She kept her eyes on the plate, which could not be taken sides with.
Danny rose from the equipment case in no hurry. He had taken off nothing and put on nothing; he shot, as he did everything in public, in the black open shirt over the grey tee, with his blond hair bright in the sun, and when he picked up his rifle he did it with the ease of a man picking up a tool he had designed himself. Someone behind the line called his name. Someone else called it with a whistle folded into it, the kind of whistle that is half cheer and half claim. Danny lifted two fingers, not turning, the smallest possible acknowledgement, the kind that said he had heard it and filed it where such things belonged, far below the work.
"You set a good pace for me, gentlemen," he said to Ronnie and Pete and the older man, pleasantly, and Ronnie, to his credit, said, "Go on and beat it, then," pleasantly back.
Grant called him forward.
At the line Danny was different, and Willa, watching, gave him the honesty of noticing it. The performance did not vanish, but it thinned. He settled his feet on the gravel with more care than a man who wanted to be watched would ever bother with, finding the ground through the soles of his boots, moving a fraction, moving back. He brought the rifle up and down once without any intention of firing, a rehearsal his body needed, and his face, in profile to her, lost its smile entirely. She thought, unwillingly, that this was what nobody filmed. The cameras wanted the grin before and the grin after. The thing in between, the long, unphotogenic labour of standing still with weight in your hands and the whole of your balance arguing quietly against you — that was the part you had to do unobserved, even in front of a crowd.
His first shot struck the plate.
It was a good hit, not a lucky one; she could tell by the way he did not react to it, by the small economy of his working the action and returning, as if the shot had merely confirmed a measurement he had already taken. His second struck also, higher, and the murmur along the line changed key. His third went on, low, and now the judges coming back would matter, and Danny knew it, and she saw the knowledge try to enter his shoulders and saw him refuse it, rolling them once, hard, between shots, a gesture she recognised in her own body and had never seen him make before.
His fourth shot was the one the morning would be remembered by, until hers.
It struck — the plate rang in a way that was, even at this distance, somehow brighter, and a stillness came over the covered stand and the line together, because the old hands could hear a centre hit the way musicians can hear a note a fraction true. Grant himself turned his head. When the judges went down, they went down more slowly than they had for anyone else, and they stayed longer at the plate, and on the return one of them was carrying the inspection board against his chest with both hands, like something that might be dropped.
Grant read the card twice to himself before he read it aloud.
"Danny Mercer," he said. "Five shots. Five on the plate."
The crowd made the noise it had been saving.
"Four grouped, scoring. One" — and Grant paused, not for drama but because he wanted the words exact, and exactness took a moment longer than drama ever did — "one within an inch of the pin, by inspection. The closest card of the day. The closest card in" — he checked the clipboard, although again Willa believed he did not need to — "seven years."
Danny came off the line with the grin fully back in place, and now it was armoured by fact, and people were reaching across the line to touch his sleeve as he passed, and the phones followed him like a small weather system of his own. He looked, as he went by Willa, directly at her, and the look was not cruel. That was the hardest thing about it, and she would return to it later, in training rooms and in her mother's kitchen and in the small hours. It was the look of a man who had just done the best work of his year and who believed, with the whole of his upbringing inside him, that he had therefore settled the remaining question of the day.
"All yours," he said, quietly, so that only she and perhaps Grant could hear it. "Plate's warm for you."
It was kindly meant as a taunt, or taunting meant as kindness; with Danny there was always a mixture, and later she would decide that the mixture had been the man. At the time she only nodded, because her throat had closed to everything except the plainest functions, and moved her grip on her father's rifle, and heard, behind the noise for Danny, her name being shaped in Grant's mouth.
"Willa Callen," Grant said. "To the line when you are ready."
Ready was a word, she thought, that belonged to other people. She had never once, in any final, at any age, in any weather, been ready in the way the word suggested, as a state you could arrive at and then present, like a ticket. What she had was a rifle that had been her father's, a shirt with two chest pockets that her mother had ironed that morning before a shift she could not afford to miss, a mark on a card she had not yet made, and a plate at the far end of a lane with a pin at its heart that a schoolteacher, a boy with a ring on a cord, a woman seven years before she was born and a hundred patient men had all approached and none had taken.