Paradise Sky

The shooter who didn’t know his ciphers had made it through round one, but that second round of cork shooting put him out of the game.

Prairie Dog hit eight.

The little guy with the chewing tobacco hit ten, and so did Bronco Bob, who was as cool a shooter as I have ever seen. Both of them had outshot me by one cork, and I found that matter surprising, but then again they didn’t have the angle I had, and the wind hadn’t been working as hard when they took their turns. It was the only thing I could figure.

“That’s all right,” I heard Charlie yell. “You did fine. As for them others, even a blind pig can find a corncob now and again.”

I looked toward the hill where Win was. She and the others all gave me high signs and smiles, except Cullen, who looked like a man who might have started to think he had bet too much on the wrong shooter.

Now it was time for the long guns. Dimes was set up at a distance slightly farther than the corks. They was set with their edges toward us, between grooves in wooden blocks weighted down with rocks. We only got one shot and one dime. That would be the nut-cutting shot and would lead to who was in and who was out. If only one man was standing, the match was over. If not, then it moved to more rapid firing and horseback shooting.

The tobacco chewer, whom I thought of as Tobacco Mouth, was first. He leveled his Spencer and popped off his shot without so much as breathing, and damn if he didn’t send that dime spi

I was next, and, like Prairie Dog, I took my time. Mr. Loving told me that the idea was to make your target seem big as the moon in your gun sights. I aimed down that barrel, but that dime’s edge was mighty thin to me, nowhere near big as the moon. I carefully pulled off my shot.

I sent the dime spi

Bronco Bob took a fresh rifle from one of the bags the boy was toting for him, a Henry—what some called a Yellow Boy due to its coloring. Bob hadn’t no more than pulled that rifle from the bag than he wheeled. With the stock of the rifle on his hip, a position that couldn’t never be worth much, or so I thought, he fired and hit that dime as sure as my name isn’t really Nat Love.

“Damn,” I heard Prairie Dog say. It had come out of him without him knowing it was going to. Just beyond him, I saw the tobacco wad fall out of Tobacco Mouth’s piehole.

I felt weak in the knees.

“We move on,” said Chauncey, “though from the look of things, anybody whose name ain’t Bronco Bob is pretty much ass-poked.”

We was at the stage of the match where it would come fast and furious. This was the throwing of glass balls and bottles for us to shoot.

We started with bottles.

They had a big colored man throwing, maybe twice my size, and he could really wing those bottles. They went high up and away from the sun. That was the idea, to keep the sun out of our eyes. We was to fire at them in turn. None of us had any problem with the bottles. I think we shot about fifty of them, and by that point my Winchester had heated up so much I could hardly hold it. Prairie Dog’s Winchester was warm, too, and I saw him trade it off to a man in the crowd who was holding two rifles for him. Tobacco Mouth’s Spencer, being a one-shot, one-load affair, wasn’t heating up the same, but we had to take more time for him to load and shoot. He would shoot, load again, shoot, load again, shoot. He’d shoot till he missed, then when the rest of us had a turn we fired more quickly, therefore the heat-up.

Charlie watched me shift my rifle back and forth in my hands, came over and handed me a fresh Winchester. I was happy for this but worried as well. It wasn’t my rifle, and I hadn’t had occasion to sight it in or learn its personality, as Mr. Loving used to say.

It was time to shoot at the glass balls.

Glass balls was done same as bottles. You got your turn, and the tosser throwed them till you missed.

Bronco Bob, having edged us all out by a couple of points, got first shot. The colored man threw the glass balls for him, with Bronco Bob yelling “Throw” between shots, and damn if he didn’t hit all ten that was thrown for him.

Tobacco Mouth was up next, and let me tell you it was quite the boat to China waiting on him to reload his single-shot weapon, and he was nervous about it. He fumbled around like his fingers was sausages. I think that shot Bronco Bob made from the hip earlier had flummoxed him a smidgen.

The crowd had started talking during the reloading, and Checkers Chauncey yelled at them. “Shut the hell up and let the man concentrate.”

The first six shots went well, but by the seventh Tobacco Mouth started to miss and missed all the shots thrown thereafter. It was like he had gone blind. When it was over, he was given the ax, so to speak. As he walked off the field everyone yelled and clapped for him, and then he was swallowed up by the crowd and I didn’t see him again.

I went next, and, like Bronco Bob, I hit all ten, shooting them out of the air as fast as I could yell for them. Prairie Dog passed muster too.

A break was taken, and Win brought water down the hill and gave me some. Ruggert had not moved from his chair, and the way he looked at me it was as if he was trying to set me on fire with his eyes. I seen some of his men in the crowd, too, though how many there actually was I had no idea. They could have been scattered all throughout. As Win walked back up the hill, I tried to not think about them. If I was to win this thing, I had to tuck them kind of worries away.

Charlie brought my Winchester back to me, took the other, and then we was shooting again. This time there was twenty balls to be thrown, and since we all had repeaters, the match moved more quickly.

Up went those balls. The three of us took our turns. We all hit ten out of ten, and then the next ten. Twenty balls thrown for each of us. Twenty balls hit. We looked at one another and gri

Bronco Bob traded out for a new rifle. It was a sort I had never seen before, but it had the general look of a Winchester. It was thi

“Thank you, Tim,” Bronco Bob said.

“Jim,” said the boy.

“As I said, you will be called Tim.”

We all returned to the scratch line. The cotton in my ears was sweaty, and when I plucked it out to put fresh in, I seen the cotton was dark with gun smoke. Putting in fresh, I cradled my rifle in my arms, letting my arms dangle as low as possible. I was starting to get a pinch in my shoulder, a stitched feeling in the middle of my back, and my neck hurt, to boot.

“All right, now,” Chauncey said. “The balls is going to be thrown from a farther-out position, twenty-five of them. There can be no pause between shots, and no need of it, as you have repeaters. Is that understood?”

We all understood.

Bronco Bob went first, and this time he missed on his first shot. It was like seeing Zeus miss with a thunderbolt. After that he hit all the balls tossed. Like Bronco Bob, I only missed one. Prairie Dog hit the first three, missed the fourth, hit the fifth, and then he wasn’t worth killing after that. I could tell it was his arms that had worn out, not his aim. He was having trouble keeping the rifle lifted.

That was it for him. He come over and shook our hands and told us what fine competitors we was and how on another day he felt he could have outshot us, and then he moved into the crowd amid much yelling and hooting and clapping.

It was me and Bronco Bob.