“Gun for the hills, Alfonso. Gun for the hills.”

I don’t know anyone named Alfonso, but if I did, and was in charge of him, and wanted him to shoot toward raised earth too small to merit the appellation “mountain,” that’s probably how I would say it.

Calmly, see. Because whatever is up there to be fired at, we’re in no hurry. And with the solemn, confirmatory repetition after a short pause, for the same reason, and the added one that he may not have heard me right, because of the almost unthinkable calmness of the initial order.

Maybe I did know someone named Alfonso, but his name was actually Christoph, I’m fairly certain, and it was he doing both the ordering and the shooting, and there were no hills nearby. We had made a gun for bottle rockets, and when I say made, I mean it in the sense that one makes a boulder a table or a snow bank a slide: without altering its ontology at all; the action is more properly described by “designate” than “make.”

But we made that gun, dammit, made it out of a single plank with a thin protrusion running the full length of one edge and a groove the full length of the other—basic tongue-and-groove material—the idea being that one could link boards like this together ad libitum to make a floor or walls or a raft, except probably not a raft. But we had a floor and walls already, and a raft would have been great, but we only had one such board, and you probably can’t make raft out of that kind of plank anyway. So when we lightened the Turk’s stash of this particular piece it was clear that we would make a gun out of it.

Like I said, we didn’t have to alter it one bit; the groove simply functioned as a runner for the ammo; all we had to do was hold the plank on its edge, low on the hip like Rambo did real guns, and maintain our aim until the rocket fired.

One day soon after we had made it I was with Alfonso, I mean Christoph, when we had some trouble with this kid named after the Pope. Not the guy who is the Pope now, or even the one at the time, which is the same guy; the kid’s name was Gregor—the German version of the name—and he happened to be Christoph’s older brother.

To make a long story short, as one genius and a million fakes have put it, Christoph and Gregor got into a fraternal tussle over explosives or gummy candy or some other jewel we used to deal. Before I knew it, as another original person, maybe the same one, but probably a different one, and a million frauds (the same ones) have said, Gregor had gotten command of the gun and was loading a bottle rocket into the shaft. I remember Christoph’s cartoonishly pathetic jump-turn and the squeal that escaped before the rocket had fired, and I remember the little boom-on-a-stick streaking across the courtyard to Christoph’s left buttock, and the tiny scorched circle it left there, like the eye of a weasel. But only now, as I recall what Gregor yelled at him when he started bawling like a toddler, does it return to me that I guess Christoph’s name was Alfonso after all.