In the end he goes with the truth. “I tried a few things, back in my wild days. Didn’t like any of ’em one little bit, so I quit trying.”

“What’d you try?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Cal says. “I wouldn’t’ve liked anything else any better.” The fact is, everything he tried repelled him with an intensity that startled him and that he was unwilling to admit even to Donna, who back in those days accepted the odd drag or snort with cheerful ease. He hated the way every drug in its different way scooped the solidity right out of the world and left it quicksand-textured, cracked across and wavering at the edges. They did the same thing to people: people on drugs stopped being what you knew them to be. They looked you right in the face and saw things that had nothing to do with you. One of the happy side effects of having Alyssa and leaving his wild days behind was not having to hang out with people who were on drugs.

He asks casually, his eyes on the desk, “How ’bout you? You ever try any of that stuff?”

“Nah,” Trey says flatly.

“You sure?”

“No way. Makes you stupid. Anyone could get you.”

“True enough,” Cal says. He’s thrown by the strength of the relief. “I guess if you’re not the trusting type, drugs probably aren’t for you.”

“I’m not.”

“Yeah, I picked up on that. Me neither.”

Trey looks at him. He seems thinner in the face this week, and paler, like this is taking something out of him. He says, “Now what’re you gonna do?”

Cal is still turning that over in his mind; not what to do, exactly, so much as how to go about it. What he does know right now is that the kid needs something good to happen today. He says, “I’m gonna teach you how to use that rifle.”

The kid’s mouth opens and he lights up like Cal just handed him that birthday bike. “Easy, tiger,” Cal says. “You’re not gonna just pick it up and be a sharpshooter. Mostly what you’re gonna do today is learn how not to shoot your foot off, and miss a few beer cans. If we have time, maybe you can miss a few rabbits.”

Trey tries to give him an eye-roll, but he can’t wipe the grin off his face. Cal can’t help grinning back.

“But,” Trey says, his face suddenly falling. “That’s not finished.” He indicates the desk.

“So it’ll get finished some other day,” Cal says, straightening up off the counter. “Come on.”

The gun safe looks out of place on Cal’s bare bedroom floorboards. The only other things in the room are the mattress and sleeping bag, the suitcase where Cal keeps clean clothes and the garbage bag where he keeps dirty ones, and the four damp-mottled indigo walls; amid those, the tall dark metal box has an air of sleek, alien menace. “This is a gun safe,” Cal says, giving the side of it a slap. “My gun stays in here until I’m planning on shooting it, because it’s not a toy and this isn’t a game; this thing was built for killing, and if I ever catch you disregarding that, you’ll never lay a finger on it again. We clear?”

Trey nods, like he’s scared to talk in case Cal changes his mind.

“This,” Cal says, lifting it out, “is a Henry twenty-two lever-action rifle. One of the finest guns ever made.”

“Ah, man,” Trey says, on a reverent rush of breath. “My dad’s gun wasn’t like that.”

“Probably not,” Cal says. Next to the Henry, he finds most other guns seem either runty or bad-tempered. “They used this rifle in the Wild West, on the frontier. If you ever watch old cowboy movies, this is the gun those boys use.”

Trey inhales the scent of gun oil and runs a finger down the rich walnut of the stock. “Beauty,” he says.

“First thing, before you do anything else with it,” Cal says, “you gotta check that it’s unloaded. Magazine comes out like this, lever goes down like this, make sure there’s no round in the chamber.” He slides the magazine tube back into place and holds out the gun to Trey. “Now let’s see you do it.”

The kid’s face when he takes the gun in his hands makes Cal glad he decided to do this. His private opinion about a lot of the baby thugs and delinquents he encountered on the job was that what they really yearned after, whether they knew it or not, was a rifle and a horse and a herd of cattle to drive through dangerous terrain. Given those, plenty of them—not all, but plenty—would have turned out fine. Failing that, they got as close as they could, with results ranging from bad to disastrous.

Trey checks the gun with the same neat-handed, intent care he puts into the desk. “Good,” Cal says. “Now see this here? This is the hammer. You pull it back all the way, it’s cocked, ready to fire. But you bring it back just a little bit, like this, so you hear it click? That means it’s safe. You can pull the trigger all you want, nothing’ll happen. To go from cocked to safe, you ease the trigger back, just a little bit, then click the hammer forwards. Like this.”

Trey does it. His hands on the rifle look little and delicate, but Cal knows he has more than enough strength to handle it. “There you go,” he says. “Now it’s safe. But remember: safe or not, loaded or not, you don’t ever point it at any creature unless you’re prepared to kill it. You got that?”

“I got it,” Trey says. Cal likes the way he says it, with a level unblinking gaze across the gun in his hands. The kid is feeling the weight of this, and he needs that.

“OK,” he says. “Let’s go give it a try.”

He gets the plastic bag where he keeps empty beer cans and gives it to Trey to carry. He puts the rifle on his shoulder, and they go out into air that’s soft and heavy with mist and rich with wet-earth smells. The first of the evening is just starting to seep in; off to the west, where the clouds thin here and there, their edges are gold.

“We need to pick ourselves a good spot,” Cal says. “Somewhere we’re not gonna hit anything we don’t intend to.”

“Will we shoot them?” Trey asks, flicking his chin at the rooks, who are arguing over something in the grass.

“Nah.”

“Why not?”

“I like having ’em around,” Cal says. “They’re smart. Besides, I don’t know if they’re good eating, and I don’t kill creatures for kicks. We get something, we’re gonna skin it, gut it, cook it and eat it. You OK with all that?”

Trey nods.

“Good,” Cal says. “How ’bout we set up here?”

The low dry-stone wall of Cal’s back field has clear views of open grass all around; no one can walk into their firing line unexpectedly. It’s also on the side of the land overlooked by silent, incurious P.J., rather than the side overlooked by Mart, although right now even P.J. is nowhere to be seen. They balance beer cans on the rough stones, stacked there who knows how long ago by what ancestors of Mart’s and P.J.’s and Trey’s, and retreat across the field. Their feet swish in the damp grass.