“You put the pin in afterward,” he said, twisting the pistol around so I had a better view of the Glock barrel’s clean gash. “Like this.” The barrel clicked closed in his hand and he passed the pistol over to me. The old man’s eyes were the hard bloody color of rusty bullets. “Now you try.”

The shiny Glock had the energy of a dangerous animal in my small hand. I stared at it and moved it around and watched the light reflect in its chrome sheen and then I looked back at the old man and he was grinning at me.

“When I was your age we didn’t have fancy guns like that,” he said, nodding at it. “The first pistol I ever shot was a beat-up police-issue .38.” His eyes darkened and focused on something distant for a moment before lighting back up. “My old man stole it from a cop.” He chuckled.

“What did you used to shoot?” I asked. Old man Weaver shrugged and messed my hair.

“Empty coffee cans in our backyard,” he said, and grinned at me again. I thought about what he said and stared out from his greasy and cluttered garage to the busy street. The boiling afternoon sun beat the world into a dizzied lassitude. Vapors resurrected yesterday’s memories from the concrete.

“How old were you when you shot your first person?” I asked him. He dropped his gaze to me and methodically pulled a small dime store cigar from his pocket. He lit it slowly and blew a deliberate plume of thick hot smoke out his nostrils.

“What makes you think I ever shot anyone?”

“My dad says you used to shoot guys all the time,” I said, staring down at the heavy prize in my hands. “He says you used to hit-men. He says you killed a lot of ‘em.”

“He did, did he?” he said, and chuckled again, coughing on the smoke. He looked out to the street and sighed deep from the cavern of his barrel chest. “Hell, son,” he said. “I love your daddy. He’s a great man, a great father to you kids. But he ain’t got any business telling you stories like that. ‘Specially when they ain’t true.”

Old man Weaver’s eyes darkened again and he took the gun from my boyish grasp with a timeless delicacy, a softness that was in his bones, his heart.

“Let’s go inside and let Mrs. Weaver make you a sandwich,” he said. “Whattya say?”

I watched him lock the gun away in a scarred black toolbox before we went in his house. The faded tattoo of a bulldog painted one of his huge hairless forearms. I had the strange feeling that I had hurt him, that I had sliced him open with a knife and bloody memories spilled out of the wound.

I stared out to the street again and felt a strange wave of doom as the sun hid itself behind a vagrant cloud.

“Come on, son,” the old man said, and we went inside.