I couldn’t blame Hunter or his drinking for the accident, though both had an effect on the aftermath. If he’d been sober, I’d still be called Frankie.

We arrived at the farm just before noon, and, as usual, we drove right past great-grandma’s house and straight to the pond. Miss Agnes was at home. I knew it because I’d seen the curtains in her bedroom twitch as we passed by. She lived in her bedroom during the summer months. It was the only air-conditioned room in the house.

Miss Agnes was a crotchety old woman, and although she was in her eighties, she lived alone. The Bartholomews were a large family, not a close one. My grandfather and his siblings—there were seven of them—paid a woman named Pearl Johnson to look after Miss Agnes. Pearl came in five days a week to do the cooking and housekeeping, and the kids trusted her to let them know if the old lady needed anything. At Nana’s insistence, I’d begun sticking my head in on the weekends to check on Miss Agnes. She never seemed particularly pleased to see me. She certainly never invited me into the bedroom to enjoy the air-conditioning.

August 11 was a hot day, about a hundred and four degrees. A dirty miasma rose from the stagnant green water of the fishpond. The tobacco in the sandy fields around us had turned golden yellow, and it smelled sticky and sweet, like raisins. We’d stopped at a bait shop on the way out so Hunter could buy a can of worms and two bamboo fishing poles. The poles rarely survived more than one or two trips. Hunter and Fred dropped them into the pond, or left them on the ground and ran over them when we left. Saving unused bait was also not done—that would’ve meant we wouldn’t need to stop at the bait shop the following week. The bait shop was where Hunter bought the beer. Two six-packs of Budweiser, tucked into the Styrofoam fish cooler.

We parked in the shade of the willow tree, and Fred unloaded the van. Fred always unloaded the van. He was a natural-born flunky. If he’d ever had a thought, he kept it to himself. He answered every question in the negative with “Nope” and in the positive with “Might as well” or “Don’t mind if I do.” I suspected he was simple-minded, but Nana insisted that he had low cunning. When she and Hunter were first married, they came home from their honeymoon to find that Fred had gone through my grandfather’s bedroom at Miss Agnes’ house and sold his guitar, his second-best suit, and the quilt off his bed.

Fred set up the lawn chairs and fishing poles and sat down. Then he mopped his face with a dirty red bandanna, a gesture that was alcoholic semaphore for “I need a beer.” Hunter took his glasses off, ran a hand across his forehead, and wiped the sweat onto his trousers. This was alcoholic semaphore for “Help’s on the way.”

Hunter put his glasses back on and squinted up at the sun.

“It’s a hot one, ain’t it, Fred?”

“It’s a hot one,” Fred agreed.

“Hot enough for you, Frankie Lou?”

This summertime rhyme was getting to be an old joke. I drew a target on a paper plate and nailed it to the willow tree. “Hotter than the blue gates of hell,” I said. “You’d better get yourself something to drink.”

This was not part of the game. I’d blown the cover. For my punishment, I had to listen to another five minutes of complaints about the weather.

Finally, Hunter felt the back of his neck. “Look at that,” he said, shaking the sweat off his hand. “The water’s just pouring off me. I must be getting dehydrated. You want a cold one, Fred?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

Fred never said no to a beer. He never said no to anything. According to Hunter, he paid flesh rent to the landlady at his boarding house, an old woman with one leg who looked like a Bonobo monkey. I’d rather have died than picture the two of them together. Fred looked like he routinely slept outdoors in a puddle of urine. His face had the weathered, gnomish look of a hardened street bum, and his eyes were permanently bloodshot. He wore his hair in a greasy black pompadour that was, except for the dandruff, an exact replica of Ronald Reagan’s. Deep wrinkles crossed the burnt red skin of his forehead like slashes in a dirty tarpaulin. Why any woman would want him, even the landlady at his boarding house, was beyond me, and yet he claimed to have three ex-wives and a host of children for whom he paid no child support. Hunter said the reason Fred didn’t have a driver’s license was for fear that one of his ex-wives might track him down and make him pay.

He had a job washing cars at the Chevy dealership where my grandfather worked as a mechanic, and it was entirely thanks to Hunter that Fred kept it from week to week. Hunter picked him up every morning, drove him home every night, and tried to keep an eye out in case anything disappeared from a customer’s trunk or glove box. He was his brother’s keeper. It was the price he paid for a built-in drinking buddy.

I took aim at the paper plate and fired. The BB struck an inch to the right of the bulls-eye, so I adjusted the sight with my Swiss Army knife and fired again.

“Bulls-eye,” Hunter said. “You see that, Fred? She’s Annie Oakley. She could shoot the balls off a housefly.”

