I wanted to say to hell with it and sleep in a little the next morning, but Grandma knocked softly on the bedroom door around seven and said quietly, “Arch? You up?”
“I’m up, I’m moving,” I said thickly. For a moment, I thought I’d overslept again and was late for work. And right around then everything from the night before came flooding back, collecting into seared images behind my eyes. The pit. Rotting steers. The worm thing trying to eat into my hand. Junior and his chainsaw. Intestines and worms spilling out all over the table. After all that, I wasn’t exactly in a rush to get to work.
“Yeah, I’m up.”
“You think you could thin out the squirrels a little? Little bastards have damn near eaten all of my squash and since the corn’s getting ripe, they’re just going to get worse. I’d keep an eye on things, but I promised Peg I’d take her some tomatoes.”
Peg was Grandma’s closest, well, her only friend really. She lived down the road about a mile and a half, and scratched out a living by raising mean, thin chickens. Once, when Peg chopped the head off of one of the chickens with a wood axe, I swear that headless chicken ran around for a full five minutes before the body realized that the head wasn’t attached and it was supposed to be dead. Even when it finally toppled over, it fought death the whole way, flapping its wings and kicking up a cloud of blood and dust. Grandma was always trading vegetables for eggs and headless, plucked chickens. I figured that half the time, the trading was just an excuse to get together and puff on their dead husbands’ pipes, filling the chicken yard with sweet-smelling blue smoke. Peg couldn’t walk too well, even worse than Grandma, so they always met at her house.
“Sure, Grandma. I got the time.”
“You still going into work?”
“I gotta, Grandma.”
She nodded and gave me a glimmer of a smile. “You take care of yourself.”
“I will.”
Grandma nodded and shut the door.
I slipped out of bed and took another long, hot shower, scrubbing my skin until it was a bright shade of pink. I stayed in there until the water had gone cold, and only then reluctantly climbed out.
Grandma had dug a pair of Grandpa’s old black boots out from somewhere and set them in the hall. There was no sign of my tennis shoes, and I figured it was for the best. Grandpa’s boots were a little big, but with two pairs of socks, the creased leather molded around my feet just fine.
A giant tomato and onion omelet was waiting for me on the counter in the kitchen. After last night, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be hungry again, but I surprised myself and inhaled the breakfast.
I checked the clock. Seven-thirty. It was time for a few squirrels to meet their maker. I opened the front hall closet. More than two dozen boxes of shells were stacked neatly on the floor next to the encyclopedias. I could remember when the closet was full of Grandpa’s guns: Winchesters, Rugers, Remingtons, a couple of Browning shotguns, a Colt 1911 .45, and even an ancient Model 1885 High Wall single shot. They were all gone, all sold to pay for rent and food. Grandma cried when she had to sell the Highwall rifle, Grandpa’s favorite. That was the only time I ever saw Grandma cry.
All that remained was the Browning .10 gauge shotgun and Grandpa’s Springfield 30.06, the two guns Grandma refused to sell. I grabbed a box of shells and the rifle case. Nestled in threadbare red imitation velvet waited my grandfather’s 30.06. Bolt action, with a five-round clip. Walnut stock. Iron sights, grooved slots of metal at the end of the barrel.
I never liked using scopes. Looking through a scope always made me feel sort of disconnected from the rifle somehow. I felt much more comfortable sighting down the barrel, through the iron sights. It felt as if the rifle and I were working together, instead of screwing a chunk of glass on the top and using that to find your target. You never knew where the scope was aiming; if it was off just a little, you wouldn’t know it, you couldn’t feel it, but by sighting down the barrel, you knew roughly where you were putting the bullet. For long-distance shots, I used a pair of binoculars, just to double-check that the tiny brown blur in the distance was, in fact, a squirrel and not just a knotted root. Shells were too expensive to waste on killing a piece of wood.
The second reason was that using a scope felt too much like cheating.
The term “thirty-aught-six” simply meant that the rifle was a thirty caliber, that is, 308 thousandths of an inch wide, and the aught-six signified the year it was invented—1906. Besides loading her own shotgun shells, Grandma also kept me supplied with plenty of shells for the 30.06, using a 150-grain bullet, propelled by 52 grains of 4064 Dupont powder. This was a deer-hunting load, a huge load to inflict on the squirrels, but Grandma never changed or reduced it. For one thing, that was how Grandpa had set up his loading bench and dies, and Grandma got nostalgic about things like that.
The other was that she felt kind of sorry for the squirrels, even though they weren’t anything but country rats—these weren’t cute, fluffy gray tree squirrels, just disease-ridden rodents that lived in giant colonies of tunnels in the dirt.
“I won’t let them eat my garden, but I don’t see any need making ’em suffer either,” Grandma said.
Well, the squirrels sure didn’t suffer much when hit by a 150-grain bullet. They never even knew what hit them; the bullet usually just turned them inside out instantly. One second, they’re sniffing around in dust, and the next, they’re climbing that great oak tree up into the sky. They never felt much of anything.
