I was loading my rifle at the regional qualifier in Tulsa when the girl two lanes down said loud enough for everyone to hear, “Did you come to compete or just to WATCH?” – and the whole staging area laughed.
My face burned. I didn’t have a sponsor patch on my jacket. Everyone else looked like a catalog ad.
I’m twenty-three. I’ve been shooting since I was nine, every weekend, in a field behind my grandfather’s house in Muskogee. He died fourteen months ago and left me his Remington 700 and a note that said, “Go show them, Becca.”
So I drove four hours to show them.
The woman who’d called me out was Danielle Pratt. Three-time state champion. Full gear. Full team behind her.
I had a folding chair and a cooler of gas station water.
First round was prone at 300 yards. I put all five shots inside a circle the size of a quarter.
The laughing stopped.
Second round, kneeling at 500. My grouping was tighter than Danielle’s by two inches. I could see her talking to her coach between stages, glancing back at me.
By the third round I was in first place.
That’s when the old man walked up.
He had to be seventy, maybe older. White hair, sun-beaten skin, a faded NRA cap. He stood behind me for a full minute before he spoke.
“Who taught you to shoot like that?”
“My grandfather,” I said. “Raymond Skaggs.”
He didn’t answer.
I looked up. His face had gone pale.
“Show me your left wrist,” he said.
I didn’t understand, but something in his voice made me do it. I pushed my sleeve back. The small tattoo I’d gotten at nineteen – a compass rose with a broken needle, copied from a drawing in my grandfather’s journal.
The old man grabbed my arm.
His hand was shaking.
“I KNEW THAT TATTOO FORTY YEARS AGO,” he said. “I was there the night your grandfather drew it. I was there the night they told us he was dead.”
My stomach dropped.
“Raymond Skaggs died in 1984,” he said. “In Beirut. I carried his body bag onto the helicopter myself.”
“That’s not possible,” I said. “He raised me. He died last year in his bed.”
The old man reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded photograph, creased so many times it was almost falling apart.
Two young Marines. One of them was him.
The other one was NOT my grandfather.
He turned the photo over. On the back, in faded ink, two names. One I recognized. One I’d never heard in my life.
“Your grandfather’s real name,” he said quietly, “was not Raymond Skaggs.”
He pulled a second photo from behind the first and held it face-down against his chest.
“Before I show you this,” he said, “I need you to tell me – did he ever mention a woman named PATRICIA EMBRY?”
My legs stopped working.
That was my grandmother’s maiden name. The name nobody used. The name I only knew because it was on the back of their wedding photo in a box I found after he died.
The old man’s eyes were wet. He turned the second photograph over and held it out to me.
“Then you need to see who else was in Beirut that night,” he said, “because the man in THIS photo – he’s been looking for your family for FORTY YEARS.”
The Rifle Was Still in My Hands
I want to tell you I handled it well.
I didn’t. My grip on the Remington went slack and the range officer had to step in and take it from me before I did something embarrassing with a loaded firearm. My hands were shaking the way the old man’s were. Like we’d caught the same virus just from standing close.
His name was Gerald Pruitt. Gerry. He said it twice because I didn’t register it the first time.
He’d driven up from Ardmore. Seventy-one years old, bad left knee, came to watch his granddaughter shoot in the junior division. She was eleven. He’d seen my name on the registration board when he walked in, and the name had stopped him cold.
Skaggs.
He said he hadn’t heard that name spoken out loud in maybe fifteen years, and even then it was at a memorial. A wall. One of those trips where you press your fingers to a name carved in granite and try to feel something other than cheated.
We walked to the far end of the staging area, away from the other shooters, away from Danielle Pratt and her coach and whatever they were strategizing. I don’t know if I forfeited my standing in the third round. I genuinely did not care.
Gerry sat down in my folding chair without asking. I stood.
He spread both photographs on the cooler lid.
Two Marines, One Name
The first photo was from 1983. He told me that before I could ask. October, he thought. Maybe November. Beirut, obviously, though you couldn’t tell from the background – just a wall, pale and crumbling, two young men squinting into the sun.
