Bang, bang

“Bang, bang” is the brutal refrain through which Mike Milo’s memory connects Mr. Croag’s killing of diseased horses to Mike’s own terror of being crippled. First heard as an order to shoot animals deemed beyond saving, it returns when Mike lies injured and imagines that a broken leg has made him equally disposable. The words compress a history of violence into a sound that follows him from one wound to another.

The Phrase and Its First Associations

The phrase enters a remembered episode from the summer Mike left college, after his grandparents died and he became an apprentice to Mr. Croag. Croag called himself a “medical man,” but he was neither a doctor nor a licensed veterinarian; he worked more or less as an inspector for the animal husbandry office of the County Department of Agriculture. The distinction matters: his authority over sick animals is practical and forceful, not the work of a properly licensed healer. Mike recalls Croag’s maxim about an injured horse: “A crippled horse isn’t worth a bubble on a puddle of urine.” The saying makes the animal’s value seem to vanish with its capacity, a judgment that will later shape Mike’s fear about his own body.

At the horse farm, disease has filled the barn with a suffocating stench. Some horses bear visible sores, while others are described as sick with an inward death; despite their condition, many remain standing. Their owner clings to that posture as evidence they may survive, insisting, “They’re standing!” Croag answers by ordering, “Shoot ’em down,” and then instructs that the barn be set on fire. The contrast between the owner’s hope and the inspector’s command makes standing an unreliable sign of life: the horses’ apparent strength cannot protect them from a decision already made about their fate.

The killing becomes a sequence of repeated commands. After another shot, blood from a horse’s head splatters across Mike’s face and blinds him. Croag shouts, “Shoot ’em all twice!” and spells out the rhythm: “Bang, bang—you get it?—bang, bang!” Mike’s inward repetition, “Oh, Christ. Bang, bang,” carries the sound beyond Croag’s speech. With about fifty horses dead and his clothes soaked in their blood and pus, Mike climbs out of the pit. The refrain thus attaches not just to the order to kill, but to Mike’s position as a witness physically covered by the aftermath.

From the Injured Horse to Mike’s Own Body

The refrain returns when the healthy yearling, frightened by the killing, runs amuck and falls, breaking a leg. Croag and several others stand over the thrashing animal, and Croag draws his other gun. The earlier maxim about a crippled horse now has an immediate, visible consequence: the judgment that disability makes an animal expendable is no longer abstract. Against that scene, Mike’s later fear of his own injury acquires a grim precedent. The healthy horse’s broken leg does not merely echo the sick horses’ deaths; it places a newly injured animal under the same lethal decision.

Years later, after becoming a stock boy at Keeley’s Rodeo, Mike ropes, wrangles, and rides steers; in Oklahoma the following winter, he begins bronco riding. He wins a modest bronze medal the next spring, then earns a gold buckle a year later. On the anniversary of that first gold buckle, he has an accident and breaks his leg. The sequence turns the sound of the horse-killing into a private measure of danger: a broken leg, once the condition attached to an animal marked for shooting, becomes Mike’s own feared sentence.

At thirty-eight, lying in the hospital, Mike imagines that the leg has not merely been broken but amputated. His inability to feel it seems to confirm the catastrophe, and the thought of himself as a cripple repeats the logic he first heard from Croag. The refrain surfaces in the compressed thought, “His leg’s broken. Shoot him. Bang, bang.” It then contracts into Mike’s own bodily panic: “I can’t feel anything. Bang, bang.” The words no longer come from an inspector issuing commands; they emerge as the sound Mike associates with helplessness and presumed disposability.

The scene does not end on the imagined amputation. The leg begins to hurt, and that pain brings a concrete reversal: sensation returns where Mike had feared permanent loss. “Bang, bang” therefore marks both the persistence of the old violence and the difference between the horse’s fate and Mike’s. The animals were shot after their bodies were judged beyond use; Mike’s fear carries that judgment inward, but the renewed pain interrupts it. The refrain’s force lies in this collision between remembered killing and present survival.

Loss, Memory, and the Refrain

The words arrive after a reflection on loss as the ache of what remains unfinished: unspoken things, unresolved arguments, half sentences, and touch that never happened. Mike’s numb leg then gives the thought a bodily edge, and the command “Shoot the crippled horse” opens into the remembered language of an earlier wound. At first, the harsh judgment seems to come from his grandfather; the narration corrects that impression almost immediately. It was Mr. Croag, not the grandfather, and the coarse word in Croag’s maxim is precisely what rules out the mistaken attribution: Mike’s grandfather never used it. Memory here is not a settled story recalled from a distance but a voice briefly misrecognized before its source is named. That correction gives “Bang, bang” a layered function. The refrain carries Croag’s violence forward, but it also shows how that violence has become part of Mike’s inner speech: an external command returns at the moment his own body feels insensible and vulnerable. The passage’s movement from generalized grief to numbness, then backward into the horse-killing memory, makes the association feel less like deliberate reflection than an involuntary return. Its final contrast is bodily rather than rhetorical: Mike’s leg begins to hurt. Pain does not erase the remembered command, but it marks a change from imagined absence of sensation toward renewed feeling.

The Refrain as a Measure of Vulnerability

The phrase changes grammatical force as it travels: it first accompanies Croag’s orders to shoot the horses, then enters Mike’s private thought as he lies unable to feel his leg. The repeated beat makes the old scene recur not as a complete recollection but as a terse verdict attached to bodily injury. Yet the hospital scene does not reproduce the horses’ ending. Mike’s leg begins to hurt, interrupting the imagined sentence of disposability with evidence that his body is still capable of sensation. The refrain therefore binds the two episodes without making their outcomes identical: it preserves the violence of the earlier memory while registering the difference between a life ended by another’s decision and an injury that, for Mike, does not end in death.