Free This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff Page A

paper—regulation match targets. They weren’t even giving a turkey away; the prize was a smoked Virginia ham. Turkey shoot was just a figure of speech, Dwight said. He thought everybody knew that.
    He also let drop, casually, as if the information were of no consequence, that I would not be allowed to shoot after all. It was for grown-ups, not kids. That was all they needed, a bunch of kids running around with guns.
    “But you said I could.”
    Dwight was assembling my Winchester, which he apparently meant to use himself. “They just told me a couple of days ago,” he said.
    I could tell he was lying—that he’d known all along. I couldn’t do a thing but stand there and look at him. Pearl, smiling a little, watched me.
    “Dwight,” my mother said, “you did tell him.”
    He said, “I don’t make the rules, Rosemary.”
    I started to argue, but my mother gave my shoulder a hard squeeze. When I glanced up at her she shook her head.
    Dwight couldn’t figure out how the rifle fit together, so I did it for him while he looked on. “That,” he said, “is the most stupidly constructed firearm I have ever seen, bar none.”
    A man with a clipboard came up to us. He was collecting entry fees. After Dwight paid him he started to move off, but my mother stopped him and held out some money. He looked at it, then down at his clipboard.
    “Wolff,” she said. “Rosemary Wolff.”
    Still studying his clipboard, he asked if she wanted to shoot.
    She said she did.
    He looked over at Dwight, who busied himself with the rifle. Then he dropped his eyes again and mumbled something about the rules.
    “This is an NRA club, isn’t it?” my mother asked.
    He nodded.
    “Well, I am a dues-paying member of the NRA, and that gives me the right to participate in the activities of other chapters when I’m away from my own.” She said all of this very pleasantly.
    Finally he took the money. “You’ll be the only woman shooting,” he said.
    She smiled.
    He wrote her name down. “Why not?” he said suddenly, uncertainly. “Why the heck not.” He gave her a number and wandered off to another group of shooters.
    Dwight’s number was called early. He fired his ten rounds in rapid succession, hardly pausing for breath, and got a rotten score. A couple of his shots hadn’t even hit the paper. When his score was announced he handed my mother the rifle. “Where’d you get this blunderbuss, anyway?” he asked me.
    My mother answered. “A friend of mine gave it to him.”
    “Some friend,” he said. “That thing is a menace. You ought to get rid of it. It shoots wild.” He added, “The bore is probably rusted out.”
    “The bore is perfect,” I said.
    My mother’s number should have been called after Dwight’s, but it wasn’t. One man after another went up to the line while she stood there watching. I got antsy and cold. After a long wait I walked over to the river and tried to skip rocks. A mist drifted over the water. My fingers grew numb but I kept at it until the sound of rifle fire stopped, leaving a silence in which I felt too much alone. When I came back my mother had finished her turn. She was standing around with some of the men. Others were putting their rifles in their cars, passing bottles back and forth, calling to each other as they drove away into the dusk.
    “You missed me!” she said when I came up.
    I asked her how she had done.
    “Dwight brought in a ringer,” one of the men said.
    “Did you win?”
    She nodded.
    “You won? No kidding?”
    She struck a pose with the rifle.
    I waited while my mother joked around with the men, laughing, trading mild insults, flushed with cold and the pleasure of being admired. Then she said good-bye and we walked toward the car. I said, “I didn’t know you were a member of the NRA.”
    “I’m a little behind in my dues,” she said.
    Dwight and Pearl were sitting in the front seat with the ham between them. Neither of them spoke when we got in. Dwight pulled