Vintage Ford Read Free

moment of how little I really knew her at all.
    Glen walked with me another quarter-mile, crossed another barbed wire fence where sage was growing, then went a hundred yards through wheatgrass and spurge until the ground went up and formed a kind of long hillock bunker built by a farmer against the wind. And I realized the lake was just beyond us. I could hear the sound of a car horn blowing and a dog barking all the way down in the town, then the wind seemed to move and all I could hear then and after then were geese. So many geese, from the sound of them, though I still could not see even one. I stood and listened to the high-pitched shouting sound, a sound I had never heard so close, a sound with size to it—though it was not loud. A sound that meant great numbers and that made your chest rise and your shoulders tighten with expectancy. It was a sound to make you feel separate from it and everything else, as if you were of no importance in the grand scheme of things.
    â€œDo you hear them singing,” Glen asked. He held his hand up to make me stand still. And we both listened. “How many do you think, Les, just hearing?”
    â€œA hundred,” I said. “More than a hundred.”
    â€œFive thousand,” Glen said. “More than you can believe when you see them. Go see.”
    I put down my gun and on my hands and knees crawled up the earthwork through the wheatgrass and thistle, until I could see down to the lake and see the geese. And they were there, like a white bandage laid on the water, wide and long and continuous, a white expanse of snow geese, seventy yards from me, on the bank, but stretching far onto the lake, which was large itself—a half-mile across, with thick tules on the far side and wild plums farther and the blue mountain behind them.
    â€œDo you see the big raft?” Glen said from below me, in a whisper.
    â€œI see it,” I said, still looking. It was such a thing to see, a view I had never seen and have not since.
    â€œAre any on the land?” he said.
    â€œSome are in the wheatgrass,” I said, “but most are swimming.”
    â€œGood,” Glen said. “They’ll have to fly. But we can’t wait for that now.”
    And I crawled backwards down the heel of land to where Glen was, and my gun. We were losing our light, and the air was purplish and cooling. I looked toward the car but couldn’t see it, and I was no longer sure where it was below the lighted sky.
    â€œWhere do they fly to?” I said in a whisper, since I did not want anything to be ruined because of what I did or said. It was important to Glen to shoot the geese, and it was important to me.
    â€œTo the wheat,” he said. “Or else they leave for good. I wish your mother had come, Les. Now she’ll be sorry.”
    I could hear the geese quarreling and shouting on the lake surface. And I wondered if they knew we were here now. “She might be,” I said with my heart pounding, but I didn’t think she would be much.
    It was a simple plan he had. I would stay behind the bunker, and he would crawl on his belly with his gun through the wheatgrass as near to the geese as he could. Then he would simply stand up and shoot all the ones he could close up, both in the air and on the ground. And when all the others flew up, with luck some would turn toward me as they came into the wind, and then I could shoot them and turn them back to him, and he would shoot them again. He could kill ten, he said, if he was lucky, and I might kill four. It didn’t seem hard.
    â€œDon’t show them your face,” Glen said. “Wait till you think you can touch them, then stand up and shoot. To hesitate is lost in this.”
    â€œAll right,” I said. “I’ll try it.”
    â€œShoot one in the head, and then shoot another one,” Glen said. “It won’t be hard.” He patted me on the arm and smiled. Then he took off his VFW