A Single Shot Page 12

  He walks over to the bureau, but there is nothing on it. He rifles the drawers and finds only clothes. In the bathroom, he finds atop the sink a wallet belonging to Cornish and inside it a paper containing a list of telephone numbers, among them Moira’s, his own, and another that is familiar to him, though he can’t immediately think why. The phone rings again. Following the fourth ring, John walks back into the bedroom and picks it up.

  “I’m very disappointed in your behavior,” a voice says.

  “Wha…?” mumbles John.

  “Your making threats has put me in a very delicate situation. I thought we’d agreed that I would handle things…”

  Then John recognizes the voice and recalls to whom the third number belongs. The phone’s mouthpiece smells like diseased breath. He hangs it up and, not touching anything else, leaves the room.

  Upon seeing him again, the woman starts to squirm, gnaw at her gag, and frantically roll her head from side to side. Her obvious fear of him makes John wonder if his looks are as frightening as her reaction to them and he peers in the bathroom mirror and thinks, “No, they ain’t.” On the contrary, he sees, as clear as pimples on his face, a kind nature, tempered some by the bad hand he’s been dealt. “Cut it out,” he tells the woman, slightly perturbed, as he leans down to straighten her wig, which, skewed again, reveals beneath it a red patch of moss-thin hair on an onion-colored scalp. “I tol’ ya I ain’t gon’ hurt ya none.”

  He helps her out of the tub, removes the stockings binding her wrists and ankles, leads her over to the bed, and sits her down on the edge of it. The room’s light is dull. One of the two overhead bulbs is burned out; crawling in the dirt-smeared lamp, half-dead houseflies cast gray shadows on the woman’s thighs. She smells of terror, emitted like a tomcat’s perfumed scent, and urine where she’s peed herself. On all accounts, John feels awful—for her, himself, and the situation in general. “I’m in a terr’ble bind,” he tells her.

  She reaches up and claws at the underpants in her mouth.

  “No! No! No!” says John. He grabs her hand and slaps it firmly back in her lap. He realizes in doing so he’s frightened her even more, but he thinks hearing a hysterical voice right now would push him over an abyss whose edge he is barely clinging to. “Let me tell ya why I am, first.”

  She opens wide at him her good eye with its already dilated pupil, but John can’t tell if it’s wide with fear, curiosity, or disbelief. “It’s been one thing after ’nother,” he says. Not sure where to go from there, he sighs and drops his forearms on his legs. He sees his hands are shaking and so are his knees. “It all started less’n a week ago, but it feels more like a year.” He looks at the woman and imagines her being quite pretty once, before she got hit with the beer bottle maybe, and then he envisions her life as a water droplet rolling north to south toward the edge of a map. “You e’er had a spell like that? When one thing keeps foll’wing ’nother and everythin’ you do to change it just digs a hole deeper till you’re so far in, you can’t see the top?”

  She slowly nods, but John already knows in looking at her that she’s had more than one such spell and likely considers herself to be in one now. “If I told ya half of it, you wouldn’t even believe me,” he says.

  She shrugs.

  “No. You w’udn’t.” John runs a hand back through his hair. “But I ain’t never killed nobody purposeful,” he says. “Though nobody in the world ’id b’lieve that. Sometimes it’s even hard for me to b’lieve.” Suddenly it strikes him that maybe he’s going insane, if he hasn’t already; then he remembers once hearing that a person who really is insane never thinks he is. But he’s not convinced. “You can see why I cain’t just let you go, cain’t you?” he asks the woman.

  She vigorously shakes her head no.

  John points his chin at the wall. “ ’Sides me, you see anybody this morning goin’ in or out that room I was?”

  Again the woman shakes her head.

  “See what I mean?”

  This time he can read in her eye and furrowed brow, along with her fear, confusion.

  John says, “What’s your name?”

  The woman tries to tell him, but it comes out all garbled. John reaches up and pulls the underwear to one side. She gasps, “Florence!”

  John puts the underwear back in her mouth. “Florence,” he says. Then he repeats the name several times, breaking it into two crisp syllables, and thinking you don’t often hear someone below the age of seventy named Florence. “Was it your mother’s name?”

