It is an autumn of luminous color.  On one October day of this lingering fall, under a noontime sun of brilliant light and warmth, three little children trundle through the reds and golds of fallen leaves, kicking then laughing, another morning of kindergarten under their belts.  They live close by, these three, and stay together as instructed, but in fact they don't have far to go on their own.  For at three succeeding street corners is posted one of a triad of maternal sentries, waiting, smiling, ready with a wave.  Three sentinels of safety and good parenting and mid-day love.    

Farley, one of these kindergartners, a small, comely blond boy, bright as the day, glimpses something down along the base of the schoolyard fence, nestled among the fallen leaves.  Curious, he slows and bends towards it.  All but invisible in the bank of yellows and browns and the odd faded red, it is brass-colored and dull except for its shiny, light-catching copper tip.  Still moving, he swoops, plucks it from its nest of leaves, palms it quickly.  He knows.  It is a grand prize, his.  A bullet.  A half-step behind his two classmates but looking ahead towards the first mother, not his, he holds it firmly and feels its unworldly coldness, the queer weight and length of it filling his hand.   

Farley wants to open his fist and look at it more than anything in his life and, sensing that, knows to keep his fingers closed tight.  Right hand.  It's there.  But it's the hand his mother will hold, always does, so he'll have to do something.  Pocket?  He does have pockets today but the thought of letting it go down in there does not please him.  He craves the hard feel of it, loaded as it is into his fist.  

He swoons thinking it could explode at any moment.  His mother, last of the three, will not like this a bit.  Then, he decides before he can summon the words to articulate that thought, he won't tell her, and so begins the transfer.

Left hand up and out.  Farley studies his left palm as if it bears a clockface telling the time he cannot yet read.  Time will come, and be bends his fingers, watching them curl in towards his palm while against his back the blue denim backpack jiggles as he walks.  Farley separates one finger from the others, then scratches his nose with it.   

Never scratched his nose before when it didn't itch, he thinks, and readies himself to make the switch.  Morgan has already skipped off up her street, two steps ahead of her mother.  Daniel's mother waits next, rocking her baby that's very new, and watching them.  

Farley does it, smoothly, passes metal from right hand to left.  He'd picked it up with his right, holds it now in his left.  Never again will he confuse one for the other he realizes and looks up, smiling, to see paper stapled to a telephone pole.  There are words he can't read written under the scratchy photo-copied picture of a cat.  Somewhere this cat is lost, gone to hunt witches, Farley believes.  The paper has been there all week.  Black, witches and cat.  Looking for witches who need a black cat, is the thought he's had before.  But now he doesn't think that's it.  Probably the lost cat's just dead, and his left hand is already slimy with sweat.  He squeezes, his whole fist filled up with bullet.    

"Goodbye, Farley!" Daniel's mother calls out because Daniel hardly talks.  It's one of the things Farley finds comforting in kindergarten, the other boy's stretches of silence.  "Daniel says goodbye too!"

No, Daniel does not, Farley thinks and looks into the face of his own mother at the next corner.  He has no idea of what she does all morning while he's gone.  He thinks he'll ask her, wonders if she'll tell him, really.  

Farley is five.  Won't turn six till the lilacs bud, is how his mother says it; Farley says May first , if asked.  Oh, you're an old soul, Farley, his Aunt Lenore has told him more than once.  You've been around and around, you know?  He didn't know, still doesn't.  Don't tell him things like that, Lee! his mother's always saying to her sister, but Farley would like to hear more.  What does she know?  And around what?

He holds his mother's hand up their street, the whole way as always, and she doesn't know and can't tell what's in his other hand.  He won't tell her and never show her either.  Show and Tell is always on Friday.  Bring anything, Miss Tyree told them the first week, anything that will interest your classmates, which sounded pretty good at the time.  But nothing dead, she added the next week after Tristan brought a garter snake imprinted with a tire track.  So they learned something then, something more: bring what would interest Miss Tyree, and dead things did not.  That first Show-and-Tell Friday interest was high at recess; on the playground Tristan became the temporary best friend of all the boys and half the girls.

