Because Miloš’ father can not rouse himself to war; or because he comes from a family of lost causes, a grandfather who tried to stop an invading tank with hypnotism; or because he shoots his wad early when he’s with a woman; or because his attempts at lovemaking are interrupted by bombs; or because his lothario co-worker goes through the ladies with a rubber stamp; or because there’s nothing worse than being a virgin; or because he fails to commit suicide in a brothel; or because youth is winsome and impulsive in the same breath, Miloš volunteers to drop a bomb on the passing Nazi train of ammunition and gets shot, falling onto the train shortly before it explodes.
Because it was the 80s and Nancy Reagan had declared a war on drugs; or because, even after 10 years, American culture still seemed to baffle my father; or because our house had been burgled twice, a broken basement window: stolen jewelry, VCRs, my precious Nintendo console, our sense of security; or because we needed protection from… something, a nebulous entity haunting us like poverty; or because we felt ill at-ease in the suburban enclave of Aurora, Colorado; or because his Vietnamese friends had convinced him that there was nothing more bonafide American than firearms, my father bought a rifle, which he stored in a camouflage-print bag, despite the fact that he’d never gone hunting once in his life.
Because I knew where my father stored his gun in the basement, in the small cubby between his waterbed and the wall; or because I had been to the gun range with him once when I was young, the shooting earmuffs clownishly large on my head; or because I had found, on the top shelf of his closet, his box of ammunition, which rattled like a metallic snake, because one shell was missing, the single shot he had taken at the shooting range; or because the spirit of döstädning had possessed me; or simply because I had been convenient, the child present in Colorado, visiting in my childhood home, when my mother wondered aloud what to do with the gun, I became the legal owner of my father’s rifle.
Because the man in the shop could sense my discomfort; or because the police officer to whom I tried to surrender my father’s gun told me, “You could probably sell this”; or because the employees saw how I looked around nervously at the guns on the wall, the guns in glass cabinets, more guns than I had ever seen in one place; or because I felt queasiness, not from the fact that these guns were ‘real,’ unlike the plentiful metal fabrications in television and movies, but more that I was giving up a piece of my father, a piece that had gathered dust for decades, but a piece that I’d known was there, and thought would always be there too, the gun shop owner offered me a token $100 for the gun, adding, “Come back if you have any others.”