Free Red Dog by Jason Miller Page B

said. “Example, I know you unscrew that baffling, you’ll get a better lope.”
    â€œI like my lope just fine.”
    â€œWhatever. I get a ride on that?”
    â€œNo.”
    He looked at me regretfully a moment. Finally, he decided he didn’t want a ride on the bike with the pitiful exhaust note anyway and shrugged and said, “You after Carol Ray?”
    â€œI might be. You her boy?”
    â€œI’m a boy,” he said. Unnecessarily, I thought. He looked at Anci and smiled with every tooth in his head and then looked back at me. “But not hers. I take messages for her sometimes.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œService for which I get five dollars.”
    Reluctantly, I took out my wallet. The boy licked his lips and craned his neck to look inside the billfold. I had a ten but no fives.
    â€œYou got change?”
    â€œSure don’t.”
    He took the ten.
    He said, “Carol Ray ain’t here.”
    â€œI think I want my money back.”
    â€œShe’s over to Shotguns & Shakes.”
    â€œThat a place?”
    â€œLast I looked. Got a parking lot and a sign. Carol Ray works there.”
    â€œDo you know the address?”
    He said, “Do you know how to Google?” and smiled again at Anci before slipping away to await the appearance of his next mark.
    Behind me, Anci said, “What a wonderful boy.”
    In fact, I thought he was a bad boy, a terrible boy, but I refrained from saying so. I was still in that time of life where I wasn’t sure how to react when she said such things. Boy-related things, I guess I mean. Other parents had cautioned me that, to some extent, anyway, I’d have to let Anci make her own choices and—yea, verily—even her own mistakes. Mainly, they said, it was important that I not overreact, but I confess that part of me wanted to walk quietly into the sea whenever the subject came up.
    Anyway, we rode into town and grabbed that coffee. Anci had more ice in hers. Mine was straight up. I wanted a pastry, too, but I’d given most of my cash to that little con artist, so I settled for frowns. Then the two of us looked up Shotguns & Shakes on Google and discovered where and what it was.
    Anci said, “You got to be kidding me.”
    â€œIt’s the world we’ve made for ourselves,” I replied.
    Shotguns & Shakes—a combination burger joint/shooting range with an emphasis on getting firearms into the hands of little ones—was south and east of us a little in the abandoned strip fields and farmland near Moake Crossing and the retail sprawl that had built up around the I-57 exchange. There was a restaurant with some picnic tables and playground-type equipment outside and in the field beyond a hot zone of funnel traps and an impact berm maybe thirteen or fourteen feet high situated just north of the complex and facing the old Tombstone Lakes. The restaurant was busy with an early lunch crowd kitted out in Realtree and Mossy Oak and Carhartt, but we managed to snag a harried-looking food server and some directions.
    â€œRange B,” he said, and pointed. “Grab some cans before you go out.”
    We grabbed the aforementioned ear protection and walked around outside in the booming air. Everywhere was the crack of gunfire: small arms, long guns, something that sounded like a bazooka. A five-year-old ran past us carrying what appeared to be an Uzi, laughing manically.
    â€œWhere do you think her parents are?” Anci asked.
    â€œIn Kevlar, if they’ve got any sense.”
    After a while, we found four men and one woman firing shotguns on a trap range near the edge of the complex. The men were regulation upper-middle-class rural sportsmen—jowl-cheeked and gutty—but the woman was a surprise. Carol Ray was twenty years younger than I imagined she’d be. She was tall and willow-thin, with expensively cut blond hair and an adorably crooked mouth. She had pale blue eyesand a