IN THE FIRE

“I never wrote him a letter.”

“Have you ever written anyone a letter?” The boy’s father asked.

“He wrote me four.”

“It’s not a competition, pal. Adunya wrote letters to you because he’s your friend. But even without the letters, he would still be your friend.”

“What if he’s mad I didn’t make an effort?”

“Would you be?”

The boy shrugged and stared into the fire. He would be. He knew it. And it made his gut feel hollow. If Adunya had not sent letters, the boy would think he had been forgotten.

The boy’s father leaned back and rubbed his chin. The fire demanded attention in quiet moments. And the boy’s father, like the boy, did not resist.

The flames led them into a dance, a soft rhythm--the seduction of warmth, the threat of destruction. It held them in a quiet trance and almost stole their thoughts.

But for the boy, the dark part of the flames, the blue, the almost black, felt like a mirror. It stared back at him and pierced his heart.

Yet inside that darkness, the boy also saw visions of lions and buffalo, deer and bears. He did see fear. But when he thought about hunting and fishing with his friend again, he saw hope.

GOOD NEWS

Dear Steven,

Uncle say we come back to America soon. He say maybe we stay for long time. Do Jon Jon learn to throw spear yet? I hunt my first warthog with Uncle now. He give me lesson with rifle. We shoot target every day. Then Uncle tell me to sit by tree and shoot when warthog come. I miss first one, but Uncle say we wait for number two. When it come, I make sure I no miss. Uncle say I natural. But it much work to cut meat from big animal. Men with Uncle no touch pig because they say it no clean. I think it taste much good. I want to bring some to you and Jon Jon. Uncle say it not possible. I am happy to come back to America. I am sad to go from the home of my father.

The boy re-read the first sentence. Adunya was coming home. With new stories about Africa, about hunting, about beasts the boy had never even read about. And he could show Adunya the flock of turkeys he discovered in the breaks. And Adunya could see that Jon Jon was practicing with the spear every day. And the boy wanted to show him the new fishing hole where he hooked into a big catfish. And he wanted to show him his new shotgun.

He read through the letter again. No mention of when they’d be coming. He’d have to ask his father.

The boy pumped his fist in the air and ran to find his younger brother.

SPECTATORS

The spear hit the water again and Jon Jon lifted it without a fish, again. He waded to the mossy south end of the pond and tried to stick one of the bullfrogs croaking half out of the water. They all splashed off.

“Throw it, Jon Jon,” the boy said from the shore.

Jon Jon feared losing the spear. He worried it might break. What if he threw it awkwardly and looked like a fool?

“There’s a big one. Throw it.”

Jon Jon noticed the bullfrog half out of the water.

“Throw it, Jon Jon.”

He stared at the frog, its bulbous eyeballs glinting above a body the color of the moss that hugged the pond’s edge. Its eyes shifted, the amphibian aware of the hunter’s menacing presence.

“Throw it before he jumps.”

A throaty scream jumped from Jon Jon’s mouth and heaved Adunya’s spear. The frog plopped below the surface. The spear landed shaft first and bounced onto the shore. He turned to his brother. “Stop yelling at me.”

The water lapped like a whisper and a breeze rose into the big cottonwood and made the leaves grumble. A layering of clouds glowed with a sun not quite ready to set.

For a moment, nothing.

Then, Jon Jon sloshed over to the spear Adunya had thrown with such accuracy and grace. Half a dozen more frogs croaked and disappeared below the surface. He wrapped his fingers tight around the spear, wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist, and waded back to where the water was clear. A bluegill darted past and he jabbed at it. Not even close.

He sensed his brother watching from the shore and then he missed again.

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/