Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Then for the first time in that entire day I was alone. And I didn’t mind it. I sat squat down in the grass, loaded my double gun, and took my other two shells out of my pocket to hold. I pushed the safety off and on to see that it was right. The wind rose a little then, scuffed the grass and made me shiver. It was not the warm chinook now, but a wind out of the north, the one geese flew away from if they could.

Then I thought about my mother in the car alone, and how much longer I would stay with her, and what it might mean to her for me to leave. And I wondered when Glen Baxter would die and if someone would kill him, or whether my mother would marry him and how I would feel about it. And though I didn’t know why, it occurred to me then that Glen Baxter and I would not be friends when all was said and done, since I didn’t care if he ever married my mother or didn’t.

Then I thought about boxing and what my father had taught me about it. To tighten your fists hard. To strike out straight from the shoulder and never punch backing up. How to cut a punch by snapping your fist inwards, how to carry your chin low, and to step toward a man when he is falling so you can hit him again. And most important, to keep your eyes open when you are hitting in the face and causing damage, because you need to see what you’re doing to encourage yourself, and because it is when you close your eyes that you stop hitting and get hurt badly. “Fly all over your man, Les,” my father said. “When you see your chance, fly on him and hit him till he falls.” That, I thought, would always be my attitude in things.

And then I heard the geese again, their voices in unison, louder and shouting, as if the wind had changed and put all new sounds in the cold air. And then a boom . And I knew Glen was in among them and had stood up to shoot. The noise of geese rose and grew worse, and my fingers burned where I held my gun too tight to the metal, and I put it down and opened my fist to make the burning stop so I could feel the trigger when the moment came. Boom , Glen shot again, and I heard him shuck a shell, and all the sounds out beyond the bunker seemed to be rising — the geese, the shots, the air itself going up. Boom , Glen shot another time, and I knew he was taking his careful time to make his shots good. And I held my gun and started to crawl up the bunker so as not to be surprised when the geese came over me and I could shoot.

From the top I saw Glen Baxter alone in the wheatgrass field, shooting at a white goose with black tips of wings that was on the ground not far from him, but trying to run and pull into the air. He shot it once more, and it fell over dead with its wings flapping.

Glen looked back at me and his face was distorted and strange. The air around him was full of white rising geese and he seemed to want them all. “Behind you, Les,” he yelled at me and pointed. “They’re all behind you now.” I looked behind me, and there were geese in the air as far as I could see, more than I knew how many, moving so slowly, their wings wide out and working calmly and filling the air with noise, though their voices were not as loud or as shrill as I had thought they would be. And they were very close! Forty feet, some of them. The air around me vibrated and I could feel the wind from their wings and it seemed to me I could kill as many as the times I could shoot — a hundred or a thousand — and I raised my gun, put the muzzle on the head of a white goose and fired. It shuddered in the air, its wide feet sank below its belly, its wings cradled out to hold back air, and it fell straight down and landed with an awful sound, a noise a human would make, a thick, soft, hump noise. I looked up again and shot another goose, could hear the pellets hit its chest, but it didn’t fall or even break its pattern for flying. Boom , Glen shot again. And then again. “Hey,” I heard him shout. “Hey, hey.” And there were geese flying over me, flying in line after line. I broke my gun and reloaded, and thought to myself as I did: I need confidence here, I need to be sure with this. I pointed at another goose and shot it in the head, and it fell the way the first one had, wings out, its belly down, and with the same thick noise of hitting. Then I sat down in the grass on the bunker and let geese fly over me.

By now the whole raft was in the air, all of it moving in a slow swirl above me and the lake and everywhere, finding the wind and heading out south in long wavering lines that caught the last sun and turned to silver as they gained a distance. It was a thing to see, I will tell you now. Five thousand white geese all in the air around you, making a noise like you have never heard before. And I thought to myself then: This is something I will never see again. I will never forget this. And I was right.

Glen Baxter shot twice more. One shot missed, but with the other he hit a goose flying away from him and knocked it half-falling and — flying into the empty lake not far from shore, where it began to swim as though it was fine and make its noise.

Glen stood in the stubbly grass, looking out at the goose, his gun lowered. “I didn’t need to shoot that, did I, Les?”

“I don’t know,” I said, sitting on the little knoll of land, looking at the goose swimming in the water.

“I don’t know why I shoot ’em. They’re so beautiful.” He looked at me.

“I don’t know either,” I said.

“Maybe there’s nothing else to do with them.” Glen stared at the goose again and shook his head. “Maybe this is exactly what they’re put on earth for.”

I did not know what to say because I did not know what he could mean by that, though what I felt was embarrassment at the great number of geese there were, and a dulled feeling like a hunger because the shooting had stopped and it was over for me now.

Glen began to pick up his geese, and I walked down to my two that had fallen close together and were dead. One had hit with such an impact that its stomach had split and some of its inward parts were knocked out. Though the other looked unhurt, its soft white belly turned up like a pillow, its head and jagged bill teeth and its tiny black eyes looking as if it were alive.

“What’s happened to the hunters out here?” I heard a voice speak. It was my mother, standing in her pink dress on the knoll above us, hugging her arms. She was smiling though she was cold. And I realized that I had lost all thought of her in the shooting. “Who did all this shooting? Is this your work, Les?”

“No,” I said.

“Les is a hunter, though, Aileen,” Glen said. “He takes his time.” He was holding two white geese by their necks, one in each hand, and he was smiling. He and my mother seemed pleased.

“I see you didn’t miss too many,” my mother said and smiled. I could tell she admired Glen for his geese, and that she had done some thinking in the car alone. “It was wonderful, Glen,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like that. They were like snow.”

“It’s worth seeing once, isn’t it?” Glen said. “I should’ve killed more, but I got excited.”

My mother looked at me then. “Where’s yours, Les?”

“Here,” I said and pointed to my two geese on the ground beside me.

My mother nodded in a nice way, and I think she liked everything then and wanted the day to turn out right and for all of us to be happy. “Six, then. You’ve got six in all.”

“One’s still out there,” I said and motioned where the one goose was swimming in circles on the water.

“Okay,” my mother said and put her hand over her eyes to look. “Where is it?”

Glen Baxter looked at me then with a strange smile, a smile that said he wished I had never mentioned anything about the other goose. And I wished I hadn’t either. I looked up in the sky and could see the lines of geese by the thousands shining silver in the light, and I wished we could just leave and go home.