week he allowed himself the small joy of a can of tuna fish. Although just an hour from Taos, after buying his furniture and initial supplies he never went back to town. For new supplies he drove all the way to Albuquerque, three hours each way, and he bought in bulk.
During the first year Leonard dropped eighty pounds, scaling back to 210. He cut his hair stubble-short, grew a full beard, then cut it short and guessed that the cold winter turned it gray. He pretty much ignored the natural beauty around him. He spent his early days in relentless exertion. He awoke at first light each morning through the spring and summer. When the colder months brought shorter days, Leonard was always awake and starting his day before the sun. He chopped wood and ran up and down the hills comprising his land. He bought gym equipment in Albuquerque, trucked it back in his SUV, and assembled it in the living room of his cabin. Each morning while his coffee brewed, Leonard did thirty minutes on the treadmill and thirty more on the complicated calisthenics apparatus. He believed, and it seemed to be true, that the constant effort helped him control his dreams. They had elements in common and were always extremely unpleasant; some tore him from sleep, some tortured him within it. Those that did not involve his family had Dahlonaga in them, Barbara, and others he left behind.
After the first four months, Leonard began collecting and learning to use an assortment of guns. In time, this occupied most of his time. Many days he rose with the early light, worked out, ate a simple breakfast, and fired his rifles until dark. At night, with a small fire going and the sounds of classical music coming from his radio, he disassembled, cleaned, and polished his weapons. He took enormous pride in this. Each piece of each weapon was cleaned and shined and laid out on the table in front of him. When the rifle had been completely stripped, he patiently put it back together again. He bought all of his rifles on the Internet. He spent hours researching sniper rifles and shotguns, scopes and ammunition. He liked it. He began to see these weapons as his tools, and he studied them with something akin to parental sensitivity. He had his favorites. He became a fan of firearms designers like Dr. Nehemiah Sirkis, with his Israeli conversions of the US M-14. Sirkis’s models became known as the M89s, with the M89SR one of the world’s outstanding long-range rifles, complete with a sound suppressor. Leonard envisioned the day when he could hold one to his shoulder and hit a target no bigger than a baseball at a thousand yards. He knew that day would be his. For the shorter-range targets he leaned toward the Yugoslavian Zastava M76, a challenging weapon because of its reduced ammunition loadout. It demanded a first-shot strike.
Every weapon he found could be bought somewhere on the Internet. Many were very expensive. A Holland and Holland double rifle can be had, but only for twenty-five thousand dollars or more. Some of the extremely rare guns brought prices well above that-when they were available at all. Leonard spent months seeking a Walther WA2000, a semiautomatic rifle made in Germany. For accuracy, power, handling, and recoil, Leonard considered the Walther to be the finest gun ever built. Like the Sirkis M89SR, the Walther had only a six-shot load, but with its exceptional accuracy, Leonard did not see that as a drawback. Only a few of them had been built. He badly wanted to own one. When one of them became available, Leonard rushed to buy it. The Internet was his schoolroom; just the place for a single-minded student. He had no interest in price. Money meant nothing to him. Everything he bought was eventually shipped to Evangelical Missions Inc. at a private mailbox drop in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where he picked them up.
Leonard had always heard that shooting comes naturally to some. When he first moved south he was not surprised to learn that so many sons of Dixie found it so. At Nina’s suggestion he found excuses to leave the room when talk turned to shooting doves. Of course, he never accepted an invitation to go hunting. He would say, “The only hunting I do is for lost golf balls.”
But he found that he too had a knack for guns, and from the start he had a deeply comfortable sense that they belonged together. He liked the feel of the stock against his shoulder, the touch of the cold, metal barrel in his hand. His finger felt good gripping the trigger.
He quickly mastered the pulling, smooth and even. He liked the smell of guns when they fired, and when they had to be taken apart and cleaned with oil and rags, and when he held them reassembled, ready for use.