The man on the left was Gerry. Young, thinner, same jaw. Recognizable.
The man on the right had dark hair and a wide, easy smile. He was holding something – a cigarette, or a pen, it was hard to tell. The photo was creased right through his face.
“That’s Raymond Skaggs,” Gerry said. “The real one. We went through Parris Island together. He was from Odessa, Texas. Twenty-two years old. He died in the barracks bombing on October 23rd, 1983. Two hundred forty-one Americans.”
I knew the date. My grandfather – the man I’d called my grandfather – had a moment of silence every October 23rd, every year, for as long as I could remember. He’d sit on the porch in the morning with his coffee and not speak to anyone for about ten minutes. We knew not to bother him.
I thought it was something private. Something he’d explain when I was older.
He never explained it.
“The man who raised you,” Gerry said, tapping the photo, “is not in this picture.”
He slid the second photograph forward.
Three men this time. Different wall, different light, the photo less worn. Gerry was in this one too, younger-looking, which meant it was taken before the first. He was on the far right. In the middle was Raymond Skaggs again, the real one, still smiling.
And on the left was a man I recognized immediately. A man with my grandmother’s eyes, or she had his, or whatever direction that inheritance ran.
My grandfather. His face, forty years younger, in a photograph from a place he’d told me he’d never been.
Under the photo, in the same faded ink: three names. Gerry’s. Raymond’s. And a third.
Thomas Earl Embry.
The Name in the Journal
Here’s the thing about grief. It doesn’t end when the person dies. It keeps finding new rooms to move into.
I stood there in the Tulsa sun with a gas station water in my hand and felt something shift in my chest that I don’t have a clean word for. Not anger. Not exactly. More like the ground had always been slightly tilted and I was only now noticing because someone had handed me a level.
Thomas Earl Embry.
Patricia Embry had married a man named Raymond Skaggs in 1969, according to the certificate in the box. I’d seen it. I’d held it.
But Patricia Embry’s maiden name was Embry. And the man in this photograph was named Embry. And he was standing in Beirut, Lebanon, in what Gerry estimated was the spring of 1983, six months before the bombing.
“He took Ray’s name,” Gerry said. It wasn’t a question.
“Why?”
Gerry was quiet for a moment. He took his NRA cap off and turned it in his hands.
“Tom Embry had a problem before he enlisted,” he said. “I don’t know the full shape of it. Ray knew more than I did. Something about a debt, or a man, or both. Tom was running from something when he joined up, and Ray was the kind of person who let people run toward him.” He paused. “When Ray died, Tom had a decision to make. Go home as Tom Embry, with whatever was waiting for him there. Or go home as Raymond Skaggs, a dead man with a clean record and nobody left to contradict him.”
“He had a wife,” I said. “My grandmother already knew him. They were already married.”
“Patricia knew,” Gerry said. “Had to. She knew his real name.”
My grandmother died when I was four. Ovarian cancer. I have three memories of her and they’re all blurry. She’s been a photograph to me longer than she was a person.
She knew.
What Gerry Had Been Carrying
He didn’t come to Tulsa looking for me. That’s the part that keeps snagging in my brain. He came to watch his granddaughter shoot a junior qualifier, and he saw a name on a board, and forty years of something just cracked open on a Tuesday morning in Oklahoma.
He’d tried to find Tom Embry once, back in the late eighties. Hit dead ends. The name Raymond Skaggs led him to a man in Muskogee who had all the right paperwork and a wife who’d never heard of a Thomas Embry. He’d let it go. He said he didn’t know what he would have done with the truth anyway.
“I wasn’t going to turn him in,” Gerry said. “Ray was gone. Tom was the only one left who remembered what Ray was like before. The way he laughed. The way he’d give you his last cigarette and then be annoyed about it five minutes later.” He put his cap back on. “I just wanted to know he was okay. And then I wanted him to know that somebody remembered. That somebody knew his real name and wasn’t going to use it against him.”
I thought about my grandfather sitting on that porch every October 23rd.
He remembered too.
