But shooters did not like to shoot a walker, because even a killed walker was worth no more than a wounded flyer—that is, one point in the scorekeeper’s book. A killed flyer earned two points for the shooter, while a wounded walker scored a mere half point. Missing a flyer altogether was sure to bring a round of good-natured jeers from the spectators. But unluckiest of all was the shooter who completely missed a walker: he faced both a one-point deduction and a lifetime of ribbing.
Once every four or five boxfuls, a pigeon got away clean. Missed entirely by the buckshot, it flew over the reaching arms of the crowd and into the sky, circled the field several times and was gone.
On the table by the scorekeeper stood a golden bird, this year’s Sharpshooter Award.
The wringers had learned their jobs well. At the feet of the pink-hatted wringmaster they crouched like sprinters, counting five shots. They sprang onto the field three at a time, one with a new, loaded box, the other two after downed pigeons. They did not wring the necks of the wounded in the field, for that would waste time, and the wringmaster was holding a stopwatch and calling the seconds. They dashed back with both living and dead swinging in their fists. Some held the birds by the neck, some by the feet. Some wringers wore wristbands.
The wringing was done on the sidelines, the dead birds dropped into large dark green trash bags.
Palmer noticed that Beans, Mutto and Henry always worked as a threesome. Their turn came about every fifteen minutes. They never rotated jobs. Henry always did the boxes.
When the sun had cleared the tallest trees, Palmer felt a hand squeeze his little finger. It was Dorothy.
“Did you eat?” she said. “Your mother said you didn’t eat breakfast.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
They both looked ahead, at the shooting field, as they spoke. Dorothy did not let go of his finger. With every boom of a shotgun he felt her flinch. At every neck wringing, she squeezed his finger. He could hear her breathing.
Though he had seen little of Dorothy since she returned from her vacation three weeks before, he was not surprised that she was beside him now, here.
Through most of the morning it had been a relief to Palmer to see that he was ignored by Beans and Mutto. Sometimes the pursuit of a flopper brought one of them within ten feet of where he stood, but they went about their business of snatch and dash and never seemed to notice him—until now. This time when Beans snatched a wounded bird flopping in the grass, instead of heading straight back to the wringmaster, he detoured over to Palmer. His teeth even yellower in the sun, his eyes wild with glee, he thrust the pigeon before Palmer’s face, and then Dorothy’s, and as he had so often pretended, wrung its neck. The bird’s orange button eye blinked.
Dorothy’s eyes were shut. She backed away. “I have to go.”
Palmer caught her by the arm. “Wait.”
They stood staring at each other’s face, the only place their eyes were safe. Double-barreled booms and laughter mingled with smells of mustard and onions and barbecue and gunsmoke.
He could not wait any longer to ask. “Where did you let him go?”
“Nipper?” she said, as if she didn’t know.
“Yeah. Where?”
“In the city.”
Palmer was puzzled. “The city? I thought you went to the shore.”
He had pictured Dorothy standing on a boardwalk or beach, tossing Nipper into the air, Nipper soaring over the sand, the foaming surf. He imagined a pigeon would have a good life at the seashore.
“We did,” she said.
She was not making this easy.
“But you just said the city.”
“We stopped off in the city”—a boom, she flinched—“for a day.”
He remembered his trip to the city two years before, his delight in the pedestrian pigeons strolling, nodding up and down the sidewalks right along with the people. That too, now that he thought about it, seemed like a good life for a pigeon.
He nodded. “City, huh?”
She nodded.
“Did you, like, reach up and throw him into the air and he flew away?” He wanted a clear picture to remember. “Or did you let him down on the sidewalk, and he walked along with the people?”
She twitched at a gun boom. She took a step back. “No, none of that. I rolled down the car window and he flew out.”
It wasn’t how Palmer would have wished. “While you were driving? Or stopped?”
“Stopped.”
“In the traffic? Downtown? Where?” Still trying to picture it.
Another gun boom. She shivered as if it were December and not August. “At the railroad yards.”
