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New trends come late into these deep wrinkles in the Appalachian Mountains where I live. It couldn’t have been more than a month or two ago when I first came across the hissed appellation “toxic masculinity.”
What the hell does it even mean? Best I can figure it means you saw a John Wayne movie once and liked it. Dial it back a few years, a lot of years actually. I was thirteen. The night before I had just watched J.D. Cahill. In that grand opening, John Wayne rides into a group of five men and offers them the opportunity to surrender.
One of them points out, “They’s five of us and only one of you.”
In his left hand he has a 12 gauge double, in his right, a single action Colt .45. There’s a lot of shooting. The scene breaks, and they’re riding away. John Wayne is shot up but mounted, trailing behind him are the couple still alive, both shot up and prisoners. They’re laughing. John Wayne accuses one of them of shooting him in his bad shoulder on purpose.
I line up five empty beer cans thirty feet out. My feet firmly on the ground, this is going to be easier than on horseback. In my left hand, I have my father’s Ansley H. Fox “C” grade 12 gauge, loaded with paper high brass fours, which cheats. The fours have about 130 pellets compared to the nine or so in the buckshot load John Wayne would have used. In my right, I have the single action Army I always carried in those years, except it’s a .38 Special which makes it marginally easier to shoot than the .45. I time my first shot with the 12 gauge and the Colt so they go off at exactly the same time. I empty both as fast as I can. One can still stands.
My first thought is that I can learn this. My second is I nearly broke my hand with the 12 gauge. I’m more likely to break my hand than to learn, and no matter how fast I ever get with a gun in each hand, I’ll always be faster with one gun in both hands.
Shooting the shotgun in one hand was the drawback. I could have cleaned the cans with the Colt. I didn’t have enough experience to know the scene came from the over boiled imagination of a Hollywood writer who had never fired a twelve gauge in his left hand. He had something to say about humanity I missed. At thirteen, I could have taught him about weapons. I was not actually bad with a shotgun, a few years later I killed three geese on the rise with a twelve gauge. There was a lesson in that opening to J.D. Cahill, but it was subliminal. I didn’t yet have the experience to see it.
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Move forward to last winter. I’m in the tractor, round bale of hay speared to the backend. I’m feeding cattle. As I drive the cab tractor phone in hand, I talk to Terry, a childhood friend. I talk to him as much as possible. Terry goes around in overalls, the quintessential ignorant redneck until you mention some obscure third world country, and he answers, “Been to that shit hole.” By looking at him, you’d never see behind his carefully constructed persona and glimpse the electronic genius who traveled the world as a military contractor. Now he’s retired. Exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam is wrecking his life. Same age as me, the man, who went on two hundred foot dives or to the center of the Dismal Swamp with Navy Seals so they could graphically illustrate what they needed him to invent or modify, can barely walk. We talk little about what’s lost. Tomorrow’s going to get better. He still buys guns and fishing boats. We mostly laugh. I tell him he won’t like his new fishing boat. “Ain’t got no twin Browning fifties.” Weeks before he bought a new 1911 .45 he no longer has the stamina to put through its paces. He hands it to me. He wants to see once more what a tuned piece of ordnance can do up close, rapid fire.
He’s telling me again about Nathan Dean, reaching back to long ago. He and Nathan are tiny children. He has Nathan up on a box, hands tied behind his back, rope around his neck. Terry already knows a correct hangman’s knot has thirteen turns.
Nathan turns nervous. “We’re just playing aren’t we?”
“What do you care? You had a fair trial.”
Terry kicks the box out from under Nathan. A neighbor raking leaves, who had been paying scant attention to two kids playing cowboys and rustlers, clears the white picket fence in one single leap.
The next day Nathan tells Terry. “My mommy says I can’t play with you no more.”
I tell Terry to hang on.
A coyote crosses the upper tram road a hundred and fifty yards out. The next thing Terry hears over the phone is the boom of my old single shot 45-70. I kill the coyote.
The conversation resumed, he asks, “Two legged or four?”
“Does it amount to a damn?”
I guess not. Neither of us know how much we have left. It’s a certainty what’s in front of us won’t equal what’s behind. We laugh. A shared joke is precious.
◊♦◊
He says he’s getting better. Maybe he is. He should be long dead, but as he says, he’s a hard kill.
Most of the stories he’ll tell rarely. Some of them, he’ll never tell. His retirement check is hinged upon keeping a closed mouth. That’s the least someone involved in intelligence could face. But that first time keeps cropping up. Because of his communications abilities, he was assigned out of the aircraft carrier to the riverboats on the Mekong Delta. Part of their mission was to draw fire.
From an isolated clump of scrub trees, not fifty yards back from the shoreline, a shot from an AK-47 comes so close to Terry’s head he can feel the wind as it goes by. All these years later, he still asks, “I never done nothing to him. Why’d he want to kill me?
Terry was on the twin Browning fifties. He turns it to the clump of trees. When he stops, pieces of the cut up Viet Cong hang from the branches.
After Terry wastes ammunition excessively, the old Chief Petty Officer behind him asks, “Do you think you got him?”
And there it is, the lesson I was too young to learn at thirteen from the old J.D. Cahill scene, a good joke can sometimes keep a killing from ruining an otherwise perfectly good day.
Oh, yeah, toxic masculinity. I don’t give a damn.
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Photo credit: Getty Images
Edd, thanks for your contribution. The consciousness which kills operates inside a consciousness which responds with more life. The difference between the two is I. I’m posting you on my FB page TheFatherConnection
If women can run the gamut from pink frills and turning themselves into walking, talking Barbie dolls to being in the Army and on the front line, why is it that men don’t seem to be allowed the same range?
Because any hint of behavior deemed feminine in men is seen as making them inferior.
And the reason for that is why? Patriarchy? Continued sexism? Toxic masculinity? Toxic femininity?
And men aren’t enforcing that on their own.