Taking Aim

by Michael Cart

  There hadn’t been any bullets in the magazine, but there had been one—just the one—in the chamber. The sound was huge. The hole was huge, bleeding darkness. Bish stared, gape-mouthed, at the torn metal a foot away from him. He stumbled back. If he was surprised, Morley was even more surprised, but he couldn’t lose this moment. He swallowed hard and wrestled his voice steady.

  “My iPhone, Bish. Now! I won’t miss again.”

  Bish turned to him, his eyes wild. He fished the iPhone out of his pocket and threw it on the grass at Morley’s feet.

  “Don’t ever come near me again,” said Morley, just barely managing to get it out. He could feel himself crumbling inside, feel chunks of himself falling in, walls caving, a seismic crack in the floor at the base of his skull. He would cry any moment. Could feel the tears welling up inside him. “Get out of here!” he yelled. And Bish took off.

  “Fucking lunatic!” Bish yelled when he was out of sight.

  He’d tell the boys at the fence. What they did with the information, Morley couldn’t even begin to guess. None of this had played out the way he had imagined it would. He hadn’t fired at the shed wall as a warning. It was his shaking arm mixed with recoil. It was just pure dumb luck he hadn’t killed him. Luck! He’d been aiming at Bishop Fox and he had missed, at six feet.

  He dropped his arms to his side, the weight of the tiny gun too much to hold up another moment. He dropped his head. Let the tears come. He sobbed. His fingers came uncoiled and the gun fell to the ground. He buried his face in his hands. He sobbed, waiting for the authorities to come and take him away. They’d do it by the book. They’d want to take inventory of all the shit in his head.

  Minutes passed into ages. No one came. When Morley could breathe properly again, he wiped the snot and tears off on his sleeve, picked up his phone, and put it in his pocket. But beyond that he couldn’t move. He sank very slowly to his knees and felt along the cinder-block foundation until he found a gap. The soil under the shed was sandy, free of grass. He began to scrabble at the earth, clearing it away, clawed at it. It was soft enough that he had a hole a good eight inches deep in no time. With one last hurried look around, he thrust the gun into the hole and covered it up. He cleared the site. Stood, looked down. There was no sign. He rubbed his soiled hands on his pants, to wipe away the evidence. He’d scour his hands in the washroom, wash a layer of skin off them. Make himself clean. He moved away, turned back to look at the burial place. Took a deep breath. Then he stuck his hands in his pockets and headed back across the field toward the school. He didn’t look in the direction of the smoker clan over at the fence, but he could feel their eyes on him. Feel the silence. No one spoke. He’d shut them up. For now, at least.

  Zane Prosser stepped from behind the trees where he’d been hiding. He was disappointed in Morley. He had been so close to doing the right thing and saving everyone a lot of trouble. But he’d blown it. Still, you had to look on the bright side.

  Zane’s father was very careful about his firearms. They were always locked up and the hiding place of the key was a secret to Zane, though he had searched and searched. Anyway his father’s collection was made up of rifles and shotguns. Nothing you could hide. So Morley might have failed, but he had done Zane a very big favor nonetheless. He sighed a little.

  It would have been good to have an ally, but he’d long ago stopped believing that would ever happen. There was no one on his side.

  On his knees he crawled along the wall, his fingers probing, here and there. He’d heard Morley digging but he hadn’t dared to look, so he didn’t know exactly where the thing was buried. What had Morley called it: an MP25, semiautomatic? So, .25-caliber ammo. He could get his hands on that, easily enough, now that he had his hands on a gun. And it was here, somewhere, close at hand. He could almost feel it. He sat back on his haunches, closed his eyes, his hands resting lightly on his thighs. He listened with his whole bruised heart.

  “Where are you?” he whispered.

  Pssst!

  SHOOT

  Gregory Galloway

  It was nearly midnight, and surprisingly, no one had been shot yet.

  We had gone hunting at my uncle’s deer lease in the morning, and came away empty when we shouldn’t have. He has a system that practically serves up the deer on a silver platter. The only problem is, you still have to shoot them. You aim and fire, and we’d done it hundreds of times, but this time was different. Aim and fire. It happened twice that day, for entirely different reasons and with entirely different results.