Railroad yards.
Palmer grabbed her by both arms and squeezed. “What?”
She squirmed. “What what?”
“Did you say railroad yards?”
“Yes. Stop it.”
She twisted away from him and ran back through the people. Palmer caught her at the back of the crowd. He planted himself in front of her.
She sneered. “Treestumping again?”
“Dorothy”—he was screeching—“you let him out at the railroad yards.”
Dorothy threw up her hands. “So?”
“So? The railroad yards are where they go to trap pigeons and bring them here. Why did you have to let him go there?”
A boom was followed by a second, louder explosion of cheers and howling laughter. Something outrageous had happened.
Dorothy stared, stunned, at Palmer. Her lips quivered. “We don’t know about that stuff. Nobody ever told us that. Nobody in my family shoots pigeons!” She was screaming.
Heads turned. Dorothy ran off. This time Palmer did not follow.
40
He knows how it will end.
He can see it. His bird terrified in the smothering darkness of the box—it’s like a coffin—when suddenly one wall springs up and light pours in and he’s free to go. He steps out onto grass and feathers, thinking, Hey, where’s the bedroom? He takes another step, looks around. There are people, people everywhere, more people than he has ever seen. But he is not afraid. The people he has known, the boy and the girl, were always good to him. He almost thinks of them as pigeons. He wonders if they—
The blast knocks him off his feet, drives him sideways, like the other blizzard long ago. There is pain in his wing. It drags. It will not move. He cannot stand straight or walk right. He tries to fly but labors only inches into the gray, sour cloud and flops back to earth. The people are noisy. The people are laughing and cheering and whistling. They are happy. He has never seen so many happy people. He wobbles toward them. He wants to be with them, with all those happy faces.
And then he sees that one face is different, one face is not laughing, is not happy. He knows the face. He would know it anywhere. Dragging his wing through the feathers that cover the ground, he heads for the face, he is limping toward the face when the second blast comes—
He whispered, “Nipper…Nipper…”
At the old train station on Friday, a swelling gobble of noise had come from the crates. Here they were silent. If Palmer had not known better, he would never have believed there were thousands of pigeons behind the wooden slats.
“Nipper…Nipper…”
He whispered into the crates. He stood on tiptoes and crawled on hands and knees, peering into the dark strips of space between the slats. Orange eyes flashed in the dark. He could not hope to reach the ones on top.
“Nipper…”
Nipper was here. He knew it. Somewhere in the canyon wall of crates towering above him.
Unless he was already shot.
“Nipper…” “Hey, kid—”
A workman coming around the corner, pointing. “Let’s go. Move it. You can’t be back here. Out with everybody else.”
Palmer thrust a hand as far as it would go into one of the spaces. He wiggled his fingers, feeling only darkness.
The man was coming. “Kid—now!”
Summer
has nearly two months to run, but the shooting field, covered in feathers, has a look of gray, demented autumn.
A man with a bamboo rake pulls shotgun shells into piles.
The mound of green plastic bags grows taller than the wringmaster’s neon pink cap. Sometimes a bulge of plastic moves.
The line of shooters is never more than seven or eight deep, yet it never ends. The golden pigeon never blinks.
People point hot dogs at wounded, scurrying birds, yell to wringers, “There! There!”
The boxmaster makes a mistake. He opens two hatches at once. Out fly a pair of pigeons—boom—knocked from the air with one shot. A double kill! A rare deuce! Four points! The crowd goes wild.
The biggest cheer of all goes to a yellow cat, which streaks onto the field, snatches a wounded bird and streaks off into the trees.
Gunsmoke and afternoon sunlight.
Someone tosses a Frisbee onto the field. The shooter on line fires. The Frisbee lurches and falls. A wringer dashes out, snatches the disc and pretends to strangle it. The wringmaster laughs. The crowd howls. The scorekeeper maintains a stern face, disqualifies the shooter.
People come and go, changing the composition but not the shape of the crowd.
Only Palmer stays through it all.
