A Single Shot Read online

  John lies down next to the girl. He stares up at the ceiling and softly talks to her. He tells her he is sorry he shot her and that most of the time he believes it was an accident but occasionally, when he thinks about how angry the world sometimes makes him and how little he seems able to change things, he’s afraid it wasn’t. He tells her that when he was her age his only plan had been to marry the girl he loved, move her back to his family’s farm, be the best farmer he could be, and raise his children to do the same, and that his father’s having lost everything when John was sixteen crippled John the same as if he’d been in a car accident and lost the use of his legs. He tells her about the many failures in his life and that the only things in it worth holding on to are his wife and son, but that they had left him.

  The body is bloated with gas. It occasionally burps or breaks wind. Sometimes it shifts on the mattress. When its right arm jerks out and hits John’s elbow, he stops speaking and gets up from the bed.

  Standing over her, he apologizes for talking only about his problems when he at least was alive. He tells her that, no matter what else happens, he will try to find out her name and where she was from and that, if he succeeds, he will somehow notify her family about her death and let them know either where her body can be picked up or that she has received a proper burial.

  He lifts up the cadaver, stiff with rigor mortis, and slides the plastic out from around it. He takes off the dead girl’s shoes and socks, then wrestles her out of her jeans and blood-soaked T-shirt. She isn’t wearing a bra. He pulls off her panties because they are soiled and wet. He drops everything into the plastic. Then he takes out his hunting knife. After rolling the cadaver onto its back and eyeballing the bullet’s course through the torso, he goes after the slug with his knife. He locates it just beneath the skin’s surface, embedded in soft flesh. He quickly cuts it out, then drops it onto the clothes.

  He walks down the hall to the bathroom, picks up from the floor a towel and washcloth, dampens the latter with soap and water, then returns to the bedroom and spends several minutes scrubbing blood, sweat, and dirt from the cadaver. He sees no star-shaped birthmark; no scar on her knee; no blood-red bull’s-eyes. Far from being large and womanly, her breasts, surrounding the bullet hole, are small and girlish. She has almost no pubic bush. For these things alone, he is thankful.

  He pulls on a pair of Moira’s rubber cleaning gloves, then from the floor takes one of her combs, a tube of red lipstick, black eyeliner, and blush. After combing several hair strands away from the dead girl’s forehead, he unties her ponytail, combs out the snarls, and catches the hair again in a rubber band. He applies the eyeliner and a thin gloss of lipstick. Still, he thinks, she is too pale. He dabs blush on her cheeks and, less so, her temples.

  After tearing the tags from one of Moira’s panties and a T-shirt, he puts the underwear on the dead girl. He considers outfitting her in a blouse and skirt, but is afraid they might somehow be traced to Moira, so settles for a label-less pair of her jeans. He dresses the corpse one side at a time, using a hand to hold the rigid body upright and another to slowly thread a leg into the pants. It takes him close to half an hour. All the while, the cadaver makes noises and jumps. The smell starts to make him nauseous. He rolls up the jeans, slightly long on the dead girl, then snaps them. He puts her old socks and sneakers back on, then props the body in a mostly sitting position against the headboard. He pushes with his fingers at the corners of her mouth, removing some of its slackness.

  Afterwards, he stands back to appraise her. He thinks she looks almost alive and that if she were, she’d be beautiful. He tells her so. Then he runs and gets the Polaroid. Eight shots remain in the camera. He uses them all in a dull light, taking her portrait from midchest up at three different angles. He lays the photographs on the bureau. Now he’s not sure what to do with the body. What would make things worse or better? And for which of them? A part of him feels as dead as the girl. He’s tired enough to fall over. He wonders if in the morning the sun will shine everywhere but on the trailer, and in that sliver of darkness the world will see what awful secrets he is hiding.