He started slowly, took his time, mastered each phase before moving on. He spent months shooting simple and basic rifles, without scopes, at short distances. Ten yards at first, then thirty, then fifty. From August through Thanksgiving he fired thousands of rounds. Always, he studied and evaluated his efforts, learned about windage and elevation, the effects of temperature, humidity, distance. “Imagine the path of the bullet,” he told himself, “calculate the factors; at a thousand yards in a twenty mile-per-hour wind a bullet can veer ten inches off course. Even the round makes a difference; some ammunition is more accurate than others; some more powerful. Make choices. Make allowances.” When he could put enough shots into a twelve-inch target at fifty yards to disintegrate it, he moved on. Then he installed the scopes that allowed him to hit targets up to fifteen hundred yards away. He spent many weeks utilizing the scopes at shorter distances-two hundred yards; three hundred yards; five hundred yards. Finally, he set himself up and began firing at targets as distant as a thousand and fifteen hundred yards. He took aim slowly, adjusted his scope, corrected for the wind, elevation, all the conditions subject to change, and then squeezed the trigger and watched the bullet strike the target so far away. Time after time after time.
As his skill increased, he swapped bulls-eye paper targets for life-sized cardboard humans. A year’s work and tens of thousands of rounds took him from hitting the center of a man’s chest at fifty feet to doing it from a half mile or more. By then he could take apart and reassemble every rifle he owned in less than sixty seconds. He learned the specs on every type of round: who manufactured it, what it could do; what kind of weapon and which particular ammunition was best for every possible circumstance.
During the second year, Leonard’s weight leveled off at 170 pounds. The stubble-short hair on his head now matched his beard, steel gray with patchy reminders of darker days. At fifty-six years old he’d never felt nearly so powerful. He was also certain that few individuals had ever attained comparable accuracy with so varied a group of long guns. He’d put thousands of hours into his shotguns and rifles. He’d perfected his skills in the heat of the desert’s summer sun, in the driving rain, the cold and snow, and all this at morning light, high noon, and twilight. He had total confidence he could hit any target in any circumstance. He’d even achieved a high degree of mastery while practicing by standing on a small trampoline. The target and the shooter move, and then the moment arrives, the trigger is pulled, the bullet flies, and the target is hit.
Two years alone can do strange things to a man, even a man so resolved in his purpose as Leonard Martin. He had stretches of time as long as a month or more when he didn’t speak a single word to another human being, not to anyone. He began speaking to himself, not out loud, but still they were conversations with himself. He had long talks about the weather-how to spot the movement of a storm, what the changing shapes of the clouds meant for the next day-and about the creatures he shared the New Mexico wilderness with. “The rabbits,” he’d say to himself, “they run four or five jumps and then change direction. Why do they do that?” He studied them closely, sometimes sitting on a chair in front of his cabin for many hours without moving. There was a method to their movement, he realized. At least three-quarters of the time when a rabbit jumped in another direction it was to his right. “If I were a coyote,” he said, “I’d chase to the right and I’d have rabbit for dinner.” Leonard watched all the living things around him: the birds, the deer, and the prairie dogs; even the insects, the beetles, the spiders and butterflies. They all had a purpose, and they all had a pattern to their lives. He’d never given a thought to any of them before. Now he felt he knew them, knew them in a way other men did not. Some of the larger animals he came to recognize by sight. One rabbit in particular became his favorite. He was scruffy like all the others, but he had a dark spot on his hindquarters and a piece missing from one ear that made him easy to identify. Leonard named him Henry, after Frogman Henry. There were no frogs around, so the rabbit would do. He often sang, out loud, “Ain’t Got No Home” in his best Frogman Henry voice. One day Henry didn’t show up. Leonard never saw him again. “It’s a cruel world,” he said to himself. Leonard could not hurt any of the animals that lived around him. In fact, he couldn’t even stomp on a pesky insect. They all had complicated lives, he told himself, and he had no business disturbing them. They respected him. He respected them. Many times he could have shot any one of a multitude of living creatures racing, jumping, or crawling about his personal firing range. In truth, it would have been very helpful to do so, but he never fired a bullet in anger at any living thing in New Mexico.
After two years in the mountains of the southwest, Leonard Martin packed everything he needed into the evangelical SUV and began his journey to Boston.
New York
