The only person who ever shot at me was Mrs. Herzog, firing from her house in the valley below the railroad bridge my friends and I had walked across with trash hauled from a nearby illegal dump: a sink, a fish-bowl, many toys, a television set. We dropped the junk from the bridge to see each object crash at great speed against the wooden beams and ground a hundred feet below. The television’s fall was most impressive, a loud “whoomp” as the vacuum tube imploded, the spray of glass catching sunlight like diamonds.

This was Winslow, Arkansas, the late eighties. There was no internet. Radio sucked. Fayetteville—its stores and movie theaters—was thirty miles north, a mountainous, curving stretch of highway. John, Craig and I all knew people who had died driving that stretch of road.

I have never much liked heights. I have been stranded due to a broken down vehicle often enough to permanently distrust mechanical engineering of any kind. And the bridge did not look safe; it is a spindly structure of crossed timbers built in 1881; it still stands 780 feet long and 115 feet high.

It was precarious and dizzying to walk across the bridge; there were no railings and between each railroad tie was a six inch gap through which I could see green treetops below my feet. We felt suspended, just barely, in air.

I had a Dr. Pepper I was drinking and now and then I’d blow across the bottle top to make a soft whistling noise--it sounded ominously like a distant train whistle. We were in the middle of the long trestle and if the train came across there would be no way to outrun it; we'd have to stand out on the flimsy platform built for just that purpose.

At first I barely noticed the pops of rifle fire—it is not unusual to hear gunshots in the country. But Mrs. Herzog's aim improved because next came a sound--a very quick ripping of the air--as a few bullets sang past just feet above our heads. John had been pissing from the platform as we all dropped; I remember the sight of him squirming on his side, buttoning his jeans, cussing.

I might be wrong, but I do not believe the woman was out to hurt us. I came to know her, eventually. About a year later in her eccentric stone cottage she cooked me and her daughters artichoke hearts sauteed with butter in a cast-iron skillet over a propane stove. I never mentioned the bridge incident and never bore her any hard feelings, though it probably sounds foolish. From what I know of her it's very likely she was drunk and meant only to scare us off.

The three of us dropped to our stomachs--I remember staring through the gap between the ties and seeing the trees far below us and expectaing any minute to hear the train sound its whistle and come rolling around the far bend, but it did not. We crawled t0 the far side of the bridge, clambered down from the tracks and ran to our car, and though John was wild about getting his father's guns and finding Mrs. Herzog, Craig--who works for the Fayetteville police department, now--talked him out of it.

I still feel bad about dropping all that trash down into the valley. Perhaps it's why I never got too upset about being shot at. A part of me thought we deserved it.