“I’m not in the mood,” Kathryn says.
“I’m in the mood.”
“It’s okay,” Michael says to Kathryn. “You don’t want to bother them, do you?”
“I don’t like kids and guns in the same space.”
“I’ll go talk to them. I’ll ask if it’s okay.”
Gary says, “I don’t give a damn. I hauled three gross clay pigeons up here and we are going to shoot every one. We are going to drink beer and we are going to shoot guns. It’s Friday night and we are Americans.”
“Easy. Five minutes.”
As Michael crosses the field, Kathryn packs away the stove. Gary goes round to the far side of the truck, where she can’t see him, and sifts through boxes. He slides a double-barreled twelve-gauge out of a soft case and cracks it open. The metal sounds crisp.
It’s a safe place to shoot. They camp in “the field,” the timber ghost town of Spruce. Nothing’s left but scorched foundations, a lone switchman’s shack, and the odd pile of rusted peavey-heads in the weeds. At four thousand feet, Spruce was once the highest incorporated town in the east. Fifteen hundred people lived up here — with hotel, church, and post office — but they never buried anyone, the true measure of settlement. Spruce lasted twelve years. It’s an old story, no secret place. In spring and fall, fishermen bound for Shavers walk seven miles up the ruined track. Kathryn has finagled a gate key to the private road — she’s the only native in the department and knows how to talk — and fishermen are amazed to find a big, dual-wheeled truck parked up there. “How’d you get on that road?” they ask, salivating. “Connections,” she says. In bright summer, trout grow wary, and fishermen leave. The researchers have it to themselves. Until that man and his girl appeared.
Birds shatter from the field.
He shot me.
He didn’t, no, he shot a beer bottle on a stump. Battering off the ridge, echoes recede in waves. Gary pops open the breech, and twin trails of gun smoke drift. Kathryn has to sit. She pats herself down. She clutches her head, as if to keep it from being unscrewed.
“Sorry! Kathryn, look at me. I didn’t mean to scare you. I thought you saw me. I did.”
Michael returns with man and daughter in tow. “Hi!” Shelly says to Kathryn.
The man sticks out his hand. “I’m Russ,” he says, “Russ Nedermeyer. Good meeting you.”
Names and bottles of beer are introduced all around. Nedermeyer keeps on talking. He has an Eisenhower jacket, a brown crewcut under a ball cap, and a five-day beard — in an odd way, he looks clean-shaven just the same. It’s his stride, crisp and confident, and he wears a camouflage t-shirt, the kind sporting-goods stores sell from a cardboard box. It sags over a slight belly and blue jeans gone white and soft. Kathryn can tell he’s local. He has that accent, somewhere between a twang and a brogue, a run-on voice with words tripping over each other and along. Not southern, but musical and watery, like stones knocking underwater. An accent Kathryn has taken pains to cull from her own throat. She wants to be taken seriously.
Gary says, “You all are on vacation up here.”
It’s not a question.
Nedermeyer grins. “That’s right. Shelly and me are having a big time.”
“You like to shoot?”
“Love it.”
Everyone makes sure to keep Shelly back, and she revels in the attention. They sink each leg of the clay-pigeon thrower and point it at the forest. The string has dry-rotted, so Gary’s bootlace is volunteered. Discs are flung in wild, wobbling arcs, slivers of toxic orange against the blue. They shoot for an hour. Shoulders purple and ache sweetly. Nedermeyer cancels one and cancels the other. He can’t miss. He knocks double after double from the sky, the best shot by far.
“I was a piss-poor shot till the navy. You be surprised how much the navy makes you shoot. You wouldn’t think that, would you? Maybe we ought to bet money on this. No?”
Between shots, he delivers a running monologue on their family life. Some of it makes Kathryn blush, with Shelly there listening. “Her mom’s on drugs. She’s living in Baltimore, it’s a damned crack house, she don’t even get visitation. Wish I was lying to you.”
That’s hard, they all agree.
Nedermeyer makes a little shrugging hitch with his shoulders. “Her decision. Last time I went, there had to be eight guys in there, smoking the pinkest biker rock you ever seen. Air tasted like Drano on the back of your tongue. Don’t marry young, is all I can say. I got Shelly out of there. Judge drug his feet on it like you wouldn’t believe. No telling what she saw.”
Separately, the adults imagine the vile things Shelly encountered.
Readjusting to this, Kathryn looks at the girl. No response. Shelly’s heard all this before. Yellow piles of shotgun hulls accrue at their feet, and Shelly makes a game of racing forward between shots and gathering them up. Nedermeyer hands the shotgun over to Kathryn.
“Knock them down,” he says. “Shelly! Get back from there! Throw-arm on that thing’ll break your effing leg.”
Kathryn shoots a dozen times, missing all but three. She’s distracted.
“You lost your touch,” Michael tells her.
“It comes and goes.” She hands the shotgun back.
Nedermeyer guesses, correctly, that Kathryn grew up shooting. “I can tell.”
Gary drinks beer and makes small talk with the girl. He’s good with children. It’s surprising. Kathryn feels a little off balance. Maybe she’s drinking hers too fast.
Nedermeyer tells them, “God, I love this. Been too long. Too long. We used to hunt grouse. Raised English setters. My dad, I mean. No more birds to speak of. Pull!”
Kathryn smiles in spite of herself. Nedermeyer is half the people she went to high school with: a garrulous semi — con man, damn good with tools, maybe a little into drugs, basically harmless. A serious talker. He’s a new type for the others. They spent their years in the labs and classrooms of a tamed college town. They don’t know the local animals. Gary’s from the suburbs of Minneapolis, and Michael grew up in DC, the only white kid in his school.
It’s inevitable, so Kathryn asks Nedermeyer where he’s from.
They grew up a few miles apart, in Tuscarora County, to the north.
“What’s your last name?”
“Tennant,” she says.
“Aw, shit. I know your dad.” Then, more softly: “Well, I knew him.”
Kathryn’s heart thrills and saddens at the same time. Nedermeyer doesn’t say anything else. He senses not to. She sees that in his face. He offers the box of shells. She waves it off.
Gunpowder curling in her nose. It reminds her of squirrel hunting with her father. No one thought it strange, he had no sons. Her mother would boil two eggs in the dark kitchen, and Kathryn would stick her hands in the pockets of the oversized hunting vest and clutch them for warmth. Once they cooled, she peeled each egg in the woods for a late breakfast. Her father smiled as she popped each yolk, a miniature sun, into her mouth. Before each shot he’d whisper, Plug your ears. Sitting on a log with him, she could feel the dull, muffled percussion through her seat, her spine. Bodies fell from the trees. Gathering them into the game bag in her vest. Feeling them lose warmth against her back. Soothing, and strange.
Nedermeyer closes the shotgun with a muted thunk. “Nice piece,” he says to Gary. “I like this gun. I like a twenty-six-inch barrel. Nice and quick. Whippy. A bird gun. It’s choked improved cylinder and modified? Classic. No sense changing it.” He makes a show of looking at the barrel, reading embossed letters. “I never heard of Ithaca before. That a new make?”
“No. The Japanese make it.”
Nedermeyer slaps his head and makes a goggle-eyed funny face. His daughter laughs. Kathryn suddenly loves the man.