Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [37]
The wind picked up, carrying messages from the south. Rocky’s tightly curled hair flipped up, exposing her forehead, making her feel naked. She shook her head around to get the hair to come back down. They practiced soft knees, turning heads, shoulders going still. They practiced finding her center, dropping energy down, pulling energy up, breathing from the belly, letting all the breath out, and then the deeper stillness.
“Everyone wants to pull the arrow back and let her rip. That’s like saying to a mathematician, ‘What’s the final answer?’ The arrow is the least of it. What did you eat before you came here? Your energy is too high up in your body.”
“I can’t remember. Let’s see, I had a juice and coffee. I haven’t had lunch yet.”
“That’s part of it,” he said getting into the stance himself. “Watch me. Tell me what you see.”
He closed his eyes for a few seconds and turned to the side. His thick eyelashes rested on his cheeks. His chest and belly filled up with air. He opened his eyes. On the release of breath, he turned his head with hydraulic fluidity. His shoulders were back and down. He looked like a tree trunk swaying with imperceptible movement. And then he entered stillness. He pantomimed pulling back an arrow with his right hand, which glided smoothly from a spot an arm’s length in front of his back to his ear. Finally he released the imaginary arrow. Rocky thought she could hear the thwack of it hitting the target. Her eyes darted to the target despite what her brain knew. She looked back at Hill, who remained in his still posture. She knew he had noticed that she looked at the target. Tiny muscles around his lips struggled to keep from smiling.
“In this posture, nothing should be able to knock me over. It’s like being anchored to the ground, but the upper body can stay flexible. Push me,” he said. “Hard.”
“This demonstration is not going to be very effective, if you’re trying to show how powerful you are against equal strength. I don’t have a lot of brute strength these days. I must have left it somewhere else,” said Rocky, feeling strangely hypnotized by his movements.
“Well, give a really big push, then.”
What was the point of this, that a woman would ricochet off him in an attempt to tackle him? She was suddenly irritated at the predictability of the exercise. There was something about the hint of childhood taunting that motivated her in the moment. She impulsively put her head down and dove into him with her shoulder, the way she had seen football players do. She imagined the man as firmly planted as a tree, so the point of this demonstration was to show what little impact she could have on him, and she simply did not care. She wanted to hit someone hard. She plowed into him with a force that welled up from dank, unused places. She knocked him over. Or more exactly, he seemed to collapse like a bridge that had rusted out.
“Damn,” he said from the ground. “I never know when that knee will go out. Football is a surgeon’s favorite sport, a real moneymaker. All this from playing football at a state college, division-three ball.” He rubbed his knee from his flat-back position. “You sure you want to learn archery? You have potential in the more aggressive sports, like hockey.”
Hill stood up, rubbed his knee some more and said, “Practice breathing, practice everything you did today, except the part where you tackled me. I’ve got space for one more student. I lost a student a few months ago. Oh wait, I’m assuming you want the lessons. Do you?”
Rocky had not tackled anyone with such satisfaction since sixth grade when she could still overpower Caleb. And she had not touched another man, other than griever’s hugs, since Bob had died.
“Are you sure you’re not hurt? Yeah, I want to sign up for lessons. I’m not a hunter. But there’s something about archery. I want to learn how to do this.”
Hill grabbed his jacket from the picnic table and put it on. “Lots of people will start something like archery, but when it gets hard, they quit. How about you, what do you do when things get hard?”
What did she do? She