by Melinda Minx
“Want a beer?” he asks.
I grimace, and Hank laughs.
“Having a beer with me is that bad?” Hank asks. “Come in, son.”
He waves me in.
“Sorry, Hank,” I say. “It’s just I was thinking of going to drink while Sophie cooled off, but then I decided it wouldn’t help, so I came here instead. It’s not you, I just didn’t want to drink.”
“Having a beer isn’t really drinking. I don’t feel a thing until I’ve had three.”
“Can’t argue with that,” I say, which sends Hank straight to the fridge.
He hands me a Heineken, and I twist off the top. I take a long swig. The cool liquid feels good as it flows down my throat. I won’t feel anything from one beer, but it tastes damn good.
As I sit down, I realize that this is the same position I used to sit in when I awkwardly waited for Sophie to get ready while we were dating those short few weeks.
Hank catches me smiling. “What’s so funny?”
I point behind him. “I see it now.”
“See what?” he asks, looking back.
“You always sat in that chair, with the gun case right behind you, and that’s why you had me sit here, so I’d see you and the guns all together.”
Hank laughs. “You caught me.”
“Did you ever tell Sophie what I said to you?” Hank asks. “Back then.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I was worried she’d get mad at you, which would get you mad at me.”
Hank laughs and slaps his knee. “So I scared ya? You can tell her now, by the way. I won’t get mad.”
“I’ll save the story for when she’s talking to me again, I guess,” I say, taking another swig.
“Any idea where Sophie is?” I ask.
Hank shrugs. “I’m sure you could find her if you wanted, but I know her pretty well, Mason. You don’t want to find her just yet.”
I nod. No angry makeup sex tonight. John would be disappointed.
I suddenly find my eyes drawn to the shotguns. I never really thought of my rifle as anything more than a tool. It became a fucking part of me, but it was still a tool. I was good with it, and my intense urge to do something I’m good at doesn’t subside. If I can’t fuck, I may as well shoot something.
“Wanna shoot the guns?” I ask.
Hank cocks his head. “The shotguns? You wanna shoot them? When?”
“Now,” I say. “Let’s gather up all the empty bottles you’ve got.”
We drive down to the old abandoned lumber mill just outside of town.
“If Sophie finds out I’m going shooting with you,” Hank says, “she’ll be mad at me, too.”
“Tell her it’s stress relief,” I say. “She’s always going on about your health and—”
Hank glares at me. Shit. I shouldn’t talk about that to him, it might make him feel like less of a man.
“Sorry,” I say. “You know how women are, that’s all I mean.”
Hank laughs. “My mother died just after I married my wife, and my wife died just after Sophie was born. It’s like God wanted to make sure there was always a woman in my life, telling me exactly how many strips of bacon I can eat per week.”
“How many?” I ask.
“Three,” Hank says, shaking his head. “Get used to it, Mason, if you’re gonna’ stick around that is.”
I ignore his jab. He didn’t mean it maliciously, but he’s rightly worried about me. I haven’t been back long enough to prove that I’m intending to stick around. I’ll have to prove to him that I can stay put.
We grab the 24-pack, which is mostly full of empty bottles—some are still full—and haul it out toward an abandoned wooden shed. It’s more of a hut than a shed, I suppose, since it’s open on all but two sides. It looks like they used to use it to store raw lumber. There’s some wooden scaffolding, which was probably used to keep the wood off the ground so that it didn’t get wet. I arrange three of the bottles equidistant apart from each other atop the scaffolding.
Hank has the shotgun—we decided we only really needed one—loaded and ready. It’s dark already, so we have the headlights and high beams on, illuminating the lumber hut.
“This isn’t fair,” Hank says. “My old man eyes against your soldier vision?”
I shrug. “I’m not competing, Hank, I just wanna shoot shit.”
“Fair enough,” he says, aiming the gun and firing. The muzzle flash is brief, but it illuminates his face in a warm yellow and orange for a brief moment. I swear I can see the stress melting away from him in that brief moment.
The bottle doesn’t move. A miss.
“Shit,” Hank says, but he doesn’t sound angry or upset. It’s just a thing he has to say to acknowledge he missed.
Shooting was a good call. One of the few good ideas I’ve had since deciding to come back here for Sophie. Taking up fishing again was probably a shitty idea, all things considered. Maybe I should have gotten a job at a shooting range.
“I got an idea,” I say.
I grab the unopened beers and place them down by our feet, then I head over to my car and turn off the headlights.
Hank laughs. “I miss the bottles when the lights are on, and your idea is to turn them off? How’s that supposed to work?”
“Drink a beer with me,” I say.
I pop open two beers and hand one to him. We clink the bottles together and drink.
“You’d have been real proud of Sophie,” Hank says. “Seeing how far she got. I never thought a girl I raised would turn out that smart.”
“You did a good job with her.”
“Don’t kiss my ass,” Hank says. “It’s her mom’s genes. That’s gotta be it.”
“Ever thought of fishing again?” I ask him.
He laughs. “I worked as hard as I did so I’d never have to do it again. You don’t wanna keep doing that shit, son.”
“I know,” I say.
