Chapter 3

There is something just plain incongruous about a woman who buys a rifle and ammunition to shoot furry dog-like things and then, on the way home, flashes bare legs at the old man driving the truck as, with a foot pressed to the dashboard, she paints her toenails bright, playful red. Not for the first time did I realize there was a woman hiding in that teenaged body, and that Jill Simmons was a complicated female of the species. She hummed with the radio as she painted, making me wish I were twenty years younger. Then, while her toenails dried, she unpacked the rifle and attached the scope and carry strap. That made me glad I was too old to go nosing around this fresh-faced girl and get myself in trouble.

The rifle didn't weigh fifty pounds. With the scope, four rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber and the sling on it, it weighed in at a hair over ten pounds. It just FELT like fifty pounds. And don't be impressed by my use of words like "rounds" and "chamber" and all that. It took me a week of Jill's tutoring to get the language down. There was a dip in the land at one end of the tillable property, and she set up a target range in that. She started me off at a hundred yards, which I thought was ridiculous. I couldn't even throw a rock that far. How was I supposed to shoot something that seemed like it was a mile away? Then I looked through the scope and it looked ridiculously easy until I pulled the trigger the first time. I wasn't ready for either the noise or the kick.

She made me put on the headphones I'd forgotten to wear but the second time I closed my eyes as I pulled the trigger, anticipating the sharp crack and the stiff jolt to my shoulder. I missed the target completely.

She had me lying down in the beginning, which she called the prone position. I had to support my upper body on my elbows, with the carry strap ... sorry, I mean sling ... wrapped around my left forearm. It was kind of nifty in a way because I didn't actually need my right hand to do anything but pull the trigger. The way she had me holding the rifle made it stick right where it was supposed to.

The way she solved my flinching problem was to lie down on top of me. She wasn't heavy, but she was all woman these days, and all that soft flesh on top of me caused some really hard flesh to develop underneath me. Her right hand came down to almost caress my right hand as she spoke into the earmuff, telling me what to do and what not to do and how to ease the trigger back, instead of jerking it. She made me shoot an entire box of ammo without aiming at all, just to get me used to the kick and to let me learn to keep my eyes open.

About halfway through the next box I wanted to roll over and have her lie on top of me that way. It was very distracting, let me tell you. Which is why I started paying particular attention to the rifle. I needed the distraction. I paid attention to the feel of it in my hands, and how the bolt worked as I pulled and pushed on it, and how the round looked as it was brought up out of the magazine and into the chamber. I watched each tip slide into the dark hole of the chamber and thought of the sexual symbolism as I rammed the bolt forward, locking it down and caressing the trigger until there was an explosion that shook the body.

I was panting so hard by the end of the second box that she stopped me and gave me a five-minute lecture on breathing control. She slid off of me, lying on her side with one leg over mine, probably because it was just more comfortable for her that way.

It wasn't comfortable for me, though. I think it was the effort to try to stop thinking about having wild sweaty sex with this delicious young woman that finally brought all my attention to the task at hand. Trying to remember all the little parts of shooting correctly was taxing on the untrained mind anyway. I found that if I actually thought about not being stiff, and not gripping things too tightly, and having the right cheek-to-stock weld, and getting the right sight picture while taking three breaths before holding one to shoot on ... well if I thought of all those things in the right order two things happened. The first was that the bullet made nice little holes in the target right where they were supposed to. The second was that Jill stayed a virgin that much longer.

Not that I'd have actually fucked her. I mean we were close, but not in that way. And I was almost thirty years older than she was too. While I'd have loved to climb between those sweet young thighs, she'd have probably upchucked at the very idea. So not thinking about that was a good thing.

In short, trying not to think about what I wanted to do facilitated her teaching me how to get good at the task I wasn't all that hot about performing.

When I put ten rounds within the space a fifty-cent piece would cover, she said I was ready to learn to shoot sitting and standing.

I admit that the first time I shot at a coyote I got off my horse to do it. Jill had made me practice shooting on horseback, and on the tractor too. I had carried the rifle on my back so often that it no longer seemed odd to do it. But when I saw the brown flash of movement off in the distance, I just wasn't willing to explore it from up on the horse.