"How'd things go today?" his mother asks.

"Pretty good," he tells her.  I have a bullet in my left hand, he tells himself and shivers.  If you put a bullet on a concrete slab and smash it with a rock, will it explode?

"Spook House tonight, remember?"  She's swinging his hand now.  He remembers, everybody remembers; it's all anybody talks about, especially, Miss Tyree.  He knows his mother tries hard.  It's hard being someone's mother, he once heard her say to Aunt Lenore, who is no one's mother.    

"I remember about tonight, " he says.  

"And then tomorrow's Halloween."  She gives his hand a little squeeze as they both look up the street towards their house, walking in the spotty shade of the gigantic trees lining the sidewalk.  "I love this time of year, don't you?"

He sees himself as a pirate walking back into his school later, between his parents, who are tall, but not as tall as some, and nicer than most.  His mother tries harder than his father.  

Though it hurts, Farley likes lifting up the bandages to peek at the wounds on his forearm.  He admires where his skin is red and broken and oozes with ointment.  But the forearm burns aren't half as bad as the ones on his hand.  The hand itself, completely bandaged, seems like it belongs to someone else, a mummy, and only the pain is his.  He can't move any of his fingers, though they say he certainly will again.  It hurts a lot and he leaves it alone, but still inspects it often, respectfully, raising the mummy's five fingers in front of his face for a good look.    

The excitement is all over now and, assigned to his room and bed the way he is, the day's starting to get long.      

First it was the panic and then the fast ride to the hospital and the noisy emergency room.  It was all wild, then all quiet and tense.  Then after he was home and settled in his room, early in the afternoon it was his father, straight-backed and uncomfortable, who came to talk to him.  To ask him where in the world he'd gotten a bullet.  But his father hadn't come by choice, he knows that, because even through the ringing in his ears which the hospital people say could last a long time, he heard his mother directing his father, telling him which questions to ask and how to phrase them.  He'll talk if you don't confront him, Lawrence, he heard her say.  Farley's glad she doesn't talk to him in that dark voice.    

He figures his mother's scared of him now, and so sends in his father.  Before all this, if he'd just fallen off the shed roof and broken an arm or something sort of easy like that, she would've been in here with him all the time asking did it hurt, did he want anything, talking and telling knock-knock jokes and reading in long stretches from Stuart Little.  But not now, no.  First she's here to bring him something, then puts it down but doesn't stay.  She looks at him and gets teary and goes out.  Next she's here just standing, not talking or reading or anything good, and touches his forehead with her fingertips.  And not a solid touch with her whole hand like checking for fever but like he's seen her do sometimes in a store, fingering something she thinks is pretty and would like to buy but won't.  She stays nearby, he knows, upstairs but down the hall, moving about, coming in and then going right back out.  It all makes him tired and he wishes she'd just sit down and stay with him.      

Outside his bedroom and down the hall at the top of the stairs where she must think he can't hear, is where she tells his father what to do and say before sending him in.  Sit on the bed with him, Lawrence, not the chair.  Touch him.  Tell him bullets are dangerous.  On that one her voice rocketed higher than he'd ever heard it, like crying but not.  He's probably figured that out, his father said back in what came out as a whisper and a shout.  Tell him we love him, she said.  Tell him!  Then came her real crying again.  He's probably figured that out, too, Kate, his father said and made the sound of breath blowing through teeth the way he does when he's had to wait too long.

Kate's been crying all day.  Farley hears her dry ratchety sobs, hears her blowing her nose down the hall.  Heard her tell Aunt Lenore about it over the phone.  The bullet fired!   Her voice way up high.  I don't know, Lee, it just went off.  He could've blown his hand off, you know, or be. . .  More crying, always crying, and he's decided he's earned the right to call her Kate now.  He's been slipping it in everywhere.  You think I could have the little TV in here, Kate?  I'd like 7-Up with lunch too, instead of milk.  Please, Kate?  So far, she hasn't noticed or hasn't commented, and he's been drinking down 7-Up like water and he can't believe it but there's nothing good on any channel on Saturday afternoon.  

