Chapter 3
At fifty meters, I put five rounds through a hole that looked like one wound. Morrison walked toward the target and said it was not possible. Patterson, without raising his voice, said he was looking right at it.
At one hundred meters, I was steadier.
At two hundred, I went prone and put every round center mass.
By then, nobody was smiling.
The story moved through the barracks before dinner. By the next morning, officers with no legitimate business watching first-week recruits were standing at the back of the range. Major Kowalski measured my groupings twice. Captain Reynolds requested footage from the range cameras. Patterson asked one question that nobody in the chain of command could answer: what had James Reed done before he became a cattle farmer in Bridger, Montana?
I could not tell them. My grandfather had never told me. He had taught me how to breathe between heartbeats. How to read wind by the feeling on the cheek, not by a meter. How to wait until the world lined up and the shot became the smallest part of the work, the final punctuation at the end of a long sentence that began with weather and terrain and the particular quality of the light.
May you like
He had rolled his sleeves on summer afternoons without thinking, the way people do when they are working and heat is simply a condition to manage rather than a thing to remark on, and one afternoon I had seen the left shoulder and the ink there before he caught me looking and pulled the sleeve down without a word. I had understood, at nine years old, that I was not supposed to ask, and so I had not asked, and the question had lived somewhere in the back of my mind for the following thirteen years without resolution.
A wolf's head. Old ink, blurred at the edges from decades and sun. The kind of tattoo that does not come from a parlor on a weekend.
