BENJAMIN WEBBER was home when Terry came in, shifts cut for half the month. He pointed at the ceiling in the front room. A hummingbird beat green and red at one corner and knocked at the plaster face first, stuttered back and lunged again on the same spot and did not stop.

It’ll die, his father said.

So what?

Terry went and got a yarn dust broom from the closet. He came back and his father opened the front door. Terry held the broom at the ceiling and huddled the bird, and then he didn’t see it anymore. He lowered the broom some at the handle and then he saw the bird caught in the dust and the red yarn. He rushed at the door and shook it past. The bird shot a green spark over old leaves in the yard.

He left the house and walked around in the woods. He sat in a rusted bathtub at a clearing and splayed his feet. He smoked, held his arms up, made like he worked soap on his chest, in his hair.

He walked to the sporting goods, brushed his fingers at tennis balls in skinny cans and wooden racquets on the first aisle, soccer balls and wood bats and baseballs and gloves at the next one. He stopped on the guns two rows over and put his hands on the case glass with the rifles and the shotguns and the scopes behind, the boxed shells and bullets shelved beside, and then the bird calls arranged past those, and then the doe rut, and then the decoys. The pellet guns and slingshots were stacked at the end of the aisle. He held one of the displays, rifle shaped, tied with plastic theft cord to the shelf. He aimed it on the ceiling, and then he put it back. He took one, heavy black plastic, held his arm straight and sighted a decoy on the shelf, a wood duck, eyes cat yellow and bright. He checked both ways and lifted the front of his shirt, put the gun to his belt, and then he looked at the air pellets, took a box of a hundred and dropped it to a pocket in his green army jacket, and then he left the store. The pellets rattled in the box.

He got halfway, and then he turned back. The gun jostled some at his beltline. He pushed it back tight when he saw the sporting goods, waved at the store clerk inside and walked slow again at the gun aisle and tried to remember the space where the box of pellets fit and when he found it he took the box from his jacket and set it there.

He came back in two hours, and Benjamin Webber sat at the table in the kitchen. He worked one bottom corner on a puzzle and rummaged loose pieces. He picked one up, and then he turned it over, put it to other pieces laid out. The box was on the floor. On the lid there was a sharp color picture, at the center of it a statue, steel colored, one man pointing, another slack armed next to him. The plaque beneath was labeled THE COMING OF THE WHITE MAN. Yellow leaves piled at the stone base and tall city buildings loomed behind, sky heavy gray and cold. He tried another piece and dropped it. He rubbed his eyes and blinked hard. He stood up, limped over to the blinds and pulled them, the table lit some in the daylight. He was barefoot. The duck boots lay on their sides under the table. He soaked his right heel, rust colored from part of a bottle cap lodged there, in a cereal bowl filled with bleach. He’d stepped on it in the yard five years back, taking trash out barefoot, at night. He pried most of it out with his fingernails, but part of the bottlecap was stubborn, stuck deep in his heel, and once he started working at it with his penknife, he understood it took more of him to get it out than to just leave it be.

That’s a hard puzzle it looks like, Terry said.

I’ve been at it a week.

What kind of statue is that?

I don’t know.

He looked at the picture on the puzzle box.

Those are explorers. His father looked too.

They had to eat candles because they ran out of food. I read that. I think it’s the same ones.

His father studied the picture, face close. They look younger than me, he said.

Terry went to his closet and took the gun from his belt and put it to the pocket of a plastic apple green raincoat. He fumbled the top rack for the red snow hat.

He came back into the kitchen and dropped the hat in front of him on the table. His father picked it up with one hand and looked at it hard, turned it inside out and then back again.

I haven’t seen snow for a long time, Benjamin Webber said.

He pulled the bottom to the crown of his head, tin gray hair jutted from the sides.

It’s red, Terry said. For thinking. I got a new one.

Like this?

Further down. Closer to your eyes. It has to be on good. You have to warm up your brain.

He thought this was true, but he was not certain.

It helps me usually, when I can’t figure something.

He pulled the hat down closer to his eyebrows. He put his face back down at the puzzle, sorted a few pieces to a pile.

I shouldn’t have gone at you so hard the other day, he said.

Doesn’t matter.

I get scared sometimes, he said.

Down the hallway yellow light pushed the bottom slit of his bedroom door shut.

I’m scared of things I’ve never seen.

Yeah, Terry said. The Russians keep me up at night. Or just wars, I guess.

This air raid siren used to ring all the time when I was young. It hurt my ears. The teachers made us run home from school. I was waiting for a plane, or a bomb falling. This one lined us up at the door, said, go fast, don’t look up.

All night he sat at the table in the kitchen with his hands on the wood in front. He thumbed the puzzle pieces. He picked callus skin on his hands beneath the fingers and shifted the weight on his back and shoulders. He smoked cigarettes and dropped them at a soda can on the table, watched the black and white television on the counter. The picture struck light on his face and in the room. He cut at the table with a kitchen knife from the drawer, dusted the wood shaving. His head felt a jumbled mess, but he couldn’t figure why He went to the closet and got the gun from the raincoat.