Free This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff Page B

away fast and drove straight back to the house, where he clomped down the hall to his room and closed the door behind him.
    We joined Norma and Skipper in the kitchen. Norma had taken the turkey out of the oven, and the house was rich with its smell. When she found out that my mother had won, she said, “Oh boy, now we’re really in for it. He thinks he’s some kind of big hunter.”
    “He killed a deer once,” Pearl said.
    “That was with the car,” Norma said.
    Skipper got up and went down the hall to Dwight’s room. A few minutes later they both came back, Dwight stiff and awkward. Skipper teased him in a shy, affectionate way, and Dwight took it well, and my mother acted as if nothing had happened. Then Dwight perked up and made drinks for the two of them and pretty soon we were having a good time. We sat down at the beautiful table Norma had laid for us, and we ate turkey and dressing and candied yams and giblet gravy and cranberry sauce. After we ate, we sang. We sang “Harvest Moon,” “Side by Side,” “Moonlight Bay,” “Birmingham Jail,” and “High above Cayuga’s Waters.” I got compliments for knowing all the words. We toasted Norma for cooking the turkey, and my mother for winning the turkey shoot.
    My mother was still flushed, expansive. All the talk about turkey reminded her of a Thanksgiving she and my brother and I had spent on a turkey farm in Connecticut after the war. Housing was scarce, and we were broke, so my father had boarded us with these turkey farmers while he went down to work in Peru. The turkey farmers were novices. Before Thanksgiving they’d butchered their birds in an unheated shed, and all the blood froze in their bodies and turned them purple. The local butcher came out for a look. He suggested that the birds be kept in a warm bath for a few days—maybe that would loosen things up and turn them pink. The bath they used was ours. For almost two weeks we had these bumpy blue carcasses floating in the tub.
    Dwight was quiet after my mother told her story. Then he told one of his own about a Thanksgiving he’d spent in the Philippines, when starving Japanese soldiers ran out of the jungle and grabbed food right off the chow line, and nobody even tried to shoot them.
    That story reminded Pearl of Chinese checkers. Dwight and Skipper refused to play, but the rest of us joined in. First we played as free agents and then in teams. Pearl and I played the last round together. It was close—very close. When Pearl made the winning move we jumped up and down, and crowed, and pounded each other on the back.
     
    DWIGHT DROVE US down to Seattle early the next morning. He stopped on the bridge leading out of camp so we could see the salmon in the water below. He pointed them out to us, dark shapes among the rocks. They had come all the way from the ocean to spawn here, Dwight said, and then they would die. They were already dying. The change from salt to fresh water had turned their flesh rotten. Long strips of it hung off their bodies, waving in the current.
    T aylor and Silver and I sometimes hung out in the bathroom during lunch hour. We smoked cigarettes and combed our hair and exchanged interesting facts not available to the general public about women.
    It was just after Thanksgiving. I told Taylor and Silver and a couple of weed fiends who practically lived in the bathroom the story of how I’d killed the turkey in Chinook. “I mean I blew it off, man—I blew his fucking head right off!”
    At first nobody responded. Silver did the French inhale, then slowly blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “With a .22,” he said.
    “Fuckin’ A,” I said. “Winchester .22. Pump.”
    “Wolff,” he said, “you are so full of shit.”
    “Fuck you, Silver. I don’t care what you think.”
    “All a .22 would do is just make a hole in his head.”
    I took a drag and let the smoke come out of my mouth as I talked. “One bullet, maybe.”
    “Oh. Oh, I see—you hit him more than