Sunsmoke.
Palmer cursed the sameness of the pigeons. Some of them had dark feathers—charcoal—and as they exploded on the ground and in the air, Palmer thanked them for so clearly not being Nipper.
But three out of four birds that walked out of the white box looked just like his: gunsmoke gray. Nipper had no special markings, nor had Palmer ever thought to fix a band to his bird’s leg or neck, for he knew without reading a book that of boys and pigeons, it is the boy who, so to speak, wears the collar, that it is never the pigeon, but the boy, who is lost.
Not knowing which gray-feathered bird might be Nipper, Palmer believed that every one was. Over and over, a thousand times, he was sure he saw Nipper killed. A thousand times he felt the sting of the buckshot. A thousand times he saw Nipper’s neck wrung.
Occasionally a pigeon flapped into the air and stayed there, feathers intact, not only stayed there but rose higher and higher into the gray cloud, then above it, above the treetops, into the sky. A miracle! As the bird circled the field Palmer silently celebrated, his shoulders shrugging up and down in support of the wonderfully working, unshot wings. Around him people shot their fists at the sky and cursed. Others cheered the bird, toasted it with bottles of soda pop hoisted high. Still others jeered the not-so-sharpshooting shooter.
Eventually each miracle bird flew out of sight, and each time Palmer whispered, “Let it be Nipper.” Then he would hear the next gunboom. He would see wringers galloping through the featherfall. He would see the swollen plastic bags across the way, gorged on pigeon corpses, and for an unspeakable moment he would be inside, in a stinking muggery of limp necks and orange eyes dead as buttons, and he was sure that his bird was one of them. Fertilizer.
It did not occur to Palmer that he had not eaten all day until a crewcut little kid with a cup of grape water ice stood beside him. The little kid mimicked every gunboom by pointing a purple-stained forefinger and barking, “Pow! Pow!”
While an empty white box was being replaced by a loaded one, the little kid looked up at Palmer and said, “Are you a wringer?”
“Do I look like it?” Palmer replied, not wanting to be bothered and already not liking this kid.
The kid was untouched by Palmer’s sarcasm. “How old are you?” he said.
“Twenty-five,” said Palmer.
The dumb kid continued to stare up at Palmer as he slurped his water ice. “I’m seven.”
“Hooray.”
“In three years”—he held up three purple fingers—“I’m gonna be ten, and then—”
Boom
The first bird emerged from the freshly stocked white box, new shooter shooting.
The kid swung and pointed. “Pow! Pow!” And kept jabbering at Palmer. “And then I’ll be—”
Boom
“Pow!—a wringer. I’m gonna wring their—” He tried to show what he would do but spilled purple slush over his own wrist.
Boom
“Pow! Pow! I’m gonna wring more than anybody. I’m gonna—”
Boom
“Pow! I’m gonna—”
Palmer was no longer hearing the yammering kid. He was looking up. The second pigeon out of the box had been another Nipper look-alike. It took a few casual steps and stopped to peck at the ground—a perfect target. Incredibly, the shooter had missed. The pigeon had taken off and was now higher than the afternoon sun. Another rare one, a miracle bird.
Blocking the sun with his fist, Palmer watched the bird circle the field, as the others had done. Palmer’s shoulder muscles flexed to the rhythm of its wings, urging it on. It circled a fourth time. And again. It was not leaving. It was simply circling, circling. In fact, impossibly, it seemed to be getting closer.
It was Nipper.
Palmer simply and suddenly knew it.
And just as suddenly the horror of what he was doing struck him. For if Nipper truly was searching for him—and found him—
Palmer’s own stupid, unthinking, upturned face was nothing more than bait luring his pigeon back to a second chance at death. This time the shooter would not miss.
Palmer covered his face with his hands. No, he prayed, No No No….
Too late.
