Page 52 - Demo

Studying the next shooter through the crack, Sonny wondered what the odds were. The odds that
he’d blow his toes off by accident or something great like that. Probably not good. Down in the trap house, Sonny balanced on a slab of concrete, craning his neck up to spy out through a two-inch crack between the roof and the cinder-block wall. Like a bunker, only the top of the trap house was above ground, the bot- tom six feet buried below. The side facing away from the shooters was open for mechanically launching clay pigeons into the balding hills of San Francisquito Canyon.
This next shooter, Sid, was a fast one and killed twenty straight. His buddy, a tall, slump-shouldered man wearing a new Eddie Bauer Clay Break shooting vest and khaki pants, had just shot twenty-three of twenty-five pigeons. And the lady in a bright red pant- suit sitting spine-straight and alert at the jackknife- scarred picnic table under the stilted, forest green awning was in a dangerous rhythm. She controlled the firing of the trap shooter and had already antici- pated Sid’s “pull” call.
From a wooden crate, Sonny plucked a black and yellow clay pigeon—a miniature flying saucer five inches in diameter, designed to spin and fly and float to the earth. The trap thrower automatically swiv- eled so the shooter wouldn’t know which direction the pigeon would fly, simulating the flight of quail or pheasant. He slapped it into the trap shooter guide mount in front of the mechanical shooting arm, a dodgy device that whipped out at blinding speed, and then recoiled his hand.
The shooter called, “Pull!”
Chuh-shoo! The pigeon soared higher and higher, a black speck above the solemn blue horizon, before it lost its momentum, falling, falling, falling—then shards of clay exploded five feet above the desert
floor like heavy black feathers. Inches lower and Son- ny would have felt the consequences of the shooter waiting too long: shot pellets finding the crack at the rear of the trap house and painfully pecking the back of his head.
Before he could yell something nasty, though, Sonny loaded the trap shooter with another pigeon.
“Pull!”
The shotgun fired. The pigeon disappeared into the scrub at the far reaches of the range. Sonny cele- brated with a fist-pump; he loved seeing the pigeons get away.
This shooter, Sid, resembled Mr. Wister at the Foun- dation—fat, balding, big nose, big ears—who ar- ranged this Saturday job for Sonny. He knew it was Mr. Wister’s way of preparing Sonny to become more independent so he could leave the Foundation in
a couple of years, which Sonny had mixed feelings about; he craved the freedom but not the responsibil- ity that came with it.
Even so, he found pleasure in the working at a gun range. And reading about guns—handguns, shotguns, rifles—provoked mentally arousing images of adven- tures, of jungles and deserts and back alleys. Sonny believed you had to be a certain kind of person to use a gun. Stupid or crazy people—and a lot of men and women who drive Volvos—should not be allowed to use guns. Working in the trap house focused his at- tention on the right way to shoot.
It was the pigeons that got to him, though. He loved to watch the pigeons fly. And get away.
On pigeon number twenty-one, while Sonny re-load- ed the trap arm, the lady in red thumbed the button before Sid called for it. The trap arm was sprung, striking and slicing his hand in an arc across his palm. Sonny screamed, grasping his hand at the wrist, trying to strangle the pain, gritted his teeth so he couldn’t call the lady a stupid bitch or something.
“Pull!”
The trap arm kicked, empty. Sid called, louder, “Pull!” The shooter arm threw nothing.
“‘Pull,’ I said, Rhonda! Push the button!”
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Clay Pigeons
Tom euBanKs