“Holy Smoke—unbelievable! What just happened? Did you see how high he jumped? Where did I hit him? Wasn’t that biggest buck you’ve ever seen? Did you see him drop?”
Conor had fired but one shot at a five-by-five whitetail—head-on—from thirty-five yards. Both he and the deer had nearly jumped out of their skins, but only Conor stood stroking his unshaven chin with a free hand. It was shaking and so was Jinny’s head.
“Buck fever. Buck-buck-buck. You missed, big brother. You flat-out missed.”
Conor levered back the bolt, ejected the spent brass from the chamber, and snapped, “Breaker, breaker. Head calling tail, head calling tail, over? I didn’t miss, so zip it. Maybe he’ll hole up in the chaparral above Flag Rock.” Jinny shouldered her rifle, scrunched her nose to re-position slipping sunglasses which she didn’t need and continued slogging up the draw behind her brother, mumbling, “Don’t kid yourself. That buck’s halfway to Texas. And you, believe it or not, have a medical condition called buck fever.”
Conor triple-tongued a burst of exasperation between his lips like an Irish setter trying to spit, but he kept walking. On the other hand his seventeen-year-old sister’s tongue kept popping holes in his ego. “Say Conor, want me to take your temperature? BUCK-buck-buck-buck—fever.”
Conor grimaced and shoved his free hand into an open pocket. “You know what, Jinny? Sometimes you gnaw like a chicken on a rubber dog. Enough already?”
It was December 31, the last day of the hunting season, and the first snow had yet to fall in rural Abilene. A tiny stream meandered down Thrush Hollow, rolling over and tickling smooth pebbles into song. Speckled fall leaves fanned out in colorful kaleidoscopes, blanketed the ground, and crunched under-foot. To Jinny, fall was a deciduous delight. She watched dust devils swirl here and there, drawing her eyes toward heavenly stacks of cumuli, all lined up like little Bo-peep’s sheep across the blue Kansas sky. But Conor wasn’t looking up or waiting up. He was fed up, and Jinny knew it.
“Your nerves got the better of you this morning, big brother? Well, take heart, you only missed once.” That didn’t help.
“We’ll see, won’t we? Let’s keep after him.” Conor balanced the Winchester on his forearm, ejected another cartridge from the chamber, and stomped ahead not realizing he had dumped a live round near his spent brass in the stream-bed.
Wanting to close the breach between herself and her brother, Jinny paused to search, and then squatted twice over shimmering gold streaks bottomed in a frigid pool. She popped Conor’s brass from between the rocks with a stick and then with nimble, ungloved fingers retrieved the live round. Wiped dry, the peace-offerings cheerfully clunked in her pocket.
“Conor, wait up. Got something for you, Bro,” Jinny teased as she shouldered her .257 Weatherby—purchased after last summer’s work on the farm. Now fifty yards ahead, all Conor heard behind him was a chattering magpie who’d gotten tired of sucking eggs–Jinny. “Conor, I said, wait up. I just thought of something. Did you hear what Uncle Albert said last night? He had a coy expression on his face, so I’m not sure if he was serious or joking when he claimed that a patch of blue large enough to make a Dutchman a pair of trousers means the weather will clear. Do you believe it? Conor, did you hear me?”
He hadn’t heard, but Mother Nature had. A stiff south-wind dipped into the hollow, crawled beneath Jinny’s corduroy collar, and wriggled down her neck. “Burr.” Turning her back on the invisible intruder, she removed and pocketed her wrap-around sun-glasses, snugged the hoodie over her pony-tail, cheeks, and then knotted the tie under her chin. “Mother Nature, it’ll take more than a cold wind to make me quit the hunt,” she tittered.
Still miffed, Conor disappeared behind an outcropping of layered red and tan-colored sandstone grumbling that his sister had spooked every deer within a mile. Jinny followed, sure-footed as a doe springing from rock to rock, back and forth across the creek. She called it, The River of No Return. Never a river, ever a creek, like most things it failed to dry up her effervescent imagination.
“Jinny, come quick.”
