A Single Shot Read online

  John doesn’t say if he is.

  Wearing a lime-green suit that bags on his crippled side and is coffee-stained, the lawyer hobbles through the fallen coins as if they aren’t there. He doesn’t act surprised to see John or the sack. He leads him into the office, saying something about his secretary getting a molar capped. “Have a seat, have a seat,” he tells John, placing the box on the desk and grabbing some papers from its top.

  John, glancing warily around, remains standing just inside the doorway. On the wall across from him, a Syracuse law degree hangs between a photograph of Pitt waving from the deck of a sailboat John would never have guessed he could afford and framed words in a foreign language. A small metal plaque on the desk says “Thank You For Not Smoking,” and just above it sits an ashtray. John thinks about his father, hat in hand, coming here to beg, and of Daggard Pitt tugging at his misshapen leg and regretfully clawing at the air with his frozen hand. Pitt says, “Did you know I once had political ambitions, John?”

  John doesn’t say. He smells alcohol on the lawyer’s breath.

  “I ran for three different offices—eight times, all told—and never came close to winning anything.” He waves dismissively. “If you can’t find anybody else, run the crippled midget, was the town joke—only don’t vote for him!” He shuffles over and tries to hand John what he’s holding, but his crippled fingers won’t let go and finally John has to yank the documents from the lawyer’s grasp. Laughing breathily, Pitt tries to make a joke out of it. “I don’t want her, you can have her…”

  John doesn’t even smile.

  Pitt weakly clears his throat. “That’ll put us on an even playing field with her anyway, John.” He hobbles back over to the desk, situates himself behind it, and from the box near his elbow pulls a cruller. John follows him to the near side of the desk, but doesn’t sit down. The lawyer dunks the cruller into a half-empty coffee cup that was there when they came into the room, fishes it out, peers at the drenched pastry like it’s a bug he’s found, then half eats it. “Just sign there on the back, John, above your name.”

  John tosses the unsigned papers on the desk.

  Pitt lays down the other half of the cruller. “They’re no good ’less you sign them, John.”

  “I ain’t goin’ to.”

  “Why not?”

  John takes the sack off his shoulder and drops it on the desk, where, with a loud thump, it lands on Pitt’s cruller. The lawyer jerks his head back. “That was my last cruller,” he says peevishly.

  Verbalizing his fractured thoughts becomes too much for John. He silently stands there, his legs trembling, waiting for the lawyer to open the sack and look inside, but instead Pitt reaches into the box near his right elbow, pulls out a doughnut, and bites into it. Red jelly squirts out two sides of his mouth. He catches the jelly in his claw-hand, then lays down the doughnut, picks up a napkin with his good hand, and carefully wipes his frozen fingers. “What a mess,” he says, then matter-of-factly frowns at the sack. “I’m awfully glad you decided to nip this thing in the bud, John.”

  “Huh?”

  “This sack doesn’t belong to you, does it?”

  John doesn’t answer. No clear thoughts occupy his mind, only muddled images. And dark colors.

  “Your wife came to see me yesterday afternoon,” says Pitt, wrinkling his brow at John as if he’s a young child or a retarded adult. “I told her that as your attorney I was prohibited from talking privately with her, but she insisted, and you know, John, I question whether we in the profession always best serve our clients by paying strict attention to the rules—after all, a family breaking up is one of the worst things anyone could go through, and the rights and wrongs of it are muddled and, it seems to me, different in every case.” He nods at the desk drawer to his right. “A small one, John? I—perhaps both of us—could stand a small one?” Without waiting for an answer, he reaches into the drawer, pulls out a mug and a quart bottle of Jim Beam, uncaps the bottle, fills the coffee cup and the mug, then pushes the latter across the desk toward John. Afterwards, he seems to lose his train of thought.

