ENTRY I
COMMON NAME: The Man With the Price Gun
SCIENTIFIC NAME: Homo derelictus, rural variant
HABITAT: Cab of a Ford F-150. Sonic parking lot on Will Rogers Boulevard. Kitchen table at eleven at night.
RANGE: Mayes County, Oklahoma
PERIOD: 1959–2019
My uncle Denny kept a price gun in his truck.
He'd done a stint at the Dollar General in Pryor, Oklahoma, 1987 or 1988, and when they let him go he pocketed the price gun on his way out the door. Said it was compensation. Said a man is owed something for his time.
The price gun was orange and black. Heavy as a starter pistol. Denny carried it the way some men carry a knife or a flask. He'd sit in the cab at the Sonic on Will Rogers Boulevard and put price tags on things. Paper cups. The dashboard. His own knuckles, which were thick and split at the first joint on both hands from a winter he spent doing drywall work in Tulsa in 1993 and never fully healed after. He tagged me once, a Saturday when he was watching me while Mom was at the hospital sitting with Grandma Lois who was going through her first or second round of something the doctors named but we stopped repeating. The sticker said $0.79. I was nine years old and I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. I wore it on my forehead until it fell off somewhere in the IGA parking lot.
He kept a photo of his dog Buck rubber banded to the sun visor. Buck died in 1991 and Denny never got another dog after that. Never explained why. The photo was so sun bleached by the time Denny died that Buck was barely visible, just a pale yellow shape against a pale yellow yard.
He's dead now. Heart attack, 2019.
He missed the pandemic. He missed the Capitol. I have decided not to decide if that was mercy.
CHARACTERISTIC BEHAVIOR: Fills silence naturally, the way weather fills a valley.
CAUSE OF EXTINCTION: The heart. Always the heart.
ENTRY II
COMMON NAME: The Waco Spectator
SCIENTIFIC NAME: Timothy James McVeigh
HABITAT: Gun shows. Militia meetings in the woods. Elohim City, Oklahoma. The post-Cold War weapons circuit.
PERIOD: 1968–2001
I want to tell you what it felt like to be from Pryor, Oklahoma in the summer of 1995.
Four months after McVeigh drove a Ryder truck full of ammonium nitrate into the basement of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and turned 168 people into a number and himself into something else. Something without a clean name.
That summer felt like the inside of a dead woman. Hot and closed.
We were two hours northeast of the city. Two hours from the hole in the ground. Uncle Denny drove down to look, the way you drive to look at a tornado aftermath or a bad wreck on the highway. That specifically American compulsion to go witness damage. To stand near the negative space where a thing used to be and feel something you can't locate in your chest.
He came back quieter than he left. Sat in his truck in the driveway a long time before he came inside. He didn't have words. Denny always had words. But that night he sat at the kitchen table and drank Busch Light and looked at the wall and my mom, his sister, let him do it.
Later I heard him tell her: I seen some of them families.
She didn't ask for more. He didn't give more.
What I have spent thirty years trying to think about correctly is this. McVeigh was not strange to us. That is the sentence that does not fit in the newspapers. He moved through a world that was legible to people like us. The gun shows. The militia meetings out in the woods. Men in lawn chairs outside trailers who talked about the federal government the way other men talk about a neighbor who owes a debt that will never be paid any legitimate way.
My uncle Denny was not that. I want to be clear. Denny was a man with a price gun and a bad back and a good laugh and he voted sometimes and loved his dogs and never hurt anybody.
But he went to the gun shows. He knew men who knew men.
That is the geography I am describing. Not a conspiracy. A proximity. An ecosystem.
The American bestiary is full of things that look almost like other things.
CHARACTERISTIC BEHAVIOR: Spectator who becomes actor. Watches the fire at Waco from outside the perimeter. Takes notes on a yellow legal pad he bought at a Walmart in Waco the morning he arrived.
CAUSE OF EXTINCTION: Lethal injection. Terre Haute, Indiana. June 11, 2001. Three months before the next animal in the almanac.
ENTRY III
COMMON NAME: The Boy From the Field
SCIENTIFIC NAME: Cody Prewitt, later ideologically associated with Cody Wilson
HABITAT: Red dirt field outside Pryor. Unnamed forums. Garages.
PERIOD: Unknown. Possibly ongoing.
There's a field outside of town where kids used to park. Red dirt and Johnson grass and a cattleguard at the entrance that rattled your teeth if you crossed it too fast. On the far side there used to be a rusted out Thunderbird with no wheels, no engine, no glass, that someone had spray painted with the Confederate flag.
I went out there with a boy named Cody Prewitt the summer I was sixteen. We didn't do anything worth recording. We talked. Cody wanted to join the Army and go overseas and see something other than this. A lot of boys wanted that. Some did it. Some came back different. Some came back in boxes. Some came back fine, or said they did.
Cody had a scar on his chin from when he was eleven and his older brother threw a can of RC Cola at him for changing the channel during a Cowboys game. He kept his hair cut close on the sides the way his father wore it and his grandfather wore it before that, three generations of the same haircut in the same county, a genetic inheritance more reliable than money. He was not a stupid person. That is important to say.
He pointed at the Thunderbird. Said: My dad says somebody ought to burn that thing.
I said: The car or the flag?
He thought about it seriously, the way he thought about everything. Finally said: Both, maybe. Get it over with.
We didn't burn anything. I drove back across the cattleguard and held my jaw against the rattle and Cody Prewitt joined the Army and went overseas and when he came back I lost track of him.
Years later I found him on a forum. One of those places where men talk about what the government took from them and what they intend to recover. He was posting about Cody Wilson. The other Cody. The one from Texas who studied law and founded Defense Distributed and in 2013 published the files to print a plastic pistol on a 3D printer. He called it The Liberator. Said it was the end of gun control. Said it was democracy. The State Department ordered him to take the files down. A hundred thousand people had already downloaded them.
Cody from the field wrote: That's how it's done. That's how a man arms himself when the system won't let him.
He didn't recognize me. Or didn't answer. Or wasn't the same Cody anymore.
That night I looked up the files. Found them in ten minutes. Sat there looking at the screen a long time.
I thought about Denny with the price gun.
A man is owed something for his time.
The file weighs less than a song.
CHARACTERISTIC BEHAVIOR: Disappears into the tree line. Reappears on screen.
CURRENT STATUS: Unverified. Possibly in a garage. Possibly building.
ALMANAC NOTE: This species does not go extinct. It sheds its name and continues.
ENTRY IV
COMMON NAME: The Narrator
SCIENTIFIC NAME: Unknown. Possibly self-assigned.
HABITAT: Somewhere outside Mayes County. A screen. A garage, maybe.
PERIOD: Ongoing.
No field notes available for this specimen.
It catalogued the others. It knew their names, their habits, their causes of extinction. It drove across the cattleguard and felt the rattle in its jaw. It stood in the driveway and did not go inside. It found the files in ten minutes and did not close the tab.
What it intended to do next is not recorded here.
That is how bestiaries end. The naturalist sets down his pen. The almanac closes. Outside, something moves in the Johnson grass and you cannot tell from the sound whether it is arriving or leaving.
CHARACTERISTIC BEHAVIOR: Watches. Remembers. Writes it down.
CURRENT STATUS: Unverified.
ALMANAC NOTE: The most dangerous animal is the one that knows it is being observed and keeps moving anyway.
END OF BESTIARY. MAYES COUNTY, OKLAHOMA. YEAR OF THE SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL.
-- Akira Damian Mirco Milski is a writer working in horror, dark fiction, and transgressive poetry.