We finish our beers, and I point over to the hut. “See the bottles?”
“Shit,” Hank whispers. “I do see them. It’s pitch black, but I definitely see them. How the hell?”
“It’s your night vision,” I say. “Your eyes can adapt to the dark really well, but only if it stays dark. When we ran night missions, we had to do everything we could to protect our night vision. Sometimes the bad guys would even hit us with a strobe light just before they made the jump on us.”
“Wouldn’t that give them away?”
“Yeah,” I say, “but then we couldn’t see for shit.”
“What about night vision goggles, infrared?”
“We had that,” I say, “but they hit you with a strobe light when you got that shit on, then you’re really blind.”
“I’m gonna’ take another shot,” Hank says.
He lines up his shot, steadies his breathing, and squeezes the trigger. The glass shatters.
“Fuck yeah,” he says.
“Try to pick off the last two one after another. Shoot, pump, shoot.”
Hank pumps the shotgun, aims and fires. The second bottle shatters. He pumps again and fires straight away. Miss.
“The muzzle flash killed my night vision,” Hank mutters.
I laugh. “Good fucking excuse. You don’t know how many times we used that one. It also helps if you don’t look directly at the bottles. Try to look ‘around them’ if that makes sense. You can see low light better out of the center of your vision.”
Usually when I explain that trick, I explain it as, “Pretend you’re trying to check out a hot woman’s tits, look at them without looking at them,” but considering Hank is the father of the woman I want to be with, I decide to leave that little nugget of wisdom out.
He aims again and fires, and the bottle shatters apart.
“If you hurt Sophie again—really hurt her—I mean,” Hank says, “then you’ll regret showing me how to shoot so damn well.”
He hands me the gun. I don’t miss a single shot.
19
Sophie
When I get home, Dad isn’t there. It’s past midnight, where the hell could he be?
I call him, but his phone is off. He never charges it.
I notice a second coaster on the coffee table. Who was here?
Mason. He tried to call me, and I didn’t answer, so he came here. And now Mason took my father out? Are they out drinking together, picking up chicks?
I call Mason, and when I hear his voice, something explodes in the background.
“Don’t tell me you went back to Syria,” I say.
He laughs. “Oh, so now you care where I am?”
“No,” I say, not really meaning it. “Where is my dad?”
“He’s with me.”
“And where is that?”
“The old lumber mill.”
“What the hell are you doing with my dad at—?”
I realize my voice sounds different—there’s no sound coming from the earpiece. He hung up on me. That asshole!
I get in my car and turn it on. A friend of my dad’s got the alternator fixed while I was at work this morning. Mason was annoyingly right about the cause of the problem.
And why of all places are they at the old lumber mill? What the hell are they doing together?
When I get there, I spot Mason’s car just at the end of the dirt road. I pull up and see Mason holding a gun, aiming at something in the distance. My headlights hit them, and they both look over at me, shielding their faces with their arms.
I get out of the car, leaving the lights on so that I can see them as I shout at them.
“What the hell, Mason?” I ask.
“Come on, Sophie,” Dad says. “Turn those lights off, you killed our night vision!”
“Your night vision, what the hell are you talking about? Why do you need to shoot beer bottles at midnight?”
Mason gently lowers the gun down to his side, keeping the barrel pointed down and away from me and Dad. “We don’t need to,” he says. “But why not? You know?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t know. It seems stupid to me. I’ve never had the urge to shoot a beer bottle.”
“I’m gonna’ take your car back home, Sophie,” Dad says. “This sounds like a two wheels are better than three type situation to me. A vicious tricycle.”
“That’s not an expression,” Mason says, laughing.
“Don’t laugh,” I snap. “Dad can’t drive, he’s drunk.”
“You want to drive us back then?” Mason asks, grinning.
“No,” I say. “I don’t want to, but I have to, don’t I?”
“We’re out of beer,” Mason says. “We were just gonna’ shoot until we ran out of bottles or ran out of shells, whichever came first. Probably we’d both have been sober by then.”
Sophie drives us back home. Hank passes out in the back seat as soon as the car starts moving.
“You had to get my dad drunk?’
“That wasn’t the goal,” I say.
“So shooting stuff was the goal? Getting drunk just kind of happened?”
“More or less,” I say, shrugging.
“You’re insufferable sometimes.”
“Sometimes?” I ask. “That means I’m usually not?”
I catch her almost smile, but she forces her face back to neutral.
“Sophie,” I say, keeping my voice low so as not to wake Hank. “I came to your house to see you. You weren’t there, so I got talking to your dad, and—”
“And then it was shotguns and beer.”
I nod. “I’ll take you shooting next time. Don’t be so jealous.”
When we reach her house, I wake up Hank and help him up, out of the car, and inside. He excuses himself to go upstairs to his room. He’ll be sleeping really sound, at least until the hangover hits him.
“So I guess you’ll be leaving,” Sophie says.
“You’re still mad at me?” I ask.
“No,” she says, “but you can leave now.”
“Actually,” I say, “I’m still feeling the beer. I don’t think I can drive.”
She rolls her eyes. “Fine. I’m getting ready for bed. You can sit on the couch until you feel ready to drive.”
