Dead Eye

My grandfather Mike taught me how to shoot when I was eight. After plinking cans with a BB gun for a few weeks that summer, he pulled out an old .22/shotgun combination gun. The .22 barrel rested on top of the shotgun barrel and the hammer clicked up or down depending on what sort of shell you wanted to fire. I loved the sharp crack the .22 made and was a pretty good shot. One morning Mike handed the gun over and told me again to make sure to hold the butt-end firmly to my shoulder, breathe slowly, and squeeze rather than pull at the trigger. "Like you're making a fist." "I know, I know." Man, it felt like that gun came out the back of my arm. Mike had clicked the hammer down to strike the shotgun side. The only other time I saw him laugh that hard was when he put a lit firecracker under a coffee can to fire it in the air. The fuse was faulty, it exploded before Mike could back away and the can hit him in the mouth. His brother and he laughed and laughed, blood filling my grandfather's mouth.

A few years later Mike began taking me hunting. After that first switch-up whenever I shot a gun, even if I knew the kickback was coming, my pulse would race, I'd have to force my breathing to slow, and my mind emptied. I don't remember shooting the deer. He was an eight-pointer and Mike said his dressed weight was two hundred forty pounds. What I remember is the deer hanging in one of the outbuildings after we got him back. Empty, spread open, and darkly meaty against the fluorescent lighting. My grandmother was standing in the sawdust she'd spread on the cement floor underneath the deer, blood covering her hands and arms up to her elbows.

Burial Platform

I used to know how to sharpen a knife. My grandfather, Mike, taught me when I was a child. Once when we'd been hunting some rabbit, he killed a deer. We dressed it there in the forest, in the snow, in a clearing. I was afraid of the ghosts watching us from the edge of the field. I could hear them howling between the trees when we rode his John Deere five-wheeler. Mike let me hone his buck knife on a whetstone and then he slit the deer's belly. Steam rose from it. Mike said the Indians believed this was the deer's soul rising to be with the Great Spirit. He hated the Indians.

I could make knife so sharp if you cut yourself you wouldn't even feel it until you started bleeding. The trick was to find the sweet angle on the stone. You could sense it when the blade caught, and you wouldn't even have to press very hard. Now I'm an adult and I've forgotten everything. I have a complete Wusthof knife set that's so dull I can hack at my wrists and leave only indentations, as though I'd fallen asleep on a headphone cord. Sometimes I get out my stone and steel and slice away until my forearms bulge. But my professional knives only ever smoothen and become more dull.

In the forest I said my dad told me animals go to Heaven, too. Mike hated my dad, who he saw as an effete city-boy. This is why Mike taught me hunting, fire-starting, knife sharpening, and other man things: to keep me from growing soft. I don't know if it worked. I can no longer sharpen a knife and I still believe in ghosts.

Munchausen

Once I was in the forest with my grandfather, Mike. He was a great outdoors-man, and he was teaching me how to hunt. I never saw Mike get scared of anything. Except that day. We were trailing some deer, and, out of nowhere, this huge goddamn bear flies out of the brush. Looking all ugly, showing his teeth. He stopped and raised up on his two back feet. Mike froze. He had his 30.06 still on his shoulder, might as well have been a walking stick. The bear came back down on all fours and charged. I was learning many things at that time, including fire-starting. I patted my pockets as quick as you like and found two flints. One I threw as hard as I could at the bear's head. It flew into his maw and sank down his throat. It didn't kill him, but he was hurt and he turned around to think things over. I saw my opportunity. I whipped the other flint up his ass, sidewinder style. I chucked that flint so hard that it struck the first flint in the bear's stomach. Explosion. Man, I blew that bear straight back to hell.

I thought about that the other day when a friend of mine was proud that he'd figured out how to get the toilet to stop running.