STAND ALONE PAGES

Wednesday, November 13, 2024

Shorts: "Nambu Type B" by Ben Boulden

 


Nambu Type B

Ben Boulden

 

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TOM BOLLINGER HAD LIVED IN P—, UTAH, for 42 years. The only other place he had ever been was Iowa on a two-year proselytizing mission for the Church of the Martyr. He had been nineteen when he arrived in the Hawkeye state and anyone who knew anything about Tom knew he hated Iowa and Iowans. One reason for this hatred was because a missionary’s value is judged by the number of converts he baptized and Tom had only finagled one in two years—and that one had been a middle-aged woman with four cats and no hope of ever getting married or having children and so she didn’t count in Tom or the Lord’s eyes.

The other reason is because Iowa was the first place Tom ever really saw the lives of other people. In Utah, Tom only saw the masquerade Martyrs’ put on at church every Sunday. All the men were patient, God-fearing, and hardworking capitalists and the women were pure, happy, and sweet. So Tom enjoyed telling the guys at the Patriarchal Quorum every Sunday that Iowa was a playground for fornicators, adulterers, drug users, and fags. Boy, did Tom like the word, “fag”—he used it as a substitute for “lame,” “stupid,” “feminine,” and of course as a derogatory term for gay men and drag queens. You should have heard him when a “gay family” moved into a house on the very same street where Tom lived.

His “brothers”—as Martyrs’ call their male membership—in the Quorum never paid Tom much attention. Sure, he was off, a little weird, he made them uncomfortable but he was harmless. Everyone said so. He lived with his widowed mother, too, which provided his peers with a litany of tiresome jokes. Never when Tom was around, of course, because that would have hurt his feelings. Plus, in their quiet moments, Tom’s “brothers” knew he was right about the world’s dirty and sullen ills and they feared it would encroach upon their perfectly cultivated and inspired lifestyle as God’s chosen people.

The thing is, Tom was mostly harmless. Sure, he had a strange obsession with his late-father’s gun collection. A collection that filled an entire room in the aging but well-kept house on Oak Summit Lane where Tom lived with his mother, but he never threatened anyone or even mentioned shooting animals.

His favorite gun in that room had belonged to his grandfather. The benevolent and much loved, Lamar Bollinger. “Grandy Lamar,” as Tom had called him as a boy, had taken the little pistol from a dead Japanese soldier on Saipan in 1944. It was called a Nambu Type B and it looked like it had come off the set of a World War 2 movie. The round barrel nakedly sticking out of the blocky frame like an old-fashioned water pistol. And the grips, which were Tom’s favorite part of the pistol, were Philippine Mahogany and best of all Grandy Lamar had carved his initials into the wood so his tent mates wouldn’t get sticky fingers. “L” on one side and “B” on the other.

It was a beautiful pistol but one nearly impossible to get ammunition for. It was an 8mm, which has never been popular in the United States. Tom’s mother, she could be a real bitch Tom often thought, wouldn’t let him use her credit card to order a box from a California dealer that specialized in rare ammunitions. She said it cost too much—in that squeaky high-pitched voice of hers that drove Tom crazy—so he had been forced to work extra hours at his job waxing floors at the local University to earn the $100 himself.

Since Tom had ruined his credit a few years earlier he made a bargain with the dealer. He’d mail cash for the 8mm bullets, 20 came in every box, and upon receipt the dealer would mail the bullets to a gun store in Provo where Tom would pick it up. The actual cost went from $100 to $150 because of tax, shipping, and a handling fee that made Tom call the dealer a “fag” after he’d disconnected the call. That had been two years ago and Tom still hadn’t shot his grandfather’s old war trophy because he was saving those 20 bullets for something special. He didn’t know what, but he figured it would be obvious to him when the time came.

It was even more obvious than Tom had thought it would be, because on September 21, 2020, an apostle of the Church of the Martyr gave a speech at the University where Tom worked. The gray old man said every believer should defend the Church against the gay mob threatening to knock down the walls and sodomize the faithful.

He’d used the metaphor of a trowel for building the faith and a musket—which Tom knew was an old word for a gun—to defend it from its many enemies. Tom’s favorite line from the speech, or “talk” as the Martyrs liked to say, went, “a volley of fire is necessary to defend God’s Kingdom.” The speech’s underlying context was how the university’s faculty weren’t doing enough to suppress—and in some cases even supporting—the LGBTQ+ lifestyle on campus.   

