Sweet Talk by Stephanie Vaughn Page B

the floor, all the little bird parts of Harold and Georgette still recognizable on the linoleum.
    MacArthur never became a hunter of birds. By the time he turned twelve, and was given a shotgun for his birthday, we were stationed in Italy. The Italians, who for generations, perhaps even millennia, seemed to have a limitless appetite for small birds, had gone through entire species of game birds and were now working on the European songbirds that flew south in the winter. Thus, the diminishing numbers of thrushes, larks, and swallows in the Italian countryside made it impossible for my father to find a place that he could hunt with aclear conscience and allowed my brother to turn from real birds to imitation ones. Soon after his birthday, he was taken to the skeet range at Camp Darby, where he was permitted to shoot fifty rounds at black-and-yellow disks, called pigeons. Fifty recoils of a large gun are a lot for a boy, even one big for his age, like MacArthur. By the time he got home that day, there were bruises beginning to bloom across his shoulder.
    “Maybe he should wait until he’s older,” my mother said.
    “What ever happened to the all-American sports?” my grandmother said. “Couldn’t he learn to throw or kick something?”
    Months later, when we all drove into the post to see him shoot in his first tournament, MacArthur kept saying, “See Kid MacArthur forget to load the gun. Watch fake birds fall whole to the earth.” “Kid MacArthur” was what he called himself when something went wrong. He did not like the general whose name he bore. He did not admire him, as my parents did, for being the man who said, “I shall return.” MacArthur was not one of those ordinary names, like John or Joan, which you could look up in my grandmother’s
Dictionary of Christian Appellations
. MacArthur was a name my brother had to research. General MacArthur, he decided, had talked a big game but then allowed his entire air force to be bombed on the ground the day after Pearl Harbor. General MacArthur had sent his troopsinto Bataan but had not sent along the trucks that carried food for the battalions. The general had fled to Australia, uttering his famous words, leaving his men to perish in the Death March.
    “You’ll be fine if you don’t look out any windows,” my father said. “Looking out the window” was his expression for allowing the mind to wander. “I’m pulling down all the shades on my windows,” MacArthur said. “I’m battening all the hatches in my head.”
    Something overtook MacArthur when the tournament got under way and he finally stepped onto the range, the only boy among the shooters. The bones of his face grew prominent. His eyes became opaque, like the eyes of a man who can keep a secret. By the second time around the stations, he was third among the five shooters. No one spoke, except a man named Mr. Dimple, who was an engineer working for the American government in Italy, and the only civilian on the skeet range.
    “That gosh-damned sun,” Mr. Dimple said. “Those gosh-damned trees.” It was a hot, bright day, and the angle of the sun made it difficult to see the disks as they sailed in front of a pine forest at the back of the range.
    “Maybe we need a fence in front of those trees,” Mr. Dimple said. After his next two shots, he said, “Damned if the wind didn’t get to those birds before I did.” It was clear that Mr. Dimple was disgracing himself before the cream of the American Army. When hespoke, the other men looked at the grass. The women, seated behind the semicircular range, looked at each other. Their eyes seemed to say, “Our men are not going to complain about any trees. Our men are not going to complain about the wind or the sun.”
    “I’m not wearing the right sunglasses,” Mr. Dimple said.
    MacArthur stepped up to the station just in front of the viewing area and called for the pigeons. “Pull!” Swinging to his right, he aimed just ahead of the flying,