After I got down and spent five fruitless minutes trying to spot the critter again, I almost gave up. Then he trotted out from behind a bush I'd looked at a dozen times and just looked around. He didn't suspect a thing, despite all the gunfire that had gone on around the place in the last few weeks. I'd hoped that just the noise of me learning how to shoot would convince them to go live somewhere else. No such luck, though.

The kick surprised me completely. I hadn't even 'decided' to pull the trigger. The first thing I thought of was that I hadn't evaluated what was likely to be down range if I missed. That was a bad thing and I felt stupid. As I felt a stab of shame though, the brown body in the field of my sight did an almost magical backwards somersault and landed flat on the ground. Then it didn't move any more.

I was astonished.

It took me a few minutes to get to the body. I was so out of it that I didn't pay any attention to how far it had been or any of that. I just went to the body with the dreadful curiosity of someone who thinks he has just killed something for the first time in his life.

Hunting is a complicated endeavor. Aiming is easy, and squeezing the trigger is simple too. It's what happens after that that makes things complicated. I stood, looking down at a shaggy, dusty, multi-colored coyote. Its mouth was partly open and I could see its teeth ... perhaps the very teeth that had savaged that colt's leg. At the same time I knew that up until a few minutes ago this had been a living creature. I had assumed the role of God, deciding what would live and what would die, and I didn't like that role. I knew the poor thing lying at my feet had to die, because of the priorities that existed. But that didn't mean I was proud of having killed it. It occurred to me that I had learned this killing skill very well, considering that I was successful on my very first shot off the practice range. That made me feel good, except that my success had been the doom of another creature, which robbed me of that good feeling. And the whole time all this was going on in my brain I was hopped up on adrenaline and hyperventilating.

I thought about what to do with the body. Jill had told me not to leave anything for the others to eat unless I wanted to use it as bait and wait for them to come feed. I'd thought that was cold then, and it felt even more distasteful now. I picked up the carcass by the tail and tried to figure out how to put it on my horse. The horse wasn't impressed. He had taken the rifle shot calmly, but didn't like a coyote to be that close to him, even if it was dead. In the end I put the body in a tree until I could get on the horse, and just carried it by the tail.

Based on some strange urge that I still don't understand, I rode through the apple orchard to show Jill what I'd done. She was delighted, of course, and took the body from me, asking me if I wanted to learn how to skin it. I declined, feeling sick at my stomach. I said I had something to do and left her leaning over the still warm body of my first kill, a knife in her right hand.

The next day I found the stiff skin of the coyote nailed to the side of my barn. To be honest, I didn't quite know how to feel about that.

It only took me six months to resolve the coyote problem. By then I had fourteen hides nailed up on the side of the barn and I no longer felt guilty about killing them. There was a farm two miles down the road where I got fresh eggs and I saw what coyotes had done to some of her hens. It wasn't like they had nothing else to eat. There was plenty of game around. They just went for the easy stuff, which usually mean they went for what humans owned.

While I played great white hunter, Lynne and Jill put a lot of work into the orchard, taking it much more seriously than they ever had before. Lynne studied the common problems, like apple scab and aphids and such, and the ways that organic farmers dealt with them. In the past there had been plenty of apples for all the critters to share in. That changed when she got serious about making a profit on them. It took two years to develop the markets, and the third year, the year Jill turned sixteen, instead of driving a pickup load of apples to the farmer's market (something she'd been dreaming of doing for years) she had to settle for being ogled by the men who showed up in an eighteen wheeler to pick up the six hundred crates of apples it had almost killed us to pick and pack in a one-week period.

And those six hundred crates had come from only four acres of orchard. The next year, by hiring ten high school kids, we were able to ship three truckloads of apples. The buyer asked if she had any other varieties. She did. Her parents had planted seven different kinds of apples, but all we'd had time to take care of was the one that seemed to turn out looking the best.

