Orchard Read Free Page A

hands.”
    Meanwhile, the short man at the end of the bar had climbed off his stool, taken out his billfold, and was counting off fives and tens on the bar. “And that’s fifty.” He knocked on the small stack of bills and then spread his arms wide.
    Henry walked over and extended the rifle. “Mister, you bought yourself a Winchester.” He swept up the bills and without counting them stuffed them into the front pocket of his dungarees.
    The rifle’s new owner hefted the gun and tilted it back and forth the way a tightrope walker might hold his balancing pole.
    Look here, Henry wanted to say, you buy yourself a rifle you don’t want to check its weight; you want to bring it to your shoulder, peer down its sights, work its action.
    Instead, this slight, wiry man dressed in a white shirt and paintsplattered khakis leaned the rifle against the bar, and then stepped back and cocked his head as if his main concern were with how the blue-black steel caught the light. When he lifted it again, he picked it up by the barrel and passed the bore under his nose. “It’s been fired recently.”
    Maybe this fellow knew guns better than Henry thought. “I wanted to make sure it was firing properly.”
    “Why would you have any doubt?” He laid it back down on the bar and picked up his drink.
    The man had a way of locking you in with his narrow-eyed gaze and holding you longer than you liked. Now he arched his eyebrows as if he expected Henry to blurt out a confession that would reveal his real reason for firing the rifle.
I only killed a maple tree, mister.
    “You can sight it in all you like,” Henry said. “It’s always going to shoot a tad high.”
    “What was all that talk about straight shooting? Was that just advertising?”
    “It shoots straight. Just a little high.”
    “Whoa. Take it easy. You don’t have to defend your rifle’s honor. I don’t give a damn if it shoots around corners. I have no interest in firing the thing.”
    “What do you want it for then?”
    The man regarded the rifle once again in that head-cocked way. “I’m going to paint it.”
    He glanced down at the streaks, smears, and splatterings of white, gray, brown, black, yellow, and green paint on the man’s trousers and tennis shoes, and then Henry drew a breath and asked the question, though he dreaded the answer. “What color?”
    “What color? What
color
? Jesus Christ, I’m not going to paint the goddamn gun; I’m painting a picture of it.”
    Henry nodded in relief. “And why my rifle?”
    “You mean mine.” He tossed back his drink, then cracked an ice cube between his teeth just the way Henry’s mother used to do back in her drinking days. “I wanted the history.”
    If Henry hadn’t felt so embarrassed over his question about painting, he might have asked, What history? Instead he said, “Like you say: It’s your gun. You’re free to paint it with red and blue polka dots, if you like.” He chose those colors because they did not appear on the man’s pants.
    When Henry left the Top Deck, he did not go directly home. He walked along Gull Road, past the Loch Lomond Resort and the new golf course. He remembered another walk after giving up a gun. . . . Henry’s father had confiscated Henry’s rifle the day before deer season opened because Henry had left it out unsheathed overnight. One afternoon Henry’s friend Phil Trent came over, and by the time the boys had finished looking at the French playing cards that Phil had borrowed from his father’s dresser drawer, Henry had forgotten about his gun. The faint blush of rust on the barrel did not magically appear during the night, but that sign of neglect was exactly what caught Henry’s father’s eye. He made Henry put the rifle in a storage locker in the cellar. On the opening day of deer season, Henry was up before dawn, and by the time the sun rose, he was out walking, weaponless, as the first shots were fired.
    He could not see a single hunter, but Henry believed