A Single Shot Page 11

“Who are you whoring for now, Pitt?”

  “John?”

  “Tell the bastards stay way from my wife and kid or they’ll never get what they want!”

  John slams down the phone. Down the road, above the engine’s increased drone, the fog radiates yellow. A vehicle slowly takes shape in the thinning mist, then, two hundred feet below the trailer, a black-and-white county sheriff’s car emerges above the treeline.

  Dolan’s wearing mirrored sunglasses, though there’s no sun. He spits on the grass driveway, where John has met him, then strides forward and slaps a folded paper into his hand. “You been legal served.”

  John glances down at the paper without reading it.

  “The judge don’t want ya around her no more. Your kid, neither. First time I hear of it, I’ll slap the cuffs on ya.”

  John starts tapping the paper rapidly against his forehead. He can’t think quick enough to keep up with the images in his head. His thoughts swim in a consciousness dark as mud. Dolan points at the .45 in his belt.

  “You got a license for that, Moon?”

  John steps toward him. “She’s loaded too, Ralph.”

  “Is that some kind of threat?”

  “You just come from there?”

  “Where?”

  “Pitt’s?”

  “Who?”

  “My fucking lawyer, crook!”

  “Why would I?”

  “Who give ya this, then?”

  “I’m an officer of the court, Moon.”

  “That who sent ya here?”

  “Who the hell else?”

  “I tried to talk my kid and some guy answered the phone.” Taking a step forward, John puts his mouth six inches from Dolan’s. “I don’t s’pose you or Pitt know ’bout that or ’bout the fuckin’ rock through my window!”

  Backing against the car, Dolan puts a hand on his holster. John slaps the hand away. “What the hell are you talking about, Moon?”

  “I don’t feel good.”

  “What?”

  “I see shit everywhere.”

  “You’re jumpy as a bug, Moon.” Again he puts his hand on his holster. Again John slaps it away. “Just calm down.”

  “I’m tryin’ to figure out why you’re here. You want me to hand the package o’er you! Is that it?”

  Dolan gets his hand on his holster a third time and starts fumbling with the strap. John knocks his sunglasses off. Dolan gives up on the strap to grab the glasses. He shoves them into his pocket.

  “Where’s my wife and kid, Ralph?”

  Dolan tries to slide out around John. His lips are working, but nothing’s coming out.

  “I’m holdin’ you ’countable.”

  “Wha?”

  “They ain’t better be a hair touched on their heads!” John uses his chest to pin Dolan to the side of the car.

  “I’m just serving a court order, Moon.”

  John backs up, turns around, and walks into the trailer.

  The village is still heavily shrouded in haze when he arrives at the municipal parking lot. He wanders like a ghost in that soup down Main Street to Puffy’s, enters through the front door, nods at Puffer, who seems not to have moved in the preceding three days, sits down opposite the fat proprietor at the counter, and of Carla demands, “Coffee.”

  “ ’Bout the other night,” she says, trying to hand him a menu, which John lets drop on the counter. “Moira weren’t aware…”

  “Where’s she at?”

  “She don’t work this morning.”

  John raises his eyes at her.

  “Said somethin’ ’bout going out of town.”

  “Where to?”

  Carla shrugs.

  “How ’bout Nolan?”

  “With them, I’d guess.”

  “Them?”

  “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout it.”

  “I’m askin’.”

  “Not the right person, you ain’t.”

  “I guess you know your boyfriend’s a psycho.”

  She pours coffee into a cup, puts it down in front of him, then heads into the dining room. Smoke hovers below the ceiling like fog oozing through the vents. Voices drone like static. John gulps down half his coffee. The whole world feels to him like a whisper, with him stone-deaf. Someone drops a plate in the kitchen. Puffy rolls his thick head at the sound. Carla walks back up the aisle from the dining room. Spinning round, John catches her by the arm. “You as dumb as you act?”

  “Mitts off, John.”

  “Where’s he at?”

  “Why?”

  “We got business.”

  “Then I guess he knows where to find ya.”

  John gives her arm a squeeze.

  “Hey!”

