Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [17]
Ezra’s fingers loosened on the string. The arrow sped in a straight, swift path, no arc to it at all. As if guided by an invisible thread—or worse, by the purest and most natural luck—it split the length of the arrow that Beck had already jammed in and it landed at the center of the bull’s-eye, quivering. There was a sharp, caught silence. Then Beck said, “Will you look at that.”
“Why, Ezra,” Pearl said.
“Ezra,” their sister Jenny cried. “Ezra, look what you did! What you went and did to that arrow!”
Ezra took the straw from his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he told Beck. (He was so used to breaking things.)
“Sorry?” said Beck.
He seemed to be hunting the proper tone of voice. Then he found it. “Well, son,” he said, “this just goes to show that it pays to follow instructions. See there, Cody? See what happens? A bull’s-eye. I’ll be damned. If you’d listened close like Ezra did, and not gone off half-cocked …”
He was moving toward the target as he spoke, oaring through the weeds, and Jenny was running to get there first. Cody couldn’t take his turn at shooting, therefore, although he was itching to. He was absolutely obligated to split that second arrow as Ezra had split the first. It was unthinkable not to. What were the odds against it? He felt a springy twanging inside, as if he himself were the bowstring. He bent down and pulled a new arrow from the tube and fitted it to the bow. He drew and aimed at a clump of shrubbery, then at his father’s dusty blue Nash, and then at Ezra, who was already wandering off again dreamy as ever. Longingly, Cody focused on Ezra’s fair, ruffled head. “Zing. Wham. Aagh, you got me!” he said. Imagine the satisfaction. Ezra turned slowly and caught sight of him. “No!” he cried.
“Huh?”
Ezra ran toward him, flapping his arms like an idiot and stammering, “Stop, stop, stop! No! Stop!” Did he really think Cody would shoot him? Cody stared, keeping the bow drawn. Ezra took a flying leap with his arms outstretched like a lover. He caught Cody in a kind of bear hug and slammed him flat on his back. It knocked the wind out of Cody; all he could do was gasp beneath Ezra’s warm, bony weight. And meanwhile, what had happened to the arrow? It was minutes before he could struggle to a sitting position, elbowing Ezra off of him. He looked across the field and found his mother leaning on his father’s arm, hobbling in his direction with a perfect circle of blood gleaming on the shoulder of her blouse. “Pearl, my God. Oh, Pearl,” his father was saying. Cody turned and looked at Ezra, whose face was pale and shocked. “See there?” Cody asked him. “See what you’ve gone and done?”
“Did I do that?”
“Gone and done it to me again,” Cody said, and he staggered to his feet and walked away.
On a weekday when his father was out of town, his mother shopping for supper, his brother and sister doing homework in their rooms, Cody took his BB gun and shot a hole in the kitchen window. Then he slipped outdoors and poked a length of fishing line through the hole. From the kitchen, he pulled the line until the rusty wrench that he’d tied to the other end was flush against the outside of the glass. He held it there by anchoring the line beneath a begonia pot. When his mother returned from shopping, Cody was seated at the kitchen table coloring a map of Asia.
After their homework was finished, Jenny and Ezra went out back. Ezra had been