Willa stayed.
The rifle came up for the third time. Or the fourth, if you counted the one already standing in the bright centre of her memory, refusing to be known. She had stopped counting in the part of her mind that narrated, because narration was weather too, and she let counting live in Grant's columns where it belonged and in Hargrove's old eyes, wherever Chief Walter Hargrove was with his black jacket and his cap and the large black binoculars that hung on a strap against his chest like a second, heavier heart. She had registered him peripherally when she walked out, an old man made somehow more formal by the heat, the blue-and-gold patch on his jacket, the stillness of someone who had been a national coach when Danny's coach father was still a boy with large opinions. Hargrove had not lifted the binoculars after the first shot. Or if he had, she had missed it, and missing things outside the narrow country was the whole purpose of the country. He was saving the looking, perhaps, the way officials save their signatures for the end of a page. Let him save it. When he finally looked, either the afternoon would change or it would not, and neither version was hers to carry while her finger and her eye and her breath were still in conversation.
Eye to the scope again, then, and the familiar, merciful tunnel. The plate swam a little with heat at first, the air over the sand being neither honest nor dishonest, merely hot, and she waited beside the image until it steadied into itself. The pin in the centre was not a target so much as a rumour at this range, a raised round point that the scope rendered as a relationship rather than a size: there, where the rust darkened around it, there, where the light caught differently. Tom had made her practise on targets he drew himself on the backs of feed sacks, a dot inside a circle inside a square, smaller and smaller across a winter of dawns, not to humiliate her eye but to teach her reverence for attention. "Any fool can look at everything," he said, scraping frost off the old range gate with his glove. "It takes a person to look at one thing and not make a speech about it."
When the shot went, it felt in her body no more dramatic than the one before, and that ordinariness was the most extraordinary part and the part she would remember, later, when people tried to give her language like magic and gift and destiny and she would find the words too large and too false in her mouth, like borrowed boots. She fired well because she had fired well a thousand mornings when nobody came. The crowd, now, might decide it was witnessing something. She was doing her practice in public. That was the sum of it, and it was everything.
Behind her, the filming changed quality. She could feel it without seeing it — a subtle straightening in the weather of people. At first the phones had been held the way spectators hold phones at local humiliations and local triumphs alike, loosely, with commentary, a thumb ready to stop when the story got dull. Now the arms stayed up longer. Zoom lenses in small bright rectangles strained toward the plate and found only sand and a dark shape and gave up and came back to her, because she was the legible part of the event, a woman standing with a rifle, firing again, and again, with the same unvarying focus, and even people who knew nothing about the challenge understood rhythm when they saw it and understood that a rhythm held under pressure was a form of news.
"She ain't lookin' back," somebody said, in wonder or complaint.
"She hasn't looked back once," somebody else said.
Good, she thought, distant and almost amused inside the narrow calm. Let them have that much of the truth. She hasn't looked back once because looking back is the one shot she cannot afford.
Grant called the attempt. Danny said something, then, behind her and to the side, not to her exactly — a remark shaped for the men standing near him, for the small court of the already convinced. She heard its tone without catching its words, a laugh involved somewhere inside it, and she watched the pressure system of it cross the gravel toward her and dissolve, weather passing a hill that declined to move. It was, she realised, possibly the last time his voice would have that particular weather in it where she was concerned. Either way, it was not her business yet. Between her and any reckoning with Danny Mercer there remained shots she owed the plate, and she intended to pay in full, at the same unhurried rate, in the same coin of attention.
She worked the bolt, and the sound was clean, and she loved the sound briefly and practically, as a cook loves a knife that has never lied to her hand, as Rose loved a list that added up. Up the rifle came, a weight she knew at every angle of its rising, into the pocket of her shoulder, against the side of her face, and her eye found the scope's small round world and entered it, and the world outside — sand, stand, crowd, officials, the bright sky hammered flat above the mountains — fell away to rumour.
This was the shot where fatigue showed, if fatigue was going to be allowed an entrance. The earlier finalists had come off the line shaking out their arms and grinning with relief, and she had watched them with sympathy and filed the lesson. Standing is cumulative. It bills the body slowly and presents the total late. Her shoulder had a deep, wordless opinion. Her standing leg had a smaller one, filed in a lower court. She acknowledged them as she would acknowledge news of rain three valleys away, noted and not obeyed, and the scope picture trembled once across the plate and came back, honest as a dog, and settled.