The Suicide Motor Club by Christopher Buehlman Read Free Book Online Page A

you checked yourself. Your natural honesty is tempered with the good manners so often missing in girls your age. I like you, Judith. I don’t think you’re right for us, not yet, or rather I don’t think we’re right for
you
, however much moments like that make me doubt myself. We’ll talk about your application, and pray on it. But I tell you candidly that I think joining our order now will do you great injury.”

7
    BIRDS SANG IN THE DOUGLAS FIR AND LODGEPOLE PINES A FEW MILES OUTSIDE Fresno, California, as Judith walked behind her father on a path they both knew well. Riley Eberhart carried an olive-drab duffel slung over one shoulder. Despite his nearly sixty years, he walked with the amiable slouch of a rancher’s boy skipping church. Judith carried a shopping sack and the .22 rifle she’d been plinking cans with since she retired her pellet gun at ten.
    He turned his head to flick an ice-blue eye at her, the hollow where the cancer bit his jaw making him look older but tough, like a bone the dogs had a gnaw at but couldn’t splinter.
    A robin hopped near the path, beaking now and again after some morsel wriggling in the brush. Dad spied the bird, too, and each knew what the other was thinking about. When Jude was nine, she had shot a robin with a pellet gun and stood transfixed while it thrashed, flying up and falling, flying up and falling.
    What’d you do that for? You meanin’ to eat that bird?
    No.
    Shoot him again.
    I don’t want to.
    Have to.
    Please, Daddy.
    Ain’t no please about it.
    She tried to look away but he turned her head around.
    Do it.
    I can’t!
    She started crying then and put her gun down. Riley picked it up and put it back in her hand.
    You gonna leave him like that?
    Maybe he’ll get better.
    He won’t.
    You do it, Daddy.
    No, ma’am. I’m not the one shot him for fun.
    So she pumped the lever of the air gun until it was hard to pump, crying all the while. The bird had mostly stopped thrashing, and when she shot it again, it shivered hard once and stretched out its wing and lay still.
    Can’t unshoot a gun, Jude.
    She had cried harder and he held her.
    You won’t never do that again, will you?
    No, Daddy.
    Then be sad for this one. But you be happy the next time you see a robin, because a robin taught you something you needed to know.
    â€”
    JUDITH’S DAD UNPACKED HIS DUFFEL, SETTING FOUR SODA CANS AND TWO WHITE jugs up on the hacked-flat top of a fallen log they had laid against a primeval mound of dirt and brambles they called Boot Hill.
    â€œYour mom switched us off’n the glass to these new plastic milk jugs. ‘Jug-a-Moo,’ ain’t that a peach? Some feller probably got him a corner office and a shiny new tiepin for comin’ up with that one. What’sthe milkman s’pose to do now? They’re always dreamin’ up new ways to fire people.”
    â€œLeast nobody’s fired you.”
    â€œNo, ma’am. Work too hard. Lot harder’n them lazy-ass milkmen anyway. Ten yards to start?”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œPace ’em off,” he said in his best John Wayne.
    â€œYour feet are closer to a foot,” she drawled in response. They had been doing that routine so long she couldn’t remember if it was from a movie or not.
    He handed her a .38 revolver from his duffel and fished out a box of shells. They stuffed cotton in their ears. Judith aimed and popped holes in the cans, dumped the shells, loaded the gun for her dad.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with the jugs, you scared of ’em?” he asked her as she set the cans back up.
    â€œNah. You hate ’em so much I thought I’d let you do the honors.”
    Riley made the Jug-a-Moos hop and wobble. Once they had warmed up, they took turns throwing cans for one another and shooting them just before they hit the ground. Riley was better at this, but not much; Jude hit about every other one at ten