Pastor Bob #2

This one seems to end too soon, but again I'll go ahead and throw it out there. One good exercise after the writing class would be to take these first two stories and give them an update based on what I have learned.

Bucky

Pastor Bob

Somewhere back in the dim ages of time, Pastor Bob had taken up shooting to relax before his Sunday morning sermon. We often asked Pastor Bob how it was that someone so given to stage jitters would become a minister of a fairly large church. He would always say the same thing,
“We’re just called to it, we can’t stop,” he would intone.
The shooting group had never figured out which “we” the pastor was referring to, but this particular “we” would nod our heads gravely, just as though Pastor Bob had imparted some gem of wisdom to us and we had fully understood. Pastor Bob would then launch into some tale of hunting legerdemain, complete with stalking skill, camouflage and concealment, and racks. We cheerfully listened to his tales, each of us having a store of our own. However, we had one problem with Pastor Bob. His tales were the truth. If he stalked and shot a doe, it didn’t grow antlers over the years; it never ghosted through the woods, or shook leaves from the trees with its snorting. The pastor’s deer, remained deer and his skills were real. We just couldn’t compete with that. If a fellow added a point or two to his rack, or his deer grew in size and stealth over the years, we could compete on those grounds. But if a doe remained a doe over the years of retelling, how could a guy compete with that?
Pastor Bob was weird in other ways too; his house did not sport so much as a single antler. Our houses sprouted little antlers on the shed, a bit larger ones in the den, sometimes a truly magnificent set in the living room. Usually the truly magnificent set was found on the cover of the Cabela’s catalog, much as we would have liked to have it on the wall. There were no dead things in Pastor Bob’s house either. Stuffed deer heads, shiny dead fish, a former resident of the African plains; none of these manly decorations were to be found in the parsonage. Yet despite his lack of the manly characteristics of your normal hunter, Pastor Bob’s hunting skills stood head and shoulders above our own.
This of course led to more than a few jokes about the ‘homicidal’ tendencies of the clergy. Pastor Bob took these well, often laughing along, for the first 473 times. After that a pained expression could sometimes be seen on the pastor’s face as though he were engaged in another battle for his soul with the powers of darkness. Sometimes he got this same expression after dinner at our favorite roadside diner, but we put that down to coincidence. Somehow the rumor spread that the pastor, a Marine Recon combat veteran, had several confirmed kills on his service record. The pastor for his part neither confirmed nor denied the rumors, but seemed pleased when the homicidal jokes suddenly died out.
Another fine day at the shooting range dawned and Ed Monson and I met Pastor Bob at the range. Ed, short for Edmund, possessed a rather sarcastic sense of humor that could be fun at times but was mostly just irritating. Ed was the wisest of the wiseacres and the smartest of the smart-aleks. Taking him to a fine restaurant was a sure way to cut your stay short and experience at least one embarrassing apology. Ed had a smart mouth and he couldn’t keep it shut.
“Morning pastor, killed anything yet today?” Ed asked in place of a pleasant greeting.
Alarmed, I reached over to remind Ed of his manners with a playful tap to the back of his head.
“Easy brother, you don’t know your own strength at times,” Pastor Bob gently scolded me, “You might apologize for that, his eyes are still crossed.”
“Sorry Pastor, please forgive me, but don’t worry about his eyes they always look that way,” I replied.
“No doubt after one of your ‘playful taps’. However, sometimes it is better to apologize to the victim and not the bystander, Brother Buck”
Ouch, I checked to see if Ed had said that, but it seemed to have come from the Pastor.
“Sorry Ed, please forgive me!” I said to Ed who had recovered enough to have both eyes focused somewhere in the distance. Perhaps I had over-reacted a bit. I gently removed Ed’s rifle from his hands, just as a precaution.
“Generally the good Lord would have us wait until the victim is fully conscious to apologize,” Pastor Bob said gently.
“Yes, Pastor,” I responded meekly, fingering a scorch mark somewhere around my ear. I could see that Ed was a rank amateur in the verbal skewering arts. I wouldn’t want to catch Pastor Bob on a day he was feeling mean.