But what the apostle meant as metaphor Tom took as literal and that line about “a volley of fire” rang in his ears over and over.

So Tom set to make the world a better and brighter place. He took Grandy Lamar’s Nambu Type B semi-automatic pistol from the gun room, cleaned it, loaded its narrow magazine to capacity with seven rounds, rammed it into the pistol’s grip, and pulled the slide back to load an 8mm round into the chamber. The slide slammed home with a satisfying clunk. Tom knew the gun was ready to shoot.

He walked past his mother watching her absurd television game shows—the crowd applauding like lunatics—opened the front door and walked into the pleasant early-autumn afternoon. He didn’t bother responding when his mother asked where he was going. Instead he walked down the driveway, its crumbling surface crunching beneath his boots. The crisp air as unnoticed as the setting sun. He turned left at the sidewalk.

Tom knew where he was going. He had known without understanding this was his destiny since the two “fags” had moved in three years before. But it had taken those carefully crafted words the apostle used for Tom to truly understand what the Lord wanted him to do.

When he reached the family’s house, Tom paused a moment. He looked down at the pistol in his hand. He flexed his pointer finger and laid it against the trigger guard like his father had taught him so many years ago. A neighbor getting out of her car after a long day at work saw Tom with the gun in his hand. She squeaked and rushed to her own front door, the key shaking so badly it was impossible to get it into the lock.

Tom’s hands were remarkably steady as he walked up Mark and Roger Dawson’s driveway and stepped over a short hedge of privet bushes onto the concrete porch. He saw there were lights blazing inside and from somewhere a piano played a simple and familiar tune. Tom stopped at the front door, which had been painted purple in the spring. He reached for the knob and twisted it—it was open, just like he hoped it would be. After all, no one locked their doors on Oak Summit Lane.

A rich and delicious smell of cooking wafted across the threshold. Tom could see Roger in the kitchen, his back turned. On his left a girl whose name Tom thought was Rosie or Rachel looked up from the piano. Her hands frozen in mid-air, her mouth open in surprise.

Tom stepped toward her. He raised his grandfather’s prized war souvenir with the same ease as if he were pointing a finger at her. He pulled the trigger. The Nambu’s sharp crack muted the girl’s shouts like they had been so much useless white noise.

Tom couldn’t be sure, but he thought her last word had been, “Please.”

From the kitchen Tom heard Roger shout. Tom turned as the man rushed toward him. A single phrase flashed in Tom’s mind: Kill the fag!

And he did. The little Nambu pistol bucked with the trigger pull and Roger stumbled forward two steps before collapsing face down on the hardwood with a floor rattling thump.

A shout came from the second floor. Tom ascended the stairs in three longs strides. At the top he followed a hallway into the rear of the house. The first door went into an empty bathroom. The second opened onto a bedroom and inside Mark Dawson was frantically trying to load a small black revolver. When he heard Tom at the door, Mark turned and threw the gun at him. It smacked against the door jamb and caromed to the floor with a bounce.

Tom raised the Nambu Type B. His mouth razored into a tight smile.

Mark said, “Why?”

Tom pulled the trigger. The gun shimmied in his hands and Mark fell onto his back.

In a beat of gleeful worship, Tom whispered, “Thy will be done.”

Behind him a baby cried.

Tom turned away from Mark’s bleeding form and walked towards the crying. At the back, in a tiny room, a toddler stood in its crib. The boy’s face was crimson with terror. A forgotten binky hung from a ribbon attached to a pocket of its blue pajamas. A mobile turning a parade of shapes—squares and circles and rainbows—glittered with the room’s overhead light.

The toddler shook with emotion and if you listened, he was shouting, “Daddy, Daddy!” again and again. A chill ran down Tom’s back. His skin prickled with goosebumps. He drew the pistol up from his side and looked at it. He extended his arm and pointed the Nambu at the baby. He squeezed his finger on the trigger but his hand shook with the gun. He closed his eyes and breathed with a conscious effort. When he reopened them Tom saw the child—as the first responders would learn later the boy was named Colin—for what he was. A scared, hurting little boy.

An orphan.

In the distance Tom heard sirens. He knew they were coming for him and he began crying. For a beat he understood the monstrosity of what he had done.

As the sirens grew closer, Tom raised his Grandy Lamar’s prize to his temple and pulled the trigger. He faded to blackness as Colin cried with pain. And Tom knew it was too late for redemption and he hoped there would be no God on the other side, waiting to judge him.

