Her disgust became humiliation. She dug a fifty cent piece out of her pocketful of tips. ‘Try again,’ she said. ‘And this time, don’t miss, or I won’t pay for it.’ I didn’t have any money with me. I put the gun down on the counter and refused to shoot again. ‘To hell with it,’ I said.

‘He’s a sissy, Tim,’ she said. ‘All he can do is write poetry.’

Tim obviously liked only people who knew how to shoot a gun. He looked at me with distaste, saying nothing. I picked up a repeating Winchester rifle, took aim, and started pumping lead. The big target sixty feet away, three feet above the ground on a post, showed no sign of being hit. A bell was supposed to ring when the bull’s eye was hit. Not a sound. I emptied the gun, sniffed the tart stench of powder, and made a face. Tim and Camilla laughed at the sissy. By now a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk. They all shared Camilla’s disgust, for it was a contagious thing, and I felt it too. She turned, saw the crowd, and blushed. She was ashamed of me, annoyed and mortified. Out of the side of her mouth she whispered to me that we should leave. She broke through the crowd, walking fast, six feet ahead of me. I followed leisurely. Ho ho, and what did I care if I couldn’t shoot a damned gun, and what did I care if those mugs had laughed, and that she had laughed, for which one of them, the boobish swine, the lousy grinning Main Street dopes, which one of them could compose a story like The Long Lost Hills? Not a one of them! And so to hell with their scorn.

The car was parked in front of a cafe. When I reached it she had already started the engine. I got in but she did not wait for me to get seated. Still sneering, she looked at me quickly, and let out the clutch. I was thrown against the seat, then against the windshield. We were jammed between two other cars. She banged into one, and then into the other, her way of letting me know what a fool I had been. When we finally broke from the kerb and swung into the street, I sighed and sat back.

‘Thank God for that,’ I said.

‘You dry up!’ she said.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘If you have to feel this way, why don’t you just let me out. I can walk.’

She immediately put her foot on the throttle. We raced through the downtown streets. I sat hanging on and thought of jumping. Then we reached a section where the traffic was sparse. We were two miles from Bunker Hill, in the east part of town, in the section of factories and breweries. She slowed the car down and pulled up to the kerb. We were alongside of a low black fence. Beyond it were stacks of steel pipe.