  He crouches down, puts his arms beneath the girl’s knees and chest, and lifts her off the bed. Her unbending weight is staggering. That close to his nose, the smell nearly gags him. He labors with her over to the bedroom door, then down the corridor to the top of the basement stairs, where, after leaning her against the wall to switch on the light, he carts her down-cellar and over to the stand-up freezer, the door to which is open, its melting contents scattered on the floor. The compartment is just five feet high. To get the cadaver inside, he vigorously bends and twists it for several minutes, until finally there is the sharp snap of breaking bone and the body folds half-inward from the waist. John pushes it to the back wall, then stacks around and in front of it pieces of the butchered deer and snake so that, when he’s done, what is visible of the cadaver is nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the meat.

  Upstairs, he wraps the girl’s old clothes, the bloody sheets and towels, the note, and the rubber gloves in the plastic strip, then takes the plastic out to the incinerator and burns it. He hurls the slug deep into the woods. He enters the woodshed. His tools are on the floor among garden mulch and fertilizer from several sliced-open sacks and rock salt from a tipped-over fifty-pound barrel. He shovels the mulch and fertilizer into trash bins and the rock salt back into the barrel, then rearranges the tools exactly as they had been.

  He goes back outside and crawls beneath the shed, where the sack is still attached to the fourth beam. He unties it, carries it into the trailer, dumps the money on the floor, and tries to count it, but after reaching eighty thousand dollars loses his place. He is too tired to start over. He thinks that even if he were to give the money back to the thieves, they would kill him, especially if it came from Ira Hollenbach’s. And if he handed it over to the law, he would implicate himself in at least one death. He puts the money back in the sack, carries it outside, and ties it beneath the truck bed, between the axle and one wheel.

  He spends over two hours cleaning up the trailer, repairing what he can, and putting most of his and Moira’s belongings back where they had been. With the dead girl there, he thinks he won’t sleep, but he does. He turns on the television set, lies on the couch, and for less than five minutes watches the horizontally distorted images of a man shooting a pistol at a giant fly.

  THURSDAY

  The unrestful dead, those who have not by their loved ones been laid to earthly rest, inhabit the trees, bushes, birds, and animals of the mountainside. Their eyes are the sun and moon; when one shuts, the other opens. Their words are the stars. Their sadness the clouds. Their fingers the wind. They watch, talk, and touch, but are not felt by the living…

  HE WAKES, in a cold sweat, to the sound of shattering glass. Sensing another’s presence, he lies there in the still-dark morning anticipating a gunshot, a black shadow, or the touch of cold steel against his neck, but hears only the tick of the living-room clock and, through the screened windows, a light wind moving the trees.

  Had he been hallucinating? Or dreaming? If he hadn’t, and in a second was killed, would he come face-to-face with the dead girl? Would she forgive him? Would her soul in the afterlife be as beautiful as her body in death? He pictures a place following life—a wood-paneled bar maybe, playing soft country music—where souls, good and bad, dance a few slow ones and reminisce before receiving their permanent assignments to heaven or hell. A place where life’s hatchet is buried and all drink to eternity. He remembers his father, reduced to skin and bones, after wordless weeks, rousing himself to scream at the visiting Pastor McLean, “Weren’t never your call, Reverend! Was mine! Now it’s His!”

  An engine roars to life outside.

  In one motion, he rolls off the couch and fumbles beneath it for the .45. Powerful lights intrude through the trailer’s back windows. The engine exhorts a labored whine. The lights get brighter. John grasps the gun, cocks it, and jumps up. The
engine’s pitch ascends to a high-revved torque. “Son of a bitch’ll ram the trailer!” thinks John.

  He dashes away from the sound toward the front deck door. He’s three-quarters there when the bottom of his bare foot feels as if it’s been shot. He goes down. Behind him, the lights blink off. The engine upshifts, reaches a crescendo, then slowly recedes.

  Through the broken glass of the deck door, John watches the outline of the vehicle, darker even than the surrounding dark, vanish down the hollow road.

  Panting heavily, he gets to his knees. He fumbles for the wall switch and turns on the light. Glass from the door’s middle panel lies in fragments on the linoleum floor. A piece of it has lodged in his foot, which is bleeding.