Fin

Ben Boulden is the author of two novels, several short stories, and more than 400 articles, book reviews, and columns. His latest book, Casinos, Motels, Gators is available for Kindle, and as a paperback everywhere. Click here to see it at Amazon.

© 2024 by Ben Boulden

 

Monday, November 11, 2024

"Simon & Simon: Loser Turns Up Winner"

“Simon & Simon: Loser Turns Up Winner,” by Jerry Buck appeared in the May 8, 1983, issue of the Sunday Magazine in the Salt Lake Tribune. Essentially an interview with Simon & Simon (1981 – 89) creator, Philip DeGuere, Jr., it chronicles the series’ early years. My favorite part? Learning it started out life as Pirates Key—set on a mythical island in the Florida Keys.



 

Thursday, November 07, 2024

Booked (and Printed): October 2024

 

Ah, my old friend October skated by with hardly saying hello; or so it felt because the entire month passed in a week. A windstorm stripped the trees of their coloring leaves and the nighttime lows plummeted from the 50s to near freezing. Brrr… But my reading—as it always does this time of year—improved over last month with five books, four novels and a story anthology, and three shorts.

My first of the month is Gavin Lyall’s splendid aviation thriller, Shooting Script (1966). Lyall’s work is defined by his imaginative plotting, literate style, and Raymond Chandler-esque dialogue. And Shooting Script, which is Lyall’s fourth published novel, is amongst his best. Keith Carr—a Korean War RAF fighter pilot—operates a struggling one plane Caribbean air cargo service. After Carr is gray-listed by the U.S. Government for false rumors he is flying supplies to revolutionaries in the fictional Republic Libra, he is forced to take a gig flying a camera plane for an American movie crew filming in Jamaica. But as one would suspect there is more going on than meets the eye. There are echoes of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a bigger-than-life actor with a resemblance to John Wayne, right-wing politics and all, and a creative use for a rusting old B-25 bomber. Shooting Script is about as good as a mid-century thriller gets.

Chuck Dixon’s vigilante tale, Levon’s Trade (2012), came next. I’d heard good things about Levon’s Trade and its eleven sequels. It is well-written and entertaining, but there’s not much original here. It’s the same book that has been written over and over since Don Pendleton introduced The Executioner in 1969, but if you like this stuff, you can do a lot worse than Levon’s Trade.

Eight Very Bad Nights, edited by Tod Goldberg (2024), is a solidly entertaining anthology featuring eleven new crime and thriller stories set during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. In a phrase, it’s good fun—check my detailed review here.

There was a time when I read horror; a lot of horror. And one of my favorite writers from that long ago era is Jack Ketchum. His most popular work tends to be gross-out, ultra-violent slasher stuff; e.g. Off Season (1980), Offspring (1991). But categorizing Ketchum’s writing, even at its most depraved, with the norm in the slasher and splatter-punk subgenres is like comparing a BMW with a Yugo. Ketchum wrote with vigor and style. His tales unfailingly revealed something about humanity; even if that revelation is uncomfortable. So for Halloween this season I reread Ketchum’s 1984 novel, Hide and Seek. I originally read it twenty years ago and I had forgotten almost everything except the climactic sequence and its Maine setting. It’s a demented haunted house tale about five kids playing a game of hide and seek in an abandoned house. It’s damn good, too, but only if you like horror and don’t mind a bit of graphic violence.

Penance (1996) is David Housewright’s first novel. You’ve likely noticed—if you read the blog regularly—I’m a fan of Housewright’s Rushmore McKenzie mysteries. But Penance features a former St. Paul, Minnesota cop turned P.I. named Holland Taylor. It’s obviously a first novel. The voice isn’t as strong as Housewright’s subsequent books and the plot is overly complicated. But it’s fun watching Taylor spin around a murder investigation that takes him all the way to the State House. And Penance really is good (just not as good as Housewright has become in the decades since).


The number of short stories I read in October dropped from the previous month, but two of the three were novellas. The first is Ed Gorman’s post-apocalyptic, “Survival” (1995). A novella that was originally published in Gorman’s collection, Cages, “Survival” is a rare so-so tale from Ed. The idea is cool: Fascist religious terrorists demolish humanity with nuclear weapons and the survivors band together in hospitals where they are treated, without medicine, for the after-effects of the blasts. The plotting is a bit confusing, but the premise and characters are interesting enough to make it worthwhile.