Still, I can’t say I enjoyed killing them. I liked shooting, loved it, lived for it most days, but I never thought drawing blood when you pulled the trigger was much of a sport. It was too easy. I’d rather just throw some old golf ball as far as I could toward the foothills and shoot at that for a while. But we had to protect our food.
Grandma’s garden came first. And so, every month or so, I’d grab the Springfield and a box of shells and head into the knee-high Johnson grass beyond the garden to a level spot under the dead oak tree out in the middle of the field.
The tree was a monster; it had been out there forever. Lightning had struck it once or twice, and the branches grew out into the clouds in dizzying, twisted patterns because of the jolt. I don’t know what finally killed it. I like to think it was old age. It had been dead a couple of years now. The tree had also survived a few grass fires, and I could just make out the dim lines at various points along the thick trunk that spoke of floods in years past. Some of these lines were above my head.
About sixty yards past the tree to the north, the field dropped into a dry creek bed, nothing more than gray gravel and red mud. I’d never seen any water come down the creek, just puddles that collected after heavy rains. The foothills rose on the other side of the creek bed. This was where the squirrels lived. Over the years, before they built thedam and created the Stony Gorge reservoir, the creek had sliced chunks of the hills away, and now crumbling dirt cliffs rose out of the gravel, some nearly twenty to thirty feet high. Giant colonies of squirrels, some numbering into the hundreds, maybe even thousands, lived in there, in complicated mazes of holes that periodically opened out into the dirt face of the cliff. And there, when I walked out to the old oak tree, was where they died.
I leaned the rifle against the tree and studied the sky. No rain yet, but plenty of fat, angry clouds rolled across the low sky. I squatted down and got comfortable, mashing the tall grass down to form a cushion, my back to the tree, dirt cliff slightly off to my left. Sometimes, just to make things interesting and give the squirrels a sporting chance, I’d shoot standing, or off-hand as the old-timers called it, but today I was too damn tired and in too much of a hurry. I just wanted to kill a few squirrels and get to work before Fat Ernst got mad. Again.
I settled into the grass, feet planted firmly, knees bent at a 45-degree angle. If the holes in the cliff were at twelve o’clock, then I faced more or less toward the two o’clock mark. You always turn a little sideways to what you’re shooting so you can support the gun easier. If you face the target head on, then your left arm has to hang way out there, holding on to the end of the forestock, supporting the barrel. You can’t keep it steady. But if you turn sideways a little, then the rifle is resting across your chest, allowing you to draw your left arm in a little, so you can brace that elbow on something like, say, your knee if you’re sitting.
The key to holding any gun steady is in your posture. The idea is to build a series of solid supports, using your bones, locking them into place, from the ground up to the gun. I don’t care how strong you are, holding a rifle steady only using your muscles while firing at a target a hundred yards out is damn near impossible. You’ll shake too much. You need to relax those muscles, you need to be calm, breathing nice and slow and relaxed. Even your pulse can throw off your aim. It doesn’t have to be much. Moving the barrel a fraction of an inch could translate into missing the target by nearly a foot at a hundred yards.
My grandfather taught me everything about shooting. I can remember starting with a .22 when I was six, shooting at paper plates nailed to fence posts, then moving on up through .410 shotguns, and finally into larger rifles and shotguns like his 12 gauge pump Winchester and a .484 Remington. One summer evening, when the blazing sun had dropped halfway behind the coastal range to the west, when Grandpa and me were sitting under the same oak tree, watching for squirrels, he told me, “A gun is nothing more than a tool, but don’t forget that it’s nothing less than a tool either. Like any tool, a gun is only as smart as the person wielding it, but if you know what you’re doing, then a tool can move mountains. Squeezing the trigger is nothing less than imposing your will on the universe.”
I rested the rifle across my knees and fed five shells into the clip, loading them from the top, forcing them into the slot until I heard the click of the spring locking into place. When the clip was full, I took a deep breath, readjusted my knees slightly, and brought the binoculars up to my eyes, letting the air in my lungs out slowly and evenly.
The cliff face leapt into view with startling clarity. Sure enough, the squirrels were out and about, busily scurrying from one hole to the next in a flurry of motion one second, the next second freezing, watching, and listening—then another blur of motion. The trick was to nail them when they stopped to listen for predators. I suppose that’s kind of ironic, but they were just too damn hard to hit when they were moving. You had to factor in lead time and wind and all kinds of other damn things, and when I was pressed for time, I simply shot them when they were still.
The squirrels were all over the place. I could easily find them with my naked eyes, so I dropped the binoculars back to my chest, took another deep breath—settling in now, focusing my energy, quieting everything else down—and brought the rifle up to my shoulder. I pulled it in snug, because a 30.06 kicks like a mule that’s just been blinded with a faceful of pepper spray. You don’t really stop the recoil so much as rideit, guide it. I never braced myself against the tree, putting my shoulder between the stock and the trunk of the tree—I’d end up dislocating my shoulder or worse.
