The Strange Sad Ballad of Jimmy Sutton
by Dale Bridges
I grew up in a small town in rural Nebraska across the street from a kid named Jimmy Sutton who was born with a gun for a penis. This was back in the ‘80s before the Internet. The world was a bit more mysterious back then, more magical in some ways. There were things that happened out on the prairie the rest of the country knew nothing about. I saw a woman with no arms at the county fair paint a picture of Jesus with her feet. I saw a tornado pick up a bale of hay in a field and drive a dozen flimsy yellow straws clean through a telephone pole. I saw a bull calf born with its beating heart outside its chest. I’ll tell you more about that last one later. But I never saw anyone before or since birthed into this world with a pistol between their legs.
Jimmy’s mother died during the delivery. It would be understandable to assume her death had something to do with Jimmy’s peculiar anatomy, but it was just a plain old hemorrhage the local doc didn’t know how to stop. That left Jimmy to be raised by his father, Big Mike Sutton, the town drunk, who had never accomplished much of anything outside of holding down his favorite barstool. For the first couple of years, some of the ladies from the Church of Christ pitched in regarding feedings and diaper changes, but after Jimmy got big enough to operate a can opener, he was mostly looking after his own self. He seemed to prefer it that way. He was a quiet, gentle kid who always had a library book in hand, and most days you could find him curled up on the shady side of a hackberry tree reading stories about robots or wizards. I guess we was about as close as two boys could be back then, but I don’t recall him ever saying more than a dozen words in one sitting.
Jimmy was sensitive about his deformity, so I only got to touch it the one time. I was ten years old and unlearned in the ways of sex. Some of the older kids had shown me a porno magazine after baseball practice one day, and if I'm being honest, I found it to be more disturbing than anything else. The women were certainly attractive, but their exposed breasts seemed far too large for their willowy bodies, as if someone had sewn a couple of cantaloupes under their skin. It would be years before I learned of plastic surgery and the like. Anyways, I was too young to appreciate the female form in such extremes, but like most boys that age, I had a fascination with guns and since my daddy refused to show me how to use his hunting rifle until I had reached my twelfth year, I asked to see Jimmy's. He wasn't exactly keen to show it off, but I insisted and we found a private spot behind an abandoned house to drop trou.
I was surprised to see the gun was actually a gun. I don't know what I expected, maybe a fleshy protrusion with some gun-like qualities, like how if you squint hard you can see the shape of a horse in a cloud. But this was a real gun. I told Jimmy he could touch mine if I could touch his, and he agreed. I didn't know nothing about makes or models at the time, but now I know it was a Colt 45, small and black and cool to the touch. I asked if he wanted to shoot some squirrels but he said he didn't have any bullets. Instead, we stood against the side of the house and peed together. His came out the barrel like a squirt gun spraying Mountain Dew and we both laughed.
From the time Jimmy could walk on his own, Big Mike would bring him along to the bar. This wasn’t uncommon back in the day, and Jimmy didn’t seem to mind. He spent most of the time drinking free Cokes under a neon sign that gave off just enough light for him to read by. And whenever Big Mike ran out of money, which was often, he would go around the bar collecting five dollars from anyone who wanted to see his son shoot a pop can off a fence post at twenty paces in the back alley with his tallywacker. As you might imagine, this was quite the spectacle, especially in a town with one stoplight, and no matter how many times he did it, Big Mike never failed to collect at least fifty dollars, which can buy an awful lot of cheap whiskey. Being the shy kid he was, this wasn’t something Jimmy enjoyed doing, but the few times he protested, Big Mike took him out to the truck for a while and brought him back inside with a new attitude and a fresh red handmark on the side of his face.
Life in small towns is mostly about routine, and this was the routine at the Sutton house until Jimmy became a teenager and started running away. He never got far, mostly because there wasn’t anywheres to get to, and when the sheriff inevitably found him hitching down the highway and brought him back, there would be scuffle the whole neighborhood could hear, and Jimmy would miss a week of school afterwards. I asked my daddy about it one time, what was happening in that house and whether someone should do something about it. He said he'd tan my hide if I started poking my nose in other people's affairs. He said small town folk get along by going along and I should remember that. It didn't seem right to me, but I knew better than to cross my daddy on issues of social etiquette.
That being said, no one was overly shocked when, on a particularly hot summer night, a gunshot tore through the neighborhood. The sheriff knew exactly what door to knock on, and when he entered the house, he found Big Mike naked on the floor with a hole in his belly.
There was a hubbub for a spell. For people who prided themselves on privacy, the townsfolk sure did seem to know all the ins and outs of the situation. Big Mike didn’t die, and since Jimmy was only seventeen, they just shipped him off to juvie for a year. He got out in time to go to college, and that was pretty much the last time I ever saw my friend Jimmy Sutton. I heard tell he landed in Portland, where he finally had the gun surgically removed from his person. The Internet had made its way to our little town by then, and the locals had plenty to say about his operation, how it was a mental sickness to alter what God had created to perfection and people like Jimmy Sutton should be locked away. But I never heard a one of those folks say jack rabbit squat about them fake breasts in the porno magazines or why Big Mike had been naked when his boy shot him in the gut with his pecker, so I think those people maybe ought to mind their own business.
Well, that pretty much wraps up this here story, excepting for a few additions I'd like to make. I realize I said some unflattering things about my daddy, and they were true but they don't constitute the totality of his character, so I'd like to rectify that if you'll indulge me. Remember that calf that was born with its heart outside its chest? My daddy delivered it. He was a ranch hand and a darn good one. From mending fences to breaking horses, he could pretty much do it all. The rancher he was working for didn't see the point of allowing such an abomination to live, but my daddy asked to take the calf home. He built a pen in the backyard behind our house and just wrapped that heart up in a plastic bag. I named him Sue after the Johnny Cash song. A bull named Sue. We thought that little guy would die of natural causes within a fortnight, but he lived for nearly two decades and grew to be one of the biggest darn bulls in the county. People would come from miles around and pay a pretty penny to take a gander at him. Sue was a gentle giant, and he would let me lead him out of his pen whenever we had an audience that wanted to gawk. I would remove the plastic bag and people would just lose their minds watching his big heart thumping away. That was a nice thing my daddy did that I thought you should know about.
The other part is about Big Mike. When he got out of the hospital, his hair turned snow white and there was a sunflower growing from the hole in his gut where Jimmy shot him. Over the years, Big Mike tried to get rid of that sunflower a million different ways. He would chop it off and pull it out, spray it with poison and set it on fire. But no matter what he done, that sunflower would grow back, tall and yellow and pretty as a new day.
Dale Bridges is a fiction writer, essayist, and painter. His writing has been featured in more than thirty publications, including The Rumpus, The Masters Review, and Barrelhouse Magazine. For several years, Dale was the arts and entertainment editor at an alternative newspaper called Boulder Weekly, where he won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists for his feature writing, narrative nonfiction, and cultural criticism. He has published a book of short stories, Justice, Inc., and a novel, The Mean Reds. He works at the library and lives in Austin with some haunted dolls.
