Woodsman
Tom Sweeney

The broken board in the attic stairway creaked and a wave of pins-and-needles tingled down the back of Shirley’s neck. Steve was going for the rifle again.
She had been waiting all day, all year, really, for this moment, but she still didn’t know what to say. There had to be something that would keep him home this one time. He did this every year, but how long could his luck hold out?
When he came down, she was standing in a dark corner of the dimly lit kitchen. He laid the rifle, cleaning kit and his single box of ammunition on the linoleum-covered table and dragged out one of the mismatched chairs. The rifle was an old, single-shot, bolt-action, scope-less model made before hunting went high-tech. From the shadows, she watched him disassemble it, cleaning and examining each piece in turn. Same as last year. Same as every year.
"I just wish you wouldn’t wait until the last day of hunting season," she said. "Seems every year someone gets shot on the last day."
"I'm a woodsman, not one of those bonehead yuppie hunters. I was raised in the country and that never leaves you. If you need to worry, worry about them, not me."
"Just once go in the beginning of the season. Or skip a year. Is that too much to ask?"
"Look, I'm fifty-two years old. No other middle manager in the whole company is over forty. I've survived every buyout, every merger, every down-sizing. You know how? I keep my job by going in to work every day. Every day. I take only one vacation day a year. For stress reduction."
"Shooting's good for that," she said. "Come out in the back with me and shoot tin cans. It’s fun."
"With a .22? Get real."
"But—"
"I'm a woodsman, not a damn plinker. Woodsmen shoot things, kill things." Steve picked up the barrel and sighted down its length. "I’ll be fine, Shirley. Don’t give it another thought." He assembled the rifle and opened the cardboard box of shells. Fifty hard-nosed cartridges had once sat erect in the box. Now almost half were gone, though all the remaining ones were as shiny as the day they came from the factory. He wiped each one with a cleaning patch. When he finished, he looked over the last one and chambered it, then took a deep breath and put the cartridge box and rifle into the carrying case.
"I’m leaving now," he said. "I’ll stay in a motel so I can be up at dawn near my new hunting stand." He gave Shirley a peck on her cheek, then walked out the door.
The house turned suddenly dead, tomblike, without his presence. Outside, Steve’s rusted old Buick sputtered and chuckled as though mocking her before roaring to life. Hiding behind the tired kitchen curtains, she watched it back out of the yard. The transmission clunked into forward and the Buick was suddenly gone, leaving behind only a single puff of black smoke. Shirley let the curtains droop back into place and looked around the desolate room. The telephone hung on a wall nearby, but she knew of no one to call. Collapsing onto a wobbly dining room chair, she cried without tears.
*
She was up at six the next morning, watching TV and waiting for the phone to ring. After the news at noon, she knew she wouldn't have to wait much longer. With an inner energy that surprised her, she began cleaning a house that she hadn't cared about in years. She thought of going through Steve's belongings, but there was still the chance he'd be home, that the news wasn't about him.
Just after four o’clock, she heard tires crunching on gravel in the driveway, then silence. Steve coming home for dinner, or the sheriff notifying the next of kin? A car door slammed. Footsteps clumped up onto the porch. Steve? Or the sheriff?
The door opened.
"Steve!"
Shirley shot from the chair, but relief immediately turned to confusion and she made no move to go to him. "Oh, thank God, you’re safe," she said, but the words sounded hollow, even to herself. Having accepted his death, did she now feel cheated? Or was Steve somehow different?
Acting like his old self, though, he pushed past her into the kitchen. "Of course I’m safe. Haven’t I always come back?"
"Yes, but every year someone gets shot the last day of hunting season. You don’t know, but it happened again this morning." Steve sat at the table, and Shirley took her place at the doorway. "The TV made a big deal about it," she said. "They said this year made twenty-two years in a row. And the man got shot where you said you were going this year."
Steve stopped in mid-stride and spun around to face her. "I told you where I was going?" His voice was ice-laden, but Shirley’s emotions were running too high for her to notice.
"Not exactly, but you know how sometimes you talk in your sleep? The night before last you were talking about northern Washington County. Something about railroad tracks. Then when the news came on at noon and reported that someone had been killed in a hunting accident near the railroad tracks in northern Washington County ... " She stopped, flustered. Steve was standing motionless, staring at her. She took refuge in anger. "Well, I was just worried sick, that’s all."
Steve expelled his breath through his nose. Shaking his head, he sat down at the kitchen table and removed the rifle and cartridge box from his carrying case. He worked the rifle mechanism twice, the click-snick of the bolt sounding unnaturally loud in the absence of conversation. When he finally spoke, his voice had no more emotion to it than had the metallic functioning of the rifle bolt. "Tell me," he said, "have there been any reports of wives accidentally being shot while their husbands were cleaning rifles the last day of hunting season?"
The deep lines on her face changed from those of anger to sudden enlightenment, then to fear. She ran from the room, but Steve wasn't worried. Where would she go?
He wiped each cartridge slowly, one by one. The last one he looked over carefully before chambering it. As he shot the bolt forward he said aloud, "I wonder if now I'll still need to take my stress day next year."
"I’m sure you won’t," Shirley said. The odd strength and dryness of her words made him look up. She held her old .22 caliber Colt Woodsman in both hands, in her best target-shooting position.
He felt a second of panic, then was surprised to see how blue the sky looked outside the window. The wallpaper, too, had colors he’d never noticed. Was he unique in seeing this? In the two seconds he had left, he sincerely regretted not asking the others what they were seeing when they realized he was going to kill them.

Tom Sweeney lives and writes in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he works for the Navy as a mechanical engineer. Stories of his are slated to appear in Analog, Mystery Street, Mammoth Book of Legal Thrillers, Orchard Press Mysteries, Blue Murder, Futures, and Have Yourself an Eerie Little Christmas, a somewhat different kind of Christmas anthology