LOYAL GOT the rifle from his brother the next morning. He told his brother some friends from work were going squirrel hunting up near Waterville and he wanted to go along, drink some beers and shoot the shit. His brother was still fresh from third shift at the Alcoa warehouse and he asked him to sit and smoke a morning joint with him before he took off, but Loyal told him he had prior commitments.
“Prior commitments, huh?” his brother said. “I bet these commitments come attached to a pair of teenage tits. Suit yourself. Here, here’s a box of shells. They’re a couple of years old, but they should be good enough for government work. You remember how to work that thing?”
“I’m not an idiot.”
“Well, let’s not get carried away there, but I’ll take that as a yes that you do remember. If you see a coon, go ahead and shoot one for me. I’d like to make the boy a coonskin cap.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“You do that.”
Loyal drove out of the park and a quarter of a mile up the road before he had to pull over and lean out the window to puke on the ground. His heart was erratic and he felt all the skin in his body shrinking in on his bones, all of him squeezed tight by what he meant to do.
“Fuck it,” he said aloud, blew his clogged nose through pinched fingers, wiped the residue on the seam of his jeans. “Let’s get it done.”
When he got to town he wrapped the rifle in a bedsheet and carried it up to his apartment. His brother had kept it well oiled and the action moved freely when he pulled the bolt back to see if a round had been left in the chamber. He released the catch and the bolt clacked home. It wasn’t much. Only a .22. But it held several rounds and the report of its firing wouldn’t cause much notice in the woods. He opened the ammunition tube and dropped the rounds into place, then closed it, jacked a round in the chamber, checked the safety and lay it across the coffee table. This was still something not done, something that he could turn away from.
He tried to write a letter, to record the rush of anger and fear that had taken up residence in him. It started out well and he thought it was something Rain might understand, but when he gave it a few minutes and tried to read it back everything seemed misplaced and driven by a desire to justify himself when he knew this was beyond anything he needed to justify. He would not write a confessional when what lay before him wasn’t a crime so much as a matter of survival. Why would a man choose to grovel about keeping his own life?
He sat with that on his mind for a while as he smoked a cigarette before he went back down to the truck and drove out past the town limits.
He parked off the edge of the road about a quarter of a mile from where the man camped. The sun was still out but it remained cold. Much of the hard snow that kept to the shadows was still in place. His footsteps made a sound like something being put to a whetstone.
He followed a game trail that cut toward the river, looking for likely spots to bring him. Though the winter had thinned the greenery, the undergrowth was thick and prohibitive. There were a few places, though, a few entrances to deeper pools at the bank’s rocky edge.
As he neared he could smell the campfire and soon thereafter see the brittle writing of smoke against the sky. He circled around until he could see the black nose of the vehicle and just beyond that the clearing. And though the fire was still burning high and well, he saw no signs of the man. He settled beside an oak as big around as his forearm and braced the stock against the trunk, swept the area with the scope, though he found nothing more. He lowered the rifle and waited.
Some awful span of time passed and still the man had not appeared. The campfire reduced itself to embers. Loyal stood and waited as the needles of bad circulation ran from his thighs and down to his feet. Once he could move without a hitch in his step, he went forward, the rifle extended before him and his finger hugging the trigger.
He hesitated at the tree line before he committed himself and walked into the clearing. His actions seemed bound by their own independent laws. The imperative of searching, of actively hunting, took over. He swung the rifle in wide arcs as he tried to gather in the entirety of his surroundings at once. The campground with its fresh tracks, the veil of hot ash on the charred wood, the muted darkness of the sleeping car. And yet, impossibly, he was somehow alone amidst the center of it. A refugee come to the wrong country.
He lowered the rifle and stood listening to the near wilderness. The strain of the river through the land and the sounds of the birds in the limbs. He walked out beyond the campsite, waited, did not hear the slight gasp as the car trunk opened at his back like a metal mouth.
The man fired a shot that took Loyal midway down his spine, pitched him face first to the ground.
His hands grasped at emptiness. His brain told his hand to squeeze down hard, grab hold of the rifle that had dropped to his side, though he could see that disobedient hand remain inert. Again, he felt himself reach but his body refused. He could only see and breathe.
The man kicked the rifle aside, toed him over so that he rested on his back. Turned over like something on a spit. Something ready to be processed.
The man did not speak. That was good. There was little time to fear what was coming, little time to know the ache of this turn. He looked away as the man raised the pistol and ended it.