The Hummingbird (14 page)

“Somebody’s selling you a bridge.” Joel hooked one thumb in his holster belt. “I’ll tell you what, Deborah. This whole country was a hair trigger after Pearl Harbor. If anyone foreign entered U.S. air space, they would have been blasted from the sky, oh yeah. Along with any birds in the vicinity, for good measure.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

Joel gave me some serious elevator eyes again, just shy of leering. I suspected not many women visited his range. “Now you be sure to keep safety glasses and headphones on when shooting time comes.” He tapped the side of his head. “Gotta protect those cute little ears of yours.”

“Easy, tiger,” said Michael, emerging from the tall grass. “Let’s leave her cute ears out of this.”

“No worries, Milk.” Joel held up both open palms. “No mischief meant. She was just making me feel old a second ago, that’s all.”

“Well, I hate to break it to you—”

“Don’t you start too.” Joel squinted across the field. Michael had pounded stakes into the ground a football field and a half away, leaned a square of particle board against them, and pinned sheets of paper on the front for targets. “Knuh. You’re shooting silhouettes today.”

“All I ever use now,” Michael said.

“Why does that matter?” I asked.

Michael kept his eyes on the field. “Until recent years, the military did not train people by having them fire at human forms.”

“Then some genius decided silhouettes would desensitize us,” Joel said. “Since people aren’t shaped like circle targets. Oh yeah, better to practice on something closer to the real thing.”

“It was pretty much the same when they taught us to bayonet mannequins,” Michael added.

“Yeah, that really worked,” Joel said. “Bayoneting a living human body is nothing now.”

And they both laughed.

Michael dragged over a platform that provided a rest for the rifle barrel, to help my aim and spare me the gun’s kick. When he opened a box of bullets, Joel tapped the first row on their tips. “Not around here you don’t.”

“I wouldn’t waste them on a range anyway,” Michael said.

“What’s the problem?” I said.

“This kind, with the little hole at the top?” Joel held one up. “Fans open when it hits the target. Tears up everything in its path.”

“But this kind”—Michael took one that appeared identical, except for the lack of an indentation in the tip, and placed it in my hand—“these are Geneva convention rounds, approved for use in war.”

“Oh yeah,” Joel said. “We only use nice bullets when we kill you to death.”

I weighed the round. It was as long as my middle finger, shiny brass. The tip reminded me of the pen my father used when he was grading papers years ago—a strange association that felt totally out of place.

“Be right back,” Michael said, and he jogged to the port-a-potty. The dogs watched him, and he kept an eye on them too. Joel stood next to me, breathing loudly. We heard a clatter of distant pistol shots.

“So what branch of the military are you in?” Joel asked.

“No part. Just a former guardsman’s wife.”

“Honey.” Joel looked at me as if I were a toddler fibbing to get another cookie. “This is America. Everybody’s in the military.”

“Sorry, but I’m a hospice nurse. That’s about as nonmilitary as you can get.”

He scratched his cheek with a thumbnail. “I’m sure it makes you feel good to think that way.”

“It’s not a matter of thinking. It’s true.”

Joel held his arms wide. “Oh beautiful for spacious skies. Another believer in the innocence of noncombatants.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh yeah. Knuh, knuh. You have no complicity in warfare at all. You are sweet and clean and would never hurt a flea.”

“What are you trying to—”

“But us soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines, we must be the Other, the stranger, the odd thing that people maybe thank or maybe hate, but either way we are something different and weird and scary and not at all like you good, nice civilized folk.”

“I’d say that’s a little bit—”

“That way,” he charged on, “that way you don’t have to recognize that
you
were the ones who recruited us, you and millions of people just like you. Oh yeah. You picked us out as too poor for college, too undisciplined for work, too patriotic for self-preservation, easy targets, easy marks. Then you trained us, you invented our equipment, you elected the commander in chief who sent us to war, you hired the Congress that drafted us, you paid taxes to support a military bigger than the next fifteen countries combined.”

Joel was counting off the injustices on his skinny fingers. The moment felt identical to listening to a patient trying to reason with his mortality, protesting against something inevitable. My job wasn’t to make sense of it, or even respond. This was about a poison he needed to get out of himself. It was, quite literally, a stage of grief.

