The End of FUN (5 page)

I didn't really know him much, but I will never forget this: he was the first person who ever told me I was smart. OK, maybe he wasn't the
first
person, but he was the first one I
believed
. This was maybe an hour after he told me I was the
stupidest
person to ever walk the earth, but even so…

The reason my grandpa called me smart was because I helped him solve this puzzle he was working on. He was always working on these puzzle books, and most of them were way over my head, but this one he happened to be doing…for whatever reason the answer was just instantly obvious to me. I took the pencil and filled in the blanks. Grandpa looked at the puzzle and cocked his head and was like, “Not bad, kid. You're smart.”

After he told me that, I got it in my head that I
was
smart, and this was both good and bad.
Good
because after that, other than my anger issues, school was a breeze. School really is easy if you believe you're smarter than it.
Bad
because I also ended up thinking I was a secret genius all the time, even when making—as I have thus far chronicled—some very what might be called
questionable
decisions.

The reason my grandfather called me the stupidest person ever to walk the earth was because I left a shotgun out in the rain. He didn't actually
call
me the stupidest person, but the way he said what he said, you could tell that's exactly what he meant. And I felt it. Though, it's funny that I would believe anything my grandpa said—he was pretty crazy.

I really only have one summer to judge off of—that was the only time I ever spent any real time with him. It was the summer I was 10, the summer after the winter Mom left, which was also the winter I tried to kill myself, and the winter Dad started drinking again. I mean seriously drinking. By summer he needed some time to sort himself out. The plan was for me and Evie to stay with Grandpa, but at the last second I was betrayed. Evie had this friend, Sam Latham, whose family had invited her on a Mormon vacation to Moab.

Well, no one ever said no to Evie. So then it was just me and Grandpa.

He was a big, mean-looking man with a hawk nose, leather skin, and a cigarette forever in his hand. Seriously. You could have walked in on him in the middle of the night and I bet he'd be lying there with a cigarette, puffing away in his sleep. He smoked this weird store brand, Valiant 100s.

I didn't know much about him. Apparently he'd worked thirty years as a slot machine repairman, hating every minute of it, and when it all went digital he got laid off. But he never really talked about any of that. When he talked—if he talked—it was mainly about government conspiracies and other things I didn't care about.

Other than that, he mainly just did his puzzle books. Like
all
the time. He tried to get me interested, but I couldn't get into them. They were either over my head or just plain boring. I mostly stayed in the spare bedroom and played video games. He gave it a try once—I let him be Player 2 on
A Boy & His Robot.
(YAY! Best. Console. Game. Ever.) But Gramps sucked. Every time it was his turn he'd take about two steps and run into a cactus or get eaten by a snatchplant or fall off a cliff—until finally I couldn't take it anymore.

I grabbed his controller and speedran the first level for him, but of course I couldn't stop there, and pretty soon I was going all the way to Level 8, LavaLand, where even the most expert gamer is bound to die once or twice in a fire geyser. When at long last I finally succumbed to the flames, Grandpa only had this to say: “Know what that is? Nothing but a fancy slot machine.”

He gave me a book to read,
True Tales of Buried Treasure
by Edward Rowe Snow. There was this weird chubby kid on the cover, and it looked unspeakably lame. I gathered he'd read it when he was a kid or something.

And seriously: What tales, true or not—written in a
book
—could compete with a multilevel interdimensional quest to collect the lost fragments of Robotopia, destroy the evil Fester Cloud, and free all the Sparkles of Joy?

But so then one day my grandpa showed up at the bedroom door with something else. Not a book. Not some crosswords. A gun. An actual, real-life gun.

“Come on. Let's go for a walk.”

I pressed pause and followed him outside. His place was all by itself five miles out of town—a 90-acre rectangle of sagebrush and cheatgrass, with train tracks running along the southern end. It was a pretty desolate spread, all right. There was only one tree to speak of—a wilted, gnarly Russian olive out by the tracks. That's where we ended up.

There were all these birds in the tree, black shadows darting among the branches. For a long time my grandpa didn't say anything. We just stood there under the rustle of birds. I was starting to get antsy. What were we going to do with the gun?

“They want to cut it down, you know.”

“The tree? Who does?”

“Them.”
He blew a cloud of smoke into the air. “Rats. Human rats. The same ones who built the power lines that gave your grandma cancer. The same ones who imported the birds. And
this
,” he said, “is a .410 shotgun. The only rule is never point it at a human being or anything else you don't want killed. Got it?”

