Shot Down by Jonathan Mary-Todd

man said from the water. “Be strong!”
    â€œLook, you’ve probably seen more awful things than a kid should’ve, than anybody should’ve. And the only way this’ll end safe and not be another awful thing is if you hand me that gun. Trust me. Trusting people—it’s another way to be strong.”
    The boy slid his finger off the gun’s trigger, then slid it in again.
    â€œBut,” he said, “
I
enjoy this too,” and—
snap
—pulled the trigger back.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
    â€œI
    can’t believe you socked a kid,” the Captain said.
    â€œHe tried to
shoot
me,” I replied. “If the canteen hadn’t stopped the bullet, I would be dead.”
    â€œOh, I was there! Not sayin’ you weren’t justified. He was a vicious little dude, when you total everything up. But—if his dad hadn’t had me in a death grip at the time, I think I woulda fallen over giggling when you socked little Kyle.”
    â€œYou’re the one who decided how to dispatch those hunting dogs.”
    â€œDo. Not. Bring up the dogs. That kid made a choice. Those poor dogs didn’t have a say in the matter.”
    I sat next to the Captain, arms around my knees, as our raft drifted creakily downriver. We would float until nightfall, then find a place to sleep, to forage.
    We had left the man and his son tied up by the shore. Once I took care of the boy, the Captain and I were able to hold down Carter. The man shouted and spat in the shallow water as we roped his wrists together. As I made my way onto the raft, the old man above us began to blow into his whistle again and again in anger. I watched him get smaller and smaller on his spot on the hillside until I couldn’t make out the scowl on his craggy face.
    â€œYer pretty darn lucky you had that canteen around your neck,” the Captain said. The woods around us looked the same as those where we’d left from, but the sun was getting low. “Maybe a luckier person would’ve gotten this raft moving a little earlier, or wouldn’t have got shot down by a family of Kentucky manhunters in the first place. You might have a net total of bad luck, all things considered. But you got pretty lucky with respect to not getting shot.”
    I rubbed my thumb along the dent left in the heavy canteen. After Kyle had fired the rifle, I’d thought, for a few breaths, that I was gone. And maybe Kyle had thought he got me. Or maybe he stood still from shock—had never shot at anyone from that close before.
    I had stumbled back, my ears ringing, my arms spinning in circles. And then I had stopped, patted my chest, and felt no blood, no bullet wound—just dirt and sweat and the stinging hot cavern the round had put in the hunk of metal around my neck. Then, like the Captain said, I socked the kid.
    I removed the canteen, looping its strap around one of the raft’s bindings, and started to tell the Captain more about earlier. When the boy had pretended to be hurt. How I thought I might’ve got something through to him.
    â€œMaybe you did. The kid’ll probably be thinkin’ about today for a while, anyway. Might dawn on him sometime down the road that his dad’s nuts,” the Captain said. “Oooh—maybe it’s
karma
you didn’t get plugged, ’specially considering it was the boy’s canteen.”
    â€œI don’t know what that is.”
    The air filled with cricket chirps and the coos of owls as the night came on, muffling other, faraway sounds. Every so often I’d think I heard horse hooves, never knowing for sure. I pictured Roman the horse clopping on through the woods, keeping pace with our raft.
    When it got dark, we figured we were far enough away to start a fire. Even if Carter or Pop-Pop saw the smoke somehow, they had a long enough walk back to their house. The Captain and I nudged the raft toward shore, then both collapsed for a while before