Legal Limit

The shooting came in October 1984, abrupt and rash, a quicksilverbang. The day it happened, Mason Hunt had spent most of his morning settled into the afghan-covered recliner at his mother's house, watching a nondescript brown and tan and gray wren fly against the big den window again and again as it tried to punch through the glass, the bird evidently sickly or a bona fide lunatic, remaining behind while its kin abandoned Virginia and migrated farther south. Despite the suicidal thumps and flutters that gained it nothing and left it pitifully outside its hope, the misguided bird never learned a lesson or gave up on its headlong, full-steam shortcut to sanctuary, never stopped, kept at the foolishness for hours. Mason was home from his final year of law school, visiting his mother and enjoying her flapjacks and rich casseroles for a weekend, waiting for his older brother, Gates, to arrive so they could saw up a maple tree that had blown over in the front yard and stack it into winter firewood. By the time Gates pulled in the gravel drive at eleven thirty, Mason had finished two cups of coffee, napped, read three issues of theStuart Enterpriseand carted the kerosene heater from the basement to its spot near the couch, even though there was no fuel in it and the weather wouldn't turn cold for another month or so. Soon after he heard Gates cut his Corvette's ignition, Mason noticed that the bird had quit its sallies and was stuck in a holly bush next to the window, one wing draped across a run of green, prickly leaves, its beak gapped, its head listing and its feet dangling, unable to take hold of anything. Gates opened the mudroom door but didn't move too far past the threshold, let out his neck like a terrapin leaving its armor to get a better view of Mason and his mother. "Hello, Mama," he said in a voice a few notches above normal. "Gates," she said, not looking up from her kitchen work. She was peeling green baking apples, circling off the skin in deft turns and cuts that went from stem to bottom without a hitch. "What're you cooking?" he asked, leaning against the doorjamb. "A pie." The two words were absolutely neutral, ciphers. "The phone not workin' where you were at last night?" "I'm sorry; I know I promised I'd call when I can't make it home. You forgive me?" "It's common courtesy, Gatesif you're living under my roof you could at least let me know where you are. Twenty-seven years old, and it's the only thing I ask from you." "It won't happen again." "Perhaps you should ground him or take away TV privileges," Mason joked, trying to lighten the mood. "There you go," Gates said. "That'll keep me on the straight and narrow." "You ready to get started?" Mason asked, bending over to retie his shoes. "Sure. Yep. Ready, ready, ready. Ready as can be." Gates was wearing a Washington Redskins jersey with the name "Hunt" stenciled across the back in gold block letters. Five inches over six feet tall, he didn't fit well into the doorframe. "Mason, man, I need you to run an errand with me before we take care of the tree, and then we're right back here lickety-split." He glanced at their mother. She still didn't look in his direction. "An errand?" Mason repeated. "You boys be careful with the saw," Sadie Grace Hunt said from the kitchen. "Chain saws are dangerous, Gates." She finally made eyeClark, Martin is the author of 'Legal Limit' with ISBN 9780307268358 and ISBN 0307268357.