If You Can't Live For Something...

I remember everything about the first gunfight I ever saw. I remember everything but the names. Too young for names. But I remember everything else.
I was 7 years old, playing with the other kids my age. We took turns pushing each other down because we were boys and that's how boys are meant to play. I pushed Bill down, and he in turn shoved Lowry to the dust, and Lowry pushed Keller into a wall, the wood splintered and Keller started tearing up. So we all pushed Keller again because boys don't cry.
Anyways, we were playing like that when our Ma's came out to run us inside. Well, everyone else's Ma, mine was dead since I was born. But everyone else's Ma's came out in a rush. But I stayed right there, back against the wall, watching as two men yelled across the street for everyone to clear out.
Something about those real gunfighters, you could always tell. Covered in dust all the time, boots worn flat, constant bristle on their jaws. Their guns hung like pieces of themselves, like they were born with a torn up, old holster hanging on their waists. The man closest to me was a gunfighter, the other was just a fighter. Everything about him was too new. He looked like most of him came from the store yesterday. His gun glinted in the noon day sunlight. The gunfighter's gun was bullet gray and didn't bother reflecting anything.
Dust blew through town on a hot wind, blistered your face when it hit you, and these two men staring at each other from 50 feet away. Seemed like five minutes passed just them staring each other down. Up and down the street were women sealing themselves away from the world, closing curtains, locking doors, and men standing out on the street, looking on, and boys looking out from windows on top floors.
Five minutes of this, then it was over like it never even began, only now, a man was dead. A loud bang and the shiny, new man fell to the ground in a lump of twisted bones and skin and blood and dirt. The gunfighter stood, smoke rising from his pistol like a whisper. The men lining the street said nothing, but went to the shiny, new dead man and dragged him to undertaker's to get fitted for his shiny, new box.
Nobody said anything, but I was close enough to the gunfighter to see the ruby red dripping from his lowered hand. If you looked close at his dusty frame, you could see the bullet glinting out of his shoulder. The newest thing on him.
Then Bill and Lowry and Keller came back out and we started pushing each other again, because we were boys.

I'll never forget that day because it's the day I saw and understood what a man is. Looking at that gunfighter, I saw his eyes squinting toward the distance. I saw that he wasn't thinking about dying or about killing, but about standing for something. He had ideals that he kept, and the shiny, new man had stepped on those ideals. People got shot all the time when I was a kid, but rarely did they give themselves the glory of a gunfight. Those are set aside for real fights about real things, not barroom brawls. They were for ideals and fighting for them.
The legendary outlaws from my childhood all fought against something: the unjust law, western expansion, territorialism. They fought with guns and dust, and they knew that they were in the right. They had that confidence so rare.
But now they're all just legends from years past. Billy the Kid was dead, Jesse James, Doc Holliday. All dead. And with them died the idea of man as a man. In my teenage years, western expansion finally took us, and my town was no longer a place for men, but rather a place where smooth-handed bankers could start fresh careers, girlish train station heads see that trains come in on time to take people away from this god-forsaken town and bring in the new type of person, a person whose only possible application of life is behind a desk, writing things down for the person in charge of him. That person in charge incapable of doing even the slightest thing for himself. Never worked a day in his life of real work. A generation raised by over protective women. My town became, by the time I turned 20, the shiny, new pride of Texas.
Our boots were shined, our collars starched. Like we were going off to Sunday school everyday. Disgusting.
I remember when the bank came out and “repossessed” my Dad's farm. This weasly, little man in a vest and glasses, head shiny bald, came out and used that word, and my Dad looked at him dead on and said, “When did you ever possess this land?” It didn't stop anything, the shiny,little man took our land away with a piece of paper and a signature. That's all it takes these days: some scribbles on a dotted line and everything you ever had becomes somebody else's.
This is what those gunfighters were fighting, only back then it was easier because it was happening so slow. You see the shiny, new man and you stop him in his tracks before he can dig himself in and “repossess” anything. You take him before he takes you. But now it's too late, you'd have to kill every man in town to get things back to the old ways. You'd have to burn down all these old houses and buildings to send the message.

22 years old and I take the old holster down off the wall and strap it around my waist. I walk downtown and walk into the bank, grab the bank manager and pull him outside to the middle of the street. I pull out the revolver and level it at him and I hear everyone on the street screaming. Not a real man out here. I speak slow so he can hear me: I want you out of my town.
Of course I'm just saying him, but I'm talking to his ideals. Everything that this little twat symbolizes, everything that has driven truth and justice and dire need out of my town. His uncalloused hands, gold pocket watch glinting in the sun, his weakness. He trembles and tears up and I hit him in the face because boys don't cry.
Then the sheriff walks cautiously out onto the street. Keller. I can see him second guess every step he's taking toward me. Obviously somebody told him he should get out there and do his job, well here he is.
“Hey there, Mickey,” he says to me in a raw stutter. “What are you doing?”
I tell him what I'm doing and he looks at me, not understanding a word. I tell him I'm fighting for the past and for the real justice of the land and for good. And he says, “Well, that's all well and good, Mickey, but why don't you just put down the gun and come with me. We don't want nobody to get hurt now.” This is Keller, all over.
The banker tries to get up and I hit him in the face with my pistol. I look around me and I only see stares that whisper about the crazy man in the street, what kind of lunatic stands against the law? And the world is shit and I'm standing knee deep.
“Just put away the gun, Mickey.” But it's not that easy. If I put the gun down, I've given up and I've lost. And this weasly, little man and baby sheriff will have won and please God, I can't let that happen.
“Do you remember when there were gunfights, Keller?” He nods.
“Did you ever see one?” He says his mother didn't let him. Figures. No one in this town has seen what a man really looks like, what a hero covered in blood and scars from battle really is. To these people, these things are myths and legends, impossibilities. They don't exist.
“These people have to know what a man looks like.” I look at Keller, but my eyes are drawn to a pair of bright blue eyes looking out of a window behind him. The eyes of a little sandy-haired boy, the product of a generation, but those eyes showed his heart and his heart was a boy's heart. His gaze is so familiar to me, like looking through a mirror.
“These people have to see it.” Keller looks on curious, but scared as hell.
I look back at my banker, the yellow stripe on his back glaring through his front. I kick him in the gut and drop a gun for him, tell him to pick it up. He's sobbing. Keller has no idea what's going on. He never did.
I pick the banker up and tell him to walk until I tell him to stop, and if he stops before then, I'll shoot him in the back. If he tries to run, I'll shoot him in the back. If he tries to do anything but what I tell him, I'll shoot him in the back. He walks straight away from me down the street, blinking back tears the whole time. Keller thinks maybe he should stop me, but maybe nothing's going to happen.
“Stop.” The banker stops.
“Turn around.” The banker turns around.
“Now point that gun at me and when I count 3, you fire. If you don't kill me, you're dead.” The banker drops to his knees. “Get up and do it.” I fire a shot in his direction to wake him up, hit a coffee can off a banister. He jumps up and points his shaky pistol somewhere in my direction. Keller's trying to talk some sense into me, but I'm not listening.
“What the hell are you doing, Mickey?”
“1.”
“What are you trying to prove?”
“2.”
“Do you want to die out here?”
“3.”
There's a loud bang and it's all over. Every bullet in town hit me. Both of them, the banker's and Keller's. But as I lay in the street bleeding to death, I catch those blue eyes behind the window, and I know that he knows that he's watching a man die. That if you can't live for something, the best thing for a man to do is die for something. That if you're going to die, you have to die fighting because for a real man, there is no other way.