A Weapon Of Mass
Destruction
by Don Drewniak
During a three year span in my pre-teenage
years, I lived with my parents in a duplex
located a quarter-mile north of the Tucker Street
Dump in Fall River, Massachusetts. My three best
friends lived a stone's throw to the east. All
four of us owned Red Ryder BB guns.
We journeyed to the dump with our
Red Ryders shortly before dusk about once a week,
weather permitting. The attraction? Rats. We
positioned ourselves opposite the setting sun
with a mound of garbage and trash between the sun
and us.
Shooting began as soon as a rat's
silhouette appeared on top of the mound. To
conserve BBs, the rule was one shot each per rat.
When a rat was hit, it almost invariably sprang
one or two feet into the air before disappearing.
Then came the argument as to which one of us made
the hit.
The rifle ended up unused in a
corner of a basement subsequent to our family
moving to a different part of Fall River. My
father eventually sold it and handed me a dollar
bill (the equivalent of $12.04 as of this writing).
He never revealed how much he kept.
Leaping over decades, we come to
this past September when I was shopping at Vargas,
the mega-hardware store here in Atenas, Costa
Rica. I passed by a locked glass case that had
two pellet guns in it.
Memory of the glory days of rat
hunting flashed into my consciousness. I asked
one of the employees if the store sold BB guns.
“We have them on order. They
should be here next week.”
I ordered one (hand gun) and checked
in once a week over the next five weeks, only to
get the same response, “Next week.”
Near the beginning of November, I
made the colossal mistake of telling my wife,
Dolores, I had a BB gun on order.
“You what?” she shouted.
“I ordered a BB gun from Vargas.”
“There will be no guns in this
house!”
“It's just a BB gun. I'm only
going to use it for target practice.”
“There will be no weapons of
mass destruction in this house!”
“A weapon of mass destruction?
It couldn't kill anything bigger than a mouse.”
I tossed in the towel after a few
more exchanges and walked away saying, “You
win.” I canceled the order.
We move on to mid-December when
Dolores returned from visiting a neighbor. “I
told Jennifer (name changed to protect the
innocent) about your wanting a BB gun.”
Still pouting, I questioned, “So?”
in a less than pleasant tone.
“Ted (her husband/name changed)
has a BB gun and a real gun.”
“So?”
“I apologize. Buy your gun.”
“No thank you.”
“Don't be a baby.”
I went to Vargas a few days later
only to find out that they still hadn't received
the BB guns. As a result, I ordered one from
Amazon knowing that it would most likely not
arrive here until early January. It's a long
story as to why it takes two-to-three weeks to
get items shipped from the States to Costa Rica.
My daughter, son-in-law and two
grandsons (ages twenty-one and fifteen) spent
Christmas in Las Vegas. They returned two days
after the 25th to their home in Maryland. Dolores
and I flew in the next day.
Gifts were exchanged that evening.
We gave our grandsons what we knew they most
wanted – cash. The oldest is now a senior in
college, the youngest a high school junior. They
laughed throughout when their ancient
grandparents gave their versions of the weapon of
mass destruction.
The “kids” approached me
the next afternoon and asked if I wanted to join
them on a trip to Walmart. Off we went in my
oldest grandson's pickup truck.
Once in the store, I followed them
up to the second floor and through a bevy of
aisles until they found their target, a locked
glass case containing both BB and pellet guns.
They examined the merchandise for ten minutes or
so before flagging down an employee who opened
the case and pulled out an elongated box with a
Barra 1866 CO2 Air Rifle (BB gun) in it.
I couldn't resist as I pulled my
cellphone out of a pocket and took a few photos
of them each holding one end of the box. Off went
one of the photos to Dolores. Zap!
Needless to say, she was not
overjoyed when we returned to the house with the
Barra 1866. After unpacking the new weapon of
mass destruction, off the three of us went to the
backyard where we took turns blowing holes though
an empty gallon plastic container.
Decades earlier in college, my
closest friends nicknamed me “The Drewn.”
On occasions when I did something right, I would
hear “Score one for The Drewn.” It was
a “Score one for The Drewn” afternoon.
My BB gun arrived ten days into
January. With it were a packet containing about a
hundred BBs, two CO2 cartridges, four pages of
microscopic directions and a pair of plastic
glasses to protect eyes from ricocheting BBs.
Called to mind by the glasses was
the classic 1983 film, A Christmas Story,
specifically the “You'll shoot your eye out”
scene. For those not familiar with the movie,
there are several YouTube clips centered on a BB
gun worth the watch.
“Directions? Who needs them?”
I pulled the cover away from the handle and as I
suspected, there was a slot for a CO2 cartridge.
After loosening a plastic screw at the base, I
inserted one of the cartridges and began
tightening the screw only to jump about a foot in
the air when a loud hissing sound accompanied the
release of some CO2 from the cartridge.
Rather than try to read the
directions that would have entailed using a
magnifying glass, I found two clips on YouTube
that said the release of a small amount of CO2
was necessary to break the seal and allow the CO2
to power the BBs.
One down, one to go. I ejected the
magazine. It included a track in which to house
the BBs.
Piece of cake.
I filled the track with twenty of
them and pushed the magazine back into place.
It was off to the backyard to test
my latest toy. After releasing the safety, I took
aim at one of dozens of morning glories covering
a wall that separates our property from that of a
neighbor. Nothing but clicking sounds accompanied
each pulling of the trigger. That was it. No loud
firing sound. No holes in the morning glories.
Back to YouTube. The one and only
video I watched began with the release of the
magazine and pulling back a spring before
inserting BBs.
A spring? Who knew?
“No problem,” I said to my
wife's cat who was watching my every move. “All
I have to do, Furnando, is put the magazine over
a bowl, turn it upside-down and watch the BBs
succumb to gravity.”
Furnando yawned.
Clink, clink, clink... Out dropped
sixteen BBs. Four defied gravity. Shaking the
magazine failed to dislodge them.
When I inserted the BBs, unbeknownst
to me at the time was that I had dropped them on
top of the spring. Four were stuck in it. Trying
to get them out using needle-nose pliers, a
magnet and several jackknife blades yielded no
results.
Furnando was sleeping.
I then tried prying one of them out
using the tip of a thin, three-inch nail. Eureka!
Out sailed a BB. It was on to a second BB. Out it
came, but only a half-inch as I dislodged a small
section of the spring thereby destroying it. I
had no recourse but to place an order for a
packet of two magazines with Amazon and wait
another two or three weeks for them to reach
Atenas.
Dolores figured something was amiss
when she realized I wasn't attacking the morning
glories or anything else in our yard. While she
made no comments when I told her my BB gun tale
of woe, I'm sure she quietly enjoyed a good laugh.
During the interval, I built a 2-foot
by 2-foot by 2-foot box made out of plywood. One
side was left open. I stacked ten empty aluminum
cans inside the box in a 4-3-2-1 pyramid shape
from bottom to top, The reason? To recycle the
fired BBs that landed on the bottom of the box,
and not scattered and difficult to find in the
jungle-thick undergrowth of the morning glory
plants.
Target day. The magazines arrived
nine days into the new year. It must have been
wind gusts that made me miss hitting any of the
cans with my first nine shots. It was then that I
thought I heard Dolores say from inside a nearby
window (probably to Furnando), “Couldn't hit
the side of a barn door.”
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