BILL HLADKY

IT WOULD BE SO EASY

Stance! Grip! Sighting! Breathing! Trigger Pull!

The mantra of marksmanship.

Several hundred rounds bang through the barrel.

Afterwards, solvent and a wire brush clean the steel before morning inspection

and another three-hundred trigger pulls at the police academy.

After twenty years on the job and two shoot-outs,
the hand grips and un-holsters without looking,
the chi stretches the barrel until the target is touched.

I visit the sixth floor of the Texas School Book
Depository, now a museum.

I look through the window down towards the gentle-
sloping Elm Street.

Stance! Grip! Sighting! Breathing! Trigger Pull!

It would be so easy.
It was so easy.

THE GARAGE

We were five boys playing
confined inside an empty garage
during a grimy-gray winter day.
My best friend showed off his new bicycle.
We took turns racing it,
turning at last moments
to avoid walls.
We became stock car racers
at the county fair.

My best friend's mother
called him away for supper.
He left behind the shiny bicycle
for us to keep pretending.
We stayed racers,
but became drivers in a demolition derby,
causing dents, scratching metal,
making his bicycle no better than our
hand-me-downs.

A tire blew when it slid hard against the wall.
We punctured the other tire,
stepped on its spokes
and dumped the bicycle in a puddle outside,
making the bicycle less than ours.

When he cried and bellyached
about his battered bicycle,
we punched and kicked him,
bullying him,
because he became different
with the new bicycle.

After I grew up,
I pondered things in grown-up ways.
But when asked how could
the Germans tattoo the Jews,
the Japanese rape Nanking,
the Americans cage the Indians,
the Serbs cleanse Kosovo,
I remember the garage.

Bill Hladky is a detective in Miami.