Sweet Jesus Read Free Page A

relaxed back onto their perches.
    What’s with
this
guy? the young man said, looking around. His chivalry was all defensive bravado now.
    Pick on the clown, tough guy, Zeus thought.
    What an idiot, the guy said, walking back to his seat. Fucking clown suit, he said under his breath.

 
    L ast year, Norman Peach had gone hunting in Newfoundland and come back to Toronto with a hundred pounds of frozen caribou meat. Hannah Crowe had never known anyone to hunt. He’d left her the keys to his apartment and two hundred dollars and called her halfway through the week. Go get me a chest freezer. So Hannah had gone around the corner from where she lived to a secondhand appliance store on Queen Street West and chosen a little freezer that had been painted white on the inside to cover its imperfections. Two middle-aged men, one Jamaican, grey at the temples, and the other a thin Ukrainian in flat dress shoes, carried it up the steep fire escape to Norm’s apartment. When the Jamaican man heard what it was for, he joked, I’ll bring a two-four round, man, in a couple of weeks and we’ll have carry-bou steaks on the barbie.
    Hannah was impressed that Norm had gone into the woods alone, found a caribou, shot it down, gutted and quartered it, then carried the quarters to where his old Toyota Tercel was parked, somewhere on a woods road. He was only abouthalf a mile from his car, but it took him five hours to lug the meat out. This was proof of a kind of courage, self-reliance, and physical endurance that she admired. She wanted to admire herself for the same reasons – so, this time, she’d gone with him. They’d flown to Norm’s hometown of St. John’s, rented a car, and picked up the keys to the house of a friend who was away on vacation. In the morning, they drove to a quarry forty-five minutes outside the city, to sight in the rifle and take a few practice shots. Hannah was nervous about the kickback. She’d seen a picture of Norm with a dark bruise on one side of his chest, just below the shoulder.
    They got out of the car and Hannah lifted the gun out of the trunk and slung the strap over her head so the rifle hung diagonally across her back. She’d never carried a gun before and it was thrilling. Wearing the first warm clothing of the year, she felt like some glamorous Russian spy from an old Bond film, about to ski down an alpine slope in a tight, white one piece, with fake fir trees bouncing behind her in the background. She had an accent.
You know nussing about me, you only sink you do
.
    Coming? Norm said.
    You know, Hannah said, we could turn around and go home now and I’d still feel like we’d been on a pretty satisfying adventure.
    Yeah, but there’s shootin’ to be done.
    Norm was drawing a circle the size of an eyeball in the centre of a square of cardboard. He paced off fifty yards, set the cardboard at the far end of the quarry, and walked back. He showed her how to flick the safety on and off and check the barrel for cartridges. The bullet’s going to arc, he said, and there’s a bit of wind from the south, so aim higher than the crosshairs in your scope and a bit to the right. Norm could sense that Hannah was stalling.
    Do you want me to take the first shot?
    No, I’ll do it, she said.
    She planted her feet and aimed, but looking through the scope was like looking through a blurry magnifying glass. A little juniper growing out of the gravel exploded into focus. Okay, I got it, she said. It was like binoculars. You had to get the angle right. Hannah panned an inch to the right and the target slid out of sight. She panned back and caught the cardboard in the crosshairs. It looked small. The bull’s-eye smaller. Her arm was trembling from the weight of the rifle.
    You can crouch, Norm said. Like this.
    Hannah squatted, put her elbow on her knee. The Lee-Enfield was sighted to hit dead square at both fifty and two hundred yards. The target was fifty yards away so all Hannah had to do was centre it, but