“Where did you go tonight?” I ask.
She glares at me. Now she’s mad. “You think being overprotective is the same thing as being protective?”
“Uh,” I say, “it’s got the same root word, doesn’t it? It just varies by degrees.”
“Wrong,” she snaps. “I was out with Melanie and some other girls from the Crab Shack. I don’t ask you where you go every hour of the day. I don’t ask how many fights you get into, or—”
I laugh. “I promise you, Samuel is the only guy I’ve hit since I’ve been back in America. Besides, we met each other because I like to fight, remember?”
“That first time,” she says, pointing a finger, “you were actually protecting me. This time, Mason, you weren’t. You were protecting your own ego, not me.”
I cross my arms. Maybe she’s right, but I won’t let her know I’m considering the possibility.
“I suppose it’s going to be real awkward on the boat for you now? Right? Maybe you should think things through more before you act.”
“I’ll try,” I say, springing to my feet. “After this.”
I grab hold of her and press my lips against hers. She fights me for a few brief seconds, and then her whole body seems to melt in my arms. She stops fighting as our tongues press together.
Her taste fills me, and my cock stiffens. Then I think of Hank sleeping a few rooms over from Sophie’s bed, and my dick goes limp. I just trained the guy to be a good shot, and the shotgun is still loaded on the coffee table.
I pull away.
“What?” she asks.
I point over toward the kitchen, toward a long baguette on the counter. “Can we eat that?”
“You want to eat?” she asks.
“No,” I say, walking into the kitchen and opening the fridge. I find a half-eaten wheel of Brie. I take it out.
“And that wine?” I ask, pointing to the rack.
“You want to drink? More?”
“I want to take you on a date, Sophie. We still haven’t been on a real date since I came back.”
“You don’t count what we did in the car?” she asks.
“That was an attempted date,” I say. “I like where it ended up, but it still wasn’t a date.”
She looks at the clock. “It’s 2:00 a.m., Mason.”
“I got a good place to go at 2:00 a.m., but you gotta drive.”
20
Sophie
We reach the coastline near the old light tower, and Mason tells me to stop the car.
“It’s a bit cold for the beach,” I say, zipping up my coat.
Mason leans over toward me. I wait for him to kiss me. I want him to kiss me. As nice of a gesture as a date is, I’d rather make out with him in the warm car and wait to see where that takes us, than to walk out into the cold and to wherever the hell he thinks we should go so late at night.
He leans over me, past me, and pulls the latch to pop the trunk.
“You’re not going to kill me and stuff me in the trunk, are you?” I ask.
“Don’t be nervous,” he says.
I watch him head toward the trunk. There’s the bread, the wheel of cheese, a bottle of wine, and some candles and a lighter sprawled all over the back seat. And apparently he still needs something from the trunk.
He shuts the trunk, and he’s now holding a reusable grocery bag. I sigh in relief.
He stuffs everything into the bag and takes me by the hand. “Come on.”
We walk not toward the shore, but toward the steady slope that leads up toward the lighthouse.
I stop. “We’re not going to the lighthouse, are we?”
“No,” he says. “We’re just walking toward it for no reason. Come on.”
He pulls me closer toward it, and soon it’s towering above us. The lighthouse has been closed
for over ten years. Retired, they call it.
We reach the door, and there is a dingy padlock holding a bunch of chains to the handle. “I guess we can’t go in, Mason. Let’s turn back.”
He reaches into the bag and pulls out a metal tool.
“What is that?” I ask.
“It’s from your trunk,” he says. “The lug nut wrench. I gotta teach you to change a tire, Sophie. You’re hopeless.”
“Why is the tire changing wrench thing here?”
To answer my question, he sticks it through one of the chain links. He starts to twist the wrench, and the chains tighten around it. He gets a firm grip on it with both hands, his biceps bulging as he twists. There’s a snapping sound, and one of the chain links snaps open.
He puts the wrench back into the bag and pulls all the chains away and off the handle. He throws it down to the ground in a heap.
“Really, Mason?” I ask.
He grabs my hand, opens the door, and pulls me inside.
It’s pitch black, and a few moments pass until I hear the sound of a lighter. The flame shatters the darkness. I see a large open space, and when I look up, there is a spiraling staircase circling all around and up toward the top of the lighthouse.
He takes my hand, still holding the candle in his other, and pulls me toward the first step. “Watch your step. Keep a hand on the rail. It’s dark.”
“No shit, it’s dark,” I hiss as I take the first few steps up. “We broke in.”
“It’s abandoned, Sophie. That means no one cares.”
It’s not the tallest lighthouse in the world by any means, but walking up the spiraling stairs makes me start to feel dizzy, only Mason’s strong and solid hand keeps me going. After what feels like a long time, we finally stop climbing, as we reach the top. The whole center of the platform is dominated by the giant light, though there’s a huge crack down the center of the lens.
Mason puts the candle down and begins lighting another. I start to help him, and soon the lighthouse is lit once again, though only by a half dozen candles rather than a giant lamp powerful enough to signal ships from miles away.
“Do you think anyone can see these candle lights?” I ask.