  My uncle had been tracking a couple of big bucks for the past few days. He plants clover and alfalfa and wildflowers on his land to try and keep them coming back, and has some good white oak that keeps them happy in the fall. He’s set up cameras in some of the trees so he can keep an eye on them on his computer. He’d seen three nice ones just before the season was ready to start and sent me some pictures. We were in the car and headed over to his property as soon as we could.

  My uncle had a cabin about a half mile out back of his house, where the four of us stayed. It wasn’t much, but we didn’t need much. The cabin was small, with just the main room, a tiny kitchen off to one side, and a small bathroom with a sink, toilet, and shower. It wasn’t meant for much but sleeping, with enough room to fit four sleeping bags on the floor, and someone else taking the couch. It had a fireplace and no trophies on the walls. “You take pride in the hunt,” he told me when we first went hunting together five years ago, when I was twelve, “you don’t take pride in the killing.” He wasn’t a serious man, but he took all of this seriously. He kept the cabin tidy and safe, with a mudroom to put boots and coats and stuff, and a gun safe, where he stored everything. He expected us to leave it the same way or better. He would come and check on us and maybe bring us some food from the house, but mostly he left us alone. He was good that way.

  He had given us the first couple of days of the season; the rest he rented out. He made good money leasing out the cabin and providing access to the fields he owned and watched. He didn’t hunt much anymore and never with a gun. He had taught me to shoot and how to hunt almost everything, squirrel and rabbit, quail and pheasant, and deer, but he was strictly bow now. He never said it, but you could tell that he thought using a gun was cheating. What he didn’t think was cheating was setting up surveillance cameras and luring them with food. We didn’t care; we just wanted to shoot something.

  Tim had the car, but he didn’t want to go. “I’ve been deer hunting,” he said, as if that were an explanation. “Bring a book,” Nick said. “Or watch a movie.” Nick and I had done a lot of hunting together. We didn’t really care what Tim was going to do; he wouldn’t be in our deer stand. He’d be with Jacob. We only wanted him to drive.

  “Look at these guys,” I said, and showed him the pictures my uncle had sent me, drawing the phone back when Tim tried to take it from me. “Don’t you want to shoot them? Who wouldn’t want to shoot them? Who doesn’t like to shoot stuff, anyway?” I’d used this sort of argument before, usually with success, but this time my own words would be used against me. Tim shrugged as if he didn’t care, yet we knew he would drive us. “You can sit around here or sit around with us there,” Nick said, almost losing the deal after we already had it. Tim doesn’t like to be told what his options are. If you give him the either/or, he’ll come up with another way, his own way. “It’s my car,” he said. “I’ll drive it where I want to.” In the end, he drove us to my uncle’s cabin. It’s where he wanted to go, after all, whether he would admit it or not.

  It was late afternoon by the time we were packed up and on our way. I rode shotgun, and Nick and Jacob were in the back. There was no one on the road, a small, straight country highway, when Tim, out of nowhere, did a U-turn and started driving backward. Tim was always doing this kind of stuff, so much that we started calling it “going to Timland.” We didn’t mean it as a compliment, but Tim acted as if it was one. “You drive backward in Timland, I guess,” Nick said. Tim di
dn’t say anything. He looked over his left shoulder through the back window and kept accelerating. “Come on, Tim,” I said. “We don’t have time to mess around.” He slammed on the brakes and brought the car to a stop in the road. He acted as if he was going to turn around again, but then, at the last moment, started driving in reverse again. “All right,” I said. “You proved your point.” Nick and Jacob didn’t say anything.

  Tim always had to prove a point, even if there wasn’t anything to prove—or a point. It always had to be his idea, which is fine with me, but you’ll see where it takes us, and just remember, it was Tim’s idea.

  We had unloaded the car when Tim realized he’d brought the wrong gun. He unzipped the carrying case and found a .22 instead of his deer rifle. “What are you going to shoot with that peashooter?” Nick said.

  “My brother put it back in the wrong case,” Tim said. Things were never his fault.

