about a hundred yards to there, all open field, just one white oak stricken against the sky like an explosion. Be better at night. They didn’t have a dog or he’d know it by now.
“Hey,” said a voice behind him.
He turned with the rifle. It was Silas, his arms full of limbs. Firewood.
The black boy dropped the wood and raised his hands like a robber. For a moment that was how they stood, Silas in the coat Larry’s mother had given him and one of Larry’s old thermal caps his mother must’ve thought to put in the pocket.
Silas opened his mouth. “You gone shoot me?”
He moved the rifle. “No,” he said. “You scared me is all. Sneaking up like that.”
“I ain’t sneak.” Silas lowered his hands.
“Sorry,” Larry said. He put the.22 against a tree and hesitated, then came forward to shake Silas’s hand. His father’s habit. Silas hesitated, too, then, perhaps because they were alone in the woods, no school around them, they shook, Silas’s fingers again enveloped Larry’s glove.
For a moment they looked at each other, then knelt together to pick up the wood. Larry stacked his limbs onto the top of the pile Silas held. Silas shrugged a thanks and stepped past Larry and went to the edge and stopped. He looked back over his shoulder.
“What you doing out here?”
“My daddy owns this land.” Larry turned to where the gun stood, barrel up, against the bark of a pine tree. “I was hunting.”
“You kill anything?”
He shook his head.
“Cause I ain’t heard no shots.”
“I’m hunting deer,” Larry said.
“I had me a gun I could kill some of these squirrels. Let Momma fry em.”
Larry reached for the.22.
“You reckon I could borry that one?” Silas said. “I bet your daddy got twenty-five more ain’t he.”
He did, he had several guns. Larry brought this one because it didn’t kick and wasn’t as loud as the others, twelve- and twenty-gauge shotguns or higher-caliber rifles.
“How yall get to town now?” Larry asked.
“Momma got a car.”
“How’d she get it?”
“I don’t know. How your daddy get his truck?”
“Paid for it.”
They stood. Silas looked toward the cabin then dropped the wood again and turned, pointed to the.22. “Let me shoot it.”
Larry looked toward the house. “Won’t your momma hear?”
“She workin.”
“I thought she worked the early shift. Piggly Wiggly.”
“She do. Then she work the late shift at the diner in Fulsom. Here go,” he said, stepping forward and taking the gun from Larry who never even tried to stop the black boy. “How you do it?” Silas asked.
“It’s already one in the chamber,” Larry said. “All you got to do is cock it and shoot.”
“How you shoot?”
“You ain’t never shot?”
“I ain’t never touch no gun,” Silas said. He held the rifle by its stock and forestock, as if it were a barbell without weights.
Larry raised his arms and mimed how you’d aim the gun. “Which hand are you?”
“Say what?”
“Right-handed or left. I’m right.”
“Left.”
“So you’re opposite me. See that hammer there?” Larry pointed. “Cock it back.”
Silas did, and Larry watched him raise the rifle to his right cheek. “Lay your face on the wood,” he said.
“Cold,” Silas said.
“Now close your left eye and look with your right down the barrel. See that little sight? Put that on whatever you want to hit.”
Silas aimed at something across the field, closer to the cabin than Larry liked, and then shot and the echo slapped through the trees.
“It ain’t loud,” Silas said. He lowered the rifle and peered toward where he’d fired.
“That’s how come I like it.”
“Can I shoot it again?”
“Go on.”
“How many bullets you got?”
“Cartridges. This one shoots cartridges. Twenty-two longs.”
“It shoot twenty-two times?”
Larry had to smile. “No, this gun’s a.22 caliber. It shoots long or short cartridges. I got longs today.”
“How many you got?”
“Enough.”
Silas raised it again and sighted down the barrel and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
“Work the lever,” Larry said, miming.
Silas levered the rifle and his head snapped when the spent hull flew out of the side.
“Now see how it’s cocked? It’s ready to shoot again, so be careful.”
Holding the rifle with a kind of reverence, Silas bent to retrieve the hull.
“It’s hot,” Larry said, but Silas picked it up with his fingers and then cupped it in his palm.
“What you do with these?”
Larry shrugged. “Throw em away.”
Silas put the cartridge to his nose. “It smell good.”
“Gunpowder.”
“Gunpowder.”
They watched each other.
Then Silas raised the rifle again and panned it over the field, past the house, all the way back around to Larry, and held it on him. For a moment Larry saw into the perfect
“Now we even,” Silas said.
Then he moved the gun, continued his pan until he stopped on a pine tree and shot. He levered the rifle and this time caught the ejected hull. It clinked against the other in his palm. He put them both in his coat pocket, and it struck Larry with a wave of sadness, a boy saving the hulls as something valuable.
“Go on keep it,” Larry blurted. “The rifle.”
Silas when he smiled displayed an array of handsome teeth. “For real?”
It was the first time Larry had seen him smile. “I got to get it back, though. Pretty soon, okay? Promise?”
“I’ll just shoot me a few these squirrels,” Silas said. He sighted something high in a tree. “You got the bullets? The cartridges?”
Larry unzipped his coat pocket and brought out both of the small white boxes and held them out to the black boy. Silas took them reverently and transferred them to his own coat pocket. Larry showed him how to load it and gave him pointers about aiming and shooting, the same lessons his father had given him. By the time he finished telling Silas how to clean the rifle, the sky outside the woods had reddened and the limbs were darker and the smoke from the cabin had quit.
“Oh man,” Silas said, grabbing all the wood he could gather in one hand, gun in the other. “That fire go out my momma kill me dead.”
With sticks pointing in every direction he raced toward the sun, and only when Larry could no longer discern the rifle barrel from sticks of firewood did he himself turn and walk back into the forest where night had already begun
