COLD SWEAT

The boy rolled over and tucked the blanket under his shoulder. Sweat stained his pillow and a chill that seemed to explode from inside his chest sent a lasting shiver through his body. He tried to call out for his father, but rolling over had taken so much energy. Only a pitiful moan left his mouth. The pain made him want to cry, but that would hurt too much.

It had only been a fever-induced nightmare, but it seemed so fresh as if it hung there suspended in the darkness. He could still smell the breath like death dripping with blood and saliva from a row of fangs the lion exposed when it snarled.

In the dream, the lion had been chasing the boy when a flash of his best friend, Adunya, morphed the scene into an image he could not push from his thoughts. The lion feeding.

The boy felt trapped under the giant cat’s claws—like daggers in his shoulder.

At the same time, he seemed separated from the carnage like a ghostly figure from another dimension, watching the lion feed on someone else.

The lion raised his gaze and stared into the boy’s soul, its round eyes thriving on the weakness it saw there. The body below the lion moved, a bloody arm reaching out.

The boy avoided the face. He feared what it might reveal. Then he looked. Adunya.

“Help,” the Ethiopian boy had whispered.

That was when the boy ran. That was when he awoke sweating and sobbing.

Maybe it was just a dream, but what if could happen? What if he never saw his best friend again? He closed his eyes and prayed for Adunya’s safety. He prayed for the pain to end. He fell asleep in mid-prayer.

Painting: Inside The Red Zone by John Banovich

http://www.johnbanovich.com/

MOVING UP

The boy reached toward his new shotgun, a 20-gauge, the first scattergun he would call his own.

“It’s okay,” his father said. “It’s yours. You already know how to use it. It will stay in the cabinet with the rest of the guns. Just like the BB gun. Don’t you think it’s time we give that to Jon Jon?”

The boy stopped his reach, even pulled back slightly. His BB gun had been a gift from his grandfather, who said he had originally purchased it for the boy’s father. The boy had nailed bull’s-eyes with it. He had shattered glass bottles. He had knocked an apple out of a tree. He had killed his first rabbit with it. That BB gun had rust on the trigger guard. He could not count the times he had run his hand over the stock, its finish worn dull with scratches as deep as worm grooves.

“You mostly use the .22 now.”

But the .22 was not his. The .22 was his father’s. His late grandfather had not given him the .22. How could he pass the BB gun down to Jon Jon? His younger brother allowed his pet turtle to die. He broke his new skateboard after only a week. How would Jon Jon take care of something as important as Grandpa’s BB gun?

“You think he’s ready?” The boy had not touched the shotgun and struggled to turn his eyes from it.

“You think you’re ready?”

The boy turned to stare at his father as if the old man had threatened to give all his possessions to his younger brother. “What if I want to use it for shooting cans? He’ll never let me.”

“I’m sure if you give him a chance to use the .22, he’ll give you the BB gun.”

The boy refocused on the 20-gauge. It sat on the old dining table. The gun’s smooth finish, a little checkering on the pump stock, the barrel shining like a black mirror, and the scent of gun oil tempted his hand again. When he finally touched it, he forgot about the BB gun.

He no longer had to borrow Uncle Albin’s shotgun. He could shoulder his own weapon and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his father and uncle. Now, he could be one of them.

He picked it up. “Can I shoot it?”

His father placed a box of shells on the table and his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”

THE OTHER SIDE

“Dad? What’s Ethiopia like?”

“I know what I think it’s like.”

“You’ve never been there? But Uncle Albin’s a hunter there and you’re brothers.”

The boy’s father placed the book he’d been reading on the end table. “I’d like to go someday. You’re uncle and I used to hunt together all the time. My path just hasn’t taken me to Ethiopia yet. I’ve seen Uncle Albin’s pictures. I know what I think it is and I know that’s not even close.”

“What do you think it’s like?”

“What do you think it’s like?” The boy’s father asked.

“I think it’s like lions and elephants and zebras and hunting every day and living in huts and adventure.”

“That sounds pretty good doesn’t it?”

The boy started to nod, but saw that slight smirk on his father’s face. The one that told the boy to be careful of his next move. “Maybe.”

“Knowing what we know. Living like we live. That kind of existence would be fine to experience. Even to embrace and learn from. But we could not go back to that. You and Jon Jon and I, our lives are easier and in most ways better. Do you understand?”

“Uncle Albin went back.”

“Did he?”

“He lives half the year over there.”

“And he has great stories to tell, doesn’t he.”

“I love the one about the cowboy who wanted to rope a buffalo.” The boy started to laugh.

“Albin doesn’t talk much about the weeks he spends building camp, about the clients who expect the impossible, about how he loses trackers to jail, omens, and death. He don’t tell us about all them kids who catch malaria and die before they get a chance to dream about the other side of the world.”

The boy sat there for a moment and watched a tumbleweed roll across the prairie into a fence lined with tumbleweeds that had come before it. “How come you want to go to Ethiopia some day?” He asked.

“Because of the lions and the elephants and the hunting and the people who live in huts.”

FEAR

“Look, Steve,” Jon Jon whispered through his teeth. He did not move his head--just his eyes.

The boy inched his gaze to the right. His heart quickened and his breath burned. The outline of something close—something that had not been there when he began blowing on the predator call they had found in their father’s old trunk.

What could have come in so quickly? Its blurred outline in the boy’s peripheral looked big. Too big to be a coyote. Too big for the .22 in his hand. Uncle Albin used to tell stories about bears and wolves that lived in the breaks, though nobody had seen one for years.

The boy turned his head a little further. His right leg trembled and his knee started to click on a rock. It was so big. What was it?

It stomped and grunted.

The boy fell back and brought the rifle to his shoulder, sure he was about to be pounced on.

Then the doe mule deer’s body went rigid for an instant before she bounded into the valley, her twins right behind her. They raced up the next slope and, just before disappearing over the horizon, looked back, their big ears high, their bigger eyes filled with something that looked like half-fear.

Only after they were gone did the boy push himself off his elbows.

“That was awesome,” Jon Jon said. “Why didn’t you shoot?”

It was not deer season. You don’t shoot deer with a .22. You don’t kill a doe with fawns. The boy eventually gave his younger brother all those answers and more. But he never told him the entire truth.



Painting: Passing Along The Lessons She Learned by John Banovich
http://www.johnbanovich.com/