299 Days: The Preparation

Chapter 13 Capitol City Guns

Grant got in his car and went to the local gun store, Capitol City Guns, that he’d driven by a hundred times. It felt weird— dirty, actually— going into a gun store. He didn’t want people to see him going in there, like it was a porn store. He sat in the parking lot, gaining the courage to go in. He started to chicken out. Lisa would get so mad if she saw him at a gun store.

What is wrong with you? Take care of your family.

The outside thought was getting louder. Grant thought again about what criminals would do to Lisa if they had a chance. Maybe the kids, too. It was the most horrible and terrifying thought.

In he went. He knew from Forks that a shotgun was the perfect home defense weapon, so that’s what he was going to get.

The second he walked in the store, he knew he’d done the right thing. There was nothing scary or “dirty” about a gun store. It was like any other store.

The sales people in the store were very helpful. They could spot a yuppie getting a first gun a mile away, and they wanted to help. Grant got an inexpensive pump 12 gauge, a Winchester 1300 Home Defender. It would do. He got one box of twenty-five shells and a trigger lock, too. He paid cash; no credit card for Lisa to find out about. He had just cashed an expense check from work reimbursing him for a few months’ of miles he had driven on WAB business. He had been planning to turn the cash over to Lisa, as usual. Not anymore.

Right then and there he decided he would start to put the cash from expense checks in an envelope in the car. This is how he would spend money without Lisa knowing.

Grant noticed that, unlike the grocery store, Capitol City had plenty of inventory in the back. It made sense that a gun store wouldn’t have just-in-time inventory. If the grocery stores are empty, then people will be flocking to gun stores.

Did I just have that thought? Grant wondered. What is wrong with me? That trip back to Forks had really changed him. Now he saw signs of American society’s dependence everywhere he looked.

The whole experience of walking into a gun store was over in about twenty minutes. He filled out the paperwork and got his shotgun.

“Isn’t there some kind of waiting period for getting a gun?” he asked the sales clerk.

“Nope,” the guy said. “Not in Washington. No waiting period on long guns, only handguns.”

After calling a phone number where the police checked out that Grant wasn’t a felon, the clerk rang up the sale and handed Grant a large rectangular box labeled “Winchester.” That was it. Grant was now a gun owner.

Grant thanked the clerk and picked up the rectangular box and put in his car. When he got out to his car and put the box in his trunk, Grant chuckled. That was easier than I thought, he said to himself. Then it hit him: he had changed. A half hour ago he was a helpless and frightened sheeple. Now he was a gun owner. He immediately felt more at ease. The world isn’t so scary when you can protect yourself.

As he left the gun store parking lot, Grant started to wonder how he would get the gun into the house. What if Lisa was home? He felt like he was smuggling contraband. He laughed again because many husbands were going to the porn store and then smuggling it into the house. He was just trying to have a gun to defend them. What a horrible husband he was.

On the short trip from Capitol City Guns to the Cedars, Grant practiced his line. He hated lying to Lisa but, as the Jack Nicholson’s character in the movie “A Few Good Men” said, “You can’t handle the truth!” That was it. She couldn’t handle the truth and he needed to do this.

Lisa was unloading some groceries— of course, it had been since yesterday that they went to the grocery store— when Grant came home. He walked in with the shotgun box.

“Hey,” Grant said, “look what my dad gave me. Mom said he wanted me to have it. Don’t worry, it came with a trigger lock.” Grant was afraid for her to see the shotgun. It was one thing to see a box, but another thing to see a scary gun.

Lisa glared. But she was thinking. She had secretly been wondering why Grant didn’t have a gun in the house. She had heard about a friend of a friend who had a prowler on the front porch and it took several minutes for the police to come. And the trigger lock would take care of the concern about the kids. She saw lots of things in the ER from unlocked guns and kids.

“Let me see the trigger lock,” she said. Grant opened the box and the trigger lock was on. She thought about it. This gun actually made sense. She was actually a little proud that her couch potato husband was finally taking responsibility for something around the house like their security. Maybe he wasn’t so worthless, after all.

“As long as the trigger lock is always on,” Lisa said. “I mean always except if there’s a robber. And the bullets are kept separately. And the gun and the bullets are kept up high where the kids can’t get them.”

Grant couldn’t believe how well this was going. “Of course,” he said. “That’s perfectly reasonable.” It was.

Grant was a gun owner, and his wife was OK with it. That felt pretty good.

A few days later, the nagging feelings about dependence came back. The power went out for a few hours and Grant’s mind went into a whirlwind thinking about all the things that needed electricity. He realized that when the power was off, the police were hamstrung. Defending his family was up to him. You can’t outsource your family’s security. You have to man up and get it done.

A few days later, Grant decided to try out the new shotgun. He swung by a sporting goods store to get a second box of shells; it would be less “embarrassing” going into a sporting goods store than a gun store. He would leave the first box of twenty-five shells at home for home defense. He had asked the clerk at the sporting goods store where to shoot. They told him about a gravel pit outside town where people shot. Grant headed there with his box of shells and his new shiny shotgun.

Grant knew how to shoot a shotgun from growing up in Forks, but he ran into something he hadn’t experienced before. The new shotgun was jamming. Oh great. It must be broken. He would go return it and get a new one.

A guy shooting at the gravel pit, who looked like a country boy, came up to him.

“That thing jammin’?”the guy asked.

“Yep,” Grant said. “I think it’s broken.”

“Let me see if I can fix it,” the guy said. He quickly took the gun apart for cleaning and asked if Grant had ever lubricated the bolt. No, he hadn’t.

“You know how to do that?” Grant asked, pointing the bolt in the guy’s hand.

The guy looked at Grant like he was an idiot. “Yeah. It’s not hard.” After a squirt of oil, the gun ran fine.

Grant realized that he was such a sissified and dependent suburbanite that he didn’t even know to perform simple maintenance on a shotgun. His immediate thought when something didn’t work was to get a new one. Like a sheeple consumer. The idea of fixing it never crossed his mind. That’s what highly trained specialists did. Lawyers didn’t fix things.

Oh, God, did he just think that? How stupid was that?

What if he had tried to use that shotgun when someone was trying to kill his family? What if it had jammed because he’d never test fired it?

A few days later, Steve called and said he would be in Olympia for some auto parts business. They got together and started talking about how suburbanites like Grant lived. Steve said something that stuck with Grant for the rest of his life.

“We’re living under a false economy,” Steve said.

Exactly. That’s what had been bugging Grant. This was all fake and couldn’t go on. Steve, the auto parts store manager in Forks, knew more about reality than Grant’s economics professors at the University of Washington. Those idiots told everyone that America could just have a service economy and not build anything, and that whenever there was a downturn the government could just print and spend more money. What could possibly go wrong?

Grant kept asking Steve about how he lived back in Forks. He was fascinated about how much Steve could do: build things, hunt, and fish, can food they grew in their garden, all of that. The nagging feeling about dependence was there again, but Grant knew that he couldn’t just start living like Steve did in Forks. It was really bugging him.