When Billy was not quite three, when my dad’s folks lived in Dodge City, before Dad was born, Billy was outside playing with a neighborhood boy. The neighbor boy had a gun. In whatever they were doing, there were bullets on the ground, and the boy told Billy to pick up some of them. When Billy bent over to get some bullets, the boy fired the pistol at him. The bullet entered Billy in his back right below and beside his right shoulder. The bullet severed his spine and exited out his lower left abdomen.

Billy wasn’t supposed to live a year. But he did.

After multiple surgeries, there was some hope he might recover some use of his legs- that he may be able to walk again with crutches. He worked at it for a while, but in time that hope faded, and Billy was bound to a wheel chair.

Billy spent a lot of time at hospitals in Kansas City. In time, he would lose both of his legs below the waist.

Despite his handicap, Billy was still rambunctious. Like brothers do, he and his younger brother, my dad, would dig at each other from time to time. Once, my dad and Billy were in a row about something, and Billy was chasing him around their house. In the dining room, dad ran around the long large dining room table and taunted Billy when Billy could not catch him. Billy, sitting on the side of the table opposite from my dad, grabbed the table top and gave the table a hard shove- and pushed dad through a glass pane and out of the dining room window into the yard outside. That result must have been a hard one to explain to their folks.

Since the boys’ parents often worked at the theater their father was managing at the time, the great arbiter of the boys’ problems was often the phone- which the boys would use to call their folks when they needed help solving a squabble.

Billy lived to age 33.

After his death, his mother, my paternal grandmother, never quite recovered. Thereafter, she would make a number of trips to stay at the mental health hospital in Hutchinson, Kansas, for help.

I always wondered what happened to the boy with the gun.