Free Chinese Handcuffs by Chris Crutcher

brand-new. Dillon collected both twenty-two rifles from the back and leaned them against the van before scouting the area for unsuspecting bottles and cans. Crown Point was a well-known make-out spot for Three Forks teenagers and offered up an abundance of beer and pop containers, and Dillon filled two empty cases with them while Preston wheeled the weaponry to a good flat spot from which to shoot.
    While Dillon placed the targets carefully on tree stumps and fence posts and in the crooks of the branches of trees, Preston loaded the Luger’s clip and filled the chamber of each of the rifles. Their game was simple: Choose a target; miss it and the points double for the other guy. No target was placed closer than thirty yards, and at least four of eleven were more than forty-five. Preston didn’t miss one in the first round and finished it with a count of seven to Dillon’s four. When Preston shattered a Bud bottle Dillon could barely see in the crotch of two large tree branches for his seventh to end the first round, Dillon hustled out to set up another eleven, thinking all the while how strange Preston wasacting, how he kept shifting from loud and engaging to distant and silent. Preston had been silent throughout the last four shots.
    â€œYou feeling okay?” Dillon asked, walking back toward him from the tree where Preston had shattered the final Bud.
    Preston had wheeled his chair nearly twenty feet from the spot they’d been shooting from, leaving the rifles back on the ground. The Luger was in his lap.
    â€œNot tough enough, huh?” Dillon said. “Need a little bigger challenge?”
    Preston picked up the pistol and fingered it slowly, looking down at it momentarily, then back at Dillon. Dillon thought for a split second Preston was going to shoot him. “Hey, Pres,” he said, stopping at the rifles, “what’s the matter?”
    â€œA lot,” Preston said. “A lot’s the matter.”
    â€œWhat.”
    â€œWell, to start with,” he said, picking up the gun in both hands and leveling it at one of the closer bottles, “you. You’re the matter.” He pulled the trigger, and the Luger jumped in his hands. The bottle nearly vaporized.
    Dillon watched carefully, confused as to how he should feel, whether to be scared or not, as Prestonleveled the gun again, this time kicking a can on the cemetery fence post ten feet into the air. “What’re you talking about?” Dillon said. “What do you mean I’m the matter?”
    â€œI got to go out honest,” Preston said. “If nothing else, I got to go out honest. Do you know what it’s like watching what I could have been if I were big and strong and so goddamn cool all the time? So frigging funny?”
    Dillon took a breath. “No, I guess I don’t.”
    Preston nodded. “Nope. I guess you don’t.” He nailed a bottle at the edge of a ground squirrel hole. “Well,” he said, “it ain’t a lot of fun.”
    Dillon started toward him, but in that instant the barrel of the Luger was tight against Preston’s temple. He said, “Stand fast, soldier.”
    Dillon stood fast. “Hey, Pres, you on something?”
    Preston reached into his coat pocket and turned it inside out, dumping a mid-size street pharmacy onto the ground. “Yeah,” he said, smiling, “I’m on a little something.”
    Dillon’s throat knotted. He knew he might not have a chance to slow this down with Preston on drugs. He couldn’t for the life of him predict Preston when he was high. For one thing he never knew what drugs Preston had taken, and even if he did, he’d neverknown all that much about the effects of drugs anyway. “We can talk about this,” he said.
    â€œOh, yeah, we can. We can talk about it.” Preston lowered the Luger to his lap. “Go ahead, little bro. Go ahead and talk about it.”
    Dillon stood