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Think you can hit that?
By Reavis Wortham
Cousin pointed at a tin can sitting on Granny’s fencepost. “Think you can hit that?” he asked.
“I don’t miss,” I uttered for the first of a thousand times since.
I leveled off with my Daisy and plinked the can dead center. “That was too easy,” I said.
We paced off a considerable distance and I hit it again. I put the lid back on the post for Cousin to shoot. He knocked it ff.
A fly lit on the porch beside us. “Think you can hit that?” Cousin asked.
Miraculously, I hit the fly on the plank four feet away. Unfortunately, I didn’t take into account the BBs ricochet, which plinked off the faded fender of Grandad’s ’48 Chevrolet truck, knocking off a chunk of paint and making a pretty good divot.
Based on butt warmings for shooting out the vent window on the truck and the glass windowpane in the living room, we lit out of there before adults could get a hand on us.
Like the newly christened outlaws we were, Cousin and I skulked past the chicken house. Lucky for them, none of Granny’s hens showed themselves, so we shot at sparrows flitting in out of the brooder house through the chicken-wire windows.
Moving birds are difficult to hit with BB guns, so we weren’t surprised to miss the darting gray shapes. I shot a milkweed and we watched the thick liquid ooze out of the stem. Delighted in the results, we shot a dozen more stems and left them bleeding like dying enemies behind us.
We continued our rampage by advancing on the barn. Boardark posts were all right, but the dull tick of striking BBs wasn’t nearly satisfying enough. In the barn’s rafters, irritable yellowjackets readied their wings for attack.
“Getting stung by a yellowjacket would hurt like the dickens in this heat,” Cousin said.
I thought about shooting one of the nests anyway, because I knew I’d be able to outrun Cousin when the angry wasps swarmed out in search of whatever was molesting their nest. In years past, I’ve used that reasoning in grizzly country while fishing and hiking both Wyoming and Alaska. All you have to do is outrun one person, and you’re safe.
We left the barn and hurried through the noonday July heat to enter the relative shade of the plum thicket. Targets there were few and far between; just a few dried up plums on the ground.
With the pool not far away, we crept through the shadows to put The Sneak on any frogs or snakes that might be sunning themselves on the bank. Only one big bullfrog was in sight, and he was on the other side of the pond.
Each of us shot at least twice, trying to arc the BBs over the water. Finally irritated, the frog jumped to safety. We waited for him to surface. He did, still on the far side of the pool.
Our target wasn’t too difficult since he was facing away, but we soon found that the angle wasn’t right for our weak guns. I managed to bean him with one BB and he submerged as it ratted away in the dry grass.
He resurfaced and we sent another volley his way, but with poor results.
Cousin remembered a place where people used to dump their trash during the Depression. It wasn’t far away, so we worked our way across the pasture to find several pieces of glass and pottery washed out from an eroding gully.
“Think you can hit that?” Cousin asked, pointing at a piece of deep blue glass.
I did. Then he shot at it also. We kept pointing out smaller and smaller pieces of glass. Through sheer repetition, we were getting better.
“Think you can hit that?” he asked, pointing at the glass insulators on the highline wires above.
The thick insulators didn’t resonate with the musical tink we expected, but small chips of glass showered down at our last shots.
With lunch time approaching, we broke off our attack on the power lines and wandered back across the pasture toward the house. I sent a few shots toward the trash barrel where Granny burned all the combustible refuse from the house. They landed with a pleasing metallic tink.
Bumble bees flew past and we threw a few shots in their direction without results. Big yellow grasshoppers buzzed around us with a rattle of dry wings and we fought off their aerial assault with out diminishing supply of BBs as we went through the gate and across the yard toward the porch.
A dirt-dobber lit on the side of the smokehouse, holding on tight to the roofing shingles nailed there for siding.
“Think you can hit that?” Cousin asked.
“I never miss,” I said and took careful aim at the dirt-dobber. I missed him by a hair, but didn’t miss the smokehouse at all. Not taking into account Newton’s Law of Motion that I’d learned just a few months earlier in school, I didn’t think about the BB that struck the siding and then bounced straight back with enough velocity to raise a welt where it struck me on my neck.
Cousin’s eyes were wide as a lemur’s when he saw me grab my neck. At about that time the Old Man, Uncle and Grandpa came out on the porch. They’d been waiting in the cool house for us to return, as they knew we would.
The Old Man reached for his belt and pointed at the ding on the truck. “Which one of you did that?”
Slightly addled by my BB wound, I confessed. The Old Man stepped off the porch and I knew for certain that when he got to me with the belt, he could for sure hit that…
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