  “Your father wanted me to bend the rules, John—he wasn’t in the hole so deep the bank couldn’t have worked with him, but it was more profitable for them to sell the place—but I wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t go to bat for him because—in those days—I didn’t want to make waves.” He moves his crippled hand in a choppy line through the air to signify waves. “That was right before I ran for D.A. the first of three times.” He picks up the coffee cup and holds it to his lips for several seconds. As he drinks, a thin line of whiskey dribbles from one corner of his mouth, and every swallow causes an exaggerated, painful-looking bob of his Adam’s apple. John can see that he’s bombed. “I hear tell the only candidate ever got less votes than me was Ralph Dolan running for sheriff that time.”

  John says, “This ain’t about my father or your running for goddamned D.A.”

  Pitt tilts his head and purses his lips at John, and John, looking at him, suddenly thinks of Lois Copp, a three-hundred-pound girl he went to school with who would say or do anything just to get a boy to smile at her or talk to her for five seconds. “She was concerned, John, not just for you, but for her and the boy—all that money that you acted as if it had just dropped out of the sky into your lap made her think you’d maybe robbed a bank or even worse and what if you were to get arrested and her as an accomplice, what would happen to Nolan?” He jerkily wipes his mouth with the napkin.

  “She asked me to talk to you. She said she’d tried and couldn’t make sense of your answers and was so scared she didn’t know what to do.”

  John’s fear, confusion, and anger is such that it melds into a sort of clarity in which the only questions worth answering don’t have to be asked.

  “We’re such a small town, aren’t we, John?”

  John doesn’t say.

  “An attorney with any sizable clientele at all often finds himself in these conflicting situations where one client’s problems overlap with another’s.” More whiskey or maybe sweat slides down one side of Pitt’s face. Several drops land on his desk. “Clients confide in me all sorts of things, John, some of them downright reprehensible, but as a lawyer I must look at the person behind the act, and do you know, in almost every case, I’m able to see the child behind the actor and to say to myself, ‘There but for the grace of God, goes I’?” His hand shaking, he reaches for the bottle and refills the coffee cup, the glass and kiln-dried clay loudly clattering against each other. John again thinks of Lois Copp, how she’d once approached him and four or five other boys in the school corridor and in her sweet little girl’s voice offered to blow anyone who would carry home her books and get introduced to her parents. John had felt as embarrassed for her as he does now for Pitt, and on the other hand, something in both of them made his flesh crawl. He nods at the sack.

  “You represent the sons a’ bitches wanting what’s in that, Pitt?”

  “In this business, John—particularly when you handle, as I do, mostly criminal and family-court work, seeing as how the upper crust prefers to take their civilized problems to life-sized, former football-playing lawyers—you engage all sorts of pitiable characters…”

  “What’s their interest?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “How come?”

  “For the same reason I won’t ask you exactly what it is, John, or how it came to be in your possession.” The lawyer gravely purses his lips. “If, let’s say, what you’ve brought me is ill-gotten gains of which I am made aware, I’d be legally obliged to turn it over to the law, and that, I think, is something all parties would like to avoid, yes?”

  “I ain’t smart ’nough to see your angle, Pitt, ’cept to figure you’re gettin’ a piece of it.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, John.” Pitt quickly picks up with one thumb and forefinger the other half of the jelly doughnut and dunks it into his coffee cup. “I’m a lawyer emboldened by whiskey, is all.” He pops
the doughnut into his mouth. “The image of your father, perhaps, has prompted me to take a more personal role than I ought to have…”

  “You didn’t give a shit for my father!”

  “Not when it counted, I grant you, but I don’t worry so much these days about strictly adhering to the rules, John. You see, I did some soul-searching after I went through my little political stage, and what I discovered is that I am an odd, ugly duck and that my gift is to represent other odd, ugly ducks—such as yourself, John—who don’t comfortably fit into society’s placid pond…”

  Listening to Pitt, John is again reminded of his own cognitive shortcomings. Is Pitt a crippled devil or a deformed angel? Suddenly he feels as if all the world, outside of himself, is staring like a large audience at him—a deaf, dumb, and blind performer. Reaching down, he jerks the .45 from his belt and holds it loosely in one hand. Pitt, acting as if the gun isn’t even there, mouths through his chewing lips, “You haven’t discussed with anyone else the problems that have brought you here today, have you, John?”

