By Ethan Denault
We came for doves, four of us, two shotguns each, a cooler of Tecate warming in the truck bed. The truck was Hector’s cousin’s, technically, though the cousin was gone, off to “see about a thing,” and hadn’t come back.
The field was huge and gold and hot. Doves came off the tree line in twos and threes, and Ronald, who’d wanted this trip, who’d used the phrase “real high-volume shooting, none of that limited-bird nonsense” with a straight face, dropped one clean and whooped. I remember thinking, this is nice. I didn’t know yet that the day was going somewhere else.
The trucks came out of the same tree line the doves had been coming from. Two of them. Men, a dozen or so, stood in the beds, AK-47’s slung the way you’d carry a golf club, an umbrella, some item you’d used so many times—and every one of them wore the same thing: black baseball cap, black bandana over the nose and mouth, and black Ray-Bans. No faces at all—just the sunglasses, throwing my own reflection back at me, small and bent. That was somehow the worst part. Not being able to see anything in them.
They didn’t hurry. Hurrying would’ve meant we mattered enough to hurry for, and we didn’t. They rolled up slow, like they had the whole day to spend on us if they wanted to.
Surviving Sicarios
Hector went gray. Hector, who’d been laughing about his cousin 10 minutes earlier, started talking fast in Spanish, too fast for me to follow except for the shape of it: please, we didn’t know, we’re nobody, please.
One of them hopped down out of the truck bed, unhurried, the way you move when you’re carrying automatic weapons toward men holding vintage shotguns, and everybody already knows how that math works out. He looked at our guns the way you’d look at a kid’s drawing of a gun. He said something in bad English—asking for money, I think, though it might’ve been something else; my ears weren’t working right by then—and Ronald held out his wallet, hand shaking so bad the bills slipped loose and fanned out anyway, an accident that looked, for one absurd second, like a trick.
I don’t remember putting my gun down. I remember it already on the ground, my hands up, staring at black lenses that gave nothing back, no eyes in them, no way to know if we’d been decided about yet. I thought, very clearly, the way you think clear, stupid things right before something happens: I’m going to die in a dove field and my mother’s going to hear about it from a stranger.
The Doves Don’t Care
They took the truck. They took the coolers. They took our shotguns and Ronald’s boots, no reason given, none asked for. They didn’t take us. That’s the whole story, really—they looked us over like meat not worth the cut, and left, slow, back into the trees. The doves kept coming the whole time, twos and threes, unbothered, on schedule, doing the one thing doves are for. Didn’t care what was happening under them. It occurred to me, standing there watching the trucks leave, that this was probably a skill worth having.
We walked out. Four miles, no water, no beer, no birds. Somebody—I think it was Ronald, it’s always Ronald—tried to make a joke about it on the walk out, something about getting a great story out of the deal, and the joke just died there in the heat, no one even pretending to laugh.
That night, back at the hotel, I sat on the edge of the bed with the AC ticking and called her—Jennifer, my girlfriend of three years, the one who’d made me promise, twice, to call her every night, a promise I was now, guiltily, keeping. She picked up happy, background noise of the TV behind her, our TV, the one I’d fixed to the wall in front of our couch next to the mule deer shoulder mount, four thousand miles from this, and asked how it was going, if we’d gotten any birds, if we were having fun.
I looked at the wall for what felt, to me, like a very long time.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s going good. Real pretty out here.”
