He accepted a broken twelve-gauge side-by-side from a stout man in a camouflage hat whom he recognized vaguely as the second husband of his second cousin Willa. Keeping his face, and the barrel of the weapon, toward the barbed-wire fence, he let them stare at the back of his ski parka as he bit the mitten from his left hand and slid a pair of shells into the warm barrels. On the ground several yards out, just where the land dropped into the ravine, someone had set up a row of leftover Halloween pumpkins, most of which were already blasted to pie filling and fanned across the dead brown weeds. Richard snapped the gun together, raised it, packed its butt in snugly against his shoulder, got his body weight well forward, and drew the first trigger back. The gun stomped him, and the base of a pumpkin jumped up and thought about rolling away. He caught it with the second barrel. Then he broke the weapon, snatched out the hot shells, let them fall to the ground, and handed the shotgun to the owner with an appreciative nod.
“You do much hunting up there at your Schloss, Dick?” asked a man in his twenties: Willa’s stepson. He said it loudly. It was hard to tell whether this was the orange foam plugs stuffed into his ears or sarcasm.
Richard smiled. “None at all,” he replied. “Pretty much everything in my Wikipedia entry is wrong.”
The young man’s smile vanished. His eyes twitched, taking in Richard’s $200 electronic hearing protectors, and then looked down, as if checking for cow pies.
Though Richard’s Wikipedia entry had been quiet lately, in the past it had been turbulent with edit wars between mysterious people, known only by their IP addresses, who seemed to want to emphasize aspects of his life that now struck him as, while technically true, completely beside the point. Fortunately this had all happened after Dad had become too infirm to manipulate a mouse, but it didn’t stop younger Forthrasts.
Richard turned around and began to mosey back the way he had come. Shotguns were not really his favorite. They were relegated to the far end of the firing line. At the near end, beside a motorcade of hastily parked SUVs, eight-and ten-year-old children, enveloped in watchful grown-ups, maintained a peppery fusillade from bolt-action .22s.
Directly in front of Richard was a party of five men in their late teens and early twenties, orbited by a couple of aspirant fifteen-year-olds. The center of attention was an assault rifle, a so-called black gun, military-style, no wood, no camouflage, no pretense that it was made for hunting. The owner was Len, Richard’s first cousin once removed, currently a grad student in entomology at the University of Minnesota. Len’s red, wind-chapped hands were gripping an empty thirty-round magazine. Richard, flinching every so often when a shotgun went off behind him, watched Len force three cartridges into the top of the magazine and then hand it to the young man who was currently in possession of the rifle. Then he stepped around behind the fellow and talked him patiently through the process of socketing the magazine, releasing the bolt carrier, and flipping off the safety.
Richard swung wide behind them and found himself passing through a looser collection of older men, some relaxing in collapsible chairs of camo-print fabric, others firing big old hunting rifles. He liked their mood better but sensed—and perhaps he was being too sensitive—that they were a little relieved when he kept on walking.
He only came to the re-u every two or three years. Age and circumstance had afforded him the luxury of being the family genealogist. He was the compiler of those family trees that the moms unfurled in the SUVs. If he could get their attention for a few minutes, stand them up and tell them stories of the men who had owned, fired, and cleaned some of the guns that were now speaking out along the fence—not the Glocks or the black rifles, of course, but the single-action revolvers, the 1911s, the burnished lever-action .30-30s—he’d make them understand that even if what he’d done did not comport with their ideas of what was right, it was more true to the old ways of the family than how they were living.
But why did he even rile himself up this way?
Thus distracted, he drifted in upon a small knot of people, mostly in their twenties, firing handguns.
In a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on, these had an altogether different look and feel from the ones who swarmed around Len. They were from a city. Probably a coastal city. Probably West Coast. Not L.A. Somewhere between Santa Cruz and Vancouver. A man with longish hair, tattoos peeking out from the sleeves of the five layers of fleece and raincoat he’d put on to defend himself from Iowa, was holding a Glock 17 out in front of him, carefully and interestedly pocking nine-millimeter rounds at a plastic milk jug forty feet away. Behind him stood a woman, darker-skinned and -haired than any here, wearing big heavy-rimmed glasses that Richard thought of as Gen X glasses even though Gen X must be an ancient term now. She was smiling, having a good time. She was in love with the young man who was shooting.
Their emotional openness, more than their hair or clothing, marked them as not from around here. Richard had come out of this place with the reserved, even hard-bitten style that it seemed to tattoo into its men. This had driven half a dozen girlfriends crazy until he had finally made some progress toward lifting it. But, when it was useful, he could drop it like a portcullis.
The young woman had turned toward him and thrust her pink gloves up in the air in a gesture that, from a man, meant “Touchdown!” and, from a woman, “I will hug you now!” Through a smile she was saying something to him, snapped into fragments as the earmuffs neutralized a series of nine-millimeter bangs.
Richard faltered.
A precursor of shock came over the girl’s face as she realized he isn’t going to remember me. But in that moment, and because of that look, Richard knew her. Genuine delight came into his face. “Sue!” he exclaimed, and then—for sometimes it paid to be the family genealogist—corrected himself: “Zula!” And then he stepped forward and hugged her carefully. Beneath the layers, she was bone-slender, as always. Strong though. She pulled herself up on tiptoe to mash her cheek against his, and then let go and bounced back onto the heels of her huge insulated boots.
He knew everything, and nothing, about her. She must be in her middle twenties now. A couple of years out of college. When had he last seen her?