I walked to the diner, where the waitress touched my shoulder with her voice and then her smile:
And what can I get you today?
Coffee, I said as I went to the small table by the window behind the large floor plant, a palm, like the one I had in the cabin by the bookshelves, the warm books in the window sunlight.
I must discase myself, I said to her as I took my coat off. She nodded and said,
Yep, that’s the coffee right there.
When she left me, and I was sure I wasn’t being observed, I opened the carrying case and lifted the telescopic sight to my right eye and brought it to the noticeboard two blocks down, ranged the focus, and put the sight on my lap. Every couple of minutes I trained it through the café window to catch any anonymous writers. The waitress saw me and wandered over with her coffee pot and asked me who I was spying on, then laughed.
I nodded. I am testing a very old sight. The optics.
Well as long as there’s no gun under it in here, I’m fine with that.
I smiled. Always having to have their word in, some people, and I kept my smile until she went away, and then I brought the sight again to my face.
There, a man with a scarf around his head leaning to the wall with a pen or some instrument. I tried for more detail with my finger, turning the dial. There had been shots with Enflields up to a thousand yards. It was not an impossible shot at all, especially if along a street, walls on each side, a corridor to help shepherd the bullet.
Suddenly the sight went out of focus, a black cloud crossed it, pale on top, and then a tap sounded on the window, another when I pretended not to hear and didn’t move. After a few seconds I realized that freezing did not bring safety or invisibility, as the person evidently knew I was sitting at the window and was probably in fact on the other side of it. I removed the sight and blinked: Claire stood on the pavement outside, wrapped in gloves and a scarf except for her bare left hand touching the glass, the glove held in her right, as if she were leaning on the window with her fingertip. If she were an adversary and we in the open I might not have survived the next few seconds. She had stood so close I did not see her, and I determined not to forget that lesson.
Her face was shaped a pear in the scarf but enough to recognize. I saw her say my name, heard the last syllable of it, us, the sound muffled as though she stood at some distance, like a shout across a wide stretch of woodland. I sat holding the sight and made no movement. She had spied me in the act, and now she passed along the window and walked into the diner, across the floor and into the reflection of the same window up to my table, ignoring the waitress who followed her with a coffee pot.
Julius, she said.
I turned until she was real in front of me. Yes?
What’s that? She pointed to my lap.
Optics, I’m having them looked at today. Down at the gun shop.
Troy, she said, you know Troy?
I saw him with you, I said. I was there, if you remember.
She sat opposite me, unfurled the scarf off her head, and I saw the full face that lay beside me on many mornings when I woke, a very happy season.
What are you doing, Julius? It’s just that Troy says, I mean he’s talking about where they think the killer is operating, or where they think he lives.
Killer, I said.
They found a body, she said.
35
IT WAS MY FATHER WHO TAUGHT ME BASIC RIFLE SKILLS. The war stories came mostly from my grandfather and contained other rifle skills buried in their telling, lessons he learned about shooting under pressure and being shot at. As my father relates it, my grandfather came home from World War One and was fine for twenty years; then one afternoon, for no evident reason, he broke down and said he had seen the faces of his victims in his dreams for some weeks past, and not only their faces but also the children they never had, crowding the edge of the dreams, legs and arms sneaking into the picture. After some time, when the trouble did not disperse in him, a doctor was mentioned. Perhaps, it was suggested to my grandfather, he was suffering from shell shock.
No, my grandfather said. This is no shell shock. I was not generally under artillery fire.
My father explained to him that he might not have seen the faces of many people he shot as a sharpshooter since they were often a hundred yards and more away, and at that distance the faces were a plate, no eyes or expression a human would have. But there was no reassuring him, my father said to me, and my grandfather grew quiet after that, grew haunted, hollow, his eyes blacker, as if looking through sights at things a long way off.
I cannot believe how unlucky your grandfather was to have been caught up with like that, he said to me.
Caught up with? I said.
Yes, they caught up with him. You see it from battle.
My father was so sparing in his words you had to add water to them before they swelled into a sentence you could understand.
I said, From battle?
He thought some more and put down his book to say what he had to say.
That’s it, a gun leaves a battle loaded with dead men. Your grandfather must have seen so many times their faces through the telescopic sights, the surprise on the face of the man he shot that he was shot, that he was shot and not the man next to him or someone way down the line or on another battlefield altogether, so much surprise that those men crawled twenty years toward him with their fingertips, and when they got to him he was lying asleep in his bed, so they pressed those fingers into his dreams and punctured them like wet jelly, entered into those dreams and stood up and he saw them, all of them, in that jelly, in their uniforms, sick to their boots of the long journey into his dreams. And then they pointed those fingers at him and said, Remember me? You killed me.
Hearing that, I realized that the medals and the rifle were not the only things my grandfather brought back from the war. The men he killed dragged themselves across seas and rivers, roads and hills, an inch a day, unerring as to the compass that pointed to my grandfather, and when they found him, they must have smelled his dreams, tasted them too, ate them until they were the only dream that was left in his head, the only one his sleep could produce, and so he soon stopped sleeping and spent the nights with his eyes open in the dark.
To my knowledge my father never fired a single killing shot out of that gun. Perhaps he did not want to have any ghosts come after him if they heard a familiar sound, the last sound they may have heard in their lives, even if it wasn’t a gun he fired at them, or his father fired at them for that matter. The English sniper’s gun came with spirits attached, following it like a wake behind a ship, the water coiling in white streamers. My father had been a regular paratrooper in the last year of the second great war and did little that could be called sniping, mostly running and firing, more running and firing, a lot of ducking, more running and firing. Of the war he said little other than that the destruction was complete in most villages along the way to the Rhine, rubble where there used to be windows, rubble where there used to be people. And that destruction cured him of triggers completely.
For my part, I had discharged the Enfield twice before the recent events. Once I shot a wounded fowl at my father’s direction, and later, the following winter, a fox that limped into the clearing, bleeding from what I believed was a bear wound. The fox did not run when I approached, and when I saw his condition, he still did not move, and when I brought out the gun, he looked at it and me. The shot filled the forest and drove the fox to the ground. There is little honor in pain or in enduring it, and less honor in ending it. In truth I thought of that fox for many a night after and hoped the best for him, if beyond the body there really is a place you can survive.