American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,152

there is something odd about it. It does not feel like metal to her, but flesh. There is a give to it that is distinctly organic, and it sticks to her, like it doesn’t want to be put down. Yet when she sets it back in the bed of the truck, it makes a metallic clunk sound.

It is when she takes her hand off of it that she suddenly smells something ionized and dusty, like a lightning strike out in the desert, and she imagines someone whispering softly in her ear…

She shudders. She needs to get the hell away from this place.

Mona throws the cab door open and looks in. Then she sees what’s sitting on the floor of the passenger side.

Her jaw drops. “Oh, my God.”

There are a few things you’d never guess about Mona from looking at her.

The first, as has been already mentioned, is her age. Mona is a good decade older than she appears to be, and on learning this people tend to instantly like her less. Partially it’s because they are far more forgiving of her lifestyle if they think she’s in her late twenties rather than late thirties, but mostly they’re just upset she ages well and they usually don’t.

The second thing is that Mona, who is an absolute tomboy in so many ways, is actually really good at crochet. She can make hats, scarves, mittens, potholders, and even coats of impressive quality and with many different and complicated patterns. She had to keep this a dead secret from her friends, especially those on the force, but she made quite a profitable side income selling her goods online.

And the third—which is probably the most surprising—is that Mona has probably received several times more expert rifle training than your average American soldier.

While her father roughnecked around West Texas, he and his daughter had little common ground until the day he took her deer hunting and she showed a remarkable aptitude with a gun. Part of it was just genetics, for Earl Bright himself had served in the 75th Ranger Regiment at the tail end of Vietnam, and had been a commendable marksman himself. Their hunting or training trips soon became the only oases in their acrimonious relationship, and Earl began taking her out to the country more and more, mostly just to get her to shut the hell up.

As a young girl Mona sucked up every bit of knowledge Earl Bright had to offer. She came to know the dance and wriggle of every type of round, the rifling twist rate of every rifle and the primer type of every commercially available cartridge, the difference between shooting with a hot barrel and a cold one. She came to intuit which parts of the landscape better serve the shot, and how to sit for hours at a time with her eye to a sight without allowing herself to cramp, how to ignore hunger for most of a day, how to keep her hands warm and functioning in the cold, and how to stalk through mesquite forests and huisache forests and pine forests.

Looking back, it is only fitting that Mona’s childhood was not based around any sense of love, but the slow, bitter, patient task of killing. For a killing, as young Mona learned, does not start with the pull of a trigger and the bite of a bullet: a killing starts the instant your toe touches hunting ground and you begin circling what you’ve come there to fell.

So when Mona’s eyes fall upon the marvelous piece of weaponry sitting up against the opposite truck door, it’s a little like a Stradivarius falling into a violin prodigy’s lap. To her this rifle is such a beautiful, powerful firearm that she almost cannot believe it. And when she grasps the stock and picks it up, a thousand muscle memories spring to life, kindling many long-dormant instincts and desires in her mind.

She can’t imagine how much this thing must have cost. Christ, she thinks, and she smells its muzzle. It hasn’t even been fired much. There are even boxes of rounds all over the floor.

She brings the butt up and peers through the optic. Then she wheels around and sights a tree below.

It has not been boresighted well: she immediately senses that the reticle is far too low for the distance to the tree. Were she to shoot now, the shot would be high. But she is overjoyed to have this realization come rushing into her head. It’s like