“Dammit!” she said. Her face was redly angry. “I’m sorry, Sonny.”
“Nice ride,” I said. “But now I’m going to have to sweat my ass off getting us unstuck.”
“No, you’re not.”
She got out of the car and ducked down out of sight for a minute by one of the rear wheels and then went around and squatted by the other one and then got back in the car. She put the car in gear and eased out the clutch and we slowly rolled forward and back onto the trail.
“What’d you do?” I said.
“Let a bunch of air out the back tires so they get a better grip in the sand. It’s an old trick Daddy taught me. We got to take it kind of easy getting back, though. Till we can fill them back up again.” She was smiling as we plodded along.
I said, “Stop the car a minute.”
She did, and looked at me in question. I leaned over and kissed her a good one.
“Whoo,” she said. “What’s that for?”
“Call it a yen. Any objections?”
“Oh no sir,” she said with a big grin. “Matter of fact I’m getting some yens of my own. Why don’t we hustle on back home and I’ll show you them?”
“Let’s do that,” I said.
Her driving wasn’t the only surprise of the week. The next day we were out on another truck trail and she was barreling through the curves with even more skill and confidence than the day before—and then she unexpectedly hit the brakes in the middle of a long straight stretch. The sudden stop threw me hard against the dash and I bonked my head on the windshield. A cloud of raised dust rolled over us.
“Oh baby, I’m sorry—you all right?” She was all big-eyed. “But jeezo, did you see the size of it?”
“Of what?” I said, rubbing my forehead.
“Rattlesnake. In the road ahead. He’s probably gone now.”
We strained to see through the settling dust. “I don’t see it no more,” she said.
“There,” I said, and pointed.
It was a good-sized rattler, all right, about fifteen yards away and alongside the trail, coiled in front of a creosote shrub. It was nearly the same color as the sand and hard to spot. Except for the darker bush behind it I might not have seen it.
I took the Smith & Wesson six-inch out from under the seat and eased the door open and stepped out. I held the revolver in a two-hand grip and braced my arms on top of the windshield frame, then cocked the piece and took a bead and squeezed off the shot.
The bang was swallowed almost instantly in all that open space and the sand kicked up a little to the right and slightly behind the snake. It drew into a tighter coil.
“Almost,” Belle said.
“Almost only counts in horseshoes,” I said.
I hit it with the next one—knocking the rattler into a writhing tangle. I walked up to within a few feet of it and shot it twice more and it stopped moving. Belle came up beside me as I straightened it out some with my foot. It was close to five feet long, even bigger than I’d thought.
“Wow,” she said. “Look at it.”
“It’s one less hardcase in the world,” I said, and headed back to the car. I released the revolver’s cylinder and put my thumb over the two live rounds still in it and shook out the empty shells. I had a box of .38 cartridges under the driver’s seat and I got it out and reloaded.
She lingered over the snake a moment before coming back to the car. “Nice shooting, huh?” I was a little surprised to realize I’d been showing off, that I wanted to impress her.
“Yeah,” she said. “Nice.” There was something else on her mind.
“What?” I said.
“Sonny,” she said. It was the voice she used when she didn’t quite know how to broach a subject. She looked over at a bunch of prickly pear, then off at the mountains, then finally back at me. “Teach me?”
“What? You mean shoot?”
“Yeah.”
“You never fired a gun?”
“Daddy was always going to show me but never did get the chance.”
I took the bullets out of the .38 and passed it to her so she could get the feel of its heft and its fit in her grip. I showed her how to stand sidelong to the target to shoot with one hand and how to face it when you shoot with two and how to use the front sight. I showed her how to squeeze the trigger rather than jerk it. How to cock the hammer and uncock it again without firing. How to unlock the cylinder and how the ejector rod worked and how to load the chambers.
“I love the sounds of it,” she said. She spun the cylinder to hear its soft whirr. She cocked the hammer with its softly ratcheting double click and snapped it on an empty chamber. “It sounds so…I don’t know. Efficient.”
“That’s the word for it,” I said.
I gathered a few stones about the size of my fist and set them in a row on top of a waist-high mound of sand, then backed up about a dozen yards and reloaded the piece and handed it to her. I told her to shoot into the mound first, to get used to the report and the recoil.
She stood facing forward with a two-hand grip. Pop! She flinched hardly at all. She turned and looked at me and silently formed the word, “Wow!” Then stood sideways and fired two one-hand shots.
“Oh man!” she said. “I can do this. Watch the rock on the right.”
She took careful aim. Pop! Sand spurted an inch to the side of the rock.
“Hey girl, almost.” I was impressed.
“Almost is for horseshoes,” she said without looking at me, taking aim again, the tip of her tongue in the corner of her mouth. Missing again, this time by a slightly wider margin.
“Dammit!”
She drew another bead and held it. Then lowered the revolver to her waist and regarded the rock like she was seeing it in some different way. Then brought the gun up smoothly and fired and the rock went flying.
“Whooo!” I applauded. “Give em hell, Kitty Belle!”
She whirled around to me, wide-eyed. “Know how I did it? I didn’t think about it or even aim so much, I just sort of up and pointed at it, like with my finger. It felt, I don’t know, so natural.”
“I’ll be damn,” I said. “Fired six rounds in her life and already she’s giving lessons how to shoot.” I was smiling when I said it, but I was also flat amazed.
She opened the cylinder and shoved out the empty shells with the ejector rod. “More bullets, please,” she said.
I let her shoot up the whole box. She missed about as much as she hit but she always came close. It was damn good shooting, any way you looked at it. And you could see she loved it. It was in the brightness of her eyes, in the way she set herself to fire, in her eagerness to reload. By the time she’d used up the last of the cartridges she was as easy with a gun as she was behind the wheel of a car. It comes that naturally to some.
“Not bad, girl,” I said when she was done. “If you want, I’ll bring the .380 tomorrow and show you how to shoot that.”
She leaped into my arms, locking her legs around my waist and giving me an unintentional conk on the back of the head with the revolver in her hand.
“Oh I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said, and kissed my head—and then we were both laughing as I swung her around.
We stopped at the swimming hole to cool off before going home. There were a few kids there, swinging on the rope and splashing around, but they left pretty soon after we arrived, and we had the place to ourselves. We dogpaddled over to a shady spot under a dense overhang of tree branches where we could stand with the water up to our necks. We ran our hands all over each other under the water and she undid my pants and took hold of me and I slipped my hand up under her dress and underwear and we hugged close and gasped against each other’s neck as we used our hands on each other and a minute later both of us groaned with our climax. Then hugged and kissed and got into another laughing fit.