Jeff Jacobson - Wormfood

Grandpa used to tell me a story about this one time Earl Johnson came by the gun range. Earl was in his twenties. He was one tough customer, wearing brand-spanking-new hunting gear, boots, jeans, a giant cowboy hat. He wanted to sight in his new deer rifle, some ungodly huge .50 caliber Weatherby that had been built for the sole purpose of killing elephants. Grandpa strongly suggested that Earl might want to use a shooting bench, but the great white hunter knew what he was doing, dammit, he didn’t need to be treated like some goddamn woman.

Earl eased into a prone position, took his time settling down, getting the rifle with its huge barrel into place, and finally pulled the trigger. After the smoke cleared and the echoing thunder died, Grandpa found Earl whimpering in pain. The recoil had been powerful enough to drive him backward nearly a foot. The toes of his cowboy boots had left two neat grooves in the dirt, and the stock had broken Earl’s collarbone in two places.

I wedged my elbows into the slight indentations in my knees, the shallow groove right between my kneecap and the muscle on the inside of my leg, so the rifle was supported on the tripod I’d made with my skeleton. Two knees up to two elbows, with my shoulder as the third point in the triangle. The rifle slipped easily, naturally into place as if it knew where to go, as if it belonged there all along, as if it had never left my shoulder and cheek.

I sighted down the barrel, staring down between the notches in the iron sights, and everything else in the world fell away. Nothing else existed except myself, the rifle, and the squirrels. My breathing got even slower, deeper. The index finger of my right hand gently, ever so gently came to rest on the smooth trigger, almost as if there were an extremely rotten egg between the trigger and the guard and I was afraid of breaking the fragileshell. Then my eyes focused somewhere beyond the tip of the barrel, rushing forward across the field and coming to rest on the cliff face, alive with the motion of squirrels dashing from one hole to another.

A blur of brown fur scurried into my line of sight and froze, becoming a statue of a scraggly adult squirrel, ears up, mangy tail held high, claws clutching at the solid dirt. I swung the barrel slightly, until the notches lined up just behind the squirrel’s front shoulder. I held my breath, then let it out slow, slower still, until I wasn’t really breathing at all, and squeezed the trigger.

The world jolted, winked out for an instant, and the squirrel was gone. No pieces, nothing. It was simply gone. The crack of the shot rolled out across the field and into the hills, bouncing back toward the tree. Strangely though, I only really heard it with my left ear.

Without moving my left arm, I reached up with my right, jerked the bolt up and back. The spent casing went flying toward an old coffee can I kept, about four feet off to my right. I collected the casings when I was finished, and took them back to the trailer so Grandma could reload them.

I slid the bolt forward and locked it down. My finger found the trigger all by itself as I scanned the cliff again. Everything was still. The squirrels understood that one of their own had been touched once again by God, but they weren’t sure where His hand had come out of the sky. So they froze, listening, watching.

Another crack of thunder. This time, the bullet slammed into the squirrel’s chest, near the ground. The thin body flew off the cliff in a spectacular cartwheel, sending drops of blood into an abstract, circular pattern into the dirt. It bounced once before falling out of sight into the gravel of the creek bed. The body wouldn’t last long; the vultures would arrive as soon as I left. They were probably circling already.

In these hills, gunfire tended to attract scavengers.

I shot twenty-two more squirrels in fifteen minutes. That was enough. Only one shell was left in the breech. It took a while, but thesquirrels finally realized that it didn’t matter where the hand of God was coming from, only that it was coming out of the sky with a vengeance, and it was safer to hole up inside the burrows until God got bored and went somewhere else. I watched the cliff face for a moment through the binoculars, satisfying myself that there wasn’t going to be any brave or just plain stupid squirrel trying to make a mad dash to another hole. There wasn’t.

I was about to put the binoculars down and collect my spent casings when three quick puffs of dirt popped out of the cliff and an instant later three light cracks of another rifle echoed out across the field. I dropped the binoculars and scrabbled back against the dead tree, breathing hard. I waited a moment, watching the cliff, but the gunshots rolled away as if they had never happened.

After a full minute, I poked my head carefully around the tree, checking the field behind me. It was empty. But there, on the far edge of the field, a bright red Dodge pickup, sitting way up on some kind of lift kit, was parked on the side of Road E. I could just make out the shape of someone sitting in the driver’s seat.

I brought the binoculars up and found someone with long blond hair pointing a rifle at me. I jerked back around the tree, breath trapped in my throat. It took a moment, but then I realized that the rifle had a scope on it, and the person was probably just watching me through the scope. That didn’t make me feel any better. Only some kind of a moron would watch somebody else through a scope, not realizing that they were also aiming the rifle at the person. Or maybe they did realize it.

I took a chance and peered back around the tree. Now the person was leaning out of the window, waving at me. The rifle was gone. I glanced quickly through the binoculars again.

The red pickup sprang into view, in sharp focus, showing me everything. The person in the window was wearing a tight white blouse, and I couldn’t help but notice the generous swell of breasts barely contained underneath. The waving wasn’t helping me much either; the breastsshimmered slightly with every movement. I finally managed to tear my gaze away from the curves to see the face. But I knew who it was. Knew it before I even saw her face. I suppose I knew it when I saw the pickup, saw the blond hair.

It was Misty Johnson. And she was waving at me .

CHAPTER 15

I wasn’t sure what to do, so I raised my right arm and kind of waved back. Actually, it took me a few seconds to figure out that she wasn’t so much waving at me as she was waving me over to her, beckoning me.

For a moment, I couldn’t move. The idea that someone like Misty Johnson was calling me over to her snapped something in my brain, disrupted the flow of thoughts, and so I stood rooted to my spot under the oak tree. She kept waving at me.

I left all the spent casings behind and didn’t waste much time getting across the field.

She had the upper half of her body out of the driver’s window, resting on her elbows, watching me get closer. Her arms pressed her breasts together, pushing them up and out. I think she knew what she was doing, knew exactly the kind of effect it was having on me. I stopped on my side of the old barbed wire fence, trying hard not to stare up at her.

“I was watching you shoot,” she said. “You’re pretty good. Never missed once.”

I shrugged and stammered out something like, “I get a lot of practice.”

“I’ll bet. What’s your name?”

“Arch Stanton.”

“You live here?” Before I could answer, she said, “I’ve seen you at school, right?”

I shrugged again, trying to blurt out something, anything. “Ah … uh-huh.” That’s me—Mr. Smooth. I was just glad she didn’t mention seeing me yesterday morning, when her dad went for a swim in the ditch.