He lit another cigarette, put the gun to his shoulder, aimed at the tree, and fired.

BLAM!

A dark cloud of birds shot up into the sky, wheeled around, circled us a couple times, then settled in the tree again.

“Those are starlings. Intruders smuggled from Europe by human rats. I'll give you a quarter for every one you kill. But see that bird there? That's a blackbird. Do NOT kill any blackbirds.”

This was before the Avis Mortem, of course, before people started wondering if we'd have
any
birds left at all—but even back then at age 10 it was like,
Why would I want to kill a bird? What did it ever do to me?
And for twenty-five cents a pop? Math will tell you that's four birds per dollar. Math will tell you in order to make any real money I was going to have a literal bloodbath on my hands. There was this, too: What was the difference between starlings, which were black, and blackbirds, which were also black?

I still wanted to shoot that gun, though.

So when he handed it to me, I put the butt against my shoulder like he showed me, and I aimed above the tree, closed my eyes, and squeezed the trigger.

BLAM!

The kick was a lot harder than I expected, like being punched in the shoulder. When I opened my eyes, the birds were circling overhead.

“Missed. You need to hold it tighter to your shoulder.”

But this time the birds didn't come back. The cloud drifted eastward like smoke in the sky, settling finally at the far end of his property.

“Looks like you're going to have to chase them.”

My grandpa sent me off after the birds, and looking back on it now I have to question the wisdom of sending a 10-year-old—who had recently attempted suicide—alone into the brush with a loaded shotgun and a pocket full of shells. Talk about trust. But the truth is by that point I wasn't interested in ending my life—or the life of any birds, either. Clouds were gathering for a thunderstorm, and the air had that kind of jumpy feel to it, like anything could happen.

I ended up on the other side of the train tracks, in the hills beyond the property. The road led to this desert junk dump, the centerpiece of which was an ancient, rusted-out car with tail fins and round holes where the headlights used to be. Just a metal shell. Doors spattered with bullet holes. Broken glass everywhere. Like the aftermath of some terrible last stand. Perfect for target practice.

BLAM!
, reload,
BLAM!
, reload,
BLAM!
—I painted it in wide sprays of birdshot, adding my signature to the rest. But then, as I was aiming at a rust spot on the fender, something caught my eye.

There was this bird. This little bird. Off to the side, perched on top of a sagebrush. Not a starling or a blackbird—something else. Like a sparrow maybe—but yellow. This little yellow bird, chirping its song into the afternoon. YAY! for the little yellow bird. Next thing I knew, I was looking at it down the barrel of the shotgun. I held it in my sights. Tiny yellow body hovering at the end of my barrel.

And then, I couldn't tell you why, I pulled the trigger.

(
BLAM!
)

When I opened my eyes, the bird had disappeared like some kind of magic trick. I walked over to where it had been. And then I saw it. Yellow fluttering in the brush. I'd winged it. I chased after the bird. What was I gonna do if I caught it? How, in the middle of the desert with only a shotgun and a pocket full of shells, do you repair a broken wing? It didn't matter. Every time I got close, the bird flopped just out of reach, throwing itself around like it was on fire.

And then the bird gave up. It just stopped and sat there on the ground. I walked up to it. It didn't move. It just sat there, looking up at me with a single dark eye. It was breathing real fast.

I looked down at the bird.

The bird looked up at me.

And it's hard to explain, but for a moment I was right there with the bird, lost in that dark tunnel between us…and it was just—darkness. Terrifying. The bird was dying. It was headed to the other side, and it knew it, and I knew it, too. I began to feel like if I looked at it any longer, that bird was going to reach out with its eye and pull me into the darkness, through the window of a bird's eye into the world of the dead.

And that's why I ran. That, and it was really starting to rain. Just pouring down from the sky. I turned around and booked it.

Grandpa was waiting for me on the porch.

“You got soaked,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“How much I owe you?”

“Nothing.”

He eyed me, kind of curious, like he was trying to figure me out. “Where's the gun?”

Right. In my terror I'd completely forgotten about it.

That's when he looked at me like I was the stupidest person ever to walk the earth.

“Never leave a shotgun out in the rain,” he said.

So back I went.

Already the storm was starting to pass. The sun had dropped below the clouds, and every sagebrush cast a long shadow, and it was beautiful, but all I could think about was that little yellow bird lying out there in the rain. It was nearly dark when I finally located the gun. As for the bird—I didn't see it anywhere. Not in the brush, not on the ground, not anywhere.

That bird was just gone.