by Stan Parish
We listened to the surf in silence until Jules stuck his head through the door.
“Do you two need to pack?” he asked.
“Pack for what?”
“We’re heading up to my family’s shooting estate. Damien’s just gone to get his car.”
“Who’s we?”
“Damien, myself, Clare, you, your mates, if you’re interested. And Mary. Mary likes to watch men kill things. And this way we won’t be distracting Kelsey.”
It was the first time I had heard him say her name aloud.
“We’ll be ready in a few,” I said to Jules, who nodded and ducked back inside.
“You wanna see a castle?” I asked Casey.
“When in Rome,” he said.
I woke up to hazy daylight and lay in bed, staring at a ceiling painted like the sky. Someone had left a pitcher of hard well water on my bedside table, and I swallowed three glasses before I peeled back the linen sheets and stepped onto the cool stone floor. I walked to the window and stared out at the manicured piece of Scottish countryside through leaded glass. An actual castle. It was like coming to in a Jane Austin adaptation. I wondered how many times Kelsey had come up here with Jules, how many mornings she had come to in a four-poster bed upstairs. I was glad she wasn’t here now.
I followed the sound of voices and silverware on china down a long hall lined with high-backed chairs and oil portraits of stern-faced men in high, frilly collars. The hall opened into a cavernous dining area with a kitchen that looked out on a murky pond. The ruins of a proper English breakfast—sausage, poached eggs, grilled tomato slices—were being cleared from the table to make way for the guns being laid out by a stocky man with grease-stained hands. Casey was applying oil to the action of a 12-gauge shotgun.
“Morning, sunshine,” he said.
“Bro, check these threads out,” Mike said, turning in place so I could admire his borrowed herringbone trousers and a hunter-green shooting vest with a suede patch sewn into the shoulder. He stuffed his hands into the pockets to strike a pose. Something surprised him, and he pulled a prescription pill bottle from deep inside the vest. He read the label, rattled the contents, and tossed the bottle to Jules, whistling in awe.
“Shall we?” Jules said, pocketing the pills.
We piled into Damien’s Land Rover, the guns broken down and packed in leather-wrapped cases stacked like a layer cake in the trunk. Jules drove us off his estate and, after a few miles of country road and a gate that I jumped out to unhitch, onto another. I wondered whose property this was as we headed toward a line of Range Rovers parked just off the dirt track that ran through a hilly piece of countryside. There were at least a dozen people gathered under a cluster of trees, men and women—mostly men, I saw as we drew near—all of them in tweed and houndstooth, Barbour jackets, riding boots. A stocked bar cart sat between two large rectangular tables covered in white tablecloths. One table held tea sandwiches, fresh fruit, and carafes of coffee, while the other was covered in shotguns, all of them broken open and unloaded. Mary recognized two of the women, who kissed her hello and asked after her mother. A pair of supercharged adolescent black labs ran circles around the shooting party, restless, ready for work.
I had been hoping to play the knowledgeable host with Mike and Casey, but I had no idea what was supposed to happen next. Jules rejoined us with a heavy whiskey on the rocks, and explained the workings of a driven shoot. We were after duck, he said. A large flock was fed every morning on the far side of the low hill in front of us. They were fed again at sundown on the pond behind us, imprinting them with a single flight path between their daily meals. This was how they spent their lives: feeding, fattening, flying back and forth. And when you wanted to shoot them, you called your gamekeeper, who assembled a team of “beaters” armed with sticks and arranged them on the far side of the hill, where they were waiting now, invisible to us. Their job was to flush the birds from their morning feeding ground, forcing them to take off for the pond, the only other place they knew. That flight path took them straight over five shooting stations built into the base of the hill, each of them designed to hold a shooter and a loader for the guns. The gamekeeper was talking into a two-way radio, telling the beaters that we would be getting started shortly.
“So ducks are gonna come flying over this hill whenever that dude says so?” Mike asked.
Jules nodded over the rim of his glass.
“That’s the craziest shit I’ve ever heard. Whose idea was this?”
