He Left It Unfinished. I Didn't.

What I will say is that when Hale called me twelve days later, after I had returned to the workshop and the buzzing fluorescent lights and the industrial fans and the bench where Briggs still dropped his cases, he said one sentence.

"Your father would have taken that shot."

I stood at my bench with my hand on a rifle housing that needed a new action spring.

"He would have taken it better," I said.

Hale was quiet for a moment. "You're wrong about that," he said. "But you know I'll never be able to prove it."

He was right. I would never be able to prove he was wrong. That was the nature of comparisons across time — you could not run them in the same conditions, and the conditions were everything.

But I knew what I knew.

My father had built a rifle and left it unfinished.

I had finished it.

That was the accounting, and the accounting was complete.

The case went back into the rear storage cage that night. Clean, oiled, checked, secured. I locked the cage and turned off the workshop lights and stood in the dark for a moment before I moved toward the door.

The fluorescent buzz was gone in the dark. The fans had been shut off. The shop smelled like solvent and gun oil and the specific cold of desert nights that came fast when the sun went down.

I had been eight years old when two Marines came to our white clapboard house in North Carolina. My mother had been making pancakes. I still remembered the spatula hitting the kitchen floor. I remembered the porch light staying on all night even though nobody was coming home.

Twenty years was a long time to carry something.

It was also, if you were careful, exactly long enough to learn how to use it.

I walked out into the Arizona night.

Above the mountains, the stars were the same stars they always were — indifferent, constant, belonging to no one.