Free This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff

isolated, is all.”
    “Not that isolated,” Dwight said.
    “Well,” Norma said, “maybe not that isolated. Pretty isolated, though.”
    “There’s plenty to do here if you kids would just take a little initiative,” Dwight said. “When I was growing up we didn’t have all the things you kids have, we didn’t have record players, we didn’t have TVs, all of that, but we were never bored. We were never bored. We used our imaginations. We read the classics. We played musical instruments. There is absolutely no excuse for a kid to be bored, not in my book there isn’t. You show me a bored kid and I’ll show you a lazy kid.”
    My mother glanced at Dwight, then turned back to Norma and Skipper. “You’ll be graduating this year, right?” she said to Skipper.
    He nodded.
    “And you have another year,” she said to Norma.
    “One more year,” Norma said. “One more year and watch my dust.”
    “How’s the school here?”
    “They don’t have one. Just a grade school. We go to Concrete.”
    “Concrete?”
    “Concrete High,” Norma said.
    “That’s the name of a town?”
    “We passed it on the way up,” Dwight said. “Concrete.”
    “Concrete,” my mother repeated.
    “It’s a few miles downriver,” Dwight said.
    “Forty miles,” Norma said.
    “Come off it,” Dwight said. “It’s not that far.”
    “Thirty-nine miles,” Skipper said. “Exactly. I measured it on the odometer.”
    “What’s the difference!” Dwight said. “You’d bellyache just as much if the goddamned school was next door. If all you can do is complain, I would thank you to just stow it. Just kindly stow it.” Dwight kept looking back as he talked. His lower lip was curled out, and his bottom teeth showed. The car wandered the road.
    “I’m in fifth grade,” Pearl said.
    Nobody answered her.
    We drove on for a while. Then my mother asked Dwight to pull over. She wanted to take some pictures. She had Dwight and Norma and Skipper and Pearl stand together on the side of the road with snowy peaks sticking up behind them. Then Norma grabbed the camera and started ordering everyone around. The last picture she took was of me and Pearl. “Closer!” she yelled. “Come on! Okay, now hold hands. Hold hands! You know, hands? Like on the end of your arms?” She ran up to us, took Pearl’s left hand, put it in my right hand, wrapped my fingers around it, then ran back to her vantage point and aimed the camera at us.
    Pearl let her hand go dead limp. So did I. We both stared at Norma. “Jeez,” she said. “Dead on arrival.”
    On the way back to Chinook my mother said, “Dwight, I didn’t know you played an instrument. What do you play?”
    Dwight was chewing on an unlit cigar. He took it out of his mouth. “A little piano,” he said. “Mainly sax. Alto sax.”
    Skipper and Norma looked quickly at each other, then looked away again, out the windows.

    WHEN DWIGHT FIRST invited us to Chinook he’d won me over by mentioning that the rifle club was going to hold a turkey shoot. If I wanted to, he said, I could bring my Winchester along and enter the contest. I hadn’t fired or even held my rifle since we left Salt Lake. Every couple of weeks or so I tore the house apart looking for it, but my mother had it hidden somewhere else, probably in her office downtown.
    I thought of the trip to Chinook as a reunion with my rifle. During art period I made drawings of it and showed them to Taylor and Silver, who affected disbelief in its existence. I also painted a picture that depicted me sighting down the the barrel of my rifle at a big gobbler with rolling eyes and long red wattles.
    The turkey shoot was at noon. Dwight and Pearl and my mother and I drove down to the firing range while Skipper went off to work on a car that he was customizing and Norma stayed home to cook. Not until we reached the range did Dwight get around to telling me that in fact there would be no turkey at this turkey shoot. The targets were