“Yes, uh-huh. Right. So you can jump out and scare the bejeebers out of me, you ding-louie?”
“No, come quick. I found fresh blood.”
“For real?” Jinny bounced around the protruding sandstone and sidled up next to her brother, who sat, knees pulled under his chin, on a rock at the base of a steep aggregate of clay and gravel. Privately, he lamented the fresh tear in his quilted, down overcoat, but he covered it up and bit his tongue to keep from smiling.
“Blood spatter, right there on the rock.”
“So where? Show me.”
Conor pointed and nodded. “Right there. Told you I didn’t miss.”
“Well then, you win the prize.” Jinny retrieved Conor’s brass and bullet from her pocket, dropped them in his hand , leaned forward, and sniffed the spatter. “Yep, that’s blood alright, but I’ll bet it didn’t come from a deer.”
“And you can tell by sniffing like a dog?”
Jinny shelved a saucy comeback. “Move your hand. Whoa! So how did you tear your jacket . . . and new plaid shirt . . . and your arm? Conor, your arm!”
“Barbed wire.” Conor pointed over his shoulder at the drooping, rusty villain. Jinny’s mood mellowed. She unzipped her fanny pack. “You may need a tetanus shot. Take off your coat and sit still while I clean and bandage this for you.”
Conor complied. He removed his coat and rolled up his torn, long-sleeve shirt. “I didn’t dress for this wind.”
“The wind doesn’t care how you dress.”
Lightening up, Conor chuckled. “Very funny, gunny. Let’s hike down to the road and follow the fence-posts home before we freeze in place like they have.”
“Agreed. I shouldn’t be operating right here anyway. You do remember this spot, don’t you?”
“I don’t see spots, Jinny. Do you see spots?”
“Now you’re sounding like me, but I’m speaking of last April–this spot–right here.” Twelve cubic yards of clay had collapsed into the hollow, damming the spring run-off and leaving four or five dislocated posts dangling by their necks, cruelly noosed together with barbed-wire. The no-account fence bordered the eastern extremity of Galey Corker’s property, and the O’Dwyer family had hiked up to help Galey’s grandson, Curly, clear a path for the stream.
Anxious to relocate, Jinny zipped her fanny pack and looked across the hollow. “What in the ding-louie is that?”
“Don’t you mean, who’s that?”
A Goliath-sized shadow materialized on the hollow’s far bank, dwarfing even its owner, who stood—sun to his back—gaping from the ridge above and behind Jinny and her brother. Charles “Curly” Corker leaned precariously forward, bared his large front teeth, smiled with his mouth open, and continued to chew. Then he spat a crush of half-digested apple and laughed when it dunged Jinny’s shoulder. “Yo, Conor, are you alright? It’s me, Curly.”
“Oh really? Who could have guessed?” grumbled Jinny. “Let’s head home. Now.”
Conor thrust his bandaged arm into his coat, jerked it up on his back, and mumbled indignantly, “Curly’s going through tough times. We can’t just saunter away with our noses all pugged up. Try to remember, he’s been your friend for a long time, too, you know. So, give him a break.”
“Don’t tempt me.” Disgusted, Jinny brushed the apple from her shoulder and, hoping Curly would get uneasy and skedaddle, she pawed the ground like a lathered-up brahma bull does after dumping its rider. “He’s rankled my nerves since he turned eighteen and shucked his chrysalis, or whatever you call it. And he smokes now, but you know that?”
Curly, a friend since first grade, was distinguished by an untamable blonde cowlick—a curlicue really—that fraternized with his forehead. Occasionally, Curly’s mother, Candice, would apply the bowl, shear the hair, and the curlicue would disappear for a few weeks. Like hair, Curly usually had too much time on his hands— or too little to do. “You two climb on up here. Come on, I’ll give you a hand.”
“We don’t need applause, thank you very much,” sassed Jinny.
“Huh? I’m pretending I didn’t hear that. But Conor, I saw your buck. He’s a granddaddy, if I do say so myself. He jumped the gully ‘n leaped right past me.”
“For real? See any blood?”
