Shooting dad

I grew up around guns, dozens of them, and not one of them was real. My parents owned no actual firearms, not even a deer rifle, making ours a rare household in rural Oregon. But everything I needed to know about gunplay I learned directly from black-and-white television, and its lessons in death were consistent. With the exception of yellowbellies, sodbusters and old-timers, all male characters on TV carried pistols, rifles, derringers and/or sawed-off shotguns; those who didn't usually got rubbed out before the first commercial.

The era of the adult Western began in 1952 with the simultaneous debut of "High Noon" and the radio show "Gunsmoke," followed by "Shane" in 1953. As the myth of the Reluctant Gunfighter Forced to Take a Stand evolved, gunfighters became less reluctant to slap leather, until Hollywood finally quit being coy and began to celebrate the fast draw, the dead eye and an occasional knife quivering in someone's chest.

Television programmers took it from there. We saw a) that the whole world was full of bad men; b) that such people cheated, lied, ambushed, fornicated and generally flouted established rules of fair play; and most importantly, c) that this class of individual was always significantly improved by death. For that, bullets worked perfectly, often allowing the malefactor time for a brief speech of repentance and remorse before a sucking chest wound completed his rehabilitation.

In those bygone days, I mowed down hundreds of imaginary human beings in the forest behind our house, smiting the enemies of democracy without regard for ethnic background. This body count did not even include the rustlers, horse thieves, snide and surly gunfighters, rude drunks with itchy trigger fingers who had the temerity to crowd me at the bar of a dusty saloon or the usual assortment of dirty stinking heathen savage redskin Custer-killers.

Out of curiosity, I asked my dad if he had ever shot any enemy soldiers. In those prepubescent years, I'd been reading piles of war comics, including "Sgt. Rock" and other illustrated classics of martial history, and in my inchoate system of moral values, killing in war was no big deal. My father's answer didn't chill me as much as the way his face went blank when he said it: "Far too many." Pressed for details, he clammed up. "We'll talk about it someday."

Someday came years later, when he spoke of his deep regret for taking life so indiscriminately and even being a witness to the slaughter, let alone a participant. At 19 years old, he appears briefly in archival war footage of the Pacific Theater, with two head wounds sloppily bandaged. He had sent so many Buddhists into the Void that he returned from the war committed to learning the principles of Eastern thought, and he spent the rest of his life doing so.

His name was Mac. He died a few years ago at home, at the end of a powerful and good life. Mac was proud of the fact that none of his sons ever had to fire a shot in anger or take a human life, although three of us have served in the armed forces.

Mac had no father of his own for a role model, but he studied the science of fatherhood with a beginner's mind. When we asked him questions, it was apparent that he was paying close attention, listening to our lives. One time I parroted a philosophical dictum from Davy Crockett, spouted from the lips of Fess Parker hisself -- "Make sure you're right, and then go ahead." Mac instantly jumped on it: "Yes, but how do you know, beyond any doubt, when you're right?" Over the past 40 years, that question has given me sufficient food for thought.

One evening, as my brother Jon and I were relaxing after a hard day of plugging each other and our playmates, Mac asked to see my Fanner 50. At the kitchen table, he removed all but one of the cartridges, slapped the loading gate closed, and spun the cylinder. "You guys want to play Russian roulette?"

Boy, did we. We didn't know exactly what it was, although I'd heard the term before, probably on TV. Mac went first, ignoring the canons of weapons safety by putting the muzzle to the side of his head -- Click. Then it was my turn -- Click. Jon, 8 years old and smiling like Howdy Doody, also missed the bullet. Out of turn, I grabbed my revolver, put the barrel to my third eye, and squeezed the trigger: Pow! The three of us just about died laughing. My mother came into the room, sniffed at the manly stink of cordite, covered her eyes, shook her head and left.

We played that deadly game for hours. In violation of all the laws of chance, I was the loser every time. This got a little eerie, because it didn't seem to matter how thoroughly we spun the cylinder or in which order we took our turn. I got "killed." It was weird, and at the time, hilarious.

But afterward, Mac made me promise never, ever to play Russian roulette again. "You've got the wrong kind of luck for it," he said.

And there the lesson stayed for years, dormant and pointless, until the darkest night of my life, when I was alone with a Colt revolver and a single .38-caliber bullet. Just as I dropped the cartridge into the cylinder, that promise came back to me, as well as my dad's comment on Crockett's Axiom. I flushed the bullet down the toilet, threw the gun in the garbage and went to bed. The next morning dawned, and things began to improve.

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