  “What’s goin’ on, John?” Puffy’s smoke-raggedy voice floats quietly across the counter. John glances at him, but doesn’t answer. The pharmacist, Leonard Pine, walks in and sits down two stools from John. John grimaces menacingly at him. Pine gets up and moves to a booth. Carla tries to pull her arm free. John pinches it harder. Puffy says, “How can I help?”

  “It’s up to her,” says John.

  Puffer casually blows smoke Carla’s way.

  “I don’t even know what he wants.”

  “I’d as soon break your arm,” whispers John.

  “If he’s got a question, Carla,” Puffer says, crunching out his cigarette and slowly pulling another from the pack in his shirt pocket, “why not give him an answer?”

  “I ain’t got the one he’s wantin’.”

  “Try, though,” says Puffer.

  “ ’Bliged to ya, fat man,” says Carla. “You’re a real prince.”

  Puffer ignites the fresh cigarette, drags on it, then, folding his hands on the counter, lets it dangle from one corner of his mouth while exhaling twin lines of smoke through his nose. “Leonard Pine sets over there in a booth ’stead of at the counter where he has for ten years waitin’ for his coffee to drink and a menu to read.”

  “Coffee black, eggs over easy, rye toast with grape jelly!” Carla barks into the kitchen. “ ’Kay, Puffy?”

  “Had a pretty young thing in here the other day wants to waitress,” Puffy rasps barely above a whisper. “Had tits the size of cantaloupes. I told her leave her number.”

  “Bet she’s just holding her breath, too,” hisses Carla. She frowns loathsomely at John. “Last I knew, he was staying over to the Oaks.”

  “What room?”

  “My memory ain’t what it was. Somethin’ in the two-twenties.”

  John lets go her arm and stands up. Puffy says, “Best you don’t come back in for a while, John.”

  “Big man,” snorts Carla.

  John strides past her toward the exit.

  At the south end of town, he turns left and heads through Shantytown, a single dirt street of unpainted clapboard shacks and grassless, junk-marred yards, where yapping dogs and half-naked kids run in the street. From behind a gutted jalopy something flies out and lands loudly in the back of the truck. The kids start laughing and hooting. A few of them yell at John to stop. He keeps driving, not slowing down until after he comes to the top of the gradual, mile-long hill where sits the Oaks.

  He’s above the fog. The unimpeded sun illuminates the two-story, paint-chipped motel, L-shaped and most recently yellow. Half a dozen cars sit in the lot. None of them is the black Chevy Blazer, though at the far end of the longest row of rooms sits a rusted-out blue-white Cadillac that at a glance John thinks might be Simon Breedlove’s.

  He pulls the truck around behind the building where it can’t be seen from the front, shuts off the engine, shoves the .45 down his pants, covers it with his shirt, and steps out. Immediately he hears something moving about in the truck’s bed. He looks inside. Scurrying around in there is a large black Shantytown rat. John reaches in, grabs the squirming rodent by its tail, whips it in a fast circle over his head, and hurls it at the bushes bordering the motel. The rat lands on the pavement just short of the bushes, shakes itself,
then runs off squealing. John walks to the building’s rear entrance and enters the office, where on a crippled recliner behind the desk sits Skinny Leak, watching television. Leak waves at the set. “You b’lieve them titties is real?”

  John doesn’t say.

  “Well, they ain’t. It’s a man got plastic tits and a pussy made from the skin off’n his own leg!”

  “Obadiah Cornish staying here?”

  “Doctor cut off his dick and sewed them things on.”

  John reaches down and turns around the register so that he can read it. Skinny nods at him.

  “A Moon, ain’t ya?”

  “The on’y one.”

  “What ta hell happened your brothers?”

  “Never had none.”

  “Who ta hell am I thinkin’ you is, then?”

  “Somebody I ain’t.”

  “Fer Christ sake! Your old man worked to the mill sure as I sit here.”

  “He was a farmer,” says John, running his finger down the names on the register, but seeing no Cornish.

  “Let me get this straight now—you’re a Moon”—Skinny pushes his bird-like body out of the chair and hobbles over to the desk—“but there ain’t but one of ya and your old man was a farmer and never worked to the mill?”

