That Evening
“Lickety split, hurry up, don’t slow down now, boy,” the man said. They trudged up the side of the mountain and down the other side, not on a trail, just out there moving in between the pines and scrub brush in the accumulating snow, rifles jostling on their backs. In the valley they saw a cabin with a light on inside and smoke coming from the chimney. It belonged to the man’s enemy. The sky grew dim. They stood at a distance and through binoculars watched him move slowly from one room to the other in a flannel shirt and blue jeans with suspenders. He was gray-haired and looked harmless if you didn’t know what he’d done. They approached the cabin, rifles up. The cabin’s occupant came to the door. “You can park those over there.” The three of them went into the dining room and had Sunday supper and the man and boy went home. “Next time say thank you to Grandpa.”
A Sense of Humor
Jim was tall and thin and had been called wispy. He liked to hunt deer and wild turkey and ducks. There was that bear-hunting joke that he disliked where the bear offers a penetrating psychological insight to the hunter at the end of the joke. He disliked too much thinking, but there you are not moving a muscle for hours in a duck blind. He liked shooting a duck, field dressing it, bringing it home and giving it to his wife, Ronald, to cook, and eating it with their son, Dorothy. Don’t fuck with Dorothy.