  “I’ll get a gun from my uncle,” I said.

  “No,” Tim said. “Don’t say anything to him about it.”

  “It’s no big deal,” I said. “Take mine. I’ll borrow the gun. It doesn’t matter.”

  Tim was adamant. “Don’t. It’s all right. I don’t need to shoot. Don’t say anything.” Tim zipped the gun back into its case and took it out to the gun safe.

  We were unrolling our sleeping bags when my uncle checked in on us. “Tim’s got the couch,” he said.

  “He drove,” I said. “It’s only fair.”

  My uncle had brought us some breakfast sausage he’d made. It was worth the trip just for that. He also brought us some eggs; all we’d brought was a couple of big bottles of Coke and a loaf of bread, not even butter. My uncle put the sausage and eggs in the refrigerator and then showed us the most recent images of the deer. “They’ve been coming by the stands over by the oaks in the morning,” he told us, “not too early, so you can sleep in a little if you want. No need to get up while it’s still dark.” He stood to leave and surveyed the room. He saw the shotguns propped in the corner or laid out on the floor. “Make sure those get in the safe before you go to bed,” he told us, and then left us alone.

  We all woke up in the dark and couldn’t get back to sleep. No one said anything; we put on our boots and jackets and got our guns and ammunition out of the safe and walked out into the field. The sky was a timid gray, ready to be chased off by the sun. I didn’t mind if we were early. I liked that time of morning, just before the sun comes up and the world is still asleep, even the trees seem like they’re sleeping. It was only us and the sky that were awake.

  We got to the first deer stand, and Nick and I took it. Tim and Jacob agreed to walk on to the next one. Tim had carried his .22 along; we didn’t know why, but we didn’t say anything, either. He wasn’t going to hunt; he wasn’t even going to pay attention. He already had his headphones on. He was going to sit there and stare into his phone and watch videos or something. I didn’t care. I don’t think Jacob cared, either.

  Nick and I got comfortable in our stand and then went to work, watching and listening, and waiting. This is why I like hunting. You try to be nothing more than eyes and ears, unnoticed and totally aware of what’s around you, the way the sunlight fills the field, the way it fills the empty spaces between the trees. You can almost smell the sunlight, subtle and sweet, as it warms the dead grass in the field. You notice things you don’t usually pay attention to, the feel of the wind as it moves across, west to east, the sound of the birds, all of it, until you are unaware of yourself or even the person next to you. There’s only the field and whatever enters it, light, sound, or, if you’re lucky, a deer. I don’t even really care about the deer. Some of the best hunting days I’ve had I’ve never seen a single deer. It’s enough to be out there, completely out there, locked in to the field, with nothing else in your mind, nothing else mattering. The deer is almost a bonus, and on that day, we got a bonus, and then some.

  I had hardly noticed when Nick raised his rifle to his shoulder. I hadn’t even seen the deer. It didn’t matter; it was his kill. We watched it make its way closer, strolling through the field as it had for days. I wondered if my uncle was at home watching all of this on camera. Nick waited, ready, waiting for one good shot. He took it and the deer fell. Nick lowered his rifle and we both watched as the deer got back up and ran off into the woods. We tried to see it through the trees, to tell which direction it had gone so we could follow it.

  “I had him,” Nick said, and I didn’t doubt it. He was a better shot than I was, probably the best of the four of us. I nodded and kept my eyes on the woods, where I thought the deer had gone. Nick took a few pictures with his phone and then texted Tim and Jacob. We waited a good twenty minutes or so before we left the stand.

  “I had him, I swear,” Nick said as the four of us stood in the field. Tim and Jacob nodded and we walked across the field toward the trees.

  There was no blood. There had been some in the field, where the deer had fallen, but almost nothing after. Nick looked at the pictures he’d taken with his phone and then looked at the woods in front of us. We were in the right place; there just wasn’t any sign of the deer. We weren’t going to be able to track him, and Tim wanted to leave. We didn’t leave; instead, the three of us continued on into the woods, and Tim followed. “Maybe he’s up ahead. How far could he go?” Tim said, and put his headphones back on.