  She shakes her head.

  John’s sweating profusely. He rubs the back of his hand over his forehead, then shakes the hand. Drops of perspiration fly against the near wall. Suddenly he has the feeling he may be performing acts—even mundane ones, like wiping his brow—for the last time. His thoughts don’t expound upon the feeling. Then he’s not sure that he felt it at all. “A relative, though?”

  The woman doesn’t respond, just shivers like somebody’s opened a freezer in front of her. “It’s a beautiful name. Someone took some time picking it out. Not like mine—John. John Moon—that’s a real simple, common kinda name.” John feels horrible, actually physically sick. He pictures Obadiah Cornish’s head with an ear, lip, and its nose sliced off and his little baby and Moira in the hands of the madman who did it. He nods solemnly at the woman. “Fella sits in the next room with his throat cut who’s got somethin’ to do with stealin’ my wife and kid and even if I was you or the cops, Florence—I’d think I’d done it.”

  The woman’s good eye madly squirts left to right like a guppy.

  “I don’t know what to do,” says John. Abruptly his legs start hopping up and down as if they’re run by little motors and he feels, between its vicious pounding, his heart whispering extra little beats like the flapping of a sparrow’s wings. He wonders if maybe he’s having a heart attack, only nothing really hurts. He feels more like a jet revving up to take off. “But I got to do somethin’.”

  He looks down at the woman’s fingers and they’re white where they’re digging into her pink sweatpants above the pee stains on her thighs. It strikes him that she’s more petrified than he is and that he’s the reason why; realizing this angers John, as he’s twice told her he doesn’t intend to hurt her. A knock sounds on the door and a female voice with a Spanish accent says, “Clean room, okay?”

  Florence precipitately bolts up from the bed and bounds for the door. From his sitting position, John dives headlong and tackles her. For several seconds they grapple on the rug, she squealing through her gag and kicking and punching at him, until finally John gets on top of her and pancakes her to the floor. He barks at the hallway, “No room service!”

  “Later, you want?” asks the voice.

  Suddenly, in the midst of her exhortative squirming, the underpants pop out of Florence’s mouth. She starts to scream, but John points a threatening finger at her, and she stops, her mouth a frozen pink gash. “Later, no!” John calls out, sitting up and, with his knees, pinning Florence’s arms to the rug. “We’ll make our own beds!”

  “Sí,” says the woman.

  “Wait!” hollers John.

  “Eh?”

  “I’m in room 229. I don’t want no room service there neither!”

  For several seconds there’s no answer.

  John yells, “No towels. Nothin’!”

  The voice says, “You stay there?”

  “Right. Two doors down! Don’t even knock! Comprende?”

  “Two-twenty-nine. Sí.”

  He hears her walk off down the corridor, stop at the room before Obadiah Cornish’s, knock, and in a few seconds the door open, then close again. He says to the woman, “I guess I got to put you back in the tub.”

  “No,” she whispers.

  “I cain’t see ’nother way.”

  “I won’t tell nobody what I seen.”

  “You won’t have a choice once they find ya.”

  “I could say there was a stocking over your head and
I didn’t see your face.”

  John thinks about it. “They’ll know a’ready I was here.”

  “What’s it matter, then?”

  “I need time.”

  “To do what?”

  “Get back my wife and kid.”

  “From who?”

  “I ain’t sure.”

  “Mis… John—listen… please?”

  “What?”

  “You’re hurtin’ my arms.”

  John rolls off her, flops his arms out to the sides, and gazes up at the ceiling. The woman sits up next to him. “Can I reach in my sweats?”

  John rolls his head toward her. “What for?”

  “I got a joint in there. You wanta smoke a joint with me?”

  John doesn’t say, but doesn’t stop her when she reaches into a side pocket of her sweatsuit and pulls out a fat cigarette and a Cricket lighter. She puts the cigarette in her mouth, ignites it, inhales deeply, then withdraws it and places it between John’s lips. They smoke the whole joint without talking. Afterwards, John is just as confused as he was, but a little calmer, and the woman acts so, too. “You got bus fare to Enid, Oklahoma?” she asks.