“Naw. Come on up and I’ll fill you in. And don’t worry about old Grandpa C. warning you off. He don’t warn nobody off no more.”
Like his grandpa before him, Charles often patrolled the property line, pretending to be both owner and U. S. Border-Patrol agent. He carried a beat-up J. C. Higgins .22 caliber bolt-action rifle—christened The Supper Snuffer—which his mother had purchased for his twelfth birthday while serving her life term in the basement at Sears. Curly’s father, Hubert, was a no-account bum. He had run a maintenance crew at a local refinery until his unrefined drinking habit finally got him canned. Broke most of the time, he hung out “looking for work” over in Salina for days, sometimes weeks at a time.
“Come on Jinny, let’s do this. You go up first,” Conor insisted. “That way if you fall I’ll catch you. And who knows, maybe my wounded buck will hobble by and ask for directions.” Jinny sighed, complied, and slung the Weatherby over her shoulder— freeing up both hands. With her eighteen-year-old brother as a safety net, she scrambled up a grade only a deer or mountain goat could fancy. It was steeper than steep.
Clamoring to the top of the declivity, Jinny caught hold of Curly’s wrist but failed to detect the abrupt increase in his pulse rate when he glommed onto hers. “Easy now.” Pulling Jinny up eye to eye, Curly feigned surprise, grinned, and exposed a gap where one of his teeth used to occupy a parking space. “And who do we got here?” he whistled. “Conor, is this philly your pack mule or another cousin?”
Jinny was indignant. “You’re a real charmer, Curly, and you can add bad breath to the list of your finer qualities. You’ve been smoking again, haven’t you?” Jinny stomped on his toe. Curly yowled, let go, and Jinny fell back, initiating a chain of events she would later colorize in slow motion at the dinner table:
“Curly lost his grip on my wrist, bumped me with his forearm and—succumbing to the law of gravity—I twisted back into a graceful one-and-a-half gainer, doomed to land head-first in the River of No Return. But in the nick of time, Curly snatched my hoodie, then my arm, and hoisted me up safely onto terra firma—but NOT into his arms.
“Meanwhile, Conor, his fingers clawing the clay, waited anxiously for a hand up. I turned, he let go, and I think the expression used by bungie-jumpers is he free-fell down, down, down—splat— and landed spread-eagle on his back in a bed of soggy leaves. Great stunt. No camera. Spectacular. Oh, I wish you could have been there. Unharmed and disarmed, Conor lay perfectly positioned to plow like a snow angel, if only he’d been patient for a few more hours.”
In truth, Jinny shrieked when Conor’s fall suddenly terminated within inches of the bloody rock where they’d sat. He groaned and lay motionless. “Conor, are you breathing?” He groaned again, slowly tried to right himself, and then fell back. Like a parachutist when the jump-light flashes green, Jinny passed her rifle to Curly, slid under the dangling barbed-wire fence and leaped, landed on her fee, as agile as a bobcat, and dropped to her knees. “Oh Conor, what have I done? I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”
Finally Conor’s lungs sucked air; his chest heaved and fell like magma crusted within a form-fitting caldera, and his eyes fixed on his sister. “Who are you and where am I?”
Panicked, Curly bawled out, “Jinny, should I run for help? Conor, you are okay, right?”
Conor erupted. “I’ve been ridiculed, gouged, punched, fallen thirty feet, landed on my back, and had the wind knocked out of me—SO WHAT DO YOU THINK, Mister Magoo?” Before Curly could kick his legs in motion and run for help, Conor ratcheted himself up on a bruised elbow. “No Curly, stay put, I guess I’ll live, no thanks to you two.” He shifted to one hip, became aware of a lump under his legs, and let out a forlorn whoop. “It’s broken.”
Fearing the worst, Jinny drew back. “Oh no, you broke your leg. Which one? Or is it your arm? Your ankle?”
