She reached for a button in his booth and held it in. The paper target suddenly came to life and screeched along the lane toward Brazil, as if it were going to attack him.
Startled, Brazil shot wildly. BARNI BARNI BARNI Bullets slammed into the target’s metal frame, into the back rubber wall, and then he was out of ammo. The target screeched to a stop, rocking from its cable in his face.
“Hey! What are you doing?” He turned to West, indignant and bewildered.
She did not answer at first as she pushed cartridges into black metal magazines. She smacked one into her big bad black. 40 caliber Smith & Wesson semiautomatic, then looked at her student.
“You shoot too fast.” She racked back the slide and it snapped forward. She aimed at her own target in her own lane.
“You’re out of ammo.” She fired. BAM BAM
“And out of luck.” BAM BAM
She paused, and fired twice again. She set down her pistol and moved close to Brazil, taking the. 380 from him, and opening the slide to make sure the gun was unloaded and safe. She pointed it down the lane, hands and arms locked, knees slightly bent, in the proper position and stance.
“Tap-tap and stop,” she told him as she demonstrated.
“Tap-tap and stop. You see what the other person’s doing and adjust.” She returned the. 380 to him, butt first.
“And don’t slap the trigger. Take it home tonight and practice.”
That night, Brazil stayed in his room and dry-fired West’s. 380 until he had a significant blister on his index finger. He aimed it at himself in the mirror, that he might get used to seeing a gun pointed at him. He did this with music playing and fantasies spinning, the deadly tiny black eye staring at his head, his heart, as he thought of his father, who had not drawn his gun. His father had not had time even to key his radio. Brazil’s arms were beginning to tremble, and he had not eaten supper.
It was a few minutes past nine, and his mother had refused to eat earlier when he had offered to fix her a hamburger patty and a salad of fresh tomatoes and Vidalia onions, with oil and vinegar. More alert than usual, she was watching a sitcom, and in the same faded blue flannel robe and slippers she wore most of the time. He could not grasp how she could live the way she did, and had given up thinking he could change her or the life she hated. In high school, he, her only child, had been the expert detective, rooting through the house and her Cadillac, seeking her hidden stashes of pills and liquor. Her resourcefulness was amazing. Once she had gone so far as to bury whisky in the yard beneath the rose bushes she used to prune when she still cared.
Muriel Brazil’s greatest fear was to be present. She did not want to be here, and the nightmare of rehabilitation and AA meetings darkened her memory like the shadow of a monstrous bird flying over her and splaying its claws, ready to snatch her up and eat her alive. She did not want to feel. She would not sit in groups of people who had only first names and talked about the drunks they once were, and binges they used to go on, and how wonderful it was to be sober. All spoke with the sincerity of contrite sinners after a religious experience.
Their new god was sobriety, and this god allowed plenty of cigarettes and black decaffeinated coffee. Exercise drinking copious amounts of water and talking regularly to one’s sponsor was critical, and the god expected the recovering one to contact all he had ever offended and apologize. In other words, Mrs. Brazil was supposed to tell her son and those she worked around at Davidson that she was an alcoholic. She had tried this once on several of the students she supervised at the ARA Slater food service that catered the cafeteria in the new Commons building.
“I’ve been away a month at a treatment center,” Mrs. Brazil told a junior named Heather, from Connecticut.