Free The Times Are Never So Bad by Andre Dubus Page B

sheath, felt its edge, stroked its blood gutter. But, see, we gave all his stuff away . That was when she understood he had been talking about Kingsley, and she had again that experience peculiar to marriage, of entering a conversation that had been active for hours in her husband’s mind. Now she brought her father to the showcase of knives and showed him, and he said: ‘Unless he’s good with it at thirty feet, he might as well not have it at all. Not now, anyways.’
    Next day, in the sunlit evening of daylight savings time, at an old gravel pit grown with weeds and enclosed by woods on three sides, with a dirt road at one end and a bluff at the other, her father propped a silhouette of a man’s torso and head against the bluff, walked twenty paces from it, and gave her the pistol. He had bought it in his name, because she was waiting for the license, and he could not receive the gun in Maine, so a clerk from the Trading Post, who lived in Massachusetts where he was also a gun dealer, brought it home to Amesbury, and her father got it during his lunch hour.
    â€˜It loads just like the .22,’ he said.
    A squirrel chattered in the trees on the bluff. She pushed seven bullets into the magazine, slid it into the handle, and, pointing the gun at the bluff, pulled the slide to the rear and let it snap forward; the hammer was cocked, and she pushed up the safety. Then he told her to take out the magazine and eject the chambered shell: it flipped to the ground, and he wiped it on his pants and gave it to her and told her to load it again; he kept her loading and unloading for ten minutes or so, saying he was damned if he’d get her shot making a mistake with a gun that was supposed to protect her.
    â€˜Shoot it like you did the .22 and aim for his middle.’
    He had taught her to shoot his Colt .22, and she had shot with him on weekends in spring and summer and fall until her midteens, when her pleasures changed and she went with him just often enough to keep him from being hurt because she had outgrown shooting cans and being with him for two hours of a good afternoon; or often enough to keep her from believing he was hurt. She stood profiled to the target, aimed with one extended hand, thumbed the safety off, and, looking over the cocked hammer and barrel at the shape of a man, could not fire.
    â€˜The Miller can,’ she said, and, shifting her feet, aimed at the can at the base of the bluff, held her breath, and squeezed to an explosion that shocked her ears and pushed her arm up and back as dust flew a yard short of the can.
    â€˜Jesus Christ .’
    â€˜Reminds me of what I forgot,’ he said and, standing behind her, he pulled back her hair and gently pushed cotton into her ears. ‘Better go for the target. They didn’t make that gun to hit something little.’
    â€˜It’s the head. If we could fold it back.’
    He patted her shoulder.
    â€˜Just aim for the middle, and shoot that piece of cardboard.’
    Cardboard , she told herself as she lined up the sights on the torso’s black middle and fired six times, but shoulder she thought when she saw the first hole, missed, stomach, chest, shoulder, stomach , and she felt clandestine and solemn, as though performing a strange ritual that would forever change her. She was suddenly tired. As she loaded the magazine, images of the past two nights and two days assaulted her, filled her memory so she could not recall doing anything during that time except kneeling between a knife and Ray’s cock, riding in her father’s truck—home, to the studio, to City Hall, to Kittery, home, to this woods—and being photographed and fingerprinted and questioned and pointing guns at the walls and ceiling of the store, and tomorrow night she had to wait tables, always wiping them, emptying ashtrays, bantering, smiling, soberly watching them get drunk, their voices louder than the jukebox playing music she would