  John doesn’t say.

  “Talking in these situations is never good for anyone. Keep the body in the ground, so to speak, yes?”

  John points the gun between Daggard Pitt’s eyes.

  Pitt exaggeratedly blinks as if struck by a sudden thought. “So, John, shall I turn the contents of this sack over to the other party entitled to my loyalty in this matter and instruct him, then, to consider it buried?”

  “What about my wife and son?”

  Pitt puts up his crippled hand as if to stop the anticipated shot from John’s pistol. “That’s the whole point of my involvement, John—to see that your impulsiveness in no way harms them.”

  “I want to know they’re safe.”

  “Safe? Of course they’re safe. Why wouldn’t they be safe? Now, please, put the gun away.”

  “Where are they now?” asks John.

  “I understand they’re out of town through the weekend—she mentioned something about the Thousand Islands…”

  John feels like he’s floating, anchorless, in space. He reaches his free hand into the seat of the wooden chair behind him and picks up the cushion there.

  “Call who’s got them.”

  “Got them?”

  “Do it now. Then I’ll leave.” John cocks the pistol. “On’y don’t call Obadiah Cornish again.”

  “John?”

  “He’s had his throat sliced and things cut off’n him.”

  Daggard Pitt’s face abruptly turns several shades paler than its normal blanched white. He picks up his coffee cup and jerkily gulps at the whiskey left inside, splashing most of it down his front.

  “Call Waylon,” says John. “Tell him you got the money.”

  Pitt pants breathily. John can see he’s in shock and that’s why he’s not more frightened. “Not my client, John.”

  “How deep you in this, Pitt?”

  “I, I… Obadiah, poor boy… odd, ugly duck… he…”

  In front of John’s eyes, the room starts to tilt again, like it did at the Oaks. An anticipatory feeling of awe comes over him, as when he was a kid and standing with his father at the Syracuse Airport, waiting to see, for the first time, an airplane take off. And he’s scared too, as he was then, that his self might jump out of his body and take off with it. “You better call somebody, lawyer.”

  “… the only one I represent, John.”

  “What?”

  “… there’s nobody else…”

  John shakes his head, but can’t rid himself of the feeling, now almost a certainty, that he’s standing next to his father again and that John’s words and actions are no longer his own, but Robert Moon’s. He places the pillow firmly over the lawyer’s face. He imagines a switch blinking off, leaving an entire chamber dark and stone-still and its contents irretrievable. “You should’ve helped us, Pitt,” he says, pushing the barrel of the .45 into the pillow.

  “… ohhhn?”

  John places his finger on the trigger.

  “… ohnnn!”

  The voice trying to transcend the pillow is muffled and strained, like an underwater shout. From its weightless haven, John’s mind recognizes his own name, one syllable giving birth to a world of subconscious connotations. You are John Moon, whispers a voice. Farmer without a farm in a world that is as it was and always will be. The year is 199–. Two futures pulse in the muscles of your finger. Aloud, it says, “You ever see him cry?”

  “Uhhh?” says the muffled voice.

  “Robert Moon?”

  There is no sound from the other side of the pillow, only the ripe pungent smell of the lawyer’s feces. “Not me,” says John. “Nor beg neither. I wished I had.”

  The weight behind the pillow goes limp.

  Suddenly John realizes he is shaking. He looks at his hand and arm holding the pillow and sees they are tense with exertion. He pulls his finger from the gun’s trigger, then jerks back the pillow. The face behind it is tinged blue. The head drops to one side of its neck. John’s not sure how much time has elapsed. “Pitt?”

  The lawyer doesn’t answer.

  “Who with, Pitt?”

  The head lolls.

  John slaps it.

  The lawyer groans. His eyes flutter open. He takes several shallow breaths. Then deeper ones. Spittle rolls from the corner of his disfigured lips. His face looks like it’s been pulled from a vise. “Who with in the Thousand Islands, Pitt? Who took them!”

  “She… they… he—boyfriend…”

  “Whose boyfriend?”

  “I’m awfully sorry, John…”

  “Huh?”

  “Love’s unraveling—so painful…”

  John slaps him again.

  “… they know nothing about”—Pitt’s crippled hand flutters in front of his face like a defective parachute—“this…”

  “They ain’t kidnapped?”

  “Kidnapped? No… ah, the note… Obadiah—bad child…”

  “What?”

  “… she ought to have told you, John.” He starts panting faster again, as if suddenly remembering the nearness of his own death.

  “… he, uh—boyfriend—apparently… on the water—a small camp?—you know, uh—for vacation?”

  His small, simple world has turned ambiguously sinister. Heads have two faces, one visible, one not. Words, though spoken in proper linguistic form, don’t mean what they ought to. From one moment to the next, nothing in this upside-down world is static. Even voices dichotomize, their bifurcating sounds clouding his thoughts, sending his mind reeling first down one path, then down another. Who can be trusted in this world? Humanity itself—the whole great mass—is mutable. John feels ill equipped to deal with it.

  Avoiding eye contact with everyone he passes, he walks the three blocks back to the municipal parking lot, dangling the heavy money sack over one shoulder. The smell of hot tar fills the air. At the east end of the lot, his old crew works. As Cole Howard drives his roller over the freshly laid, steam-breathing tar, Levi Dean, his fat, sun-pink torso supported by a shovel, talks to a bald string bean who John guesses might be Gumby Talon. They strike John as three creatures out of a past life from which he has been catapulted like a small stone. He tosses the sack into the passenger seat, then, after ducking into the pickup, quickly pulls out of the west end of the lot.

  He takes the less-traveled back river road out of town, passing by the old feed mill, closed nearly a decade now, where once a week he used to come with his father in their old flatbed truck. John remembers Robert Moon always opening each sack of grain, sniffing and running his fingers through the cool, sweet-smelling oat and barley mix to make sure he was getting what he paid for, and the prideful feeling when one day that task was turned over to John. He thinks of the dozens of farmers they used to meet and converse with at the mill, most of whom, like him and his father, now aren’t, and suddenly John understands that whoever is to be blamed for his pitiful state, it is not his father.

  St
aring to his left at the serpentine course of the river wandering through mostly abandoned pastureland and virgin forest, he thinks of his wife and son, as far away from him as the rest of the life he lived before the dead girl, though he is thankful they are safe. He is not surprised—nor even really angry—that Moira has a boyfriend, though his heart aches with his own failure to be what she had wanted him to be and with the knowledge that she believes his very presence would be poisonous to their son. An odd, ugly duck Daggard Pitt had called him, as if John were the same as Obadiah Cornish or the rest of his down-and-out clients. He shivers at the memory of how he had nearly killed the lawyer—who maybe deserved it. He hadn’t, though, and that’s a thought worth holding on to.

  But who had killed Obadiah Cornish? Waylon, maybe, after having discovered that Cornish—with his kidnapping bluff—was trying to recover the money without him? Or was it Simon Breedlove? But why? What was his connection with the other two? And where had the money come from? John remembers how Ira and Molly Hollenbach had been cut up and their throats slit, just as the Hen had been. Too many bad people in the world. Too many unanswerable questions.

  He takes out the dead girl’s picture and, driving with one hand, unfolds it on the steering wheel. She is five feet six inches tall, weighs one hundred eighteen pounds, likes motorcycle riding, outdoor sports, and is daughter to Bob and Melanie Banes, whose address and phone number appear beneath the words “Please help us find our daughter.” The picture, he thinks, doesn’t do her justice. She looks better with her hair behind her ears and wearing a little makeup, as in the Polaroids he took. He folds the poster and puts it in his pocket again, then abruptly pulls the truck off the road. He drives several hundred yards into an overgrown pasture of goldenrod and hawkweed and parks behind an abandoned bridge stanchion fifty feet above the river.