"Ellis. I have coached boys who could not hold a position through a photograph. That girl has been standing in that sun holding a position since before we stood up. Her father taught her that. I watched Tom teach a room full of ten-year-olds to stand still by telling them stillness was not empty, it was full of the thing you were waiting for. I thought it was poetry for children. It was not poetry."
Grant shaded his eyes, though his cap had a brim and the gesture was mostly for something to do with his hand that was not the clipboard.
"You knew Tom Callen well."
"I knew him the way you know a man at a range for thirty years, which is to say completely and not at all. I knew his scores. I knew his temper, which was better than mine. I knew he would teach a kid with no money and one eye that would not focus exactly as long as he would teach a state champion. I did not know his daughter could do this." Hargrove paused. "I am not yet saying she has done this."
"You are saying it with your feet, Walter. You have walked halfway to a plate in this heat at your age."
"My feet have always been more honest than I am. It has been a problem in committee meetings." Hargrove began walking again. "Come on. If we stand here the crowd will decide we have seen a ghost, and by supper there will be a song."
Behind the line, Danny Mercer could not keep still in the way Willa could, and everyone watching him knew the difference and pretended not to.
He walked the width of his allotted space and back. He went to the officials' table and looked at the binoculars and did not touch them, because for all his performative ease he did know the laws of a range, and an official's glasses lying in the sun belonged to the verdict and not to him. He came back to the line. He looked over his shoulder at Willa, though she was in front of the line and not behind him, and the movement of his head was noticed by three separate phone cameras and would later be described in comments he would read at two in the morning.
His coach, who was also in some complicated way an employee of his father, had come down from the stand and was standing with his hands raised slightly, palms toward Danny, in the universal gesture of a man saying stay calm to a person he is paying to be exciting.
"Danny," the coach said. "Whatever it is, we respond well. That is the phrase. We respond well."
"Respond well to what."
"To the result."
"You don't know the result."
"Neither do you. That is why we prepare the response." The coach glanced toward the lane, where two small figures were still walking. "If it is a scoring error we respond generously. If it is a malfunction of the plate we respond with humour. If she has actually—" He stopped, because Danny's face had done something. "We respond well," he finished, more weakly.
Danny looked out at Willa's back. Her shirt was dark with sweat now across the shoulders. She had not once looked round. He thought, with a clarity that felt like a hand on the back of his neck, of the moment at the start of the day when he had handed her the rifle. He had smiled knowingly. He had known the smile was being filmed and he had arranged his face for the film, and underneath the arrangement there had been a real feeling, and the real feeling had been relief. Not cruelty, exactly. Relief. The standing final was the hardest and loneliest of the events, the one with nowhere to hide, and a girl nobody had seeded, the instructor's daughter, shooting an old wooden rifle, had looked to him like a short story with the ending already printed. He had been relieved that the day would confirm the shape of the world.
Now the world was being walked toward by two old men, at the speed of verification, and Danny Mercer discovered that he was frightened in a way no final had ever frightened him. Not of losing. Losing was a country he had visited in other events and survived with his jaw set. He was frightened of the size of the adjustment. If she had done what Hargrove's face said she had done, then the smile was on record, on four hundred phones, forever, and he would have to become a man who could carry having made it.
"I want to walk down there," he said to his coach, very quietly. "Not to argue. I want to be there when it becomes true, if it becomes true. I don't want to learn it from a phone."
The coach, to his credit, heard the difference. He said nothing clever. He went with Danny to Grant's deputy at the line, and Danny asked, formally, as one finalist concerning another, for permission to follow the officials at a distance, alone, without his phone, and to say nothing on the lane until he was spoken to.
The deputy looked at him for a long moment, then looked out at the two figures, then used the radio at his collar.
Grant listened to the deputy through the small speaker at the table radio relay, which Hargrove carried clipped at his jacket pocket for the walk, and Grant considered the request while the sand worked its way, as sand at ranges always eventually did, over the toe of his boot.
"One word out of him before I speak," Grant said into the radio, "and he walks back in front of everyone. Tell him I said that and tell him I will enjoy writing it down."
"He says yes, sir," the deputy reported. "He said tell the sheriff those are fair terms."
"Huh," said Hargrove. "The day continues to produce novelties."