How?  Why?  is what he hears over and over between and sometimes inside her crying.  Does she think he was trying to blow off his hand on purpose?  Why do you think he did it? she asked Aunt Lenore on the phone.  He wishes he'd heard what his aunt had to say.       

The rock just hadn't done it.  He found the biggest, hardest, flattest one he could and crashed it down on that bullet time after time.  Positioned in the center of the cement slab, with the morning sun bright and warming his back, the nose end of the bullet had reminded him of the tip of his penis, glisteny there in the light and waiting for something.  

His ears ring and roar like the sound TV makes when the cable's gone out, but he can't turn this off.  Could be weeks till that's gone, they told him.  

It was the rock hammer, finally, so much cold steel on the end of a slim and shapely handle.  The minute he found it in the shed he knew: it felt right.  For a while he wandered with the hammer tucked in close to his leg, calming himself and kicking at leaves his father's machine hadn't sucked up yet.  Then he began to swing it, enjoying its weight and certainty in his right hand, while, protected and waiting, the enormous bullet rode closed into his left.  He toured the yard, inspecting the leafless, brittle branches of shrubs, frost-bitten flowers and green fitzers that always smelled to him of cat pee.  Hugging the hammer to himself, he squinted up rain spouts, gazed on acorn squash left on the vine in what his mother liked to call her vegetable patch.  In the corner at the back, opposite her patch, he returned to the crumbly concrete pad where once an incinerator had stood.  All the neighbors had slabs like it too and some still had incinerators.  But theirs was gone; his father had gone after it once with a sledge hammer, striking blow after wondrous blow.  No more burning, ever, his father said that day, leaving Farley confused because he couldn't identify the adult sadness he'd heard.  After, in their yard there remained only the hard flatness.  The place.

His father sat on the bed as Kate had told him to.  She was breathing in the hall, out of sight.  Hurts, Dad, Farley said as his father's leg grazed his, though really nothing hurt beyond his arm.  But his father jumped as if stuck by a buried pin and was embarrassed.  Sorry, he said, resettling himself onto the blue Fisher Price chair that faced the bed.  Farley looked from his father's grim face to the bedside table where the closed hard-backed copy of Stuart Little  lay next to his Star Trek tricorder and stuffed parrot and a half-full glass of bubbling 7-Up.  Around him the blinds were drawn to darken the room, as they had been when he had chicken pox and fever and sensitive eyes.  And, at Kate's insistence, he was in his pajamas too.  Farley wanted this over with and glanced back to his father trying to steady himself on the plastic chair, and he was heartened to see the wide expanses of grown-up slacks-covered knees swaying nervously between them.  

As he had foreseen, Farley entered the school Spook House dangling from the hands of his parents.  They walked together through the dim red-bulbed lighted halls where dry-ice fog snaked and eddied eerily and great hanging tangles of white spider web billowed in the moving wake of hundreds of transformed schoolchildren and their parents.  Painted and smiling or masked and frowning, child or adult, Farley watched his parents greet all the faces appearing before them.  Lawrence nodded approval at the better costumes, and Kate, doing it just right, pretended fright at the littlest ghosts and witches, setting them off to get giggles and growls and cackly laughs in return.  

But Farley, himself a pirate now, saw most of it in a blur, able to think only of his bullet.  His shell.  Ammunition.  Around him swarmed Indians, monsters, fairies and ballerinas, hoboes, dozens of Power Rangers, football players, the maimed and bloody, while inside his head words fired and ricocheted -- live ammo, shell casings,  firing pins and safeties, some of them words he didn't know he knew: magazine, hair triggers.  His mother stood looking about her and exclaimed, Just look at all these kids!  She did really love it, anyone could see that.  Good old Halloween! his father boomed as if it had been missing and he'd just found it again.  They both seemed to be having a good time.  And Farley as well.  He found that he did know the words.   Magnum. 45.    Somehow, from somewhere they'd sneaked in and tucked themselves into hiding places in his head until now when he needed them.    

