"You've got this," a voice in the crowd attempted, suddenly and kindly, and was hushed by five people at once, which was the funniest and kindest thing that had happened all afternoon and very nearly reached her. A laugh built somewhere low in her chest and had to be put carefully away, into the pocket of her khaki shirt perhaps, next to nothing else, because a final does not run on other people's kindness either, even real kindness. Weather, weather, all of it weather, even the sun breaking on Grant's badge, even love, for the length of one breath and one settling and one release.
The plate received it. Or the sand did. Or history opened one eye. She held the follow-through as she had been taught, not snatching herself out of the shot like an apology, and only then lowered the rifle a fraction and breathed as if she had surfaced from under clean water.
One remained, by Grant's count and by the arithmetic that had been taped to the officials' table all week, and it was the shot she had been warned about by every honest shooter she had ever known, which was to say by one man, her father, and by the notebook he left behind, where, two pages after the famous line, in the cramped writing he used when he was adding something he considered too obvious to deserve a page of its own, Tom had written: The last one is not the last one. Shoot it like the middle one, or it will shoot you.
She had resented that sentence at sixteen. It had the smugness of a riddle. At twenty-three she honoured its plain accuracy, because the last shot arrived trailing every story a person could tell about herself. It arrived with a crowd that had begun to believe, which was a heavier thing to stand in than a crowd that had come to laugh. It arrived with Danny gone quiet behind her, and quiet from Danny Mercer, she suspected without looking, was a more serious weather event than laughter had ever been. It arrived with the knowledge, lodged somewhere beneath her ribs, that the plate far away in the sand already wore something bright at its centre, or wore nothing at all, and that the distance between those two possibilities was the distance between going home as the instructor's daughter who had done surprisingly well and going home as — something she would not name, even privately, even now. Naming was weather of the most dangerous kind. It was a speech in the head while the eye was meant to be looking at one thing only.
So she made the last shot into a middle shot by an act of deliberate, almost housekeeping plainness. She checked her stance as Tom taught her when she was small enough that the rifle, unloaded and safe on its stand, stood taller in her imagination than any man she knew. She cleared her mind not by emptying it — minds do not empty, whatever champions claim in interviews — but by giving everything in it a seat in the outer room and closing the inner door, gently, the way Rose closed the kitchen door at home when a cake was rising and the house was full of people who kept opening doors. In the outer room sat her father's death and the car that had not come around the bend correctly. In the outer room sat the entry fee in Rose's tight handwriting in the household book. In the outer room sat Danny's smile, and the word again in Grant's official voice, and Hargrove's binoculars still lowered, still saved, and the small round pin on a rusty plate that thirty-one years of finalists had walked away from untouched.
In the inner room there was a scope's circle, a held breath, a woman's hands that knew their work.
She raised the rifle for the last time as if raising it for a middle time, a Tuesday time, a dawn time with frost on the gate, and her eye went to the scope and the plate swam and settled and the centre presented itself without pleading or hiding, and her finger completed the sentence her whole upbringing had been writing. The shot went out over the gravel and the sand, clean, unadorned, hers, and she held, and the sound came back, and the sound behind her when it came was not a sound at first so much as an absence of the sounds people make when they are sure of themselves.
Only then, only with the string complete and the rifle safe in her hands and Grant's voice beginning to do the next official thing, did Willa Callen allow herself to wonder what on earth the plate was wearing at its centre, and why nobody behind the line — not Danny, not the crowd, not the men of the table — was saying anything ordinary at all.
Chapter 10: Through the Binoculars
The quiet after Willa Callen's last shot was not the quiet of a range waiting for the next name on a list, and Chief Walter Hargrove, who had been waiting in and around quiets of that kind for the better part of fifty years, recognised the difference the way other men recognised a change in the weather in a knee that had been injured in youth.
It was the quiet of people who suspected that something had happened at a distance they could not judge and who had, collectively and without anyone instructing them, appointed his binoculars as the court that would decide it.