  John blankly stares at her.

  “I come back East to visit my sister in Boston but couldn’t find her. Somebody there said maybe she’s dead.” She reaches into her sweats for a Tiparillo, places it between her lips, and lights it. “What I seen a’ the East, I could easily forget.”

  Her makeup is smeared and now John sees that it had been partly used to conceal a whirligig-shaped scar on the cheek below her bad eye. “How much would ya need?”

  “Couple hundred—three, make it—for food ’n all.” She sucks on the cigar, then rolls the smoke out over her tongue. “But you gotta let me take a shower first and change.”

  John frowns at her.

  “I ain’t gon’ go out in public smelling like piss.”

  “You wouldn’t say nothing?”

  “Who’d want to hear ’bout it out in Enid?”

  John scratches an ear. “Five minutes,” he says.

  The woman stands up and walks toward the bathroom. John gets up and follows her. She shuts the bathroom door in his face. A minute later, when the water starts running, he steps inside and leans against the sink. From behind the drawn curtain, Florence lists what she hates most about the Northeast—the weather, people’s lack of manners, too many cars and overweight men, a closed-in feeling she can’t pinpoint, the price of marijuana, beer, and food. When the water stops running, John hands her in a towel and her blond wig. A few moments after, wearing the wig and with the towel snugly wrapped around her, she pulls back the curtain and steps out. Her legs and shoulders are pale white, smooth, and unblemished, as if they are fifteen years younger than her face.

  In less than ten minutes, she’s dressed, has put on fresh makeup and packed all her belongings. They walk down the back stairs to the rear parking lot and over to John’s truck. John opens the passenger door and waits for Florence to get in. He shows her his gun and tells her not to move, call out, or honk the horn. She says she wouldn’t anyway. She wants to get back to Enid. John shuts her door, walks the fifty feet over to the lobby’s rear entrance, opens it, sticks his head inside, and tells Skinny Leak, “Weren’t nobody home.”

  Leak glances up from the set and shrugs. John pulls out his wallet, takes from it one of the hundred-dollar bills he had removed this morning from the sugar jar, and lays it on the counter where the old man can reach it. “If he asks—or anybody else—I weren’t never here.”

  Leak sticks out a bony hand. He picks up the bill, pockets it, and hisses. “You’s one the Fitch boys, ain’t ya?”

  John leaves without saying.

  The bus station is on the south side of town in the first floor of a retired glue factory. Circled by a high metal fence, the terminal parking lot is potholed dirt. Two buses sit in it. Another, half full of passengers, idles in front of the depot. John parks the truck, then walks with Florence inside and asks the man selling tickets at the counter where the idling bus is headed to. The man says Buffalo.

  “That west a’ here?” John asks.

  The man says it is.

  Florence says, “I need to go to Enid, Oklahoma.”

  The man sneers like going to Enid, Oklahoma, is to him a personal insult. From a shelf below his waist, he picks up a little book, opens it, and starts tracing through the schedule with an index finger. After a few minutes, he says, “I can sell you a ticket there, but you’ll have to get off in Buffalo, wait five hours, then change buses.”

  “What’m I gon’ do for five hours in Buffalo, New York?” asks Florence.

  “I don’t know,” the man tells her. “I’ve never been there.”

  “Give me the ticket,” says John.

  “This is a real hardship,” Florence whispers to him.

  Ignoring her, John pays for the ticket. Handing it to him, the man smiles sarcastically and informs them they’ve got fifteen minutes to say their goodbyes. Florence asks if there’s smoking on the bus. The ticket seller says there isn’t.

  “Not even in the can?” asks Florence.

  “Nowhere on the vehicle,” the man tells her smugly.

  Florence curses and says she needs a smoke now. She and John walk over to the benches against the far wall and sit down across from a large bulletin board with posters of wanted and missing people on it. There’s no windows in the station. The stagnant air is hot and smells like body odor and the bad stink floating out one of the open john doors next to them. Florence lights up one of her little cigars. When she exhales, the smoke unwaveringly floats up to the ceiling, where it merges with an already thick, hovering cloud of it. She tells John again that taking such a roundabout route on a bus that doesn’t allow smoking is a real hardship for her. Then she says she’ll need more than three hundred dollars to make sure she gets to Enid all right. John asks her how much more.

