Remi’s .32 automatic pistol

Remi’s .32 automatic pistol passes from a piece of equipment for Sal’s guard work into a weapon Sal displays in San Francisco and, during a domestic confrontation, must hide. Its changing uses connect the routine authority of his job to loneliness, impulsive fantasies, and the danger gathering inside the shack.

Acquisition and Use as a Guard’s Tool

When Remi arranged for Sal to work as a special guard in the barracks, he gave him a flashlight and the pistol. Sal’s uniform was already an awkward hand-me-down: for his first two weeks he wore Remi’s trousers, which were too long, and went to work flapping about like Charlie Chaplin. The gun, by contrast, was functional equipment for a job that required guards to prevent the men housed in the barracks from tearing the buildings down.

Remi explained that he had bought the pistol after jumping off a train at North Platte, Nebraska, to stretch his legs. He saw it in a shop window, bought it, and barely made it back onto the train. The purchase’s casual, opportunistic origin contrasts with the seriousness of the object once Remi hands it to Sal: a private souvenir of a journey becomes part of Sal’s new public role as an armed guard.

Night Patrol and the Gun’s Imaginary Uses

Sal carried the pistol on his night rounds, which took him over the steep walls of the south canyon, across a highway streaming with cars bound for San Francisco, and down toward the barracks. In the dark, he took it out and played cowboys. That gesture makes the gun both a real instrument of authority and a prop in an imagined Western adventure, set against the mundane work of patrolling temporary quarters for construction workers waiting to sail, many of them bound for Okinawa.

The pistol’s meaning shifts again when Sal begins going to San Francisco more often. He says he took it to bars and, when a man approached him, drew it and challenged him; the man fled. Sal admits he did not understand why he did this, and relates the behavior to the city’s loneliness and to the fact that he had a gun and needed to show it to someone. The weapon does not resolve that isolation. Instead, it turns it into a threat directed at another person.

Sal also describes a sudden impulse to shoot out a jewelry-store window, take the rings and bracelets, and give them to Lee Ann so the two could flee to Nevada. The contemplated robbery never becomes an action in the account. Still, the fantasy shows the pistol attached to an imagined escape and romantic rescue, while its actual presence makes that fantasy violent rather than merely wistful.

The Shack Confrontation

As the rains intensify and tensions between Remi and Lee Ann worsen, Lee Ann tells Remi to pack and leave the shack. When Remi pushes her, she lunges for the pistol. Remi hands it to Sal and tells him to hide it; the account specifies that it has a clip of eight shells. Lee Ann goes out into the mud to find a police officer, while Sal hides in a corner with his head between his knees. The gun has moved from an instrument carried in the open on patrol to an immediate danger that the three occupants must keep out of reach during a quarrel.

Across these episodes, the pistol’s function changes with Sal’s circumstances: first issued as part of a guard’s work, then displayed in bars, imagined as the means of a theft, and finally concealed during a fight at home. It binds the episode’s comic and precarious details—the borrowed uniform and cowboy play—to a more consequential fact: in the cramped, deteriorating household, an object carried for protection can become a focus of conflict.