As the bird broke from its circle and began its long downward swing, the little kid beside Palmer pointed and screamed, “Look! It’s coming back! It’s coming back!” Palmer knocked the water ice from the kid’s hand as the people began to look up. Fingers pointed, more faces turned. The shooter, who had been walking away, stopped and turned. His hand dipped into the pocket of his vest. The only sound was the outraged howl of the purple-plastered kid.
Palmer stepped away from the people then, into the clear, onto the shooting field, the better to be seen, for he knew now that there was no stopping it. Downward came the bird, lazily looping through the haze, gray in gray descending, gliding, a summer sledder down a slope of sunsmoke.
And landed on Palmer’s head.
At that point even the howling kid shut up. His boggling eyes joined a townful of others aimed at a spot just above Palmer’s forehead. Nipper’s toes clutched and moved on his scalp, and for a strangely wonderful moment he felt himself crowned. The shooter was slipping shells into the twin barrels of his gun. And suddenly out of nowhere there was Beans, swiping at Palmer’s head even as Nipper chuckled, sending the pigeon to the ground. Before Palmer could react, Beans was on the bird, scooping it up and sprinting to the center of the field. He hoisted the bird above his head and gave a long, ripping screech of triumph. He ran to the shooter, who stood stone-faced at the chalk line, shotgun at the ready. Mashing its wings, Beans shook the bird in the shooter’s face. “It’s yours! It came back! Kill! Kill!” He slammed the bird to the ground and ran for cover.
Palmer was running too. He saw the shooter shoulder his gun. His scream—“No!”—made a puff in the gunsmoke cloud. He splashed through the fallen feathers, which were deepest here in the territory between the shooter and the white box, like October leaves. He plunged facefirst, landing, sliding through the gray softness into his hobblywobbling bird. He pulled it into himself, curled himself around it, the comical, many-voiced, eight-toed friend blizzard-blown into his life one day. He closed his eyes and buried his face in the bed of feathers and waited for the shot. The boom.
He waited.
And waited.
And heard only silence.
He dared to lift his head and look around. The wringmaster was holding one arm out, making a gate behind which the wringers gaped. The wring-master’s other hand had Beans by the collar.
The shotgun stood on its heel at attention.
Palmer got to his feet. He ignored the blood-tacky feathers sticking to his face. He held Nipper close.
Standing there in feathers up to his sneaker knots, Palmer felt a peace, a lightness that he had never known before, as if restraining straps had snapped, setting him free to float upward. For a moment, feeling in his fingertips the quick beating of Nipper’s acorn-size heart, he believed he could fly. Through a pigeon’s eye he looked down from the sky upon the field, the thousands of upturned faces, and saw nothing at all to fear.
He reached out then, held his pigeon out to the people, slowly turned so they all could see, so they all would know.
Someone whistled.
Someone shouted, “Bang!” and laughter followed.
People booed.
Cradling his pigeon in both hands, Palmer walked from the field. The crowd parted just enough to let him through. He felt the cold stares of the people, he smelled the mustard on their breaths. A hand reached out. He flinched. It was a little hand, a child’s hand, touching Nipper’s wing, stroking it. A child’s voice saying, “Can I have one too, Daddy?”
WAYMER—The annual Pigeon Day shoot held here on Saturday was declared a rousing success by the event’s organizers. More than 300 sharpshooters—“not all of them so sharp,” quipped one official—took aim on some 5,000 birds released on the Memorial Park soccer field.
Proceeds from shoot entry fees, plus revenue from the weeklong Family Fest, netted the community almost $34,000 for maintaining its park.
An unexpected episode occurred during this year’s event. At one point in the late afternoon an unidentified boy dashed onto the shooting field and retrieved a wounded pigeon. Shooting was immediately halted, and the reckless lad, perhaps seeking an unusual pet for himself, was allowed to leave the premises with the bird.
Certainly that lucky pigeon had not fallen under the aim of Howard Eckert. Eckert, 36, a dairyman from Harmony Farms, won this year’s Sharpshooter’s trophy as best marksman.
Said Eckert, “Anybody can hit a clay pigeon. These babies, you never know which way…”
WRINGER
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