  “Two more ought to do it,” she says. “Five, altogether.”

  “You mean, five hundred?” asks John, who has left in his wallet, from what he took from the sugar jar, slightly over eight hundred dollars.

  “No, dummy. Five million!” She chuckles derisively. “Hand it over.”

  “I ain’t got that much,” says John.

  She gives him a weird look. “You’re a strange one,” she tells him. Then she says, “I don’t believe you killed no one.”

  “I didn’t on purpose,” says John. “Was an accident.”

  “And you say someone’s snatched your wife and kid?”

  John stares blankly at the bulletin board, not answering. It hurts too much to think about it. Florence lightly places a hand on his wrist. “I get vibes sometimes—and I’m not just talking bullshit now—like life forces—positive or negative—and in your case I’m definitely sensing positive.” She takes her hand from his arm and smokes more of her cigar. “Really. Don’t ask me how I do it, though.”

  John doesn’t. Every time Florence inhales, her lips make a wet, snappy sound. Two black men come out of the john, strut through the glass doors and onto the bus. The man at the desk says into a microphone that the bus to Buffalo is leaving in ten minutes. He frowns at John and Florence. John takes from his wallet five hundred dollars. It doesn’t feel like money to him. When he hands it to Florence he feels like he’s giving her scrap paper with scribbles on it. She rolls the money up, shoves it down her shirt, between her breasts, and says, “You ought to go the cops ’bout your wife and kid.”

  “Cain’t.”

  “If whatever you done was an accident…”

  “There’s more to it than that,” says John. He looks back at the bulletin board. A face there gnaws at him, though he can’t put his finger on why. Florence drops her cigar butt on the floor and steps on it. John stands up. Blowing out smoke, Florence does, too. “I got to go to the can,” she says.

  John nods. He picks up her bag, watches her walk into the ladies’ room, then strides over to the bulletin bo
ard and peers at a photograph of a girl with dirty-blond hair combed neatly over her forehead and ears, making her look even younger than the sixteen he had guessed she was. Her name is Ingrid Banes. She’s from Rock Gap, Pennsylvania. Any remaining thoughts that John has of his being on an uncharted course instantly vanish. He feels a distinct pressure from a hand that is leading him along some path whose markers are known only to Him.

  He tears the poster from the board, carefully folds it, and slides it into his front pants pocket. Then he takes Florence’s suitcase out to the bus and hands it to the driver, who tosses it in with the rest of the luggage. He asks John if that’s all there is. John says that’s it. He imagines something like an invisible hawk flying circles above him. The bus driver closes up the luggage compartment and climbs into the bus. Florence comes out through the glass doors. John hands her the ticket to Enid. “I sense it’ll be all right for you,” she says. “Really.”

  John says, “What happened the one hit you with a bottle?”

  She shrugs.

  “You ain’t got no idea?”

  She gives him the weird look again. “He weren’t from Enid, so how would I?”

  John watches her get on the bus, sit down in a window seat near the back, and, a few minutes later, the bus leave. He waves at her, but she’s already talking to her seatmate, and doesn’t notice.

  Lugging the heavy sack over one shoulder, he takes the side entrance up to the second floor of the J. J. Newberry building, tries the door to the lawyer’s office, and finds it locked. He drops the sack and sits down to wait in the rickety wooden corridor whose yellowing wallpaper portrays farm scenes and emanates a musty, aged smell. He pulls all the coins from his pocket and, one at a time, rolls them across the corridor, trying to stop them as close to the wall as he can. Afterwards, he doesn’t bother to pick them up. Staring at his feet, he imagines a flat, soundless field of high grass concealing dead bodies and the secrets they died with.

  Soon he hears a thump-slide-grunt from the stairs, and a minute later, tightly gripping the rail and breathing heavily, Daggard Pitt appears at their top. Spying John, he flashes a big, toothy smile and, rattling the cardboard box he carries in one hand, gaspingly calls out, “I wonder if John Moon’s a doughnut eater?”