Free The Other Shoe by Matt Pavelich Page A

knocked ’em over with sticks while they were looking at me. Species like that, I don’t see how you could call ’em a game bird, and I also don’t see how they survive, but they do, and they’re everywhere. And you can eat ’em. Pretty dark meat, and gamy, but if you don’t need variety, and if you didn’t need a few vitamins, you could probably live off of just grouse.”
    â€œSounds like a awful lot of feathers and guts to me,” she said. “They must really breed like rabbits, huh?”
    Her bird was the magpie, she told him. She stalked them with a wrist rocket. She said she’d flung an awful lot of shots at them and never hit one; everywhere you went, there’s another magpie standing just out of range, or standing on a window ledge, an inch from a big, expensive window—they did not make targets of themselves, and if they were as elegant a bird as the sky could ever offer, still they never pretended to be anything but scavengers, and something irresistible in her told her to drive them off. “But I never do connect,” she said. “I don’t even wing ’em or anything, ’cause I’m right-handed and left-eyed, that’s what I think it is. It’s that and my ammunition. Can’talways afford marbles or think to buy ’em when I’m in a store, and I absolutely cannot make a rock fly straight. Almost any rock’s gonna wobble or hook or go way catawampus when you shoot it.”
    â€œWell,” said Mr. Brusett, “I got something you should try.” He stopped again, this time to let her fire his little pistol, and she used a box of cartridges to chase shattering pinecones down the road. Mr. Brusett said that he had quite a few more bullets for it, and he’d give them to her, give her the bullets and the gun, too, because she’d sure get better use of it than he ever could. She was a natural. Though it was so, and though she wanted as much more shooting as she could get, Karen said, “No.” She said that he was trying to be way too kind. “ Too nice ?” she said. “I wouldn’t know how to deal with that.” But Karen stood to be persuaded; she did love the accomplishment of hitting, with that little catch in the breath, hitting exactly where she aimed. With the pistol would come that black holster, too, and she could certainly see that strapped to her thigh. But then she happened to think that in her short acquaintance of the gun, she’d learned to make it deadly but not how to make it safe.
    â€œAnd who needs another tragedy?” she said. “You’re always hearing about people gettin’ shot. I can’t believe how many people seem to get shot, and a lot of ’em for not too good a reason.” Still, she wanted it. “No,” she said, “that’d be way too much.” But she wanted her little sweetheart, with its bark and its bite, she wanted that pistol pretty keenly now.

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    F ROM THEIR FIRST afternoon together Henry Brusett said that he knew he’d eventually bore her, but in the beginning she saw no end to him. Though he warned her early on that he’d been named a mental defective by the Social Security Administration, they both thought him competent enough to teach her how to shoot, to hunt and fish, how to run a saw in slash and in heavy timber. He would not, he said, show her his way of doing things; he would show her the right way, and in his company she finally learned to read the country she’d so poorly inhabited thus far, for Mr. Brusett knew what wanted direct sun and what wanted shade; he knew what lived in standing water and which birds ate voles and which birds ate berries and seed; he could find weasel, ferret, and ringtail pheasant if he wanted them; and viscerally he contained the knowledge of the day, sometimes the hour, when trees would fruit, when flowers would bloom; and when all these things