Perfectly Good White Boy by Carrie Mesrobian

to laugh. The 12-gauge’s trigger was slicker than normal; most guns, you squeeze the trigger, you don’t pull it. But the 12-gauge was especially light; the barest squeeze made a pretty damn loud shot.
    â€œWhat the hell, Sean!” Eddie said. He looked like he might have shit his pants. Which made me laugh. That, and I was happy. It looked like I’d got at least two of them. Maybe even all three of them. Two bucks and maybe a doe. Unless it was a first-year buck. We’d need to get closer to see for sure.
    I put the safety on, nudged Eddie to start moving. But he just sat there, his breath coming out of his mouth, all dumb.
    â€œSeany, you do all that shooting?” My Grandpa Chuck, calling up.
    â€œYeah,” I said. “There were three of them. I got at least two. Maybe all of them.”
    â€œNo shit,” my grandpa said. “That’s unbelievable.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œWhat if they’re not dead?” Eddie whispered. Now he was whispering. Like it still mattered.
    â€œIf they’re not, they’ll be soon enough,” I said. “Doesn’t take long for them bleed out.”
    â€œGod,” Eddie said, looking sick. Like he didn’t want to come down from the tree.
    Eddie had no idea how lucky this was. Not just one good shot, but two or three? If I’d got them all, then I’d filled almost all our tags. Something Brad couldn’t say this year. Or last year, either. I mean, I wasn’t happy to make things dead. But what did people do before, when there were no grocery stores and stuff? This was how you ate. This was how you lived. It wasn’t like we were doing it to be mean. If you wanted meat, well, you had to deal with deadness.
    â€œWhere’s Brad at?” I asked my grandpa once Eddie and me were both on the ground.
    â€œShould be along soon, I’d guess.”
    My grandpa looked thrilled; his face was bright red and smiling. He was old, in his late sixties, I think, his face was all leathery and wrinkled, and he didn’t have any hair anymore, even white hair, but he didn’t seem so old when we were hunting. He had a full kit of good gear he wore; he wasn’t all sloppy like you’d expect an older guy to be; he rocked the high-tech stuff: wrap-around anti-fog Oakleys, layers of Under Armour, waterproof Gore-Tex, that kind of thing. He made the rest of us look like kinda bad, actually, amateurs tossing blaze orange vests over our chests. Brad in his stupid duckhunter’s camo, me in my old Carhartt coat and Eddie in his snowboarding jacket. But I liked how serious my grandpa took it, hunting; I liked that he was always trying new things every year, not just being crabby and traditional about things. He was always reading stuff about it. He’d been a veterinarian before he retired, so animals were kind of his thing. That was another part of this; it wasn’t so much about killing things, hunting. It was doing stuff with my grandpa. He’d always taken us hunting. My dad never went with us; he had some hang-up about guns or hunting. Or maybe he was just being pissy about Grandpa Chuck; he and his dad didn’t get along that good. But me and Brad had been going hunting with our grandpa since we were little. Grandpa Chuck had been the one to sign us up for gun safety classes, taught us how to shoot tin can targets out at his house in the country. I’d got my first doe when I was thirteen.
    â€œLet’s get to it, then,” my grandpa said. He put his arm around Eddie’s neck and started telling him about field dressing as we hiked out to see my kill. I was trying not to run toward it, be so obvious and proud, but goddammit, I couldn’t wait to see my brother’s damn face when he strolled up.
    The sun was rising, hot and white, when we got to the kill site. Sure enough, there were three of them. All three tags, in one go, still steaming in the morning chill. I