What was wormy Lincoln thinking now? How clever was he?

And who was he? Stephen tried to picture him, tried to picture him as a target through the Redfield telescope. He couldn’t. All he saw was a mass of worms and a face looking at him calmly through a greasy window.

He realized that Jodie’d said something to him.

“What?”

“What’d he do? Your stepfather?”

“Just odd jobs mostly. Hunted and fished a lot. He was a hero in Vietnam. He went behind enemy lines and killed fifty-four people. Politicians and people like that, not just soldiers.”

“He taught you all this, about . . . what you do?” The drugs had worn off and Jodie’s green eyes were brighter now.

“I got most of my practice in Africa and South America but he started me. I called him ‘WGS.’ The World’s Greatest Soldier. He laughed at that.”

At ages eight and nine and ten Stephen would walk behind Lou as they trooped through the hills of West Virginia, hot drops of sweat falling down their noses and into the crooks of their index fingers, which curled around the ribbed triggers of their Winchesters or Rugers. They’d lie in the grass for hours and be quiet, be still. The sweat glistened on Lou’s scalp just below the bristly crew cut, both eyes open as they sighted on their targets.

Don’t you squint that left eye, Soldier.

Sir, never, sir.

Squirrels, wild turkeys, deer in season or out, bear when they could find them, dogs on slow days.

Make ’em dead, Soldier. Watch me.

Ka-rack. The thud against the shoulder, the bewildered eyes of an animal dying.

Or on steaming August Sundays they’d slip the CO₂ cartridges into their paint-ball guns and strip down to their shorts, stalking each other and raising molehills of welts on their chests and thighs with the marble-sized balls that hissed through the air at three hundred feet per second, young Stephen struggling to keep from crying at the awful sting. The paint balls came in every color but Lou insisted on loading with red. Like blood.

And at night, sitting in front of a fire in the backyard as the smoke curled toward the sky and into the open window where his mother stood cleaning the supper dishes with a toothbrush, the taut little man—Stephen at fifteen was as tall as Lou—would sip from the newly opened bottle of Jack Daniel’s and talk and talk and talk, whether Stephen was listening or not, as they watched the sparks flying into the sky like orange lightning bugs.

“Tomorrow I want you to bring down a deer with just a knife.”

“Well . . . ”

“Can you do that, Soldier?”

“Yessir, I can.”

“Now look here.” He’d take another sip. “Where d’you think the neck vein is?”

“I—”

“Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know. A good soldier admits his ignorance. But then he does something to correct it.”

“I don’t know where the vein is, sir.”