Jules explained that this was usually done with pheasant, grouse, and partridge, but that these American mallards had been imported from Texas by the estate’s new owner, who ran the real estate group for a big U.S. private equity shop, and who was talking to the gamekeeper in the watered-down southern accent I had heard on kids at Lawrenceville who came from Memphis, Nashville, and Houston suburbs. He had made a fortune over the last few years, and this property was his eight-figure bid to become an English country gentleman while he was working out of his firm’s London office. He came over to introduce himself and thank us all for coming, clearly disappointed that we were Americans, or northerners, or some combination of the two. Jules said he was a damn good shot, and that the royal family’s gamekeeper designed this shoot himself. This was how you got to know your neighbors here.
Mike and Casey both shot skeet in the Pine Barrens and hunted when they could, but the smiles they were trading told me they had never seen or heard of anything like this. I hadn’t either, and yet it was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to show them. When people down the shore asked about their trip to Scotland, this was the story they would hear. The gamekeeper called for everyone to man their stations; five loaders were already in place with two guns apiece. It was decided that the Jersey boys would sit out the first round to watch how this worked. Clare had disappeared.
When everyone was ready, the gamekeeper called into his radio for the first flight. Nothing happened for what felt like a long time. Then the first pair of birds appeared over the hilltop, two painterly little double arches against the sunless sky. They were closest to the owner, who took the first two shots, dropping one and then the other. I looked back to the hill and saw six, seven, ten ducks coming at us, and soon they were raining down out of the sky. The clean kills were breathtaking: a bird, wings pounding, would turn off in midflight and crash into the wet ground like something filled with sand. A less-clean hit sent the duck into a death spiral or resulted in a bad landing, a tumble, and a broken neck. One mallard kept trying to walk off with his neck bent like the top arch of a pretzel, his head nearly buried in the feathers of his chest, as if he had been trying to look behind himself and had gotten stuck that way. The gamekeeper caught me staring at the bird, and dispatched it with two quick whacks of his stick. He turned his back to me and called into his radio for another flight.
There was a lull, finally, and the first squad left their stations. I shook my head when the gamekeeper asked if I wanted a spot in the next round. This was more death than I had ever seen. The air smelled like wet dirt and gunpowder. A few clumps of iridescent plumage floated down out of the sky.
Mike took the fourth position in the second squad; Jules took the fifth. Another flight of ducks appeared above the hilltop. Mike was shooting well, but there was something wrong with Jules. He was missing wildly, upsetting his balance as he swung the gun. He must have dipped into the pills, and washed one down with Scotch. I had watched him pile coke and Molly on top of ten drinks with no discernible effect, but whatever Mike had found inside that vest had fucked Jules up. A loaded shotgun slipped out of his hands as the loader passed it to him. I watched the loader leap back and then attempt to cover both the error and his reaction to it, scooping up the gun with his back turned to the crowd for cover. You didn’t call attention to mistakes in public here; Michael Savage wasn’t wrong about that. Mike dropped a bird with his bottom barrel, and then swung for a bird
that Jules missed. Another clean kill, another duck crashing into the ground.
“Where the fuck is Clare?” I asked.
“Pretending to be on the phone,” Casey said, nodding toward the cars, a shotgun broken open on his forearm. “He took off like he was on fire when the owner came over to talk. You think that guy knows Clare’s dad?”
I didn’t know what to think about Clare anymore. The second squad was done. Mike and Jules were coming toward us, guns on their shoulders.
“Don’t shoot down my line again,” Jules said to Mike.
Mike stopped to let him pass and then winked at me, unconcerned.
Damien took the wheel for the ride home. The sun was dropping fast as we drove back through a cold north wind that seemed to be blowing darkness in with it.
“Stop the car,” Jules said, suddenly.
Damien looked to him for an explanation.
“Stop,” Jules said, and Damien did.
I saw the pecking order that existed between them, the chain of command that was normally invisible to me. And then I saw what Jules was stopping for: a deer, grazing at the edge of the field, just outside the tree line.
