HUNTERS

For Lloyd Swift, the hard part of killing Terry Minyan wasn’t pulling the trigger.

- Joseph S. Walker

It wasn’t watching through the scope as his cousin fell to the forest floor and convulsed for a moment before going utterly still.

The hard part was being nice to him for months beforehand. After that, killing him was pure relief.

Terry had, in Lloyd’s view, always been useless. In childhood their families lived just down the street from each other, but Terry couldn’t be counted on to fill a spot in a backyard football scrimmage, or swipe cigarettes to smoke behind somebody’s shed, or go rambling into the dense Maine woods with a BB gun, looking for squirrels. He carried books everywhere he went—always at least two, in case he finished one. He stared at the world through thick oval glasses that made his eyes look huge. He actually cared, to a degree Lloyd could only regard as perverse, about school.

By their teen years, Lloyd gave up trying to include Terry in anything he did. A lot of their classmates didn’t even realize the hard-partying quarterback was related to the valedictorian bookworm, which was fine with Lloyd. You couldn’t take girls skinny-dipping at Follet’s Pond if Terry was going to lecture them on the life cycle of the frog. You couldn’t bring him to a kegger if he was going to sit in a corner, sipping Diet Sprite and creeping everybody out with his big unblinking eyes.

After high school, Terry took off for Harvard. Lloyd was briefly scouted by some Division II schools before he blew out a knee in a pickup basketball game. It would be the local community college for him. Barring the occasional Thanksgiving dinner, he didn’t really expect to see Terry again.

And so the years rolled on. Until one day Lloyd woke to find himself forty-eight years old, twice divorced, and living in a rathole apartment while he taught PE at the high school he once ruled.