  He stands up, then, trailing blood, tiptoes through the glass and down the hall to the bathroom, where he gets a towel, tweezers, gauze, waterproof tape, and a bottle of peroxide. He brings everything back to the couch, sits down, and, mumbling a string of pained curses, with the tweezers pokes around in the wound for the glass. His foot trembles. So do his hands. He laughs giddily from pain and at his shaking extremities, then loudly commands himself to shut up and act like a man. Soon he finds the glass, a half-a-peanut-sized chunk, and pulls it out. He pours peroxide on the towel and, wincing, cleans the wound, which is not very deep, then tapes gauze around it.

  Afterwards, he is drenched in sweat. His heart beats loud in his ears. He pinches the glass chunk in the tweezers, holds it up to the light, and stares at it. He imagines himself as the glass, the dead girl his wound, and Waylon, Obadiah Cornish—and maybe Simon Breedlove—the tweezers. Aloud, he asks the girl how she had ever fallen for a guy like Waylon, who obviously grieved more for his lost money than for her. He gets mad thinking about it and tells her so. “Look how he disrespected your body and even when you was alive made you throw out your history like it didn’t matter!”

  He places the glass chunk on the coffee table, then leans back against the couch, and, gazing at the blank television set, remembers it playing when he fell asleep. He leans forward and sees that the set is still turned on and plugged in. “Ain’t that great? Along with the rest of it, the fuckin’ tube is shot!” Then, lowering his voice, he tells the girl, “This Waylon guy’s a loser. You should never a’ run off with him in the first place, then you w’udn’t a’ been in the quarry and ’id still be alive and I w’udn’t be respons’ble for ya!”

  He straightens up, leans forward, puts on his socks and boots, then gets up, goes into the kitchen, and makes a pot of coffee. He turns on the deck light. The sky is starting to lighten some. The fog is still thick. In places, it’s as high as the trees. From the upper pasture comes the invisible mooing and bell-jangling of Nobie’s herd. Any minute will sound his hollow shout. John thinks of Abbie Nobie and her empowerment theory. “I’d guess she’s about the same age as you,” he tells the dead girl. “She worries after me. Reckon she thinks I’ve become like a hermit without Moira. When Nolan was here, she used to come up and beg Moira to hold him and sometimes Moira would call her ’count of Nolan was colicky and Abbie was so good at gettin’ him to stop crying. Moira said she’s got a love in her heart and the kid could feel it.”

  From the kitchen closet he takes the broom and dustpan, then carries them over to the deck doorway, lays the dustpan on the counter, and starts sweeping up the glass. “Long’s we got the money,” he tells the girl, “I guess they won’t kill me.” He sweeps out from beneath the table, along with several small chunks of glass, a fist-sized stone that is wrapped in yellow paper and circled by a rubber band. John kneels down, picks up the stone, and removes the paper. Ink writing appears on one side. John smooths it out on the floor and reads:

  Two eyes fer an eye. Two teeth fer a tooth. We gut your wife, murdrer. We gut your kid. Git the package the Hen. Or Bang! Bang!

  P.S. Why don’t ya call the law? Hah. Hah.

  Suddenly he is aware of his own mental denseness, of his intellectual shortcomings. His stupidity looms like a brick wall between uncentered anger and thought. He tries to remember ever getting an A in school for anything but gym, and can’t. The unfairness of the world hangs before his unconscious gaze like a grotesque masterpiece.

  Beneath him at the kitchen table, his legs hop up and down. His hands shake. His vision is marred by floating cells. Adrenaline courses like a drug through him. He can’t sit still, yet his energy is unfocused. He jumps up, runs over to the gun rack, removes every weapon and shell box, then sits down on the living-room floor, tests the mechanism of each gun, looks down its barrel to see that it’s clean, then loads it. He cocks the Winchester thirty-aught-six and returns it to the rack. Then he puts the .45 in his belt, the 12-gauge in a cabinet next to the refrigerator, the .22 pistol behind the bathroom toilet, the .30-30 Greener beneath his bed, and the 16-gauge behind the basement freezer.

