LITMIR.BIZ

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his shaky, half-asleep shadow, trailing loudly behind him. When the light breaks and the nighttime animals bed down, we are still out, tracking through the woods around camp. We aren’t hunting for anything in particular. The bullet catcher’s just testing me. Each morning, I’m sore, but stronger than the previous day.

      “Exhaustion is good for focus,” he says. And I scowl and clamp my mouth shut to keep from cursing.

      We get back to camp in time to see the sunrise over the eastern peak of the mountain. Winter is in full swing. And though the sun lights the sky a bright orange-purple, it does nothing to warm the morning. When we break into the clearing, the bullet catcher’s breath is slow and even; only his flared nostrils give away any sign that we just ran for miles through the craggy mountainside. I collapse in the dirt. I’m so tired my eyes water. The dirt sticks to my face, turning my skin the same color as the earth, and I wish I could just melt into the ground and sleep forever.

      The bullet catcher ignores me and prepares to bathe, gathering up his scratching stone and rug to dry with. I crawl to the fire pit and begin arranging tinder onto the blackened remains of last night’s fire.

      “What are you doing?” the bullet catcher asks from over my shoulder.

      “Building a fire for breakfast.”

      “Do not crawl in the dirt like an animal unless your legs have been shot out. And even then you should do your best to stand.”

      I scowl into the cold campfire and struggle to my feet. “I can’t feel my legs,” I say. “They may as well have been shot out.”

      “Then it is good practice.” He waits for me to finish preparing the fire and to pull out the flint before he says, “A bullet catcher does not eat with dirty hands.”

      I drop the flint into the sooty dirt and can almost feel the hairs on the back of the bullet catcher’s neck standing on end. He glares at me, his eyes telling me to pick up the flint, to respect my tools, but I’m too tired to care. I stomp past him on my way to the lake, and as I’m passing him, I spit in the dirt by his boots. He doesn’t say anything. But hellfire flickers behind his eyes.

      • • •

      Back in camp, my hair is wet and freezing, but the bullet catcher has the fire burning. It warms my bones, soaked through with ice water from the lake. He’s fed up with me, so he says nothing when he grabs his things and goes down to the lake for his turn.

      When the bullet catcher returns from the lake he starts breakfast. Today there is boar meat. The bullet catcher turns it on a spit. The fat crackles as it drips into the fire. And there are eggs, and greens I don’t know the name of, too. And the bullet catcher piles it all onto my plate because he says I’ll need my energy. Then he sits back in his chair with his own plate, heaped high with food, balanced on his lap. He cuts his meat slowly, eats slowly. I can tell it’s one of the few things he truly loves. It’s when we eat that we rest. Really rest. But after the morning exercise I’m starving. So I dig in, and it’s all I can do to keep myself from dropping my fork and knife and just eating with my hands. As I eat I watch the bullet catcher, studying him.

      Now he catches me looking and raises an eyebrow.

      I often wonder what the bullet catcher did during the war, especially toward the end when the gunslingers were hunting down the last of his kind. Maybe the gunslingers took him prisoner and tried to starve information out of him. And what about the scars on his back? They could be whip marks. They look a bit like the scars on Nikko’s back, from when the Brothers and Sisters would punish him.

      “Why did the gunslingers and bullet catchers hate each other so much?”

      “One believed in taking power with a gun and one did not.”

      “That doesn’t seem like enough of a reason to hate someone so bad you wanted to kill them.”

      “That’s the thing about hate,” he says. “There ain’t no sense in it.”

      “Did you come up here to hide from the gunslingers? You know, during the fighting?”

      “No,” he says. He takes a slow bite of his food. “Not at first.”

      “When?”

      He looks up and fixes me with his cool, blue moon eyes. But when I stare back at him and refuse to let it drop, he puts down his knife and fork and says, “I came up here toward the end of the war. We had lost, but some chose to keep fighting.”

      “You deserted?”

      “Yes, I deserted.”

      “Weren’t you ashamed?”

      “We had lost already. I didn’t see the point of also dying. Back then I believed that there were good deaths and bad. And I believed a good death was one with meaning.”

      “And now?”

      “Now I know that death is always meaningless. A clap followed by nothing.”

      We are silent for a time. “What’s your name?” I’ve asked it every morning for the last month. The wind blows through the trees. The bullet catcher says nothing. I go back to my food. “When I die,” I say, “I want it to mean something.”

      He sloshes the dregs of his coffee into the fire. It hisses and flickers. He stands and says, “It won’t.”

      • • •

      At the base of the mountain, where the ground becomes flat and even, the bullet catcher leads me through the practice steps, like a dance. He shows me where to place my hands and feet. He corrects me if my stance is too narrow or wide, if my hands are too high or low. He slows me if I’m too fast, quickens me if I’m too slow. He tells me to close my eyes and focus on breathing. Or he says to keep my eyes open and imagine gunslingers in the warbling line of the desert. He quizzes me on what position I would use if they were shooting at my gut, my legs, my heart.

      The positions are second nature by now, and mostly the bullet catcher only tweaks my posture, putting his hand on mine, shifting it a half inch or so, or he’ll tap my shoulder and I know I haven’t turned enough to my imaginary gunslinger, that I’m providing too large a target. Or he’ll nudge the back of my leg with his toe, because my stance is too narrow and if I had to suddenly shift my weight, I’d lose my balance. At first, we would go through the steps in slow motion, but lately we’ve sped things up.

      Usually he tells me where he’s aiming, giving me time to go through my mental checklist of positions, but today, he points the empty gun, mimes the recoil, but he doesn’t tell me where he’s shooting. I keep my eye on the subtle shifts in his aim, clear my mind, and let my muscles react.

      “Visualize the bullets!” he instructs. “Even when the bullets are real,” he says, “you have to visualize them. Bullets move too fast for the eye.”

      Finally, after hours of this, I double over at the waist, my hands on my knees, and suck at the air. The bullet catcher lowers his gun and walks over to me. He produces a skin of water, takes a swig, and hands it to me. I drink greedily.

      “It’s time.”

      “Time for what?” I ask. But the way he said it, I know it can’t be anything good.

      The bullet catcher flicks open the chamber of the gun, loads a single bullet, and flicks it closed. Suddenly, the gun is huge and evil-looking, dull in the light of the moon rising over the desert.

      The bullet catcher puts his hand on my shoulder. It’s heavy and warm. Even through my clothes, I can feel the multitude of scars lining his palm. “We’ve worked all day,” I say. “Let’s do it tomorrow.”

      The bullet catcher shakes his head gently. His hand is still on my shoulder, radiating warmth. I look up at him and he’s smiling, like he’s suddenly got the knack of it. His smile is small, but like his hand, it radiates warmth. And I understand that he’s been where I am now, with his teacher’s hand on his shoulder, fear running through his spine. The bullet catcher judges my every mistake,

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