All Things Left Wild by James Wade

Author:James Wade
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2020-03-26T18:29:56+00:00

20

The gun was heavy in Randall’s hand, as it should be in any hand, and heavy with the weight of decision and consequence and the destruction to come. It was, he thought, a machine constructed to kill and spill the blood of nations and become a commodity for the powerful, and another tool with which to control the weak and later the same tool that would make the weak believe they have power when in truth they have none. Only a gun, heavy in their hand.

Randall’s gun was polished steel with gold plates clasped to the handle—added weight, added worth, he’d been told. He missed his first three shots and his ears rang with the embarrassment and his face grew as hot as the gun itself and Charlotte offered no words of encouragement or advice.

“Again,” she said, and again he fired.

They’d eaten the last of the tinned fruit that morning with beans charred over the fire in a clay fry pan. They warmed tortillas in the pan and it was hot enough from its first encounter with the fire that it did not need another to toast the thin saucers of wheat flour while they soaked up the remaining juices from the beans before them. Charlotte gathered the empty fruit cans, taking the last one out of Tad’s hands as he attempted in vain to scrape a final meaningful bite from the bare tin.

“Tad, look after the horses and don’t get spooked when you hear shooting,” she told the boy, him still sullen over the empty can. “C’mon, Mr. Dawson. Bring your guns.”

She’s going to kill me, he thought. He’d deflected her advancement the night before and now she was out to exact her revenge.

She led him out from the cottonwoods on foot and together they scrambled up the rocks of a stunted plateau and then more carefully navigated the steep descent of the far side. With a wall of rock at their back Charlotte told him to walk and so he did and thirty yards later she called, “Stop,” and he did this as well and turned to see her and thought she was beautiful at any distance.

“Seems far,” he said.

“If you can shoot far, you can shoot close,” she replied, and he had nothing to say to this.

The sun was up in full but it had not yet heated the air and it sat low in the sky as a spectator to the earth and its happenings. What was left of an oak long since fallen had been bleached by the dust and the sun and upon it Charlotte placed the cans in a row, and there they rested as if on an altar and Randall charged with defying God.

Charlotte moved to the side though not so far as Randall would have liked, and Randall drew one of the Colts and fired and missed and took a better aim and missed again. He stared at the gun, inspecting it as though the fault could not have been his

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