Sunday Gun Pr0n

I’d call it the Sunday Smith, but another rockstar blogger already has dibs on that name.

You know those stories you hear about some family heirloom spending its latter years rusting in some widow’s sock drawer before she turns it in for a $50 Target gift certificate at some Sheriff’s evidence destruction bazaar gun buyback program?

Yeah, well this one spent at least fifty years in a sock drawer, but was spared the ignominious fate of being smelted into scrap metal by a son who was a gun nut – namely, me.

All my life I had thought this was a simple Smith & Wesson Model 10, just one of a few million K-frame revolvers. It wasn’t until I liberated it from my uncle’s gun cabinet on the way to Blogorado that I discovered that it wasn’t just any Smith K frame revolver. The gun you’re looking at is a precursor to the Model 10, the gun Smith & Wesson aficionados refer to as the five-screw Hand Ejector Model – a virtual twin to this one. Dad’s, according to the Smith & Wesson Standard Catalog, was probably manufactured somewhere around 1948. He bought it new, making it one of the first guns he bought after returning from World War II.

This was the first centerfire handgun I ever shot. I learned how to shoot a pistol using Dad’s Hi Standard HD Military .22 auto, and I put a few thousand rounds through that gun. It was a plinker, and a target pistol, and that’s what we used it for.

Dad’s .38, however, was not a plinker. It shot like a target pistol, but to Dad’s mind, it was his defensive handgun. Its purpose was serious business. You shot it enough to assure that it functioned properly, and that you could hit what you aimed at, but that was it. If you wanted to target practice, that’s what the .22 was for.

In all my life, I’ll bet less than 300 rounds were fired through this handgun. I wouldn’t be surprised if its total round count was well south of 500. It was never carried, and thus shows no holster wear. The bore is still as bright and sharp as the day it left the factory.

Which is not to say, however, that it was never put to good use. Like any family heirloom, this one has some lore attached.

**********

In January, 1985, I was still a high school junior. Dad had spent a fruitless season on his new deer lease, and hunting season was winding down. Being a dyed-in-the-wool duck hunter, I had never paid the hoofed critters much attention, other than as a handy excuse to be in the woods between the first and second splits of duck season.

Mom was working, and Dad sent me to the grocery store with a $10 bill and explicit instructions to buy two pounds of hamburger, a box of Hamburger Helper, and a two-liter Coke, and to come straight home.

He assured compliance with that last part by handing me the keys to his ’68 Chevy van rather than the keys to my Mustang. When one is a teenage boy, one does not cruise the strip in a 17-year-old work truck. It just wasn’t that kind of van.

We lived in the country near Monroe, LA, abutting what was, at one time, the world’s largest pecan orchard. Well, as I approached that orchard, several deer emerged from a stand of cattails in the ditch on the right side of the road. Being an inexperienced teenage driver, I locked up the brakes to avoid hitting them, and promptly fishtailed all over the place. I wound up sideways in the road, clenching the steering wheel in panic, with half a yard of vinyl upholstery sucked up my ass.

And the deer… well, three of them – a doe and two yearlings – just stood there in the pool of light thrown by my high beams, just across the ditch, no more than fifteen feet away – quite literally with that “deer in the headlights” look.

I scrambled around to reach the gun rack on the wall behind the driver’s seat, where Dad’s 8mm Mauser and his Browning A5 usually hung, only to find the rack empty. Like I said, Dad had given up on hunting for the year.

Scrambling around in the glove compartment yielded the old .38, and I stuck it out the window, bracing myself on the mirror mount, still unable to believe my good fortune that the deer were still standing there. I cocked the hammer, took careful aim, and started shooting.

My first shot took the doe between the eyes, and dropped her like a stone. The yearling standing to her left snorted in surprise, stamped its foot, and bounded sideways about three feet. I cocked the hammer again, and calmly dropped that one with another head shot. The third deer finally realized that Bad Things were afoot, and wheeled to run. I emptied the rest of the cylinder at her, hitting her twice – a superficial wound in the neck, and once behind the left shoulder as she quartered away from me. She piled up about a hundred yards out into the field.

Fifteen minutes after I left the house, I was back, muddy from the knees down and grinning like an ape.

“You forget something?” Dad asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

“Nope,” I grinned. “Come look in the back of your van.”

As Dad stared, goggle-eyed, at the pile of venison in the back of his van, I boasted, “Send me to the store for enough hamburger for supper, and I come back with  a year’s worth of venison for the freezer.”

“Two deer too many,” he chided halfheartedly. “You shoulda stopped at one.”

“Shot ’em at night, from the driver’s seat of a truck, Dad,” I pointed out. “Three’s just as illegal as one.”

“Well, that takes care of supper,” he mused, letting the subject drop. “Let’s get these deer cleaned.”

“Sure thing, Dad,” I grinned, “but when we’re done, can I take that ten bucks and my car into Monroe for a couple of hours?”

**********

A few years before that, for the only time in our family history, Dad used the .38 for its intended purpose. My older sister, Recreational Pharmacist, had married a fellow recreational pharmacist who, among his many criminal talents, was a violent psychopath who took great pleasure in torturing little kids and animals. They lived, rent-free, in the home my parents owned in Monroe.

