Page 64 of Snake-Eater
“Well . . .”
Grandma Billy’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. “What about if something came after Copper?”
“That’s a low blow,” muttered Selena, but shouldered the bag that Grandma handed her and followed the old woman out into the desert.
“I thought cans on the fence were traditional,” Selena said, eyeing the bank of orange dirt with a pair of faded targets leaned against it. One was shaped like a deer and one like a human. The ground was littered with brass.
“That’s fine if you plan on gettin’ attacked by a can.” Grandma sighted down the barrel of a rifle. “But if it’s a person, I’d rather you knew what part to aim for.”
“What if it’s ... err ... not a person?” Selena thought of the roadrunner.
“Shotgun,” said Grandma. “But we’ll start you out on a rifle, ’cause it scares people less.”
Selena felt plenty scared enough. The gun felt like a scorpion, something that you could handle safely but would punish you if you got careless for a second. “Can I shoot at the deer-shaped one?”
“Sure, if it makes you feel better.”
It did. Otherwise she was pretty sure she’d be picturing Walter on the man-shaped target and the thought made her feel both guilty and exhilarated in some hard-to-define fashion.
Grandma ran her through loading and unloading. “This here’s a cartridge, but if you call it a bullet, I don’t mind. And this is the magazine, but plenty of people call it a clip, and the only people who get pissy about the difference are a pain in the ass at the range.”
“What do you call those?”
“I call ’em earplugs. Put ’em in.”
When Selena had loaded and unloaded to Grandma’s satisfaction and mastered the safety, she wedged the rifle hard against her shoulder—“No, harder than that”—aimed, and was finally allowed to pull the trigger.
“Not bad,” said Grandma after a moment. “Might do even better if you kept your eyes open.”
“It’s loud,” said Selena meekly.
“Yep, and you know it’s gonna be loud, so you flinch. That’s why we’re using a little bitty .22 to work the flinch out of you first.”
Selena thought glumly that life had been instilling a flinch in her since birth and it was gonna take a lot more than an afternoon with a rifle to get it back out again, but tried again.
And again. And again.
When she finally hit the faded red bull’s-eye on the side of the deer—not the center, but at least one of the inner rings—she was astonished at the sheergleeshe felt. “I hit it. I really hit it!”
“You sure did,” said Grandma. “If you’re hunting a deer, that’ll do the job, assuming you’ve got a proper deer rifle.”
Selena paused. “Arethere deer here?”
“Yep. Mule deer, mostly. Some whitetail. Pronghorns too, but I never could stand the taste. Like chewing sagebrush. Even javelina’sbetter—and donotgo shooting a javelina.” Grandma’s frown woke all the wrinkles in her face. “You see a javelina around here, you can yell at it, but don’t you point a gun at it, you hear?”
“I wasn’t going to. Err ... what’s wrong with the javelina?”
“Never you mind.” Grandma nodded to the target. “Now let’s see you hit that again.”
Selena’s right shoulder was sore and her hands had a slight buzz when they got home. Grandma had threatened her with another round of training later in the week. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. On the one hand, it probably didn’t hurt to know, but on the other, it was impossible to imagine herself pointing at a living being and pulling the trigger.
She didn’t feel like going out to the church for a meal, even though the alternative was yet another omelet for dinner. (Selena was starting to suspect that Grandma Billy was using her as a dumping ground for excess eggs.) But there were green things in the garden that could go into an omelet, even if they were mostly herbs and a few leaves of spinach.
An unexpected glimpse of yellow winked at her from the far end of the garden. Selena approached and saw the golden trumpet of a squash blossom, and let out a cry of delight. She’d been so busy the past few days, what with the ... well ... everything ... that she hadn’t even seen the bud form. She picked up Copper’s front paws and did an impromptu dance with the Labrador. “It flowered! The squash flowered!”
Of course it did,said the Walter in her head.It’s a plant. What did you expect it to do, explode?She ignored him, dropping to her knees to inspect the flower. There were ways to eat squash blossoms, she knew, but she didn’t want to remove it and stop it forming an actual squash. Summer squash sliced and fried would make a nice change from omelets, even if she’d probably be sick of squash too by the time the season ended.
“Thank you, squash god!” she called, and went inside without considering that she was already thinking like she was staying until the end of the season.
