pips off a playing card with one of these, boys could dance a tin can around a yard like it was on a string. Hotter than slick shit in July as long as nobody put the wind up their ass.” He takes me by the shoulder and points to the scarecrow Wylie has planted in the garden. Ragged overalls and a pillowslip stuffed with straw on which a lopsided face has been scratched with a piece of coal. “I just put a little wind up your ass. Now point and squeeze,” he says.
I shake my head. I don’t trust my trembling hand.
“You wanted this fucking lesson. Learn it, Vincent.”
I raise the gun. Immensely heavy, a great weight dragging on my arm, it is as if I am trying to lift the scarecrow staked in the garden on the tip of the gun barrel, uproot it from the earth. I fire, the pistol springs in my hand, a small captive animal struggling in my fist.
“High and to the right,” says Shorty drily. “Point and squeeze.”
The quaking in my hand has spread, run up the length of my arm to vibrate in my shoulder. I try to fix the bead in the centre of the overalls but it twitches with every beat of my heart. Clenched muscles cannot overrule it. Another shot. A puff of dust dances in the field beyond the garden.
“Squeeze,” says McAdoo, “squeeze.”
I snap off two more shots as quickly as I can; I want to be done with it, the gun kicks in rapid recoil, the smell of expended powder worms up my nostrils. Then I am pulling the trigger of a gun dead in my hand, the hammer clicking repeatedly on empty chambers, the scarecrow leering at me untouched. Shorty’s hand closes on the barrel and pushes it down to my side.
“Learn anything?” he asks.
Over Shorty’s shoulder I spot Wylie running hard and awkward in his riding boots, knees pumping high, shoulders thrown back. Passing the burned house, he snatches a piece of lumber from the ground and hurtles on toward us.
“Lose the gun, Harry,” Shorty is saying. “It ain’t for you.” Then he senses something, breaks off, turns and catches sight of Wylie. “Christ,” he says, “here comes the cavalry.”
The cavalry is upon us now. “I heard them shots, Shorty! I come to see!” he cries, breathless. “You okay, Shorty?” He holds the two-by-four wrapped in a two-fisted grip. A large rusted spike protrudes from it.
“Calm down,” says McAdoo. “Everything’s okay.”
Wylie’s eyes jump suspiciously from McAdoo to me. He has spotted the revolver in my hand and it seems to have stirred muddled outrage in him. “Why you shooting that gun?” he yells at me. “Shorty says you try to make him talk about stuff he don’t want to talk about.” He takes a menacing step towards me. “You leave him alone. He don’t have to talk to you.”
“Climb down off of him, Wylie,” Shorty orders. “I was just giving Harry a shooting lesson.”
Wylie clamps his top teeth over his bottom lip and sucks it, seeking solace and consolation even while his eyes narrow resentfully. “Whyn’t you give me a lesson, too?” he complains to Shorty.
“Yes, Shorty, whyn’t you give him the lesson you gave me?”
“He don’t need that particular lesson,” says Shorty.
“Please, Shorty, I ain’t never shot a short gun but once or twice. Leave me do it, Shorty.”
“Wylie don’t need no lesson like you did, Mr. Writer. You seen him coming to the rescue like hell in a handcart with nothing but that piece of lumber in his hand. He was ready to pulp somebody.” He gives me a wolfish grin. “No wind up Wylie’s ass.”
“That’s right,” agrees Wylie hesitantly, unsure what the conversation is about, “I ain’t got no wind up my ass.”
“Going to save old Shorty’s bacon, wasn’t you, boy?”
“I heard them shots. I say, There’s maybe trouble, maybe Shorty’s in trouble, and I run like the wind.”
I hand the pistol and a box of cartridges to McAdoo. “Give him his lesson,” I say.
“Show me, Shorty,” Wylie pleads. “I can do her, Shorty.”
McAdoo doesn’t say anything. He simply breaks the gun, feeds cartridges into the chambers, slaps it shut. Before giving it to Wylie, he says sternly, “Point your finger.”
“At what, Shorty? Where?”
“There. At that goddamn scarecrow you made, Wylie.”
Wylie does.
“Say
“Bam,” says Wylie.
“Put your hand down.”
Wylie does.
“Now up and
“Bam,” goes Wylie.
“All right.” McAdoo smacks the gun into his palm. “Do the same with this, point her and squeeze the trigger.”
Wylie hefts the gun in his hand, the brightness of the weapon pulses up his arm and into his face. He beams. The gun flies up. It goes
“See?” says McAdoo to me. “Nothing to her.” He turns to Wylie. “Like shooting fish in a fucking barrel, ain’t it?”
Wylie grins, face shining. “Easy,” he says, head bobbing. “Easy.”
“Try for the head,” says McAdoo. The words are scarcely out of his mouth when the barrel glares in the sun. I hear three shots, so quick they stutter, and the head of the scarecrow tosses like a buggy whip.
McAdoo and I stand silent while a few wisps of errant straw float lazily to the ground. Wylie has drilled a hole in the scarecrow’s leer and two more, one through the right eye and the other two inches above the left.
“Jesus Christ,” mutters McAdoo.
“Bam,” goes Wylie with the empty gun. “Bam, bam.”
“The gun’s his,” I say. “I don’t want it. Let him keep it.”
I walk away, quickly. Wylie is standing with the gun, swinging it from target to target, going
17
The fording of the Milk was a good deal easier than the Marias – no fool and blind white horse to save from drowning. Once across, they shucked their wet clothes and hung them in the willows, built a fire and breakfasted buck naked while their duds dried. Finding themselves north of the Milk seemed to lighten the boys’ mood, they were now beyond reach of the Choteau County sheriff, the United States Marshals, the army, or Indian agents. On the Canadian side of the line there were no meddlesome lawmen of any stripe whatsoever.
And the health of their spirits might have owed something to the fact that all trace of the horse thieves was now well and truly gone. Pure relief, the Englishman’s boy guessed, noting how the knot in his own gut had loosened over the last day when it became clear they had lost them. Biggity talk about what you were aiming to do to Indians was one thing, the prospect of delivering on it was another. There were some hard cases in this crowd, but even hard cases got second thoughts when their mouths fell shut long enough to allow a spell for thinking.
Hardwick let them linger over morning coffee; with the trail dissolved into thin air there was no point in hurry. The thieves might have skedaddled in any direction – maybe they’d even doubled back south. But Hardwick had decided to gamble that they were bound for the Cypress Hills, fifty miles to the north, prime hunting grounds for the tribes. And not just for the Cree, the Saulteaux, the Assiniboine, and the Blackfoot who gathered there to dance, to hunt, to make war, and to chop lodgepole pine, the slim, arrow-straight, nearly branchless trees prized for teepee and travois poles. Because also folded in among the hills were bands of Metis who had given the