  We looked for a long time. We looked at every tree and every blade of grass and every fallen leaf, looking for a sign, something that would lead us somewhere. We looked together, then we fanned out and walked through the woods in a broken line, like you see people do when they’re looking for a murder victim on a cop show. We were detectives, and we liked it, or most of us did. Tim gave up after a couple of hours.

  “This is officially pointless,” he said. He was right, but we weren’t ready to call it. “I’m going back to the cabin.” We let him go, knowing we should have gone, too, but the three of us stayed and continued our search, more out of obstinance than anything.

  We didn’t get back to the cabin until after two. Tim was asleep on the couch and woke up when we came in. We were tired and starving. I scrambled up a dozen of the eggs on the small propane stove and cooked up a pound of the sausage. The smell of the sausage filled the cabin and my friends sat with plates and forks in their hands, waiting. We ate it all and then cooked up the other dozen eggs and ate all that.

  Jacob and Tim did the dishes. “I should go back out,” Nick said.

  “You’re not going to find him,” Tim said.

  “Where did you hit him?” Jacob asked, wiping the last of the plates with a towel.

  “I thought I had him in the boiler room,” Nick said. “Obviously I didn’t.”

  Tim shook his head. “You’re too good of a shot for that. You were aiming for the head shot.”

  “I took the safe shot,” Nick said. “I missed, that’s it.”

  “Head shot,” Tim said. “You thought you’d brag about it. Probably hit him in the ear.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jacob said.

  “I want him to admit it,” Tim said.

  “I couldn’t even hit him in the gut,” Nick said. “I wasn’t trying to get tricky.”

  “That’s it then,” I said.

  “That’s it then,” Tim said. “I was only trying to help him out. We all know he’s too good a shot, but if you want me to think he botched the boiler room, that’s fine, but somebody please tell him to stop talking about going back out there. Not now and not later.”

  There was no point in going back. I was tired and settled into my sleeping bag and closed my eyes.

  When I woke up, it was dark outside. Tim was talking. “So you’re saying under the right conditions, you would do it.” I didn’t need any more context to know that he was playing his “conditional” game. Tim liked to pose hypothetical questions to get us to admit, or to prove without our admission, that we were all moral relativists, capable of doing about anything under the right
circumstances. “Would you ever eat human flesh?” he might start, then lead you down a path where you would have to admit that you would. “What if you were in a plane crash in the mountains, and the only thing to eat were the dead passengers in the snow?” And that would be one of the tamer ones. He was talking to Jacob now, getting him to admit something finally. I sat up and saw Tim holding his .22 from the gun safe.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “I was trying to let him shoot me,” Tim said.

  “It needs to go back in the safe,” I said.

  “Don’t you want to watch me shoot him?” Jacob said.

  Jacob and Tim might think it was funny, but my uncle wouldn’t like a gun being out of the safe. I held out my hand and knew I was embarrassing myself but I didn’t care. Tim finally handed over the rifle and I took it out to the mudroom and put the gun back in the safe. You could see my uncle’s house at night if the lights were on. They weren’t on. Maybe he’ll come by later, I thought.

  Nick was up when I got back. The three of them were sitting on the couch, Tim in the middle, with Jacob and Nick on either side, peering over Tim’s shoulder, looking at something on his phone.

  It was an old black-and-white video, with really only eight seconds of video; the rest of it was about two minutes of narration. They were transfixed.

  “Look at this,” Nick said to me, and I went and stood behind the couch.

  Tim started it over again and pointed to some text below the video. “At seven forty-five p.m. I was shot in the arm by my friend.” Tim skipped ahead and showed me the footage. Two men stood in a small room, one standing up against the wall as another stood about ten or fifteen feet away, aiming a rifle at the first man. Then he shot him in the arm and the shot man walks calmly toward the guy who shot him. There’s two still photos after that, one of the guy’s bleeding arm, then one of him being bandaged.

  “It’s fake,” I said.

  “It’s not fake,” Tim said. “It’s a performance art thing. This guy, he’s an artist, Chris Burden. He did this as an art thing, in front of an audience.”