Grandpa used to tell me a story about this one time Earl Johnson came by the gun range. Earl was in his twenties. He was one tough customer, wearing brand-spanking-new hunting gear, boots, jeans, a giant cowboy hat. He wanted to sight in his new deer rifle, some ungodly huge .50 caliber Weatherby that had been built for the sole purpose of killing elephants. Grandpa strongly suggested that Earl might want to use a shooting bench, but the great white hunter knew what he was doing, dammit, he didn’t need to be treated like some goddamn woman.
Earl eased into a prone position, took his time settling down, getting the rifle with its huge barrel into place, and finally pulled the trigger. After the smoke cleared and the echoing thunder died, Grandpa found Earl whimpering in pain. The recoil had been powerful enough to drive him backward nearly a foot. The toes of his cowboy boots had left two neat grooves in the dirt, and the stock had broken Earl’s collarbone in two places.
I wedged my elbows into the slight indentations in my knees, the shallow groove right between my kneecap and the muscle on the inside of my leg, so the rifle was supported on the tripod I’d made with my skeleton. Two knees up to two elbows, with my shoulder as the third point in the triangle. The rifle slipped easily, naturally into place as if it knew where to go, as if it belonged there all along, as if it had never left my shoulder and cheek.
I sighted down the barrel, staring down between the notches in the iron sights, and everything else in the world fell away. Nothing else existed except myself, the rifle, and the squirrels. My breathing got even slower, deeper. The index finger of my right hand gently, ever so gently came to rest on the smooth trigger, almost as if there were an extremely rotten egg between the trigger and the guard and I was afraid of breaking the fragileshell. Then my eyes focused somewhere beyond the tip of the barrel, rushing forward across the field and coming to rest on the cliff face, alive with the motion of squirrels dashing from one hole to another.
A blur of brown fur scurried into my line of sight and froze, becoming a statue of a scraggly adult squirrel, ears up, mangy tail held high, claws clutching at the solid dirt. I swung the barrel slightly, until the notches lined up just behind the squirrel’s front shoulder. I held my breath, then let it out slow, slower still, until I wasn’t really breathing at all, and squeezed the trigger.
The world jolted, winked out for an instant, and the squirrel was gone. No pieces, nothing. It was simply gone. The crack of the shot rolled out across the field and into the hills, bouncing back toward the tree. Strangely though, I only really heard it with my left ear.
Without moving my left arm, I reached up with my right, jerked the bolt up and back. The spent casing went flying toward an old coffee can I kept, about four feet off to my right. I collected the casings when I was finished, and took them back to the trailer so Grandma could reload them.
I slid the bolt forward and locked it down. My finger found the trigger all by itself as I scanned the cliff again. Everything was still. The squirrels understood that one of their own had been touched once again by God, but they weren’t sure where His hand had come out of the sky. So they froze, listening, watching.
Another crack of thunder. This time, the bullet slammed into the squirrel’s chest, near the ground. The thin body flew off the cliff in a spectacular cartwheel, sending drops of blood into an abstract, circular pattern into the dirt. It bounced once before falling out of sight into the gravel of the creek bed. The body wouldn’t last long; the vultures would arrive as soon as I left. They were probably circling already.
In these hills, gunfire tended to attract scavengers.
I shot twenty-two more squirrels in fifteen minutes. That was enough. Only one shell was left in the breech. It took a while, but thesquirrels finally realized that it didn’t matter where the hand of God was coming from, only that it was coming out of the sky with a vengeance, and it was safer to hole up inside the burrows until God got bored and went somewhere else. I watched the cliff face for a moment through the binoculars, satisfying myself that there wasn’t going to be any brave or just plain stupid squirrel trying to make a mad dash to another hole. There wasn’t.
I was about to put the binoculars down and collect my spent casings when three quick puffs of dirt popped out of the cliff and an instant later three light cracks of another rifle echoed out across the field. I dropped the binoculars and scrabbled back against the dead tree, breathing hard. I waited a moment, watching the cliff, but the gunshots rolled away as if they had never happened.
After a full minute, I poked my head carefully around the tree, checking the field behind me. It was empty. But there, on the far edge of the field, a bright red Dodge pickup, sitting way up on some kind of lift kit, was parked on the side of Road E. I could just make out the shape of someone sitting in the driver’s seat.
I brought the binoculars up and found someone with long blond hair pointing a rifle at me. I jerked back around the tree, breath trapped in my throat. It took a moment, but then I realized that the rifle had a scope on it, and the person was probably just watching me through the scope. That didn’t make me feel any better. Only some kind of a moron would watch somebody else through a scope, not realizing that they were also aiming the rifle at the person. Or maybe they did realize it.
I took a chance and peered back around the tree. Now the person was leaning out of the window, waving at me. The rifle was gone. I glanced quickly through the binoculars again.
The red pickup sprang into view, in sharp focus, showing me everything. The person in the window was wearing a tight white blouse, and I couldn’t help but notice the generous swell of breasts barely contained underneath. The waving wasn’t helping me much either; the breastsshimmered slightly with every movement. I finally managed to tear my gaze away from the curves to see the face. But I knew who it was. Knew it before I even saw her face. I suppose I knew it when I saw the pickup, saw the blond hair.
It was Misty Johnson. And she was waving at me.