“The man in the second photograph,” I said. “You said he’d been looking for our family for forty years.”
Gerry nodded slow.
“That’s not me,” he said. “I gave up. The man in that photo is Dennis Cobb. He was Ray’s older brother. Half-brother. Different fathers. He was never in the service – bad heart – but he and Ray were close. He’s been trying to find Tom Embry since 1984 because Tom Embry was the last person to see Ray alive.” He looked at me. “Ray wrote a letter. Night before the bombing. Gave it to Tom to mail. Tom never mailed it.”
The cooler. The folding chair. The Remington 700 leaning against the staging table.
“Dennis is seventy-eight now,” Gerry said. “He’s in a care facility down in Lawton. He’s not well. But he’s been asking about that letter for forty years, Becca. He just wants to know what Ray said.”
What My Grandfather Left Me
Fourteen months ago I drove back to Muskogee and cleaned out the house over three weekends. My mom helped for the first one and then she had to get back to work. The second and third weekends I did alone.
The journal was in a fireproof lockbox under the floorboards of the closet. I know how that sounds. But he was a man who’d built a life on a borrowed name; I suppose he had his reasons.
The journal was half-empty. He hadn’t written in it since the mid-nineties. But the early entries – 1984, 1985, 1986 – were dense. Small handwriting, careful. Like he was trying to take up as little space as possible even on paper.
I’d read it. I’d cried over it. I’d put it back in the lockbox and not opened it again.
I hadn’t known what I was reading.
I drove back to Muskogee that same night. Four hours. Got there at 2 a.m., sat on the floor of his closet with a flashlight, and read the journal again with new eyes.
October 24th, 1983. The day after.
Ray gave me the letter to mail to Dennis. I have it in my pocket. I can’t mail it. If I mail it, Dennis writes back to Ray, and Ray is gone, and it unravels. I know what this makes me. I know exactly what this makes me. I’m going to carry this one.
And then, two pages later, in 1986, two years after he’d come home:
Patricia says I should find a way to get the letter to Dennis without explaining. I can’t figure out how. Every road leads back to the same place. I’m sorry, Ray. I’m carrying it.
The letter was in the back of the journal.
Still sealed. Raymond Skaggs’s name in the return corner, in my grandfather’s handwriting, pretending to be someone else’s. Dennis Cobb’s address in Lawton, Oklahoma, forty years old.
The Third Round
I went back and finished the qualifier.
I don’t fully know why. Gerry sat in my folding chair and watched. His granddaughter had finished her junior round and she came and sat on the cooler and didn’t ask questions, just handed me a Gatorade before my final stage like she’d been doing it her whole life.
I shot the third round at 600 yards, standing.
I don’t remember it clearly. My hands had stopped shaking by then, which was either focus or shock, and I’m not sure it matters which. I put the crosshairs where he taught me to put them – breathe out halfway, hold it, don’t squeeze, let the shot surprise you – and I fired.
I finished second overall. Danielle Pratt beat me by four points.
She didn’t say anything when they posted the scores. Neither did I.
Gerry walked me to my truck. The letter was in my jacket pocket, still sealed, which felt insane and also felt like the only right thing. I’d driven four hours to show them, like the note said. I’d done that much.
“Will you take it to Dennis?” Gerry asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
He nodded. He started to walk away and then stopped.
“Your grandfather,” he said. “Whatever his name was. He taught you right.”
I got in the truck.
The Remington was in the case in the back. The letter was in my pocket. And in my head, my grandfather was on that porch, October 23rd, coffee going cold, ten minutes of silence for a man named Raymond Skaggs who gave him everything, including his name.
I drove south toward Lawton.
—
If this one got under your skin, pass it along to someone who’d feel it too.
For more gripping tales of unexpected encounters and family secrets, check out My Name Was On the Chip We Just Risked Everything to Steal, or delve into the mystery of My Dad Got Into a Stranger’s Van at Midnight and I Followed Him In and He Grabbed My Arm and Said “Dale’s Not Dead – But If They Find Out You Know, You Will Be”.
