Of Ringers and Leaners

Mulak Reader - Of Ringers and Leaners

This one was a challenge, since it contains a flashback, and there is always a risk of leaving the reader behind when you go back and forth in time. In this case, I think I carried it off fairly well. And I really like the result. This one appeared on the back page of Sports Afield, and I included it in Brown Feathers.

Of Ringers and Leaners

          Robert leaned against the porch railing, watching the progress on the skeet field immediately in front of the clubhouse. Five men were engaged in what was supposed to be a game, but when one of them missed a high house shot from station three, the silence was louder than any sarcastic laughter could ever be. He shook his head, smiling to himself.
          Inside the clubhouse, his father made conversation with some fellows who were waiting for someone else. Robert wondered if there existed a man anywhere with whom his father couldn't make small talk. He glanced at his watch: It had been 20 minutes they had been waiting to shoot. He went to the window inside.
          "Mind if we go out ourselves? Field three is open."
          The fellow in charge of registrations was on the phone, but he looked up at Robert's request. "Sure, go ahead. You'll have to push your own buttons, though—All my trap boys are tied up right now."
          Robert nodded. Actually, he preferred it that way. There were several groups of fellows at the club he enjoyed teaming with to fill out a five man squad, but most were like those he had been watching on the porch: They took their fun much too seriously. He and his father walked down the hill to field three. Behind them, the sounds of shotguns repeated a staccato cadence.
          The remnants of thousands of empty shells littered the field, and just beyond the shooting area the ground seemed to blush florescent orange among the weeds, almost as if some exotic wild flower blossomed there rather than a six-inch layer of broken skeet. They walked to station one at the far end of the field. Robert leaned his gun against the high house building and took up the electrical push-button device that set off the traps.
          "Go ahead, Dad. I'll shoot after you."
          His father stood on the square concrete pad that marked the shooter's position, flexing his arm and shouldering his gun in preparation. When he seemed ready, he asked, "High house first?"
          Robert nodded.
          "Okay... Pull!"
          The target flew out immediately above his father's head. Robert waited, but no shot was fired. His father said, "Oh, high house first. Go ahead, let me have another one... Pull!"
         Another target flew out, this one shot at and missed.
          "Take another try, Dad."
          "High house again?"
          "Yes. Same shot."
          A third target flew, but after his father's shot it, too, landed unbroken with the previous two.
          "What am I doing wrong, Bob?"
          "I don't think you held under it."
          "Yeah." His father nodded to himself. "Why didn't you remind me?"
         Robert smiled a thin smile but said nothing. He wasn't given to handing out advice to the man who had taught him to shoot.
          "Go ahead, low house now." Robert said.
          The target was called for and his father tracked it until it floated just above his left shoulder before pulverizing it.
         "That's the way." Robert said. He remembered a younger time when this now old man had been a good shot—A time when everything his father did seemed miraculous and larger than life. That same young man still lived inside his father, a younger man who could shoot well and took pride in his shooting. A younger man, too, who knew nothing of things like cataracts and angina. Lately, enjoying his father's company took more patience than serious skeet shooters were willing to spend. Robert was glad they had the field to themselves.
          At station two, his father shot late and broke the high house target when it was on its way down, 20 yards or so beyond the stake. He turned to Robert. "Did I hit that?"
          "Right between the feathers."
          "Better send the dog to fetch him in." His father joked, and turned back to the station.
          "I'm afraid she'll bump up those other three that landed over there just a moment ago." Robert replied.
          They both laughed.
          Before Robert could take his turn at the second station, a pair of men came down the hill from the clubhouse. They carried shotguns. "Mind if we jump in?"
          "Of course not." His father was quick to answer. "Go ahead and shoot station one—We'll wait for you."
          Robert nodded a terse greeting to the pair. One was someone he knew only as Marty, a regular shooter at the club. The other man wore a green baseball cap. Robert didn't know him, but if he was a friend of loud-mouthed Marty he couldn't have much in the way of judgment, he thought. As a longtime member of the club, Marty had a way of looking down his nose at "non-regulars" like Robert who didn't shoot every weekend. A definitive character trait of Marty's, evident to anyone who shot just one round with him, was that the man never missed a target as the result of poor shooting: It was always a bum reload or the trap boy's pull or the wind or his new jacket or the Corollas effect—Anything but his own fault. Robert handed the push-buttons to the fellow in the green cap.
          Both men shot with the mechanical precision of practiced skeet shooters, centering each target over the 23 yard stake. They finished quickly and came up behind Robert and his father at station two.
          "Hi there." Said Marty. "Thanks for waiting. We've shot together before, haven't we?" He spoke to Robert.
          "Sure, a few times." He hesitated, then decided not to introduce his father. Instead, he took his position and called for his targets.
         When Robert finished, Marty said to him, "Now I remember you: You're the one that uses that screwy international style." He referred to Robert's refusal to follow current skeet dictum and shoulder the gun before calling for the target. There were any number of people who could have told Robert his shooting style was screwy without making him grit his teeth. Marty wasn't one of them.
           At station three Robert's father missed both targets.
          "That low house needs a good three-and-a-half feet of lead." Advised Marty.