“You bought the planes, oh yeah, big fancy fast planes, and the fuel for the planes that flew us to the foreign land. You made the trucks and the fuel for the trucks, and the seat and windshield and steering wheels and the tires, man, knuh, the fucking tires that brought us to the battlefield. Then you put guns in our hands and ordered us to pull the triggers, do it or we go to jail, do it or we die. And when we did what we were told you washed your hands and said killers, you fucking monsters and heroes and murderers. Then you watched TV and ate and shat and bought stuff, all the time telling yourselves over and over that your hands were clean, your conscience, you sleep fine at night, oh yeah, you got no complicity whatsoever.”

“What’s up, Joel?” Michael stood at my side. I could feel him bristling. “Did I miss something?”

Joel faced the ground. He swallowed hard. “Windy weather, my man. Knuh. Getting mighty windy on your old lady out here.”

“That’s what it sounded like.”

“I’m OK now, I’m cool. She’s cool too. Cool lady.”

Michael remained between the old man and me. He ran his hands back through his hair, as though he were stroking down his hackles. “You off your meds or something?”

Joel shook his head, laughing. “Brother, I am never off my meds.”

AFTER THAT,
Joel stepped back by the shed, and everything went faster. Michael unzipped the gun case and affixed his rifle to the platform, its carrying strap folded aside. He handed me the orange headphones and plastic protective goggles. He focused the scope, showed me how to adjust the platform height, pointed to where I’d release the safety, and demonstrated how to load the gun.

I couldn’t do it. My hands kept shaking. I reminded myself: I was the tough one, the expert in pain. I could do it.

But I dropped the round in the dirt. Michael brushed it off and handed it back to me. It was an odd thing, to receive a bullet from my husband. I thumbed the shell into the chamber. It slid in at an angle and stuck there. He had to take the gun off the platform and bang it against his palm to get the round out.

After that there were no more preliminaries. I clamped on the eye and ear protectors. He told me to lean down to the scope to find my target. Somehow the target had become mine. But the lens was hard to see through, its focused part a bright circle surrounded by darkness that kept moving around.

“You have to hold still to see squarely,” Michael bellowed. I knew he was only raising his voice so I could hear him through the headphones. “Get close on it.”

He leaned down and scooped his arms around, cradling me in against the gun. Oh, I felt the man in him just then, the strength of his arms, the way his gender masked vulnerability with certainty. I curved my back against him, as if to increase the surface area where we were touching. Michael pressed me into the weapon while my eye settled against the scope, and with arresting clarity the target came into view: a human torso with concentric rings around a yellow bull’s eye on its chest.

“Fire when ready,” Michael called, rising away.

For a moment I thought I might vomit. My mouth tasted as if I’d eaten something foul. But there was no way I would ruin this moment, squander this opportunity to understand my warrior by knowing his weapon, and I swallowed everything back.

I thumbed off the safety and touched my forefinger to the trigger. So this was what he did. Over and over, under the most intense time pressure imaginable. Take too long and the enemy spots you. Shoot too soon and you miss. Take too long and you die. I curled my finger and held my breath. I pulled a fraction, nothing happened. Then there was a burst and I’d blinked, and the bullet went wild to the right.

Joel was clapping his bony hands. “Woo-eee. Good banging, rookie.”

“Yow,” I said, rubbing my shoulder. “That really kicked me.”

“You have to hug it tighter,” Michael said, loading another round. “Love it right up close.” He pressed me into the gun again, warm and alive on my back. I would have stopped everything to prolong that contact, but he was gone and upright and I was holding the weapon.

Love it up close. Right. I pulled the stock tight to my shoulder, suppressing a wince. I pressed my eye to the scope. Wrapping my finger around the trigger, slowly I squeezed, and again the burst came from under my arm. That time I had no idea in which direction the bullet had veered.

“OK, OK, headphones off.”

“What is it?” I asked. The kick hurt less that time, but already I could tell my shoulder would be sore later.

