The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto by Stephen Graham Jones

Author:Stephen Graham Jones [Stephen Graham Jones]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9781573661096
Google: 7_8i5U019Y4C
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 576617
Publisher: Fiction Collective 2
Published: 2003-08-31T23:00:00+00:00

NO SOUVENIRS

This time would be different. What they needed was this, the gun: the repeating rifle. Fuck Remington; this was a Savage.

The first thing you do is fall down. The next thing is stay there, and stay there, holding your hip where it took the butt of the rifle. Like you can cover the pain. The barrel is full of dirt. The truck is a brown plume, already blowing away.

This is still the grassland, at least. Home.

There are eight shells in the gun.

Two of them you use on one rabbit, and eat alone that night. Another you fumble into a prairie-dog hole. The fourth you keep in the chamber. The rest go in a pouch around your neck.

The rabbit is greasy and perfect. In the morning you stuff the skin full of grass, stand it up in the coals of the fire. It jumps out. You smile.

Home.

From a ridge you can see teepee rings to the north, so you go the other way, to meet whichever band it is that makes this circuit every year.

Three days out, there they are.

You carry the rifle first by your leg, then on your back, then behind your neck like a stick—any way but like a soldier. They don't take it from you, just feed you instead, wait for you to talk.

It takes a while, though; you want to stay here, silent, just moving along. But then on the second night one of the children pulls the trigger of the rifle and the fourth shell makes a hole in the lodge. The darkness seeps in, the smoke rising to meet it.

‘So,’ you say, fingering your pouch, the one on your neck.

They're all looking at you, even The Half—the impossibly tall one who wears his face and chest painted like they say his father's was when they found him: with black paint across the eyes like sunglasses, a stripe down the chest for a tie. Black leggings, black war shirt. His hair parted not in the middle but the side.

You hold the rifle out in your fist. ‘You want to keep this land?’ you ask.

They shrug as one : of course.

‘This, then,’ you say, the rifle. ‘This is what you need.’

‘How much?’ one asks.

You tell him it's a gift.

‘It's a gun,’ another says, sighting down it at an imaginary buffalo.

You nod, tell him it's better, though. Show him the lever action.

Now they're nodding too.

‘And we just need one?’ a third asks.

The Half is looking at you. You look at the gun for an answer, and there it is: ‘You just have to build more like this,’ you say.

The Half smiles, looks away, and you break the rifle down into receiver, barrel, trigger shroud; firing pin, bolt, lever; stock, tube. The pieces are everywhere. It takes you six days to get them back together, and then it's not even you, but The Half. He does it without looking.

‘How do you know?’ you ask. ‘This isn't even invented yet…’

He shrugs, adjusts the painted-on sunglasses. ‘My father, I guess,’ he says.

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