  He runs back upstairs and dials Moira’s number. The sky out the kitchen window is gray. What wind there was has died down. It will take most of the day for the fog to move. The phone rings four times. Five. The air through the screens is warm and filled with birdcalls. Seven rings. Eight. John rubs his eyes, removes his hand, and waits for his vision to clear. The phone is picked up. A man says, “Hello?”

  “Let me talk my son,” says John.

  “What?”

  “Put him on.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number.”

  “He better be there, you bastard.”

  “The only child here, friend, has a vocabulary of less than half-a-dozen words.”

  “Wait!”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t tell me where to leave the money.”

  The phone clicks dead.

  He sits naked in the unstoppered bathtub beneath the shower’s hard stream of cold water, unconsciously reflecting on how the world’s lee and sway is as paralyzing to him as it had been to his father. He remembers his father pacing back and forth in the kitchen at night, loudly cursing while blindly punching and kicking appliances as if the machines were his creditors and cancer, “The bastards! The dirty, fucking bastards!”

  When he steps from the tub, he is beet-red. He rebandages his foot and shoulder, then puts on a clean pair of jeans and T-shirt. The dull light of the heavily fog-shrouded morning comes through the bedroom window. “Nothing off this mountain is real,” he thinks. “If I sit here and do nothing, nothing will be lost.” Then he looks at Moira’s and Nolan’s pictures on the headboard and knows it’s not so. In the living room, he calls their apartment again. This time there is no answer. He redials, lets the phone ring twenty times, then hangs up. He has no idea what to do. He wishes the whole world were as easy as tracking something down and shooting it. He goes down-cellar.

  He opens the freezer, takes out a couple of venison steaks, and stares at one side of the girl’s made-up face with its wide-open eye. The smell has dissipated. “I’m trying to figure things out,” he says, “but I got no fuckin’ idea.” He puts the steaks back, closes the freezer, and locks it. He runs around collecting the guns that he had hidden, then starts rehiding them in different places. He is on his way out to the woodshed with the 16-gauge when the phone rings. He goes back and answers it.

  “How’s John Moon getting on?”

  “You ain’t said your name.”

  “Sorry, John. Daggard Pitt. Thought you recognized my voice.”

  “What d’you want?”

  “I have those papers ready for you to sign.”

  “Did we talk ’bout this?”

  “You’re not agreeing to anything. We’re just protecting your rights. Remember?”

  John’s not sure if he hears an engine’s whine down the road. He can’t see through the fog beyond a hundred yards.

  “Is it convenient for you to stop in this afternoon, John?”

  “It ain’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I can’t make it.”

  “Maybe you’ve got another matter you want to discuss?”

>   “What?”

  “Other than the divorce, I mean.”

  “What matter?”

  “I hope I’m not stepping over the line, John. It’s just that I know lately you’ve been under a lot of pressure and, well—I hear things.” The lawyer pants breathily. “I’d hate to see your whole life get ruined because of a mistake or two.” Suddenly John’s pulse goes ballistic. He feels it rapping like a snare drum against his temple. “And it wouldn’t be just your life, John.”

  “What?”

  “There’s the boy to think of. Nolan…”

  “He ain’t in this!”

  “Of course he’s in it, John. He’s your son.”

  “You leave my family out of it!”

  “I’m sorry I’ve angered you, John, but I’d be less than honest if I didn’t tell you that, for me, your family has always been very much in it. Very much so.” Pitt coughs anemically. Down the road, the whine gets louder. The phone is trembling in John’s hand. “Most problems aren’t as big as they first seem, John. The thing is to deal with them before people get backed into corners.”

  “What people?”

  The lawyer exhales doggily. “Well, the law for one…”

  “The law!”

  “I’d hate to think…”