  John nods.

  “Mickey Moon, right?”

  “John.”

  “Shit.”

  “I know he’s in room two-twenty-somethin’,” says John.

  “Know what that makes you?”

  John wordlessly glances at the old man, running his pink tongue over black, toothless gums.

  “Makes you the man in the moon!” He slaps his knee and hisses. “Got to be, don’t it? You the on’y fucking one?” He reaches out and turns the book back around. “Who you looking for there, man in the moon?”

  John tells him.

  “No hens in this house. What’s he look like?”

  “Tall, gangly son of a bitch.”

  “Got him an alias.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s why he ain’t in the book.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Guess he’s expectin’ ya, is he?”

  “I aim to find out.”

  “Want me to call ahead?”

  “I’ll just go on down and knock.” John pulls out his wallet, withdraws from it a ten-dollar bill, and lays the bill on the desk, with his hand still on it. “Who b’longs that Cadillac yonder?”

  “Which one?”

  “Ain’t but one.” John nods his head at the wall beyond which, obscured from his view, lies the long side of the L. “Down the end. All beat to hell.”

  Leak cranes his head back and peeks out through a little porthole-shaped window behind the desk. He hisses again. “Musta beamed up, man in the moon.”

  “Gone?”

  Leak throws his bony little fingers into the air.

  “Was here how long?”

  “On’y you says it e’er was.”

  John lifts his hand from the bill. Leak reaches for it. John slams his other hand down on Leak’s. “Let me guess. Cornish’s down there all the way the end.”

  Leak tugs free his hand gripping the bill, folds the bill, and slips it into his shirt pocket. “Twenty-two-niner, man in the moon. Coulda saved yerself a sawbuck.”

  At the building’s front, John walks down the long cement corridor facing the rooms, each one fronted by a dead or dying spruce bush planted in gravel, to a set of metal stairs adjacent to where the Cadillac had been parked. He climbs to the second floor, again turns left, quietly tiptoes up to room 229 and puts his ear to the scratched wood door. Inside, a television loudly plays the same talk show Leak was watching. What sounds like a fan or air conditioner blows. Intermingling with the din is a gurgling noise, like running water or percolating coffee. John starts to knock, then, changing his mind, reaches down and with one hand pulls the .45 from his belt. He raises his foot to kick in the door, when, two rooms down, another door suddenly opens. He jumps back, holding the pistol out in front of him.

  “Jesus God! Don’t shoot!” Dangling a Tiparillo from her mouth, a breast-sagging, middle-aged blond woman freezes in midstride.

  John puts a finger to his lips.

  “Huh?”

  “Who’s in here?” he whispers.

  “I don’t know.” The woman gasps. The cigar drops from her mouth. “And I don’t fucking want to know.” One of her eyes looks like a clump of frog’s eggs. The other is half taken up by its dilated pupil. Her sweatsuit’s too tight. “I’m from Oklahoma. This shit’s all new to me. I ain’t had no breakfast, no coffee—I just got in last night.”

  With his pistol John waves her back into her room.

  “I gotta go breakfast,” she whines.

  John walks toward her, vaguely aware that his life is spiraling downward from bad to worse, and against the descent, his own sense of powerlessness. A part of his mind, already faded, blinks off. He thinks if the whole world boils down to a person’s last view of it, his won’t be of the Oaks, but someone’s might. He’s three steps from the woman before she moves, then she does so hesitantly, backing into the room as if she’s forgotten something inside but not sure what. John follows her in, then quietly shuts the door.

  The woman moans.

  The air smells of cheap perfume over cheap detergent and cigar smoke. A faucet drips in the bathroom. In the center of the stained yellow rug lies a large, open suitcase. John reaches into it and picks up a pair of stockings and underpants. The woman’s mouth falls open. She keeps backing up until her knees hit the bed. She lets out a little groan and sits down. “What happened your eye?” asks John.

  “My eye?”

  “Are you blind in it?”

  “A man…”

  “What man?”

  “Some guy in a bar where I was dancing…” She takes a deep breath like she’s having trouble breathing. John shoves the pistol into his belt. “I was a dancer…”

  “A dancer?”

