From beyond the post oak in the silent swamp came the geclick of the Greener breech being broken and presently the gecluck of its closing.
That was when you reloaded.
But you had only shot once, at the first single. You had another shell. Why not wait until the second shot at the second single to reload?
Because you knew you only needed three shots, two for the quail and one for you.
Wait a minute. There were four empty Winchester Super-X shells afterwards, three on the quilt beside him in the Negro cabin where he was lying after the woman wiped the blood from his face, and a fourth in the Greener the guide had brought back with the shells. The cabin smelled of kerosene and flour paste. Newspapers were freshly pasted on the walls.
But there were only three shots.
Wait a minute. Is it possible to fire both barrels of the Greener at once? There were two triggers.
“Wait a minute,” he said aloud. Then he smiled and shrugged. What difference did it make?
The three Arabs were pressing in upon him. That’s what they looked like, Arabs: the dentist, Jimmy Rogers, and Bertie: brown-skinned, coming too close, smiling, nodding — Jimmy Rogers was even rubbing his hands together.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I have to go upstairs and tend to some business.”
“What business?” asked Kitty, frowning.
Her closeness and nosiness gave him a shower of goose-bumps, a peculiar but not unpleasant sensation.
“I’m looking for an old shotgun.” He noticed absently that it had become possible to tell the truth, that it was no longer necessary to make an excuse, go fix a drink.
“What are you going to do, shoot us?” asked Kitty with a mock falling away. She told the others: “He was always like that, ready to have a shoot-out if somebody crossed him, right here and now.”
No, I wasn’t always like that.
“That was the way it was where we came from, wasn’t it, Will?”
“I was going to look for an old shotgun that belonged to my father and grandfather.”
“You didn’t mess with them either,” Kitty told the others. “Where we came from, if you fell out with somebody, you didn’t smile at them and go around behind their backs. You called them out and had it out with them.”
That’s right. We call ourselves out and have it out with ourselves. Famous one-man shoot-outs.
“I keep a shotgun loaded with double-ought buckshot under my bed,” said the grinning dentist-husband. “I fixed a rack just inside the rail. All I got to do is reach down with one hand. Just let some sapsucker come in the door or window. Just let him come. I know a man, a substantial man no redneck, who just the other day bought a shotgun and a.357 Magnum and two cases of shells, and he’s a college graduate, not one of your nuts.”
The grin, he noticed, went back to the eyeteeth. What’s this guy so angry about? His wife? Being a dentist? His daughter? No wonder his daughter’s nuts. Who does he want to shoot? Probably niggers.
“Speaking of the Wild West, guns, and shoot-outs,” said Jimmy Rogers, coming even closer, close as a lover, and, putting his head down in their midst, told them one of his jokes.
Though he tried to listen to the joke, his mind wandered. Jimmy pulled him close and then gave him a final little tug. The joke must be over. “I have to go,” he said.
“Hold on, son,” said Kitty, but it was she who held on, laughing and grabbing his arm with both hands, wrists all aglint and ajangle with gold. There was about her a rushing way he didn’t remember of coming close and pushing ahead of her the smell of her hair and a perfume — Shalimar? How did he remember after all these years? It smelled like Shalimar sounded — and a friendly kind of jostling, jostling him with arm, shoulder, elbow, hip, hair swinging past the hollow of his throat. What he did remember, not he but his body, was the warmth in the places where she touched him. It was curious. Spots she touched grew warm as if he had had a positive skin test. His antibodies remembered her body. “Hold it, son. I need to have a word with you.” Curious! Something was both strange and familiar. Suddenly he realized he had not thought about women for a long time, not since Marion’s death, not since long before Marion’s death — except for the time he thought about Ethel Rosenblum and fell down in a bunker. For three years he had lived in a dream of golf and good works.
“What?” he said, turning an ear down to her upraised face. She wanted to whisper something. The Arabs fell back, stopped smiling, bent forward in a huddle, made plans.
“Look, Will. The summerhouse is lost in the cloud.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Do you realize what happened to us?”
“No, what?”
“We passed each other like ships in a fog. I was a fool. I should have grabbed you when I could.”
“As it has turned out, I don’t think—”
“Let’s go get lost in the fog,” she whispered. She couldn’t quite whisper but like a child trying to whisper sputtered in his ear. His hair raised. He nodded.
“Could you meet me in the summerhouse?” she asked. “I have a bug to put in your ear.”
Welts sprang out on his neck.
“There’s something I have to do.”
“What?”
“I have to find the shotgun.”
“I don’t mean now. I mean after dinner. After the others leave. Is there a side door?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll go out the front door to get a breath of air. You go a different way. You’re always dropping out anyway. You know what Marion said about you?”
“No, what?”
“You were just not there half the time. But what she didn’t understand, and what you and I do, is that now and then you and I just have to drop out, don’t you?”
“I suppose.”
“Very well. Can you keep me from the foggy foggy dew?”
“Sure,” he said absently.
This time when she jostled, she managed to sidle and give him a friendly kidding hip-bump such as you used to do in high school corridors or playing basketball.
His body seemed to remember something and, turning toward her, confronted hers like a man moving in his sleep.
The cloud had come over the cliff. As it came up the short steep yard it seemed to thin and turn into fog. Wisps of fog curled around the tree, which looked more and more like a common Mississippi scrub oak than a stylish Carolina scarlet oak.
Before they came to the tree his father said: There are two singles. You take one and I’ll take the other.
Then they went ahead until the tree came between them.
One single got up, the one on the man’s side of the tree. He had hardly heard the furious wingbeat against the tiny drum of body before the first shot came blotting out everything in the shockroar which went racketing through the swamp. His father always shot on the rise.
Before he could reach the door, his daughter stopped him. Her face was cross, the frowning U cut deep in her forehead.
“You’ve got to get that shaman off my back.”
“Who?”
“Father what’s-his-name.”
“Oh, Jack.”
“Yep. He’s getting on my nerves. Tell Jack he’s not marrying me and Jason. We’re marrying each other.”
“Okay. Anything else?”
“The only reason we’re doing this here is that I promised Mother.”
“Okay. I have to go.”
“Go? Where?” Her glasses flashed. “You’re not pulling another fade-out.”