“There,” Steve hisses.
The two skunk pigs are far up the valley. They wander towards the wallow. The sun is low and this makes the pigs hard to see. JP settles his cheek onto the Remington’s cool composite buttstock. In smooth increments, he rolls his neck until the black crescent moon inside the scope disappears through perfect alignment. This full eclipse brings the world around him into fifteen times magnification. The two pigs walk abreast. Their gray bristled coats are caked in mud. Their long faces come down to a rounded and fleshy snout and their whiskers flare up into winged points. Their black eyes are vacant and pinched to slits. As the pigs come closer, JP picks out the larger of the two. He thinks it will make a better trophy. His focus becomes singular. Next to him, he can hear Steve narrating the pigs’ movements in a whisper, “They’re both behind that trunk with the four branches. You see it? They’ll move to that watering hole, I bet. The one just to our left.”
JP feels a growing confidence. He now understands the design of this trip, why Carlos had set it up, knowing he himself would never be part of it.
JP lifts the reticle in his sight. It appears as the intersection of a road running into a straight and infinite horizon. Only the hits count, he remembers from the green flat ranges, and he places the reticle right on the larger pig’s head, just as he’s been trained to do. A strip of light-gray fur runs between the eyes. The black sight is framed perfectly on the light fur. Everything is balance. The rifle is zeroed for three hundred meters. The pigs are at two hundred. JP does the math quickly in his head. He notches the range knob back four clicks. Through the scope he’s focused on the pig, who seems to stare him down. Fire. Fire. Fire. A gust of wind laps up the back of JP’s neck like a messy tongue and the four-branched ash tree leans and creaks. A northwest wind, maybe ten knots. Two clicks left on the windage knob. The pig shifts on its feet as it holds up its head to sniff the air. The fur on its bristled coat bends in the current. What JP sees now is still and certain. The reticle. The head. The wind he just compensated for. He pulls the slack out of the trigger. Just before the break he closes his eyes. There is the image of Carlos laid out in the Honda, the smoking headrest, the smell of cordite still on the air, the taste of it in JP’s mouth like his tongue on a battery, the music blaring from the Honda’s sound system, loud enough so Carlos never hears his own shot, the one that takes him, the Remington fallen across his lap.
Click.
The shot breaks in JP’s shoulder. The barrel bucks towards the sky. He opens his eyes into a cloud of dust from the muzzle flash. A squeal muffles itself, followed by thrashing. These noises aren’t from the pig he’s shot, but from the other one, who now runs up the valley to the north.
“Nice,” says Steve. He stands from their hide, kicking aside the sagebrush as he walks down into the wallow to find the dead pig. JP stands in the open, on the side of the ridge, watching Steve tramp through the valley below. For a moment, Steve drops from sight, stepping behind the ash tree.
Then, rolling up the ridge comes an “Aww, sheyit!” “What?” shouts JP.
“You shot him in the head!” Steve shouts back. “How am I supposed to fix him into a trophy if you done shot him in the head?”
JP doesn’t know how to answer. He looks up. It is late in the day and the sky is darkening. He can feel the cold night on the air. Above him the large hunting birds have begun to circle. He stares at their broad wings and can feel their eyes. They look down at him and the mess he’s made.
*
Elliot Ackerman, author of the novel Green on Blue, served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. A former White House Fellow, his essays and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Ecotone. He lives in Istanbul, where he writes on the Syrian Civil War.