“IT’S MY RIFLE! Confound you, Jinny! Now you’ve done it.” Conor grubbed in the mud and hefted his prize Winchester. It looked like a dinosaur bone salvaged from the murky La Brea Tar Pit in Los Angeles. The expensive Weaver scope, yet to be retrieved, had been severed from its mounts. Conor refused Jinny’s outstretched hand, rolled to his knees, and slowly climbed to his feet. Without scraping the muck from his rear-end, he bent over, found the scope, and stomped down the gully toward Dummy Lane, limping a little for show. As he rounded the layered sandstone outcropping, the wounded warrior looked back over his shoulder. “AND DON’T YOU FOLLOW ME, Jinny. I’m done with you; I’m done with both of you; take a hike—A TWO-HUNDRED MILE HIKE.”
Jinny pressed an index finger against the tip of her nose, then pursed her lips, wrinkled her brow, and looked up at Curly. His open mouth looked like a played-out mine. He took off his woven cap and scratched his head. “Now what?”
Jinny tried to ignore the arterial pulsations in her neck while her mind finished rewinding her version of Conor’s fall from grace. Then she replied, “So, here’s the deal, Curly. I’m NOT scratching my way up to you again. Hold onto my rife and hustle to the head of the hollow. It’s about three-hundred yards. Go.” And she was gone.
Curly shrugged. “I know how far it is, gol-darn it.” Without articulating the remainder of what he was thinking—a rare discretion for the lad—he snatched up the rifles, one in each hand, followed orders, and jogged along the twisted fence line, counting posts as he ran.
“. . . 35 . . . 37 . . . I mean 36, and here’s your gun.”
Still smarting from Colon’s rebuff, Jinny grabbed and shouldered her rifle, but none of the blame. “You know, Curly, sometimes you really get on . . . never mind.”
“Never mind what?” Curly wiped his nose on his sleeve. Just then the wind picked up a few knots and a dust-devil spun dry leaves into a large swirl, causing Jinny to shield her eyes. Too late. She removed a glove, gently pinched and pulled forward an eyelid to scour a mote from her right eye. Her blinking lashes reminded Curly of butterfly wings. Beautiful butterfly wings. Alone at last. Curly shivered with excitement. Playing the clown, he smacked his own buttocks and chortled, “If you ask me, Jinny, Conor just bruised his eggo.”
“It’s ego, and I didn’t ask you.”
“Huh? You didn’t ask what?”
“Never mind.”
Hoping to hear better, Curly rolled up his seaman’s cap, allowing his large ears to pop out like doors on a taxi-cab. “That big buck got within twenty feet of me without even looking up and then trotted on down the gully towards you. Then blam. One shot. The bullet ticked an antler and spun him around. Before I could get out of the way, he jumped the wash, and I guess you might say we had a confertation. He stopped, grunted, and then he was gone. Far gone.” Curly paused, then added sheepishly, “I almost peed my . . . well . . . since you never miss what you’re shooting at, I figured your brother had missed, but I hadn’t spotted you as yet.”
“You’re right, I never miss. Conor was shooting uphill; he missed high. The deer leaped five feet into the air and lit out of here like a bat out of . . . well you know the rest. “
“That’s what I was trying to tell you before Conor got all hot and toddled away.” Curly wasn’t sweating, but he dabbed his brow anyway, and then he pulled his cap back down over his ears. The temperature was dropping, too. “On a day like today, I’m sure glad bucko didn’t charge me.”
“Yes, that deposit may have been nonrefundable.” Jinny’s impish smile made a brief appearance.
“Huh? Come again?” Curly—realizing he was being made fun of—jerked off his knitted cap, fisted it against his chest, and narrowed his eyes at Jinny. “You do understand, don’t you? My .22 was no match for that big five by five. Right?”
“Right. So, show me where he came up out of the hollow,” she replied, hoping to avert a more problematic confrontation.
“Okay. If you’re up to it, we’ll have to backtrack about a hundred yards. But I’m starved. Say, Jinny, didn’t I see a package of cookies sticking out of your fanny-pack?”
