Wormfood (12 page)

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
.

I wasn’t sure what to do, so I raised my right arm and kind of waved back. Actually, it took me a few seconds to figure out that she wasn’t so much waving at me as she was waving me over to her, beckoning me.

For a moment, I couldn’t move. The idea that someone like Misty Johnson was calling me over to her snapped something in my brain, disrupted the flow of thoughts, and so I stood rooted to my spot under the oak tree. She kept waving at me.

I left all the spent casings behind and didn’t waste much time getting across the field.

She had the upper half of her body out of the driver’s window, resting on her elbows, watching me get closer. Her arms pressed her breasts together, pushing them up and out. I think she knew what she was doing, knew exactly the kind of effect it was having on me. I stopped on my side of the old barbed wire fence, trying hard not to stare up at her.

“I was watching you shoot,” she said. “You’re pretty good. Never missed once.”

I shrugged and stammered out something like, “I get a lot of practice.”

“I’ll bet. What’s your name?”

“Arch Stanton.”

“You live here?” Before I could answer, she said, “I’ve seen you at school, right?”

I shrugged again, trying to blurt out something, anything. “Ah … uh-huh.” That’s me—Mr. Smooth. I was just glad she didn’t mention seeing me yesterday morning, when her dad went for a swim in the ditch.

“Wanna go for a ride?”

My heart stopped. “Uhh … A ride?”

She sat back, pulling her body into the truck, then held up a rifle. For the briefest second, I found that I could tear my eyes off her breasts and focus on the rifle. It looked expensive. But then she stuck her head back out the window and thrust that chest at me again, and I forgot all about the rifle. My gaze slid right back into place, like a couple magnets were pulling at my eyes.