  “You’re scaring me.”

  “I ain’t tryin’ to.”

  “You are, though.”

  “I know it. Me too.”

  The woman looks at him confusedly.

  “Was you with your clothes off?”

  “What?”

  “Dancing?”

  “Nobody’d pay me otherwise…”

  John moves farther into the room. His balance seems affected. He has a feeling he’s listing to the right. The framed vase of flowers on the wall appears to get shorter and fatter as he looks at it. “It’s like when I shot the girl,” he says, barely aware of his own words. “We was all there.”

  “What?”

  “Her. The deer. Me.” He wads the underpants into a tight ball. “Who knows why? Just happened that way.”

  The woman pants a little maniacally. John pictures in his mind a set of dull claws scratching at a smooth wall. He’s back in the quarry maybe, trying to scale its sheer sides. He thinks the woman’s probably a mother. Her drooping breasts and wide hips. Her disconsolate gaze. Her breathlessness. “A beer bottle.” She huffs. “Some guy…”

  “What?” says John. He moves closer to her.

  She half sobs, “My eye.”

  “You cain’t see out it?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Can you see these?” John holds the wadded underpants out to the side of the woman’s bad eye. She doesn’t even try to look. She starts to cry hysterically. John leans down and claps a hand over her mouth, warm and moist as a hot sponge. In his mind he sees only the pointlessly scraping claws. “Shhh,” he whispers, bringing the underpants down and putting them where his spit-damp hand had been. “Shhh. This ain’t gon’ hurt you much. And that’s a promise.”

  Her blond wig falls off. John carefully replaces it, as if later he might point to this small act as proof of something. He lays her in the bathtub and pulls shut the curtain. Before leaving her room, he hangs out the “Do Not Disturb” sign.

  The sun is hea
ting up. On John’s shoulders it rests like flesh warmer than his. Below him, last night’s moisture steams from the cracked parking lot, where a half-bald dog simultaneously laps and pisses into an oil-filmed puddle and four cars sit, all but one on the short side of the L. From the roof’s overhang, several filthy-looking pigeons coo. Laughter sounds down near the office and John watches two maids emerge from there and disappear around back.

  He takes out the .45, again walks to room 229, and crouches next to the door’s keyhole. He hears what he did before, except now a soap opera plays and the gurgling sound has stopped. He is overcome by the same unbalanced sensation as earlier in the woman’s room. He thinks of Simon Breedlove, the closest person to a father he still has, and of his wife and son, whom he experiences now as bodiless dreams from which he has awakened desiring to reenter while sadly realizing he can’t. He decides he will buy the boy a gift. A thing they can enjoy together. A replica of a farm maybe, with lifelike animals that neigh, moo, or oink. Then, suddenly remembering about the money, he thinks, “Why not buy him a real horse, cow, and pig?” A phone begins to ring in the room, abruptly returning John to the present. Ten times it rings, then stops.

  John stands up. He knocks on the door. No one answers. John backs up a step and lifts his foot to his waist. He kicks in the door and rushes in after it.

  Belted to a wooden desk chair, Obadiah Cornish is naked from the waist up, his head inclining precariously to one side and his mouth agape as if in stunned disbelief, reacting to what’s playing on the television in front of him. Cut clear to the spine, his throat oozes a thin line of his blood, and the rug beneath him is soaked where much of it has already pumped out. His face and chest are marred by circular red lesions that look like cigarette burns. The tip of his nose, his upper lip, and his left ear have been sliced off.

  John shuts the door, sits down on the bed, closes his eyes, and pictures the boy, in wide-eyed wonderment, petting, naming, and feeding these real-life creatures that John will buy for him. He imagines him asking questions about the animals, questions for which John actually will be able to provide answers. He imagines his son regarding him in awe for his vast knowledge of the world.

  He opens his eyes, leans forward, and switches off the television set. He becomes acutely aware of the leaky-faucet-like noise of Obadiah Cornish’s blood sporadically hitting the floor. He walks over and studies the mutilated corpse, not so much shocked or unnerved by what he sees as curious.