Elizabeth Emich and Serena Abbott, laughing and screaming with no parents in sight, were running loose, dressed in exactly the same ugly store-bought Pocahantas suits.  He and his mom had worked for days to get his pirate ready.  She'd cut down a pair of second-hand black knickers and sewed them to fit to go with an old, streaked white puffy blouse of her own.  They raided his father's tuxedo bag for the red cummer bun she said would never be missed and pawed through her drawer of scarves till he found the perfect one for his head.  They patched his eye with velvet sewed to a length of elastic.  The parrot, the best part of all, was his own idea, and she'd laughed and clapped and said Oh, yes! when he described what he wanted to do.  He'd had the green and yellow and red stuffed bird that he'd called Crackers since he was little.  She'd worked for an hour to attach it to the shoulder of the blousy white shirt, anchoring it onto a pad she sewed on the inside, for stability, she said.  When he first thought of having the parrot on his shoulder, he'd planned to carry saltines in one hand and pretend to feed it as he went saying every so often, Want a cracker, Crackers?  But since this afternoon, his plans had changed.  He didn't need saltines anymore.  He had better.  No toy weapons, boy and girls, Miss Tyree had reminded them twice a day for a week as they sat on the round braided rug in the center of her classroom.  She held up her hand and folded down a finger with each weapon she named.  No plastic guns or phasers, no clubs, no knives, and no swords either, Sir Victor and Sir Tim.  Bowing, she looked right at Victor Glenn and Timothy Dunning, who both, as everybody knew, planned to be knights.  Not once during the week had she mentioned anything about bullets.  Barrel.  Sights.  A revolver. 

"Great pirate, Farley!" called Mr. O'Dell the principal, done up as a clown.  "Looking for treasure, mate?"      

Earlier, with care and caution, and with delight bordering on delirium, he'd tied his bullet into an old white handkerchief and used two safety pins to secure it into the folds of the red cummer bun they were by then calling his cinch.  And when just knowing the bullet was there wasn't enough for him, in the company of his family and whole school, Farley probed for a secret feel.  Finding it, he sighed, while before them Phillip Anhauser rose up in his dinosaur costume.  Phillip growled and seemed not to care that everyone knew who he was inside the suit he'd worn everywhere for the last six months.  Farley watched as if interested and fingered the hard spot of bullet inside his cinch.  Its heat radiated through all the layers of pirate cotton and flannel and silk, and his fingers itched for the true, cold feel of it.    

Farley lifts the bandage on his left forearm.  Powder burns, they called them.  His skin is striped with red.  With the hammer, he'd hit it a time or two straight down, and just like with the do-nothing flat rock, nothing happened.  So he picked up the bullet to have another look, up close, and saw what somehow he'd missed before.  The silver bull's-eye circle on the flat end was the place.  He replaced it gently on the cement and with two fingers steadied his bullet at its tip, drew back the hammer and sent it home to that silver target for all he was worth.  It didn't sound like a gun firing, not that he'd ever really heard one before; it was bigger, like thunder, a roaring so loud he hears it still underneath everything else.  And pain.  The hurt matched the noise, and he remembers himself screaming out and crying about his hand.  And his parents there instantly, and neighbors too, running up, everyone kneeling and crowding in.  His name a million times, in all colors and tones. 

Farley, your mother and I...  Lawrence's light-colored hair stood out in an unfamiliar way, dry and straight, making Farley think of the leaves that had protected his bullet from the hands of others.  If he could call his mother Kate, he decided, his father should be Lawrence.  Where, Farley, did you...  Farley watched his father's mouth move even though it didn't want to.  Farley, didn't you know that...  The rock hammer had known exactly what to do, as Farley had believed it would.  What if your hands, your eyes. . .  Farley had never seen tears in his father's eyes and there were none there now.  I was wearing safety glasses, Lawrence, he reminded him.  And he had been.  They'd been right there in the shed.   Out in the hall, after his father had said the things he'd been told to, he heard them.  You didn't say anything, Lawrence! his mother said.  I don't think you finished a single sentence.