Michael bent like a football coach inspiring his huddle. “You’re throwing the bullet. You’re pushing it out there. Just let the gun surprise you. It has all the power it needs, believe me. Just aim, and let the rifle do its work.”

Let it surprise me? What did that mean? I put the headphones back on and wrapped myself around the weapon without his help. And squeezed the trigger like I meant it. This time I did not blink, and the gun stayed steady. Through the scope I could see a little dot I’d made on the target, a black puncture up in one corner. Damn if I can deny it: I felt a dirty little thrill.

We spent another hour, Michael instructing in a measured voice, though also pacing behind me before I shot. Joel crept forward to add a word or two. Breathe out all the way, he said, then a little more, and then fire. The air smelled of gunpowder, metallic and sour. I shot perhaps twenty times. Most rounds went wide of center. But each time I managed to nip the merest piece of that target, I felt a rush of pride.

“Enough?” Michael said eventually.

I nodded, gulping despite a dry mouth. “Enough. Thank you.”

“No thanking.” He started out into the field. “Let’s see how you did.”

But it struck me that there was one way I could take this day further, and I spoke without thinking. “Aren’t you going to have a turn?”

He pulled up, arching his back as though he had taken an arrow between the shoulder blades. Michael stood that way fully half a minute, then shuffled a half circle back to me.

In a blur he snatched the rifle, loaded it, and hooked the strap with his elbow to pin the gun against him. It was scary, how quickly he brought one eye to the scope, leaned forward as if he were planting a spear in his enemy’s chest. And held that way, frozen.

The moment sustained itself like a violin’s high clear note. The summer meadow held its breath. Joel watched him with unmoving eyes.

Then the pistol rang out from the range’s other side. Michael released a massive exhale. He opened the chamber to remove the round and held it in one palm.

“No,” he said, thrusting the rifle into my hands. “Not in front of you.”

I stood there wondering what I’d just done. As he strode off into the tall grass, Michael called back over his shoulder. “Feel free to shoot me anytime.”

While my husband took things down, Joel came coughing up beside me. I turned to him, trying to rub my shoulder without drawing too much attention. “In the war, how do you decide who to aim at?”

He sniffed. “Depends on the mission. With a caravan, you take the lead driver. One shot and they pour out of the other vehicles like ants.”

I imagined those ants, each one a human being, rushing into an ambush.

“In your nonengaged situation, though,” Joel continued, “you pick the highest ranking officer.”

“How do you know who that is? Do you learn their uniforms?”

“You can’t count on that. Clothes in a battlefield get torn, passed around, generally trashed. One time I remember, though.” He chuckled, leaning against the shooting bench. “These two VC standing side by side in my scope. Course, I know I’ll only get one, on account of one shot gives your location away, it’s pop and run and don’t look back.”

Joel raised an imaginary gun to his shoulder, sighting down its barrel, moving right and left, right and left. “So which one, you know? Who’s the lucky guy? Then one of them pulls out a map and starts reading it while the other one’s standing by. Dead giveaway, so to speak. Oh yeah. Hello, Officer Map, and good night.”

He lowers his pretend gun. “Even today, you’ll never catch me looking at a map. I’d rather stay lost than get popped.”

Michael emerged from the field, holding up the target. “Check this out.”

There were five punctures on the outermost rings, which I now realized meant they were nearly a foot off the mark, and one just above and to the left of the yellow center.

“Look-ee there.” Joel took the sheet, cackling his approval. “Bang bang.”

“Decent pattern.” Michael began picking up brass casings from my shots. “Six on paper on the first day.”

“Just lucky,” I said. “With a good instructor.”

“Don’t be modest,” Joel said. “Around here it’s OK to admit it. You’re a natural born killer.”

“No.” Michael paused in his clean-up and spoke at the ground. “One in the family is enough.”

Joel wandered away while Michael packed up, but he ambled back with a gallon jug that had a bright orange top. “You mind if I do the OJ bit?”

Michael made a sour face. “Not a good idea, buddy.”

Joel shuffled his feet. “If she wants to know what it’s really like . . .”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“It’s a nasty thing Joel does to teach people,” Michael answered. “An exercise in perspective.”