Читать книгу Heathcliff Redux - Lily Tuck - Страница 32

When we were first married, Charlie taught me how to shoot. He taught me how to shoot a pistol—his .44 Magnum with an ivory grip that he had bought from a dealer in Texas—and a shotgun. The shotgun was a double-barreled twelve-gauge, and the recoil hurt until I eventually got used to it and stopped anticipating it. Eventually, too, I got to be a pretty good shot and enjoyed going clay pigeon shooting with Charlie. I also surprised myself by how competitive I turned out to be and how determined I was to get a higher score than Charlie’s. (In a standard clay pigeon round—or skeet shoot, as the sport is also known—each person gets to shoot at 25 “pigeons,” and each “pigeon” is 3 points for a first barrel kill, 2 points for a second barrel kill, and, of course, 0 for a miss. The maximum per round is 75 points, and I usually scored in the mid- to high 60s.)

Charlie had taken a four-hour course with Lucky McDaniel, who taught “instinct shooting,” and, for a while, Charlie could not stop talking about him. The premise was that you didn’t aim, you just pointed at the target—the way, for instance, you point your finger or throw a baseball.

“He’s taught thousands of people to shoot,” Charlie told me. “From a six-year-old kid to an eighty-five-year-old grandmother.”

“No kidding,” I said, unconvinced.

“Lucky McDaniel also taught John Wayne to shoot.”

But the time Charlie took me bird hunting, it was different. With my first shot, a dove fell out of the sky like a stone.

“Well done!” Charlie yelled. “See, what did I tell you? You didn’t aim, right? You just shot at it.”

Bella found the dove in the cornfield and brought it to Charlie.

“A clean shot,” Charlie yelled again.

The dead dove was a mourning dove and monogamous, and I vowed then never again to shoot and kill anything.