and not cheating shouldn’t get kicked when they decide they need something different out of life. Hell, they ought to get a medal or something.
He slowed down when he ran out of asphalt. The county never bothered to surface roads out this far, and washouts scraped the bottom of the Trans Am if he didn’t keep the wheels on high spots.
Virginia would get used to the situation. She was just slow to change. Virginia had been on that same sewing machine at Union Underwear for years—had sewed the same seam a million times. Roger admired that steady part of her sometimes, wished he had more of it himself, but he got bored. He’d started out weaving skeins of cotton in the knitting department and had jumped to nearly every job in the plant by the time he finally up and quit. Loomis, the floor boss, let Roger try most anything in the basement where the men worked. At one job, all he did was walk around tables longer than a house, unrolling material. He put down six dozen layers of cotton, one on top of the other, and then the cutters came along with big saws and sliced out the underwear or the tee-shirts. Roger never asked to try cutting, since those guys always seemed to be missing a finger or two. What he did like was outlining garment patterns using templates and carbon sticks. Roger was good at art back in high school. He had loved making birdhouses and leather key rings in shop. Everybody always said he was good with his hands.
The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the rain, and Roger pulled into the weeds on the road shoulder. He watched Buckhorn Creek push and curl against its banks. His last job at the factory had been in the dye unit. Roger quit that job because at the end of the day they opened a pipe and released huge vats of dye into this very creek. The water ran the color of the day—red, blue, or bright green. Today the water had a yellow tint—goldenrod day.
Roger didn’t get the chance to tell Virginia himself the day he finally quit. She found out before she left the building, beat him home, and when he walked in she was banging around the kitchen. “You’re going back in there and tell Loomis that you made a mistake.” Wham went the oven door. “Tell him you had temporary insanity or something.” Clang went the skillet. “Crazy. You’re crazy.” She peeled potatoes so fiercely that Roger was afraid she would shave one of her fingers down to the bone.
Roger had been doing small mounting jobs. If it could run, swim, or fly, he could mount it. Things had gotten to the point where he thought he could make money. Once word got out that he could mount, folks started bringing things to shoots—small birds or animals, always whole and frozen stiff. Guys would come carrying a cooler to the shooting shed and the others would gather around to see what was inside. Roger was always glad to see a towel wrapped around a frozen trophy fish. That meant the man knew how to preserve the mount. After everybody admired it, the fish would get tucked back into the cooler and Roger took it home. He especially liked the detail work in fish, and when he brought it back to the shoot, everybody would gather around again and tell him how he had a flair for making everything look lifelike. The better he got, the more he thought about opening a taxidermy shop. Roger knew sportsmen who would spend big to have their bucks mounted, plus it made a good excuse to be gone all the time. Virginia complained about the two or three nights each week he went to shoot trap, but Roger thought if business was involved that she would understand. It hadn’t worked out that way. Virginia stopped giving him spending money from her check, and soon Roger’s secret roll of twenties he kept for betting grew thin. Most nights he’d be a good shot and leave with more money than he came with, but one week he’d had to sell his favorite shotgun. That was a bitch, having to sell the Pirazzi; but he put two thousand dollars in his pocket.
The problem with Virginia was she didn’t have any vision, or any patience. It takes a while to get a business off the ground, but she couldn’t wait. She never took chances, never gambled. If something went wrong for Virginia, she was quick to pin the blame on somebody else. But Roger wasn’t her problem. Never had been. He was tired of being the dog that got smacked every time something didn’t go her way. He’d been going to leave long before Bootsie showed up. Bootsie had only kick-started the process. Roger had counted on Virginia being too proud to ever let him come home, but she had surprised him, had left the door open even after he had moved in with Bootsie. Sometimes a woman, even a woman like Virginia, would surprise you.
Roger snaked the car slowly up a hill. At the top, he spied Bootsie’s yellow Chevette parked out front. He smiled, remembering the first time he saw her at Shelby’s Shooting Range. His little Browning was hot. He was hitting 24 or 25 out of each round. He’d just picked off another guy’s missed shot when he heard a woman’s laugh, the kind that made a man stop what he was doing to look. She was crawling out of Harley Jones’s muddy truck in the loudest clothes Roger had ever seen. Her slacks were so tight you could see panty lines. Her hair was what women called frosted, and her teeth were perfect, like two neat rows of white sweet corn. Roger always was a sucker for pretty teeth.
Instead of going into the snack bar building where wives and girlfriends congregated to drink watery coffee and smoke and complain about how much they hated coming to trap shoots, this bright, thin bird of a woman hung around the shed watching the games. Somebody handed her a set of ear protectors and she said, “Those look like stereo headphones.” She balanced on the back of a bench in the shelter so she could see the targets over the shooters’ heads and Roger grinned to himself thinking she looked like a dragonfly with those big things on her little head.
Roger handed his two dollars to the range manager and got in line for the next round. The first shooter said, “Pull!” A target flew out of the trap house and report rattled down the hollow. Shot rained into the steel gray bank behind the range where buckshot had peppered the leaves off the bottom of the trees in a wide oval against the hillside.
“This is exciting,” the woman said. The usual profanity and ribbing was replaced by concentration when it became apparent that a woman was going to watch. One by one, shooters took their turn, five shots at each line. They advanced to the next post to the right like clockwork, silent except for shots. It was a game of constant motion, a well-orchestrated dance.
The next heat was Killer. Thirty men stood shoulder to shoulder while a serious young man walked behind the lineup with a remote-control launch button in his hand. “Pull!” the first shooter said. The boy pushed the button, a target flew, shot broke it, and the pattern repeated until someone missed. “Pull!” Another target. A hit. The next. Same story. Everybody was on. Gunpowder made the air sour and metallic. It was Roger’s turn. “Pull!” The target flew to his left. He shattered the bird. He broke open his gun, tossed the spent shell into his side bag, fed a loaded shell into the chamber, and rested the open barrel on the hook at the toe of his boot. The game moved fast. Two misses and a shooter was out. The field was down to ten. Onlookers whittled and smoked. A deer sauntered onto the back of the range. The men blasted away. Bootsie cried, “A deer!” More shots. “Pull!” Bootsie ran to the side of the range, that little yellow ass twisting like crazy. Everybody stopped to watch. “Well, I’ll be,” someone said. “She’s a spitfire,” somebody else said. Bootsie clapped her hands at the deer, but it only stared at her with big dopey eyes. She got right up on the animal and flung her arms and yelled, “Run, you stupid thing!” It bolted back into the trees and she returned to the shelter as quickly as she had gone out.
“Damn Bootsie, that was dumb,” Harley said. “You could of got shot.”
“Somebody had to do something,” she said, adjusting the bulbous headphones that had gone catawampus on her head.
“Should of shot it and took it home for supper,” somebody joked.
“I like a good venison steak,” another guy said.
“Don’t mind them,” Harley said.
“It was like it wanted to get shot,” she said. “Why would it stand there and take such a pounding and not run away? Anything ought to have more sense than that.” In that instant, Roger knew he had to have her. He waited until Harley Jones went into the snack shed.
“That was a real brave thing you done,” he said to her.
“Think so? I can’t believe it walked right out onto the shooting range.”
“Happens a lot.”