Photo by Robert Collins
The Good Guys
Six boys line up in a driveway one summer. Each carries a plastic firearm. Some are bright neon colors. Others are translucent plastic. Some are the same matte black finish of real steel. One of the boys carries a secret tucked into the back pocket of his jeans. The boys divide themselves in half, the Good Guys versus the Bad Guys. The boy with the secret wants to be one of the Bad Guys, says things are more interesting on the wrong side of the law.
One of the boys starts counting, “One Mississippi, Two Mississippi…” all the way to one hundred. The boys scatter and hide. One takes up position with his back against a willow tree. Another crouches behind a rose bush. The boy with the secret kneels beside the bumper of a Ford Pinto. He lays his plastic pistol by the wheel and removes the secret slowly from the back pocket of his jeans.
Shots ring out from the boys’ mouths, filling the air with a hail of imaginary gunfire. A Bad Guy takes one in the gut, clutches his midsection in mock disbelief, keels over dead. Another gets riddled by an orange machine gun and flails around theatrically. A Bad Guy sneaks up behind a Good Guy and shoots him in the head from point-blank range, execution-style, before another Good Guy takes him down with two to the chest. The boy behind the Pinto is the last remaining Bad Guy, brandishing his secret as he walks out into the open. The boys look astonished at the secret glinting in the sunlight, before a Good Guy fires off a single round at close range. “Bang,” he says, tentatively. “You’re dead.”
But the boy refuses to die. He says his daddy says a gunshot don’t always kill you dead. He takes aim at each of them with his secret. He says sometimes it just leaves you crippled, and you have to shit in a bag for the rest of your life. Sometimes you go on living for days, weeks, months after. One of the boys wants to hold his secret. “I reckon,” says the boy, and they take turns holding it in their hands, each surprised by the heft of it. It’s maybe the heaviest thing they’ve ever held.
“You still have to die,” says one of the boys. “Those are the rules. The Good Guys always win.” So the Good Guy points the secret at his forehead. “Bang” says the boy, and the Bad Guy grudgingly complies, crumpling into a heap. They huddle around him, speechless. Soon they help him up, dust him off, and give him back his secret. On the way home, he holds it cautiously, like an egg, strokes it gently like a baby mouse. He whispers to it that one day the Bad Guys are gonna win. Just wait. You’ll see. They’ll all see.
The Author
Jamie Cooper is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of a 2020 Oregon Literary Fellowship. His chapbook, The Truth About the Sun, is available from Finishing Line Press. His work has most recently been featured in Blue Earth Review, Molotov Cocktail, Tempered Runes Press, Fractured Lit, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, OR.