That year there was a fundamental change in my relationship with the Simmons women. That was because Lynne accepted a date from a man she had known in high school, but had never dated back then. He had lost his wife to melanoma, probably caused by spending too much time in the sun. It's a hazard of the game in farming, but nobody expects it to strike when someone is under thirty.

At any rate, it was Jill's belief that since her mother knew what it felt like to lose the love of her life, she was taking pity on this man, whose name was Dennis. I decided not to mention the possibility that a still young woman might have needs and desires that are a lot more fun to pursue with a member of the opposite sex.

According to Jill, Lynne claimed to have had a good time, but they only went out twice. I knew what it felt like to be around Lynne after your wife had died, so I was pretty sure I knew how he felt, and why he didn't ask her out again. But the fact that she'd gone out with him emboldened a few other men and she accepted dates with them too. Nothing seemed to last longer than a couple of times out with the same man, though. I thought maybe Lynne had her own troubles, thinking about Paul watching her.

The change it brought, though, was that I saw less of Lynne, and more of Jill. When her mother was out with one of her suitors, Jill came over and hung out with me. I wondered if that was so Lynne and whoever she was out with this time could be alone at her house, but I never asked.

In the off season, meaning when we weren't actually picking apples, Jill and I still spent hours and hours together. I had gotten good enough at shooting that we could have competitions. I loved shooting in the summer time, because Jill usually wore halter tops, or tank tops, and even sometimes a T shirt that was cut off short so her stomach showed. I'd glue my eyes to her breasts, waiting for that special jiggle they'd display when her rifle went off. Shooting excited her too, and her nipples would get hard. There were a number of times I suspected she wasn't wearing a bra, but her breasts were so firm that it was hard to tell unless a nipple popped up.

I had given up feeling guilty about lusting after her. She paid no attention to me at all in the sense she was completely comfortable around me. If she caught me staring at her she might say "What!" but always shrugged it off if I said "Nothing," or something like "I was just LOOKING at you! Can't I even LOOK at you?"

And after thinking about what a shame it was that Lynne didn't seem to be able to find what she needed, and what a waste that was, I had finally come to peace with the thought that Vicky would probably have scolded me up one side and down the other for simply arresting my social life, as far as women went. Still, it was one thing to gaze fondly at this girl and have distinctly naughty thoughts about her. It was another completely to translate those thoughts into actions. Besides, I liked both Jill and her mother too much to screw things up if I did something that made either of them uncomfortable around me.

In the years I had known her Jill had taught me things like welding, most of what I knew about fixing the tractor, all about gardening and things like that, while I had taught her woodcarving, and sketching. They didn't have a suitable tree on their property, so I had let her help me build her a tree house in an elm out behind my house. In all the years I'd known her I'd never known her to take any interest in boys. She never talked about them to me, and never seemed frustrated about them or any of that. And several times Lynne bemoaned the fact that her daughter didn't have a boyfriend. She was around boys at school. They just didn't impress her or something.

Of course I loved that part of things, in one sense, because I firmly believed she was a virgin and that made my fantasies so much the sweeter.

I'm not rambling here. I tell you all this because you really need to understand where my mind was, at this time of my life, because shortly after Jill's eighteenth birthday everything kind of went crazy. It was a Saturday, and it was late July. There was an air of anticipation in the air, but only part of that had to do with the apple harvest. The trees were heavy with fruit, but it still needed some time to get to the picking point. The other part of it was that in the fall Jill would be going off to college. It seemed like somehow that would change everything.

On this particular day I knew that Lynne was in town doing the weekly shopping, and was looking for just the right birthday present for Jill. She had asked me to distract Jill so that she wouldn't want to go with her, and had assigned us the task of inspecting the tops of the trees for signs of pests. We were concentrating on the trees that had been the best producers the year before. I used a ladder. Jill still just climbed like a monkey.

I finished a tree and went looking for Jill. She had the list of which trees were done and which still needed to be inspected. I was walking under a tree when an apple whizzed by my shoulder, missing me by inches. It hit the ground by my foot with a thump. I looked up to see a grinning Jill standing in the branches.