Trey checks the gun with the same neat-handed, intent care he puts into the desk. “Good,” Cal says. “Now see this here? This is the hammer. You pull it back all the way, it’s cocked, ready to fire. But you bring it back just a little bit, like this, so you hear it click? That means it’s safe. You can pull the trigger all you want, nothing’ll happen. To go from cocked to safe, you ease the trigger back, just a little bit, then click the hammer forwards. Like this.”
Trey does it. His hands on the rifle look little and delicate, but Cal knows he has more than enough strength to handle it. “There you go,” he says. “Now it’s safe. But remember: safe or not, loaded or not, you don’t ever point it at any creature unless you’re prepared to kill it. You got that?”
“I got it,” Trey says. Cal likes the way he says it, with a level unblinking gaze across the gun in his hands. The kid is feeling the weight of this, and he needs that.
“OK,” he says. “Let’s go give it a try.”
He gets the plastic bag where he keeps empty beer cans and gives it to Trey to carry. He puts the rifle on his shoulder, and they go out into air that’s soft and heavy with mist and rich with wet-earth smells. The first of the evening is just starting to seep in; off to the west, where the clouds thin here and there, their edges are gold.
“We need to pick ourselves a good spot,” Cal says. “Somewhere we’re not gonna hit anything we don’t intend to.”
“Will we shoot them?” Trey asks, flicking his chin at the rooks, who are arguing over something in the grass.
“Nah.”
“Why not?”
“I like having ’em around,” Cal says. “They’re smart. Besides, I don’t know if they’re good eating, and I don’t kill creatures for kicks. We get something, we’re gonna skin it, gut it, cook it and eat it. You OK with all that?”
Trey nods.
“Good,” Cal says. “How ’bout we set up here?”
The low dry-stone wall of Cal’s back field has clear views of open grass all around; no one can walk into their firing line unexpectedly. It’s also on the side of the land overlooked by silent, incurious P.J., rather than the side overlooked by Mart, although right now even P.J. is nowhere to be seen. They balance beer cans on the rough stones, stacked there who knows how long ago by what ancestors of Mart’s and P.J.’s and Trey’s, and retreat across the field. Their feet swish in the damp grass.
Cal shows Trey how to pull out the magazine tube, drop the bullets into its slot and slide it back into place. They’ve picked a good day: the cloud keeps the low-angled light from dazzling them or throwing shadows, and the breeze is just an easy brush along one cheek. The beer cans are silhouetted sharply against the green fields, like tiny standing stones. The brown mountains rise behind them.
“OK,” Cal says. “You can shoot standing, kneeling, or flat on your belly, but we’re gonna start with kneeling. One leg under you, one knee up. Like this.”
Trey imitates him carefully.
“The stock goes in the hollow of your shoulder, right here. Good and tight against you, so it won’t kick too hard.” The balance of the rifle is perfect; Cal feels like he could kneel there all day long without his muscles getting tired. “See that bead on the end of the barrel? That’s the front sight. This half-moon here, that’s your rear sight. You line up the two of ’em right on your target. I’m aiming for the third can from the left, so I’ve got those sights lined up on it. I’m gonna take a breath and then let it out again, nice and easy, and when all that breath is gone I’m gonna squeeze the trigger. Not hard; this isn’t a gun you need to haul at. It’ll work with you. You just breathe out through your mouth, and then out through the gun. Got it?”
Trey nods.
“Good,” Cal says. “Now let’s see if I still got it.”
Somehow, after all these years, Cal’s eye with a rifle is still there. He knocks the can clean off the wall with a triumphal ring of metal on metal that echoes across the fields, over the gun’s sharp report.
“Ah yeah,” Trey says, awed.
“Well, look at that,” Cal says. He inhales the smell of gunpowder and finds himself smiling. “Your turn.”
The kid holds the rifle well, settling it into his shoulder like it belongs there. “Elbows in. Let your cheek fall against the stock, nice and easy,” Cal says. “Take your time.”
Trey squints down the barrel, carefully picking his can and lining up the sights. “It’s gonna go bang,” Cal says, “and it’s gonna kick into your shoulder a little bit. Don’t get startled.”
Trey is too focused to bother with the eye-roll. Cal hears his long slow breath in and out. He doesn’t wobble in anticipation of the kick, and he doesn’t flinch when it comes. He misses, but not by too much.
“Not bad,” Cal says. “All you need is some practice. Pick up your shell casing; you gotta leave a place the same way you found it.”
They take turns till the magazine is empty. Cal bags himself five beer cans. The kid gets one, which lights him up so vividly that Cal grins and trudges across the field to retrieve the holed can for him. “Here,” he says, passing it over. “You can hang on to that. Your first kill.”
Trey grins back, but then he shakes his head. “My mam’d want to know where I got it.”
“She go through your stuff?”
“Didn’t useta. Only since Brendan went.”
“She’s worried, kid,” Cal says. “She just wants to know that you’re not thinking of going anywhere.”
Trey shrugs, tossing the can into the plastic bag. The light has gone out of his face. “OK,” Cal says. “Now that you’ve got the idea, let’s get ourselves some dinner.”
That pulls the kid back; his head snaps up again. “Where?”
“That piece of woodland over there,” Cal says, nodding towards it. “Rabbits got a bunch of burrows at the edge of that. I see them up feeding most evenings, around this time. Come on.”
They collect the beer cans and set themselves up far enough from the little wood not to spook the rabbits, but close enough that the kid stands a chance. Then they wait. The gold in the west has shifted to pink and the light is starting to fade, turning the fields gray-green and insubstantial. Off in Cal’s garden, the rooks are having their bedtime powwow; distance gentles their racket to a comfortable babble, running under the high scattered chitchat of the smaller birds.
Trey has the rifle resting carefully on his knee, ready to raise. He says, “You said your granddaddy taught you to shoot.”
“That’s right.”
“How come not your dad?”
“Like I told you. He wasn’t around a lot.”
“You said not steady.”
“That’s right.”
Trey thinks this over. “How come your mam didn’t teach you? Was she not steady either?”
“No,” Cal says, “my mama was steady as they come. She worked two jobs to pay our way. Thing is, that meant she wasn’t home enough to watch me. So she sent me to stay with my granddaddy and my grandma, most of the time, till I got big enough to watch myself. And that’s why he’s the one that taught me to shoot.”
Trey absorbs this, watching the edge of the wood. “What jobs?”
“Care assistant in an old folks’ home. And waitressing in a diner, in her time off.”
“My mam used to work in the petrol station up the main road,” Trey says. “When Emer went off, but, there was no one to mind the little ones while we were in school. My granddads and grannies’re all dead.”