Growing up in a steeltown going obviously down the toilet, sometimes I had to dodge a bullet. The first time I was fourteen years old standing in the woods near a strip cut smoking a filtered cigarette. An older boy I’d known for a long time, a dark-haired boy who’d had a driver’s license for over a year and could bench press nearly 200 pounds, said he wanted to shoot the cigarette out of my mouth with a pistol. The boy’s younger brother was there too. He was leaning against a birch tree. A minute earlier, offered the same proposition, he’d said, “No way, man. Not a chance.”

Of course, that sealed it. If his own brother refused to stand at parade rest in the middle of a replanted forest on the ridge line above a played-out coal mine and let him fire a copper jacket hollow point a few inches from his milk-white face, I sure as hell was willing. “Why not?” I said. I took a quick drag and pursed my lips, pushing the cigarette out as far as I could. Closing my eyes, I locked my hands behind my back. I waited. A pistol crack echoed through the forest.

After, the cigarette still jutted from my mouth. Untouched. No one said a thing. When I asked the younger brother afterwards if it was Doug’s suspect marksmanship that kept him from volunteering, he told me that wasn’t it. “He’s a pretty good shot,” he said finishing up his Coca-Cola and getting up, “as far as that goes.” It was only later—after Doug took a pot shot at two boys fighting in a field—that I heard he’d been talking about shooting somebody square in the head all that antic summer and how he just might get away with it.