“You can’t shoot them from the car, homeboy,” Mike said. “We’re not on safari.”
But Jules was already out of the car, walking around to what he called the boot, which he opened. I turned to find him digging through the field bag packed with ammunition, tossing boxes of birdshot aside until he found the slugs buried at the bottom. He put a gun together, stuck his head into the car, and whispered: “They’re in season.”
The deer raised her head and froze as Jules stepped down off the road. I was praying she would make a run for it, but Jules had frozen too, and soon the deer went back to grazing. Her body shuddered with the first report, but Jules had missed completely. The air around us seemed to freeze with the echo of the second shot, and the doe’s hind leg buckled underneath her. She started limping for the line of trees at the edge of the clearing, dragging her back left hoof under a shattered joint. Jules started for the car where he had left the shells and then slipped on the rise that led up to the road.
“Motherfucker,” Mike said. He jumped out, grabbed the box of slugs, and then scooped the shotgun off the slope where Jules was struggling to his feet. Mike set off at a jog across the field, gun in one hand, ammo in the other.
We watched Mike disappear into the trees, and waited. Jules sat down on the shoulder of the road and lit a cigarette. There was a report, a pause, another. I tried to judge how far the deer had made it, but the gunshots seemed to come from all around us.
“What’s he doing?” I asked Casey.
“You know what he’s doing.”
“There he is,” Damien said, pointing as Mike came out of the woods a hundred yards from the spot where he had disappeared. Mary gasped. The dead doe was draped across his shoulders like he was Errol Flynn in Robin Hood, on his way to confront the king. Mike’s knees buckled as he struggled to find his footing on the damp grass, the weight of the carcass threatening to topple him as he came on. As he drew closer I saw that the side of his face and the front of his shirt were dark with blood, not shadow. The clean side of his jaw was brilliant with sweat in the glow of the headlights as he ran up the rise and into the road. He stood directly in front of the car, staring down the high beams and breathing so hard through flared nostrils that each inhalation contorted his face into a snarl. He dropped to a squat, and heaved the animal onto the hood. There was a dull thud and a metallic snap as the dead weight depressed the ridge in the metal. The doe slid slowly across the smooth finish like something moving on ice, and stopped as one leg tangled in the top half of the headlight cage. It looked like a different animal, some primitive breed of deer with a smaller cranial structure and exposed teeth. Half its head was missing where the slugs had torn away the flesh and bone.
“Hey, learn how to shoot before you shoot at things,” Mike said, staring into the windshield, squinting against the lights, assuming Jules was in the car.
He was wrong about that. I watched Mike stumble backward, raise his hands, and drop his stare. He cocked his head as if he had just misheard something, his eyes trained on the ground in front of him. Jules was standing just outside the glow of the high beams with a shotgun pointed at Mike’s chest.
“It’s unloaded,” Jules said.
“What the fuck, man,” Casey said.
“It’s unloaded,” Jules said again.
“So put it down.”
“Why? It’s unloaded. Everybody just relax.”
“Jules,” Mary said. “Put it down, please. Before someone gets hurt.”
No heat or panic in her voice. She had seen much worse from him.
“It’s unloaded,” Jules said. “What’s there to be afraid of?”
I would have shattered his skull with the tire iron, but I also saw how hard this was for him. On most days he could have it all: Kelsey, Mary if he felt like it, the pills, the Scotch on top of them, the birds, the deer. This was how he had lived up to now, which made it a matter of life for him, and also a matter of death. You can’t deny someone the only existence they’ve ever known and expect them to take it lying down. Of course, you also can’t point guns at people. I could see the headline and the grainy photos in the London tabloids: DRUG-FUELED HIGHLANDS WEEKEND ENDS IN FATAL SHOOTING. A story about absent parents and kids left to their own devices in a house full of unused prescription medication and expensive firearms. This, I thought, is exactly how people end up dead.
