no longer his adversary. I was his accomplice. What's worse, I was liking it.

I haven't changed my mind about guns. I can get behind the cannon because it is a completely ceremonial object. It's unwieldy and impractical, just like everything else I care about. Try to rob a convenience store with this 110-pound Saturday night special, you'd still be dragging it in the door Sunday afternoon.

I love noise. As a music fan, I'm always waiting for that moment in a song when something just flies out of it and explodes in the air. My dad is a one-man garage band, the kind of rock 'n' roller who slaves away at his art for no reason other than to make his own sound. My dad is an artist—a pretty driven, idiosyncratic one, too. He's got his last
Gesamtkunstwerk
all planned out. It's a performance piece. We're all in it—my mom, the loneliest twin in history, and me.

When my father dies, take a wild guess what he wants done with his ashes. Here's a hint: It requires a cannon.

“You guys are going to love this,” he smirks, eyeballing the cannon. “You get to drag this thing up on top of the Gravellies on opening day of hunting season. And looking off at Sphinx Mountain, you get to put me in little paper bags. I can take my last hunting trip on opening morning.”

I'll do it, too. I will have my father's body burned into ashes. I will pack these ashes into paper bags. I will go to the mountains with my mother, my sister, and the cannon. I will plunge his remains into the barrel and point it into a hill so that he doesn't take anyone with him. I will light the fuse. But I will not cover my ears. Because when I blow what used to be my dad into the earth, I want it to hurt.

IT
WAS
A
UTUMN IN
A
MERICA
, a fine hot Indian summer day. Pretty high school girls sat on bleachers with the sun shining in their pretty hair, watching handsome high school boys play football. And then, it was halftime, which is where I came in.

I was standing in line in my silver spats down past the end zone waiting to go on. I was in marching band. I had a foot-tall, fake fur black hat, with the vaguely processed food name “shako,” strapped under my chin. The shako's purpose is to make a scrubby assortment of adolescents look magisterial. But it not only prevented me from breathing, it rendered me and my comrades in the horn section unstable, so that even though my job was to march around as some kind of sick metaphor for teenage military precision, I moved through time and space with the grace and confidence of a puppy walking on a beach ball.

Because of my double shortage of strength and coordination, I barely passed gym. But somehow, I was supposed to lift a baritone
horn that measured twice my body weight, blow into it while reading microscopic sheet music, step in a straight line while remembering left foot on beats one and three, right foot on beats two and four, and maneuver myself into cute visual formations, like the trio of stick figures we fashioned when we played the theme from
My Three Sons.

Halfway through the halftime program, I had to break formation, drop my baritone horn on the field, and sprint to the fifty-yard line—a long haul—with everyone in the band, the pretty girls in the bleachers, and the football players on the sidelines all watching and waiting, silent and still. At midfield I picked up my mallets and—this is what they had been waiting for—I pounded out a xylophone solo on a little Latin-flavored number called “Tico Tico.”

My polo shirt–clad nemesis Andy Heap stood up in the stands screaming, “Vowell! Vowell! Whooooo! Whoooo!”, as the laughter of his friends, at me, drowned out the horn section. This was the same Andy Heap, I might add, who earlier in the week in music history class had delivered an oral report on Tchaikovsky's lady friend, calling her Mimi throughout (even though her name was Nadya). Andy Heap was apparently smart enough to publicly humiliate me during “Tico Tico,” he just wasn't smart enough to know that the abbreviation “Mme.” stands not for Mimi, but “Madame.”

I only had a second to stick out my tongue at Andy when I finished “Tico Tico,” because I had to let go of the mallets, rush over to my baritone—again, the freeze-framed spectators, the loneliness of the long-distance
runner—and I'm back in formation with the low brass for the finale.

I was getting academic credit for this, to wear that uniform to play those songs. I was getting graded. Which begs the question: What exactly was I supposed to be learning? What was marching band supposed to teach me? Because marching isn't a particularly applicable skill in later life. Here then, some lessons—actually useful ones—I accidentally learned while pursuing music.

Once a week, the best band kids played with the orchestra. I played the bass drum in orchestra, which meant that I never got to play. My participation ratio was something like seventy-five measures of rest per one big bass wallop. This gave me plenty of time to contemplate the class warfare of the situation. Here's what I figured out: Orchestra kids wear tuxedos. Band kids wear tuxedo T-shirts.