I pretended I hadn’t heard him, and I tried not to look pleased. Sober, Hunter was sparing with compliments; drunk, he was often effusive. This one meant something. I fired ten more shots into the paper plate and then sat down at the edge of the pond.

“Here,” Hunter said, “see if you can shoot the cork on that fishing line.”

I tried and missed. So much for Annie Oakley.

“Balance the pistol on your knee,” he said. “Here, give it to me, I’ll show you.”

I handed him the gun and he sat down next to me. Ten shots later, he said, “Goddamn son of a bitch. Throw that in the pond and I’ll buy you one that shoots straight.”

I took the pistol back from him, took aim at the cork, and fired. This time, I hit it.

“Well I’ll be shit,” he said. “You see that, Fred?”

Fred nodded and cracked open another beer. I shot several more paper plates, a couple of corks, and an old piece of roofing tin. Then I moved into the shade and whittled a stick with my Swiss Army knife until I put a gash in my thumb. I borrowed the van keys from Hunter and drove the Econoline up and down the dirt road past Miss Agnes’ bedroom window. She looked out twice. I didn’t stop. When driving lost its charm, I went back to the pond and picked up the now sizeable collection of empty beer cans. These I set up in the branches of the willow tree. The sun was now directly overhead, forcing Fred and my grandfather to abandon their lawn chairs and seek shelter in the back of the van. Hunter whistled to himself: Once in A While, Deep Purple, and You Are My Sunshine. When he got to Lady of Spain, he’d be out of beer.

Checking to make sure that the safety was on, I spun the gun around on my index finger and then rammed it into the pocket of my shorts. I practiced a few more spins and quick draws before closing my left eye and taking aim at a can. The BB hit with a satisfying ping. I turned quickly to my right and shot two more cans.

It was the fourth shot that did the damage. The BB ricocheted off the can and struck my left eye. I dropped the gun and covered my eye with my hand. For a moment, I was afraid to move, afraid the BB was lodged in my eyeball, afraid it had gone straight through to the back of my head. It wasn’t until I felt the blood trickling down my palm that I took any action. I picked up the gun and threw it into the pond.

I heard the pop and hiss of two more beers being opened and thought for a moment about throwing myself into the pond as well. In a crisis, my grandfather only had two readily accessible emotions, anger and panic. I decided there was no help for it. With my hand still cupped over my eye, I walked around to the back of the van. Hunter and Fred were sitting on the floor with the cargo doors open, their feet resting on the bumper. Fred had taken off one of his zippered ankle boots and was holding it out for my grandfather’s inspection.

Hunter held up his hands to ward it off. “Jesus Christ, Fred. That smells like a fart in a vinegar bottle. Why don’t you wear socks?”

Fred shrugged and slipped his bare foot back into the boot. “It’s nice, ain’t it?”

“I’ll give you some goddamn socks,” Hunter said.

“I didn’t pay but twenty dollars for that boot,” continued Fred.

My grandfather shook his head in disgust. “You bought them at that pawn shop, didn’t you? What have I told you about that? Somebody might have died in them boots. He might’ve pissed in them. Why can’t you go to a goddamn store . . .”

“Excuse me,” I said as calmly as I could. “I think I need some help.”

Hunter looked up. He didn’t drop his beer can in shock. He didn’t even put it down. He said, “What in the sam hell have you done to yourself?”

The pain in my eye had given way to a dull throbbing, so I cleared my throat and took my hand away. When the light hit the pupil, I felt like I’d been stabbed. I put my hand back up quickly and said, “I shot myself.”

There was a long pause and then he said, “What did you do that for?”

“It was an accident.”

“Goddamn it to hell—what are you doing playing half-assed with that gun?”

I ignored this, as it was a typical five-beer response. There was no logic to it. “Can we go now?” I said. To press home the urgency of my request, I took my hand off my eye again for just a second, making sure Hunter got a good look at the bloody eyelid. He crumpled up his beer can and tossed it into the cooler.

“Come on, Fred,” he said. “We have to take this fumble-fingered fart to the hospital.”

For the next twenty-two miles, all the way from the farm to Wake Medical Center, Hunter carried on a stream-of-consciousness narrative.

“I told you to be careful when I gave you that thing, and what do you do? You shoot your goddamn eye out. You one-eyed fool—you think you’re Sammy Davis, Junior? What the hell were you playing at?”

“I wasn’t playing.”

“My fanny, you weren’t. You want to play something dangerous? Stick a blowtorch up your ass and play Buck Rogers.”

Mild stuff coming from Hunter; I didn’t interrupt.

“I’ll send you to live with your goddamn daddy. You’re nothing but a pair of half-assed Polacks. How about I take you out and shoot your other eye? Then you’ll match.”