Wyatt starts walking again, hesitates when he notices Jessup hasn’t started up, but after a second, Jessup starts walking, too. Movement feels like everything to him. As if to stay still is to stand on quicksand, the world sucking him down, swallowing him alive, because he already feels like the ground is opening up beneath his feet.
“I was supposed to shoot you. Brandon wanted me to shoot you. He asked me to shoot you, so I said okay.”
“You said okay?”
“You know you’re just echoing me,” Wyatt says. He starts to laugh.
“This isn’t funny,” Jessup says. He feels wretched. Doesn’t understand how Wyatt can laugh.
“It’s a little funny,” Wyatt says. “Your face. But yeah, Brandon said, ‘I need you to shoot Jessup,’ and I said, ‘Okay, sure.’ There was a little more to it than that—I mean, he thinks I’m a good little soldier, and he’s spent a lot of time cultivating me, getting to the point where he feels like he can trust me to follow orders—but basically, yeah, that’s what happened.”
“And even though you were supposed to shoot me, you missed and hit Brandon instead?”
“Yep,” Wyatt says. “I was supposed to shoot you. I just missed. Bad shot. Wind or something.”
Jessup thinks for a second, tries to replay Brandon spinning, his body tumbling into Jessup’s, legs tangling up, the two of them going down hard, hitting the truck bed before the second shot took out the rearview window, before things turned to chaos. Thinks about the open field, the thick trees on the hillock. Easy to set up and hide. Thinks about the weather.
Jessup says, “It’s going to snow later on, huh?”
“Think so.”
“But it’s calm. No wind. And there wasn’t any wind earlier, either.”
Wyatt agrees. “No wind. But there could have been a gust, couldn’t there have been?”
“How far was the shot?” Jessup asks.
“How far did you say it was yesterday, that buck you bagged?”
“Two hundred. Actually, it was more like one seventy-five,” Jessup admits, “but I told you two hundred because I knew you’d call me a pussy.”
“I called you a pussy anyway.”
“Yeah.”
Wyatt laughs again, nods. He seems like he’s happy. They’re taking their time, walking, but clearly just trying to avoid having to talk about this face to face, and Wyatt is acting like it’s nothing, but Jessup’s known him long enough to know that Wyatt acting like it’s nothing can still mean this conversation is everything. Wyatt’s trying to tell him something he doesn’t understand.
“Two hundred and twenty yards,” Wyatt says. “Five yards shorter than it was supposed to be.”
“You didn’t miss, did you?”
“Not really,” Wyatt says. Casual.