One night, Recreational Pharmacist called Dad, sobbing that she was locked in the bedroom, and Psycho Hubby was threatening to kill her. Dad hung up the phone, grabbed his .38 and sprinted for the truck.

When he got to the house, he found Psycho Hubby in a drug-induced rage, beating the snot out of my sister. Rather than just shoot him, Dad whacked him on the head with the .38. PH grunted, rubbed the bloody gash on his head, and went after Dad.

To this day, I don’t know why Dad didn’t just empty that .38 into his left ventricle. He was certainly capable of doing so, and the threat was certainly there. PH had  six inches and a hundred pounds on Dad, and he was coming at him, intent on doing harm.

If Dad had been cognizant then of all the pain and damage this man had inflicted on our family, both before that night and in the years to come, he’d have killed him graveyard dead. But on that night, he didn’t know, and in his mind he was still facing his son-in-law, his daughter’s lawfully wedded husband.

So rather than grip, sight picture, trigger squeeze, repeat as necessary, Dad instead used the .38 to pistol-whip PH into unconsciousness. If he added a few blows for good measure once PH was down, I doubt it troubled his conscience much. He left him lying there on the floor in a puddle of blood, herded my sister into the van, and drove straight to the Monroe Police Department.

I’m sure that when the desk sergeant that night tells those, “No shit, so there I was…” stories to his buddies of his days on the force, one of them will be about the time will be about the time the old coot who owned the local television repair shop marched into his police station, armed with a loaded .38 revolver.

Dad marched into the lobby on the Monroe Police Department, gun in hand. In retrospect, I’m sure that wasn’t his smartest move. Still, he took the desk sergeant by surprise when he marched up to him, plunked the Smith on his desk, and announced, “I’m Norman Grayson, and I just used this pistol to beat my son-in-law unconscious. For all I know, the sumbitch may be dead, but maybe y’all better send an ambulance over there, just in case.”

“Uuuuummmm, and where would this be, Mr. Grayson?” quoth the desk sergeant as he eyed my Dad carefully, sliding the Smith & Wesson out of reach and checking discreetly to see if it was loaded.

It was.

“XXXX South 5th Street,” Dad answered. “He was beating my daughter, and I tried to stop him. He came after me, and I had no choice but to hit him with it. Sumbitch is lucky I didn’t just shoot him.”

“I’d say so,” the cop agreed, unloading the Smith and putting the bullets in the ashtray on his desk. He picked up the phone, dialed a number, and dispatched a squad car and an ambulance to Dad’s old house. “Did you go over there intending to shoot him?”

“I went over there intending to rescue my daughter,” Dad said matter-of-factly. “Whatever came next was up to him. But yeah, I’d have shot him if I had to.”

“Well, ummm…” the cop answered, at a loss for words.

“Ain’t I supposed to fill out some sort of statement?” Dad asked. “It’s late, and I have to be up early in the morning. I’ll fill out the statement right here, and then I’m taking my daughter home and going to bed.”

“Um, Mr. Grayson, it isn’t that simple…” the cop started to say.

“No, it is that simple,” Dad snapped. “This happened in a house I own, with a firearm I legally own, in defense of my daughter and myself. The fact that I didn’t shoot the sumbitch ought to save you a little paperwork, at least. Now, you got something for me to write my statement on?”

“Uumm, sure,” the cop said uncertainly, sliding a pen and a piece of department stationery across the desk, “Might as well get started until we hear from the officers we sent to the scene. Of course you realize they may have more questions for you that – “

“Is there a warrant for my arrest?” Dad demanded.

“Um, well, no,” the sergeant stammered. “We have no reason to arrest you. It’s just that – “

“If there’s no warrant for me, then I’m finishing my damned statement and I’m going home to bed,” Dad said flatly. “If your boys have questions for me, they can call me tomorrow at my place of business, or just drop by.”

“Um, Mr. Grayson, it’s not that simple,” the cop repeated. “When there’s an investigation, we – “

“No, it is that simple,” Dad interrupted. “I’m tired, and I’m going to bed. You want to arrest me, or ask me more questions, then come get me during daylight hours, and I’ll cooperate. Send somebody out to my house tonight and wake me up again to ask your questions, and you won’t find me nearly so cooperative. Are we clear?”

“Um, are you saying that you’re refusing to cooperate with an investigation?”

“I’m saying that I’ll cooperate fully, as long as you conduct your investigation during civilized hours. I just got yanked out of bed in the middle of the night to deal with this shit, and I  just pistol-whipped my own son-in-law damned near to death. I did it because I was trying to be a nice guy. You send your boys out to my house to wake me up for a second time tonight, I’m gonna go straight to nasty.”

“Okay, well…”

“Give me my gun back,” Dad demanded. “Since there’s no warrant for me, you got no cause to keep it. Bullets, too.”

Surely against his better judgment, the cop slid the Smith back across the desk. “Um, you mind waiting until you get back in your vehicle to load it, Mr. Grayson?”

“No problem,” Dad smiled. “Thank you for your help, son.”

That was my old man, and this was his pistol.