“Dracula Wine,” by David Housewright (2021)—the 22nd installment of the multi-author A Grifter’s Song series—is a satisfying caper about a con-woman taking a businessman to the cleaners. It’s good fun with a smooth twist. Jeremiah Healy’s “Battered Spouse” (1990) is my favorite of Healy’s John Francis Cuddy shorts. Cuddy is called in when a jogger is killed by a hit-and-run driver to drum up something the police may have missed, which he does, of course—read my detailed review here.

Fin—

Now on to next month…



Monday, November 04, 2024

1970s Western Splatterpunk: Six-Gun Samurai & Sloane

 

1970s Western Splatterpunk:

Six-Gun Samurai: Bushido Vengeance &

Sloane: The Man with the Iron Fists

By Mike Baker

 

 

I’d finished the relentlessly dark Blood Meridian and then read Cormac McCarthy’s 3rd book, Child of God, which, while entertaining enough for a Cormac McCarthy book, gets progressively more f’d up as Lester Ballard becomes unmoored from his humanity, descending into the hell of his unchecked subconscious. I needed a break—which is why I grabbed Six-Gun Samurai: Bushido Vengeance, which is book #2 in that series by “Patrick Lee”.

When Tom Fletcher was a 12-year-old midshipman on duty at the American mission in Tokyo, the mission was attacked by ninjas. Everyone is massacred but Tom who escapes, is taken in, and adopted, by a Samurai who raises Tom as his own son, training him to be a Samurai warrior. When his American family is butchered by renegade Union soldiers, led by notorious Colonel Edward Hollister, Tom heads back to the States to get his revenge. Each book in the series finds him hunting Hollister and his gang of murderous scum.

This outing with Tanaka Tom is somehow more insane than the first go. Tom is hunting a man who took part in the murder of his family but is now acting as an Indian agent. The Indian agent is trying to get two rival bands of Apache to slaughter each other so that the Indian Agent can take their land for his boss, and Tom’s nemesis, Colonel Hollister who led the soldiers that murdered Tom’s family. First, Tom befriends one band of Apache and then he convinces the Indian Agent that he’s a bad guy, gets hired by the Indian Agent, gets his cover blown blah blah blah. He then rushes back to the Apaches and gets the two rival bands to unite based on the principles of bushido which they intuitively get as noble savages, and they all go to war against the US Cavalry.

There’s a whole court case where Tanaka Tom defends his and the Apache’s slaughter of the US Cavalry which is pretty f’ing boring, but it leads to a climax on par with any spaghetti western/Shaw Brothers extravaganza in its over the top, batshit crazy mass blood and slaughter.

    I’m a traditional guy when it comes to westerns. I, myself, started with Piccadilly Cowboy stuff but then migrated to Lewis Patten, Clifton Adams and Elmer Kelton because, and feel free to disagree, I need someone to root for and cheering on Edge or Crow was essentially cheering on all my rage and disappointment which I should have resolved in my 30’s. That said, the book is so bonkers that, the stupid, boring ass court scene aside, its infectious fun and the absolute absurdity of this book convinced me to buy book #3.

 

Still feeling Cormac McCarthy fatigue, I grabbed Sloane: The Man with the Iron Fists, by “Steven Lee”, and holy smokes, it is actually more ridiculous than Six-Gun Samurai.

Sloane’s daddy is a sodbuster and one day a Conestoga wagon carrying a circus troupe, led by a rubber nose wearing clown, stops at the Sloane homestead asking for directions and water and ends up with Sloane’s daddy getting tortured to death as Sloane’s mama is raped, tortured and murdered. Sloane high tails it to the countryside to get away from the horror movie his family home has descended into—let me be clear—this shit is f’d up even by Picadilly standards. And Sloane doesn’t get away because, like most circus troupes, their evil Apache runs him down with a horse and stomps holy hell out of him with the horse and then leaves Sloane for dead.

He is, of course, rescued by a Chinese family whose wife is a healer and whose father is a kung fu master which leads to Sloane living and becoming a kung fu master. They have a daughter who Sloane later screws because the 70’s had some real messed up Freudian whatever the hell that made David Hamilton ok for the American book buying public and those creepy Pia Zadora/Brooke Shields underaged movies not seem, at the time, creepy as hell.

Sloane grows up and hunts the clown, and his clown posse, down. There’s lots and lots of ultra violence involving kung fu but also guns, acrobatics, knife throwing and yes, clowning.

      The only bad thing about the books, other than the story etc., is that there were only two of them to make fun of.