Function Follows Form
Function Follows Form
by David Michael
The gun found him.
Regis Guerrin could imagine what a cop would say if he ever tried to use that line. First the cop would laugh, if he was the sarcastic type, then say, “Yeah, the gun found you.” If the cop was a hardass–which was much more likely–the response would be more along the lines of, “Don’t fuck with me, asshole.”
But it did: the gun found him.
His father’s gun, buried, hidden, on a hot and humid and dangerously quiet night in the swamp, twenty years ago. He could remember now, his father picking the rotted stump with care. “Remember this, Regis. This is your legacy. Come back here, to this exact spot. Pick up the gun, and continue the work.”
Regis hadn’t remembered, though. All he remembered for nearly twenty years was his father leaving him on a small hummock, saying, “Stay here, Regis. Someone will be by for you directly.” Then his father had fired up the engine on his small boat again, pointed the bow into the darkness, and disappeared.
It took nearly two days, but someone had come for him. A stranger, who took him to the local police and begun his life as a ward of the state.
He had never seen his father again. He had no last memory of his mother, just half-glimpsed dreams of a time when the swamp was home.
That was why he had come back to the swamp. He wanted to return to the only place he had ever considered home. His real home, not the various foster homes and certainly not the juvie center.
He had been declared an adult and given his walking papers on his eighteenth birthday. But unlike most of his peers, he hadn’t walked across a stage in front of friends and family and been given a diploma. Instead, he had been handed his papers, a small sack with his personal effects, and been told to get the hell out–though with an undertone of “we expect to see you again, real soon.”
He faced the outside world for the first time in four years, and for the first time in his memory he could go where he chose. Unsure what else to do, he chose to go home, to the swamp.
He found that sense of home again on the still waters with their canopy of tangled tree branches and dripping Spanish moss, their loud communities of birds and frogs and insects. The noises seemed to be a welcoming chorus. Even the gators joined in, but he knew they welcomed anything into the swamp that could be choked down.
He found home, and then the gun found him.
Not right away. Maybe the gun had been fooled by the false papers he picked up, his first significant purchase after getting out of juvie. Ruis Guitterez, his new birth certificate, Social Security card, and drivers licence said.
“You don’t look like no ‘Ruis’ to me,” said his first boss, eying Regis’s obvious whiteness. “Still, I need a mechanic.” The man hired Regis to help with his swamp tour business, first as a mechanic, then as a boat driver. Since then, Regis had learned more Spanish and grown dark from long hours in the sun. No one questioned him now about whether his name was Ruis. Of course it was.
He dreamed of the swamp, sometimes dreaming of a little boy with a mother and a father who loved him. The father worked the swamps, fishing, hunting, giving tours, and “other work” which the boy didn’t know what was. The mother took care of the boy, and took over the father’s work when the man went away to do his “other work”, sometimes gone for weeks at a time. Whenever the dad went to do his “other work”, the gun always went with him.
Those had been Regis’s first dreams of the gun.
After a while, the gun showed up by itself, no longer just a silent member of the family. Sometimes the gun was a .45 automatic, sometimes a .45 revolver, sometimes a short-barrelled musket, but always, somehow, the same gun.
The gun kept busy in his dreams. Sometimes carried by the memory of his father, sometimes by other men he didn’t know. The men matched the gun, a soldier with the big automatic, a cowboy with the revolver, a trapper with the musket. The situations were tense. Men hunted men–and, sometimes, not men.
Then, in the swamp, fully awake, driving a full load of tourists, giving a taste of the swamp by talking about the floating islands and the high-contrast black-and-white vision of alligators, Regis began to see the gun, feel it in his mind, his bones.
Regis Guerrin had a history of violence and an affinity with guns. He had been lucky, though. When he got pinched that last time and sent away to juvenile detention, his guns hadn’t been on him. Or in the car. Or even hidden in his room. For all he knew, they were still hidden in a lockbox in the janitor’s closet in the basement of the apartment building.
