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CHAPTER 2

His brother, a senior in high school, was allowed to tag along with their father to the range on Wednesday, the day after 9/11. His brother could have easily shot with the rest of the school’s rifle team, but shooting with their father, he said to the boy who wasn’t yet John Worthy, was better. You can shoot anything. There are military guys out there, with weapons you see only on TV or in a video game. You can get your hands on anything.

When he asked to come along, his dad said no and spelled out why: You’re not strong enough or grown enough. This isn’t a kid’s game. We’re not playing around here; we’re not plinking; we’re not shooting pissant .22s. We’re talking about defending the country, defending the house, taking care of your mother. Any gun worth a damn that I got is too much for you.

Which was pretty much like saying, Being a man, doing what a man’s got to do, is too much for you .

His father’s gun club was north of the Old Tragedy Tree or Hanging Tree, depending on who was doing the talking. The tree got its various names on account of the eight men lynched and then buried on that spot way back in 1863. Story was that the men had been on their way to Mexico with a heap of cash. Some versions said they were going to buy cattle; others said they were Confederate deserters. Whichever way it was, they were unlucky enough to meet up with Confederate soldiers from Camp Verde.

What exactly went down after was a little murky. No one to this day knows who decided that lynching was a better option than a trial. Legend was that a couple soldiers wanted nothing to do with that and rode off. Those who stayed watched all but one of those men swing. The one fella they spared the rope begged to be shot rather than slowly strangled.

When the bodies were discovered a day or so later (buzzards being an excellent marker), the men doing the discovering also found a musket’s steel ramrod pinning one man to the ground. That was why some people first said the Indians—and not whites—killed those men. Anyway, the town buried the men right there and put up a gravestone with their names and the date. That marker remains to this day. Descendants even come to visit.

One bit of the story about that day said there was a boy with those men. No one knew who the kid was or why he was with those guys in the first place. Some even said he was an Indian, a Comanche boy they’d scooped up on their travels. The boy didn’t end up hanged, though whether he got away or the soldiers let him go, no one could say. The boy just disappeared—and so did all that money.

For many days after the towers fell, the boy whose name was not yet John biked out to the Old Hanging Tree. If the wind was right, he caught the distant crackle of gunfire and the occasional cannon-like boom he knew was a .50 Desert Eagle—and maybe even his dad’s. (Which, when he was older, he understood was just the silliest weapon anyone could own. People said it was fun, but the recoil on that thing was like getting your wrist kicked by a horse. The one time his mother tried that monster, she near about knocked herself out.)

After a week of sitting with eight dead men and stewing in his own juices—of listening to what his father said only real men did—the boy who would become John Worthy went to see his Uncle Dare.