Benjamin Percy

“You see my grandson over there.” Justin’s father humps his chin in Graham’s direction without taking his eyes off Seth. “You don’t want him to see what the inside of your skull looks like, do you?”

“You’d never do that,” Seth says. “I could walk right up to that rifle and stick my finger in it and you’d never do a thing.”

“Come on and try.”

“You’re so full of it.”

Then his father swings the barrel left and fires. The crack of the gunshot is followed by the chime of glass shattering, falling from the red pickup, its left headlight destroyed.

For a moment Seth stares at his truck. “You’ll fucking pay for that,” he says.

Justin watches him in silence. There is something in his son’s face. A tightening of his jaw and a flaring of his nostrils that foretells what will come. He isn’t going to ask permission. He is going to shoot. It makes him seem faraway and unfamiliar. He is so enchanted by the desire to kill—the same acute and forceful feeling that drove primitive man to bring a blade of obsidian to a stick and sharpen it—that his current life, his school and his bicycle and his bedroom with the desk scored from the snarl of his pencil and the giant beer mug filled with brown pennies and the movie-monster posters hanging on the wall, has become nothing but a tiny black fly he brushes aside with his hand before bringing it to the stock and tightening his finger around the trigger.

Justin waits for him to say something more and soon he does, when walking about the campsite, kicking through its remains. “Bears don’t unscrew a jar of peanut butter. They don’t unpeel a stick of jerky. Bears don’t drink a Pabst Blue Ribbon and neither do I.” He peers around the cooler and knocks closed its lid. “And bears don’t steal whiskey.”