Now that he remembered his father hiding the gun in that rotting tree stump, Regis wondered if maybe he had more of his barely remembered father in him than just brown eyes and dark hair. And he wondered what that could mean.
Regis had a thing for guns. But he had worked hard to keep Ruis Guitterez clean. Squeaky clean. And that meant away from guns.
He resisted the pull of the gun for nearly four years.
Now here he was, standing by the rotting remains of the tree stump, the moisture of the swamp having reduced it to little more than a dark ring of soggy cardboard. Remember this, Regis. This is your legacy. The tree trunk didn’t look anything like he remembered. And this island wasn’t one of the stable ones. It must’ve moved at least a hundred yards–probably more–from when his father had brought him here twenty years ago. But he knew it was the right place.
He didn’t have to dig down very far before his shovel blade stabbed into the hard metal of the gun box.
He pried the box out of the earth. Then he set it down and just looked at it. The gun was in there. He wasn’t at all sure he should let it out. Then he did it anyway.
He opened the lid of the box, the rusty hinges moving smoothly, as if they had been kept in fine working condition and not buried in the damp ground for two decades. Nestled among oily rags, lay a musket pistol. A beautiful, deadly weapon with a hand-carved stock inlaid with silver and gold filigree, gleaming black barrel, with a flintlock hammer and trigger mechanism. He had no idea how old such a gun must be. It looked like someone had just polished it and put it on display in museum.
His hand wrapped around the stock almost before he knew he had reached to do so. The heft of the gun felt perfect.
As he looked at the gun in his hand, turning it over, sighting down the barrel, something in his mind clicked, almost like the sound of a round being chambered. At the same time, the gun changed, morphed. Polished wood and iron became steel, ceramic and plastic.
The gun he now held was a picture-perfect, brand new beauty of a Glock 29.
The gun had accepted him. He knew that, though he didn’t know how he knew. Hell, for that matter, he didn’t know how he knew where the gun had been buried, or why he had dreamed of it for the last four years.
Pick up the gun, and continue the work. His father’s words came back to him again.
Regis had already picked up the gun. Now he wondered, worried, what the “work” was. And why did it need to continue?
The gun had the answers, he knew. Function would follow form. And he would find out. Probably too soon.
Copyright © 2006 by David Michael. All rights reserved.
James said,
July 31, 2006 @ 1:57 pm
I like the story it has an interesting emphasis with the gun featuring so heavily in it. I’m surprised he didn’t try and shoot it… seems like he’d have been tempted.
J–
DavidRM said,
July 31, 2006 @ 2:25 pm
Thanks.
I had planned that in my first thoughts of the story…him pointing at a tree, squeezing the trigger, expecting a dryfire, instead blowing the shit out of the tree (and suddenly feeling winded)…but it didn’t seem to fit the tone of the story.
Plus, by the time I was wrapping up the story and editing, I had forgotten about that idea…
-David
DBA Lehane said,
August 1, 2006 @ 4:20 am
A wonderful and atmospheric story that had me hooked from the very beginning. I too had been expecting the firing of the gun. There was an almost supernatural theme running through the tale. You are certainly a very talented writer!
Exit 101 » Blog Archive » A Bit of Backstory said,
August 6, 2006 @ 11:36 pm
[...] Function Follows Form [...]
Allison said,
August 10, 2006 @ 7:04 pm
I like the imagery of the gun and man changing through time it was very visual.
A Short Story a Day » Best of ASSAD 2006 said,
December 26, 2006 @ 6:09 pm
[...] Silent Pictures Mother’s Little Helper Tucker Crowfeeder The Hall Closet Door A Beating Heart in Texas Trikes and Aliens The Survivor When Writers Attack Function Follows Form The Call of the Hunter Moon A Scent of Peaches Reruns Working Girl He Came The Worlds Traveler Time: A Love Story The Protector Victor Comes Home [...]