          Amenable as always, his father listened attentively. Three-and-a-half feet. Marty broke targets. There were no two ways about it, he was accomplished at the mechanics of skeet shooting. But as such, he fancied himself an expert shot, charged with the duty of instructing those less fortunate who missed once in a while—Even if the errant shooter had been tracking cross shots for 50 years or so.
Three-and-a-half feet.
Robert smiled to himself, but found no humor in the situation. Instead, he looked into the sky, searching his memory for a glimpse of something silver spinning in the air.
        At station four Robert missed his first target of the round. He steeled himself for the inevitable gem of advice from Marty, but his father had engaged the other two men in conversation, and was relating a story about fishing in Maine. His miss went unnoticed. Robert smiled.
          Marty missed one of the cross shots at station four, also. It was his first miss. "I took a chip out of that, didn't I?" It was more a statement than a question.
          "The hell you did!" replied Green Baseball Cap. They evidently had a beer bet going. Maybe he's got Marty's number after all, thought Robert.
          His father got some more expert advice at station five, with Marty pointing out the flight path of the targets as if it were some form of erudition only he possessed. When his father missed the low house bird, Marty shook his head but said nothing.
          Robert looked up once again, but still couldn't find in his memory the metal object he was searching for. Gerard Ford still carried it around with him, so he really had no reason to expect it would appear just because he was looking for it.
          He stepped close to Marty and looked away as he spoke, not wanting his father to hear. "We'll be okay, Marty—Really. We're not out here to learn anything important, just to shoot a couple of rounds and sniff some Red Dot. It doesn't mean doodlysquat whether or not..."
          "Oh, I know." Marty cut him off. "I just hate to see someone make the same obvious mistakes over and over."
          Robert took a breath as if to reply, then thought better of it and took his place on the shooting pad. I should have offered to punch his lights out, he told himself. At times he became impatient with himself for putting up with situations where he was expected to be polite to fools. Before he called for his targets he paused a moment, listening to his own thoughts. The sky in his memory remained empty. He imagined that by now he would have heard it strike the ground somewhere behind him - A Zippo lighter would make quite a clink when it hit the concrete after falling from so high up.
          When Green Baseball Cap took his turn at five he only nicked the low house target.
          "Ha!" Marty nearly shouted. "We're even."
          "He took a piece out of it." Robert's voice was flat.
          "Yeah, I thought I did, too." Said Green Baseball Cap.
           Robert glanced at Marty out of the corner of his eye. He looked genuinely disappointed.
          "Hell, blind as even I am, I could see that he dusted that one." His father said. "That's another one you'll have to send the dog for, Bob." They all grinned. Except Marty.
          They moved to the pad at station six. From the pad, Robert's father looked back at him. "High house first?"
          Robert nodded.
          In turn, each target was broken cleanly. His father gave a thumbs-up sign as he left the pad. "Not bad for an old fart, huh?"
         "Doubles now, Mister Cody." Robert said.
          "Oh yeah. I forgot." His father stepped back onto the shooting station, then glanced over his shoulder at Robert. "And watch that 'Mister Cody' stuff. On his best day, Buffalo Bill wished he could shoot like me."
          When the pair of targets flew both were missed.
          Marty nearly spat in disgust. "You shot at the high house first!"
          Robert closed his eyes. Now he could see it. Of course, his perspective was a lot closer to the ground back those 35 years, and the two familiar men in canvas shooting coats appeared much younger than today, but the blue October sky and the edge of the cornfield hadn't changed. Neither had the single tail feather Gerard waved at his father.
         "I think most of that pheasant was just in front of this, Hank. Ha ha."
         Across the years he could still hear Gerard's deep voice and slow laugh. "If this was horseshoes, I'd have to give you a point for a leaner on that bird. Ha ha."
         The constant kidding that had always gone on between the two gentle men could never be mistaken for anything else, not even by a little boy of six. Maybe the incident would never have happened if Robert hadn't been there to have seen his father miss, but his father grinned and said, "Go ahead, throw your hat in the air - I'll show you the difference between a ringer and a leaner."
          Gerard had replied, "Hell, I'll do better than that..." and had tossed his cigarette lighter high overhead.
          Five shots later Gerard walked into the weeds at the edge of the field and retrieved his much battered but still workable Zippo. But across the years the memory of it dancing against the blue azimuth of the cloudless sky, falling only to rocket upward again with each successive shot, tumbling over and over in the sunlight, stayed with him. And so had the pride that a little boy felt for his father at that moment in time.
          They continued. His father, inexplicably, broke the last six targets, including both of the tough overhead shots at station eight. He nudged Robert as they waited. "Hey, I think I've got the ol' eye back. Watch me smoke 'em on this next round." The young man inside his father smiled out at Robert.
          Green Baseball Cap was the last to shoot, but on his final low house option he lifted his head and missed cleanly.
         "Ha!" said Marty. "We're even again." He grinned and drew out a pack of cigarettes. "And I still think you dropped low five, too." he added.
          Robert could think of several charitable things he might say to a friend who had just blown a perfect round on the last shot, but instead he stepped closer to Marty. "Say, that's a really nice looking lighter you've got there, Marty. Mind if I look at it for a minute?"

This site was last updated 09/21/06