“That would be correct. I have an extra sandwich, too, or perhaps you’d prefer picking up what you spit at me in the creek-bed?” Jinny needn’t have asked. She looked for a place free of weeds, grass, dirt, and spied a tilted, flat rock shaped like Arizona. After laying out lunch on the city of Sedona, she sat cross-legged north of Flagstaff. Curly plopped down south of Phoenix. While he munched, Jinny mused aloud, “I can see it now. As Conor stomps into the house—and after Mama tells him to get back outside and take off his boots—she’ll say: ‘Where the ding-louie is your little sister? You didn’t leave her out there alone, did you?’ Conor will storm out of the room; Mama will send for Papa; Papa will whistle at Glycerin; Glycerin will whinny and come running; Papa will saddle up and come trotting up the Hollow—unaware that I’ve been kidnapped.”
“Huh? Kidnapped?” Curly ripped open and dumped an entire package of Oreos on the outskirts of Tucson.
“Well, let’s say it all depends on how you treat me.” Curly’s cogitations were no match for Jinny’s calculations. Even scratching his head didn’t help.
“So, what am I missing, Miss Jinny?”
“What’s with the, ‘Miss Jinny’? Have you been reading Huck Finn?” Before un-enthusiastically biting into her sandwich, she added, “Don’t answer that. What Miss Jinny misses is her brother.” Shared adventures had always included Conor—her hedge against Curly’s romantic notions. She felt abandoned.
Clouds, tumbling across the sky in slow motion, dropped tablespoon-size raindrops that noisily pelted Jinny’s waterproof outer-wear. As the creek puddled, her enthusiasm for the hunt dried up. She shaded her eyes against the drippy sky. “There’s a storm brewing. It’s too cold, and I hate getting wet. Let’s forget the deer and hightail it out of here. I don’t care if it is the last day of the season.” She looked up. “So much for not having enough sky to make the Dutchman a pair of trousers, eh, Uncle Albert.”
“Come again?”
“No, not come again. Let’s just go home.” Jinny retrieved her rifle and slung it over her shoulder.
Curly hadn’t budged. “You’re kidding, right? You aren’t gonna hike four miles across open country in this rain? Why not hunker down and huddle beneath Corker Rock until the storm passes?” Jinny’s neck-hairs sprang to attention, aroused by a case of the don’t get your hopes up, buster.
She replied, “Corker Rock? Bad idea. Varmits and roly-polies hunker down under rocks, not O’Dwyers.” Jinny sprang to her feet. “I’ve got a better idea, Curly. I’ll lasso and tame a bull elephant, coax him to his knees, and climb aboard.” She started running downhill before adding, “I’ll be the goad-wielding mahout, of course, and I suppose you may ride behind me.”
“Great idea. I got your back, Jinny. Wait up.”
“As long as we don’t touch. Got it?”
Curly took thirty seconds to fill his pockets with cookies, inhale a sandwich, and refrigerate his romantic inclinations. He looked up, surprised to see Jinny with such a head-start and riding a tail-wind for home. “FORGET THE PACHYDERMS, CURLY. THEY AREN’T IN SEASON HERE.”
“Come again? What did you say? Confound it, Jinny. Wait up, will ya?”
For years, Jinny’s vocabulary-rich imagination had had a way of tying Curly in knots. Square knots. Even Conor had gotten tangled in the warp and the woof of his sister’s adventures. At one time or another the threesome had tiptoed across a fallen log adjoining two of the Galapagos Islands, a thousand feet above the surf; they had shinnied to the top of the Statue of Liberty to see the sun stick its head from behind England and then rappelled to the ground to watch the same glorious orb again emerge and gasp for air; they had crawled through the jungles of Cambodia. Such adventures were often hard on growing wheat and borrowed clothesline. Fall afternoons were often spent playing Rook beneath the seductive shade of a wormy apple-tree twice their age.
The depth of Jinny’s imagination had yet to be fathomed. When she proclaimed her intention to join the army and become a sniper, nobody had taken her seriously—except, perhaps, Caleb. Initially, the O’Dwyers let the notion stand at ease, hoping soon to dismiss it altogether. Jinny was seventeen; Conor and Curly had turned eighteen. Ahead lay an uncharted bend in the road, a tragic bend–more borders, more barbed wire, more fear, more mud, more bullets, more pain, and more death. Much more death.