I held my breath as Casey stepped into the space between Mike and Jules, the twin barrels inches from his sternum. He said something that I couldn’t hear, and lifted the gun very gently, pointing it up at the sky. Jules kept his eyes locked on Mike as Casey eased the gun out of his hands, hurled it like a javelin, and then wrapped Jules in the same choke that Rob had used on him. He let up only after Jules lost consciousness, then dropped him face first onto the road, kicked him hard enough to roll him over, and pressed a foot down on his throat.
“Stop that,” Mary said. “It’s done, there’s no need for that.”
She took a step toward Casey, who looked up at her and stopped her in her tracks. Mike stood there with his fists clenched and his eyes closed, breathing deeply through his nose. He turned his back to us and started down the road.
“I’m going to pull up,” Damien said. “It’s miles to the house. Can someone tell him to get in?”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Casey said. “He likes walking. I’d let him walk if I were you.”
It was a long walk to the St. Andrews Bay hotel from Andrew Melville Hall, with a busy stretch of highway in between. I stood on the shoulder, waiting for traffic to clear. Damien had driven us back to St. Andrews the night before with Jules passed out in the front seat next to him. No one spoke the whole way home. I passed out after midnight, slept for fifteen hours, and woke up to a text from Casey, telling me to come over whenever I was up. The sun was dropping fast when I finally left my room and it was dark out by the time I hit the hotel drive.
I heard female voices behind the door to Mike and Casey’s suite. Kelsey answered. Behind her, Mike was pulling on a pair of gym shorts, and I tried to imagine what this meant through a flash of panic, which Kelsey read in my face.
“We were just doing a little fitting,” she said, opening the door to reveal Mary sitting Indian style on the floor in front of the TV. “And now I have a shitload of tailoring to do if your friend here is gonna walk tomorrow. We took bets on how long you’d sleep. What time did you get up?”
“Three o’clock.”
“Casey wins, right?” she said, as Casey came out of the bathroom.
“Sleeping beauty,” Casey said. “You want something to drink?”
“Sure,” I said, taking a step toward the whiskey, ice, and soda laid out on the dresser. Kelsey matched my move,
blocked my path, and placed her hands on my hips.
“Are these the jeans you had on in Spring Lake?”
I nodded.
“That’s funny,” she said, smiling.
“Why?” I asked, craning my neck to see the clothes spread out on the bed. Kelsey skipped over, stuffed them all inside the plastic cover, zipped it shut.
“Let me see,” I said.
“Not now. You’ll see soon enough. I put you boys at a table. Best seats in the house.”
Mike had rejoined Mary on the floor, where they resumed a game of Mario Kart. He held a hand in front of Mary’s eyes as they rounded the final turn on a racecourse that ran through the treetops of a prehistoric forest. Mary screamed and slapped his forearm as her go kart–driving princess tumbled into the canopy below the track and disappeared.
“Bro, they have Nintendo,” Mike said over his shoulder, as the turtle driving his cart took an automated victory lap on screen. “This place is Cristal sippin’, right?”
Mike was setting up another game, scrolling through the avatars. I was trying to understand how this had come together so effortlessly while I had been struggling to find my place here since I’d disembarked. Kelsey was policing the room, tucking an errant compact back into her purse, draping the garment bag over her arm. Her brisk, directed air reminded me of the way my mother left the house when I was young, calling out instructions to the babysitter as she put her earrings in. At the last minute she would put her hands on my shoulders and tell me to be good while she was gone, to be asleep when she got home. A goodnight kiss, a quick exit, perfume in her wake. I was remembering her tone and the rhythm of her movements, and then it was real. Kelsey kissed me on the cheek, and moved a lock of hair off my forehead with her finger.
“Back to work,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, kids. Don’t be late.”
The St. Andrews Charity Fashion Show was held at the St. Andrews Bay Hotel, having outgrown the Student Union and the ballroom at the Old Course. Mike had been in rehearsals since 9:00 a.m., and Casey was staying upstairs, so I split a cab to the hotel with Clare. Time alone with him meant long tense silences since the night we’d spent with his father. I was texting Kelsey to wish her luck when the cab driver hit the brakes and Clare said: