by Louis Wittig
First Rule of Chekhov
By Louis Wittig
“Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first act that there’s a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third act it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
~ Anton Chekhov to Sergius Shchukin
Late in July Dad finally finished the man cave he’d been building into the basement and altogether it was snug as shit: Salvaged wood walls, a smooth little bar with a hammered copper bartop, neon mood light echoing off a polished concrete floor and a pool table he got for just $700 off someone on Facebook. It had taken him the better part of a year. He kept saying how he was 74 now and slowing down, but he worked as fast as he ever did. What took so long was that he’d keep creeping up behind whoever was helping him at a given moment – me, my wife, my brother Richard, my sister Renee, or the illegals he picked up in the Home Depot parking lot – and he’d say “you gotta hear this.” And then he’d read them a passage from Tolstoy. “Just this sentence,” he’d say.
We would put down our nail guns down and walk right out. But the immigrants would dust their hands, sit down on an overturned homer bucket and listen while Dad read them a whole damn chapter. They vented shaky little laughs at random verbs and descriptions of flowers. Dad said they appreciated Tolstoy’s existential wit. Really they just had no idea what was happening.
Now that it was done and the day laborers were gone, Dad floated in his man cave like a fish trying to understand a new bowl.
Every day around three when our mailman John climbed up the porch Dad would be right there waiting to invite him down to the cave for a beer. They would open some cans, John would lower his big sticky thighs on Dad’s new leather couch and they’d talk about what color Dad might paint the accent wall once he got bored with the Beetroot red that was up there.
Richard could hear tall boys popping from a mile away. He wandered in and suggested Sonoma Sunflower.
“Wow. Sonoma Sunflower? Is that so? See Richard has three semesters of college,” Dad said to John. “Me, I’ve only got one class. Intro to 19th Century Russian Literature. Dr. Palmer. Spring semester ’72. That’s the only class anyone needs. Any college after that is an Antifa day camp scam. But then again I could be a moron. I didn’t take Colorpicking 100 with Dr. Lesbo Purplehair. What do I know?”
“Sunflower’s the sort of crap suggestion a bisexual would make,” John said.
One Tuesday morning I followed the sound of hammering down the basement stairs and when I peeked in on Dad he had sunk some hooks to the wall and was hanging his AR-15 up on the wall, right up under his 85” flat screen.
He just hung the rifle on the wall. He did it, just like that. If a rifle’s on the wall it has to go off. And if a rifle goes off then probably one of us is getting an extra hole.
I brought my concerns to the breakfast table.
“Remember when he showed up to visit you-know-who in the hospital and forgot to wear a shirt?” My wife asked.
I remembered the scuffle with the security guys.
“If he forgot the first law of Chekhov then my middle name isn’t Anton,” I said.
Richard dumped his spoonfull of Cinnamon Toast Crunch back into his bowl, then he parked the spoon on the lip of the bowl and cleared his throat.
“Now that he’s done hammering his nails he’s got to push our buttons.”
“He’s pushing our buttons with an assault rifle,” I said.
“A duh,” said Richard.
That evening we were waiting in line for the Trump rally and Dad was on top of the world, so I went right at it and I asked him: Why did you put that rifle on the wall?
He told me to hold his place in line and went off to the merch tables. He came back wearing a tee-shirt that read “Fuck Your Feelings: Trump 2020” and a grin.
So I waited until one night when dad fell asleep on his couch after watching eleven-hours straight of YouTube videos and I went in there like a man, a quiet man, and took the rifle off the wall. When I crept back up with it Renee was at the top of the stairs whisper-singing “Ron’s gonna get in trouble. Ron’s gonna get in trooooubble.”
He blew into breakfast like a shitticane the next morning. I told him I’d put his AR back in the standing gun rack in the bathroom where he’d been perfectly content to have it for years.
“That’s not the point you transgender grooming FBI piece-of-shit gun grabber,” he said. He yanked my hash brown and threw it at the kitchen wall. “In this country we do not just take guns. And in this family we talk about things, we don’t trample on people’s rights without talking about it first.”
“Where’s mom?” Renee asked, rolling her sausage links around her plate bitchily. “Can we talk about mom?”
Dad clomped into the bathroom, got his AR and hung it back on the wall. He tried to hold vigil over it all night but was out by 9:30. I took it down again and hid it behind the winter tires in the garage.
It took him all day but he found it and he put it back up.
The next time I was a holy knight about it. My quest was of the blood. I took it and I broke it down: Hid the butt stock in the attic, the mag in the upstairs toilet tank and buried the rail under the chrysanthemums. I even pulled out the firing pin and stuck it in his copy of The Cherry Orchard like a bookmark which I thought was a nice detail. All week he was tossing the kitchen cabinets before dawn and climbing trees in the yard after dark. He reported my crime to several indifferent law enforcement agencies. He wouldn’t stop of course. But all the same, I was testing the law: A rifle up on the wall has to go off, yes, but a rifle that was up on the wall, then came off the wall, then went back up on the wall – did that rifle still have to go off? Even if it did, I was buying us all time on appeal. Renee, Richard, my wife: I could have been saving all their lives. But they just acted like nothing.
When he finally found it again he drilled anchors into the studs and chained it up with 5/16th steel chain, wrapping it around until it was an assault mummy.
I told my wife about it while we were waiting forever to vote. She reasoned it was a good thing: A gun can’t be fired if it’s tangled in chain.
“No. It’s still on the wall,” I said. “We’re still in a critical situation. Maybe someone’s got to untangle it first. But that’s only delaying things. Minutes, tops.”
“Someone’s got to untangle you” said Richard from over my shoulder. “Character precedes drama you dumb shit. Look at Poor Folk: sloppy-ass Makar Devushkin getting all wrapped up in Varvara’s life even when no one the fuck asked him to and then she goes and marries Bykov anyway, boo-hoo-hoo. You make yourself a character, so then there’s a drama. But if you’re not a character, then there is no drama and if there’s no drama, then no gun has to do anything. It’s fucking elementary and I’m sick of you pretending it’s not.”
“I’m not going to be asleep at the switch,” I said. “That’s exactly what Killary and Obama want.”
Killary and Obama stole Arizona from us that night.
Then they took Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
We were all wandering around the house for days, zombies in the world fondling our phones like wet brains. Then they just walked out of the store carrying Georgia. Dad disappeared for three days and when he came back he said he’d joined the Proud Boys but I called the local chapter and they said they don’t take anyone over 60. Richard didn’t say anything but erupted in cackling at more or less random intervals. Renee baked a cake in the shape of the United States and iced it the color of the President’s hair, she did fondant flyaways and everything. The whole world was on its ass and everyone was like “guess that’s how it goes now.”
That gun. I had to bury the fucker or something. I had to keep it away from Dad and everyone and myself.
I got my bolt cutters from the shed and cut the thing down.
Suddenly I’m spilling onto my knees, on the floor. I’ve just been punched in the back and Dad is standing over me. He stoops and tries to yank the AR from me. He only gets the grip. I keep a hold of the rail in my left hand and help myself up with my right. He pulls the rifle at the same time I’m pulling it back. Total mess. I go to kick his knees out and he jams the thing in my gut. Then I hear the little plastic pitter patter.
At first I don’t hear it because the only thing in my ears is every dam asinine thing he’s ever said to me in 48 years. But the pitter keeps pattering and I look down and see that Dad is pumping the trigger, only the mag is empty.
He laughs. It sounds like a question mark.
“Shut up,” he said. “We both knew it wasn’t loaded. We both knew that.”
I dropped my end of the gun.
“I am not safe in this house,” Dad shouted. “So I am taking honorable-ass flight.” After throwing a few flannels, his iPad and all his 12-volume 1957 hardcover anthology of Turganev into garbage bags he moved into the RV at the end of the driveway. My wife was making a salad in the kitchen and she wouldn’t look at me. I didn’t care.
At breakfast the next morning Richard said we could relax now. The AR was no longer on the wall. It was no longer even in the house. And if it wasn’t on a wall, it didn’t have to be fired. End of drama.
“But we’re still talking about it. It’s still hanging right up here on the wall of our brains. If we had an audience here I bet they would see it through our faces,” I said. I know, I know: But I just like pissing Richard off sometimes.
“Go fuck a post-Formalist duck,” Richard said. “If a gun doesn’t have to be up on a wall to be ‘up on the wall’, then every gun on earth is part of all the action at all times simply by virtue of existing or potentially existing. Narrative in that situation, it would be like trying to grow an orchid in zero gravity you dipshit.”
“NASA grows all kinds of shit in space,” I said.
“I saw Dad in the RV,’ Renee said. “He’s taped to the wall in there. It’s the first thing you see when you walk in.”
“End of drama,” Richard repeated.
Dad would sneak into the house to raid the fridge at three in the morning when everyone else was asleep. I saw him on my security cameras. Plus I found the notes he was leaving all over the kitchen, scribbled in red sharpie on the reverse sides of printed-out spam emails:
Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.
– Yevgeny Zamyatin
And:
Fuck you fuck you fuckk you fuck you fuck you fuck fuk fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fucc you
– Me (Dad)
Eventually he reappeared in the morning. He couldn’t help himself. He’d walk into the kitchen, no “hello”, no “how are you I’m here now” and start circling the breakfast table, cradling the AR as he went.
“Because you are all such damn literalists I want you to know, and I want to personally reassure you, that this gun is not going to be fired. No way no how. It may not even be loaded. The safety could be on. Both my index figures could have crippling arthritis and be physically incapable of squeezing a trigger.”
“Your arthritis is under control with the Celebrex,” I said.
“You little AOCs think you know everything,” he continued. “Reality is there’s more unknowns than knowns in this situation. But I’m going to unzip my internal monolog here for you and push out a big steaming known: This gun,” he said, and patted the stock like a baby’s butt. “Will not. Be. Fired.”
“Goddamn it!” Richard shouted. “Will all of you just stop foreshadowing for one goddamn minute!”
He took off his slippers and winged one at Dad and send the other sailing over my head. I wasn’t foreshadowing. I wasn’t doing anything.
The days went by and Dad would randomly burst into the house, marching with his rifle on his shoulder like he was some Civil War soldier, picking his knees high up and driving them down again in time as he sang “Never Gonna Fire This Gun” to the tune, loosely, of “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
He’d take gun selfies all over town and leave them like floaters in the group chat. In some of them he was showing off his gun in the library and making obscene faces. In others he’d stand in the middle of an intersection, at attention, saluting the camera. All of them he’d send with a string of emojis that no linguist alive could possibly decipher. Then he’d wait a bit and text: Why are you sending me all these pictures of me?
Then all of a sudden he’s out on the lawn in the middle of the night, the very Statue of Libery in his boxers, firing his AR-15 into the air.
We all woke up and came running onto the porch, except Richard who had admirable self-control. Dad was standing barefoot in the frost. The security lights stripped the pink humanity off of him and in the white flood his corns and toenails lit up the color of Sonoma Sunflower.
“Not me firing this gun. Nope,” he shouted. “These are blanks. Least I hope they are. Making a lot of noise but this gun is not being fired in any meaningful way.”
He pointed the rifle at his right foot, squeezed off another three shots and walked into the dark.
He was still out on his little strike on Christmas Eve. I was on the couch in his man cave watching the Yule Log burn on Netflix when he came in and said that if he wasn’t allowed to move back into the house he was going to kill himself. Not with his AR. Never with his AR. But, he added, he’d do it somehow and it would come to the same thing.
I half believed him.
“You moved yourself out,” I said. “No one’s stopping you coming back.”
“I’m bringing my AR,” he said too loud, and threw head back over his shoulder towards the RV where it was waiting. “I’m putting it right back where it was.”
“Okay dad.”
“It needs to be up there, where everyone can see it,” he said.
“Okay dad.”
“Otherwise it gets lonely,” he said and he laughed as if that was a joke.
“You win, Dad,” I said. “Just try not to shoot yourself in the head. Or me. Or my wife.”
Dad said “well” and then he stuttered it. His face flushed and his eyes bugged out and I thought he was having a heart attack. Turns out this was how he cries. He lowered himself slowly into the couch beside me.
“Well, merry Christmas,” he got out between the sobs.
“Here’s your present” I said. “You can shoot Richard or Renee. I don’t care.”
We both laughed pretty good at that one. Dad’s laughing turned into sobbing and eventually back to laughing. He stood and ambled out, a few steps laughing, a few sobbing, until I couldn’t hear him anymore.
It wasn’t five minutes later that a metal bang cut through the air.
Renee was screaming out on the porch. I was up and flying.
“JESUS CHRIST RICHARD!” She screamed. “JESUS H CHRIST!”
I ran through the kitchen and blew through the storm door. It banged shut behind me.
Renee was standing frozen. In front of her on the deck was a big smear of white frosting and oozy cherry filling that had been a cake before she dropped it. I didn’t want to look at anything else except broken cake. But being a man as I am, I had to look up.
Richard was standing on the edge of the porch, his arms all tangled around John the mailman and snaked up under John’s postal jacket. John’s hands were down the back of Richard’s sweatpants like he was trying to pick Richard’s pocket but had missed. John was beet red.
“They were,” Renee tried. “They were doing stuff.”
The storm door banged again as my wife came running out.
“We are hooking up Renee. Hooking up is the term in case you ever wanted to learn the term you perimenopausal pear,” Richard said.
“Come on now,” John said to Richard.
“I didn’t know you were gay,” Renee said.
“I don’t define myself,” Richard snapped. “Countless as the sands of the sea are human passions. Google that, Gogol. What grains of sand you do or do not notice, that’s a you-thing.”
Richard squeezed John to emphasize his point. John squirmed.
“I didn’t know he was gay or bisexual or whatever,” my wife whispered to me. “Did you know?”
I had not known.
“Yeah, I knew” I said.
Richard turned back to John and nudged him into some performative tongue action just to make Renee more uncomfortable.
Down at the end of the driveway Dad gophered his head out of the RV door. He blinked several times until something like a smile crawled up onto his face. When he stepped down onto the driveway the rifle was in his right hand. He came walking towards us. By the time he passed the maple tree it was the most obvious thing in the world that the safety was flipped up into the off-position.
“John! Hey John!” He shouted, picking up his pace.
Dad was smiling with his whole body.
“John, they let me back in the house so you don’t have to bring my mail out to the RV anymore!”
Louis Wittig is a writer and creative director in Albany, New York. His fiction has appeared in Rundelania, which you are currently reading, and also on his substack at louiswittig.substack.com, which you can read if you’d like.
RUNDELANIA 