She had forgotten that her family had an account with the hardware. It was something from another time, another life. She charged four boxes, and felt guilty, as though she was pretending to be someone she was not. When she wrote Colette on the charge ticket, the word seemed like the name of a ghost. She left the store without even a smile at the amiable Buster, quickly crossed River Street, walked along the moldering wall of the ice plant, and crossed the levee behind it, following the batture for a mile toward the Gulf and away from any houses. After wading through fifty feet of willow brake, she stopped at the river’s edge and loaded the tubular magazine under the gun’s barrel. Seventy-five feet downriver was a mud flat, and on it, a small jam jar and a beer can. She pumped the hammer back and took aim, pulling the trigger and smiling at the familiar crack of the bullet. The shot gored the mud two inches below the can. She pumped the empty out and fired again, missing three inches to the left. She took a breath, put the gun stock on her shoe, and tried to remember what her uncle Lester had told her about shooting. She spread her feet and made her shoulders almost parallel to the barrel, fired again, and missed the can by two feet. She concentrated hard and the next shot whacked a sapling a hundred yards off.

She cursed, gave the gun an angry look, then jerked it around to her shoulder and fired in anger. The shot spun the can, and she fired again quickly, offhand, and the can jumped into the air. A third shot flipped it off into the water. Colette found a dry spot on the bank and sat down to reload. Her uncle more than once had said that she owned a born talent for shooting. She wondered if talent required that much concentration. As she let the glossy bullets slip into the Winchester, she resolved to relax and fire from a still mood, not a still body.

On the first shot, the jam jar shattered to diamonds on the mud flat. The base was still intact, facing her, and the next bullet pulverized it. She looked hard and thought she saw the lid standing edgeways, but she could not find it in the rear V-notch sight. The old gun also had a tang sight, a flip-up peephole device behind the hammer, useful mainly for long-distance work. She adjusted it, taking five minutes to figure out how it worked, lowering the rear V-notch just out of the tang sight’s line of vision. When she brought the rifle up and looked through the peephole, the lid was easy to see. She squeezed the trigger and the disk of metal flew off like a butterfly.