A Single Shot Page 14

When he gets out, his limbs are rubbery and soft. To keep from falling over, he leans back against the crumbling concrete stanchion, then slowly sits down. The rest of the bridge, except for a similarly decrepit abutment on the far side of the water, is missing. The field before him is hip-high. Past it, the water is low and barely moving. A blue heron stands statuesquely at its edge. Where it still peeks above the horizon, the sun is blood red. Two hawks circle beneath it. John closes his eyes. His brain feels like mush sprinkled with raisins, in an indiscernible mass his few discernible thoughts.

  His half-conscious imaginings become increasingly bizarre, though he doesn’t recognize them as such. It strikes him that Waylon is not flesh and blood, but a devilish specter, always hauntingly present, but seldom seen. Ingrid Banes, from Rock Gap, Pennsylvania, appears before him as a winged messenger carrying God’s personal agenda for John, but His handwriting’s illegible. John falls asleep.

  He wakes beneath a cloudless sky breached by stars. The windless air is pleasantly warm. A symphony of frogs and peepers plays. The field’s flowered scent is like that from a greenhouse. A coyote bays somewhere on the mountain on the other side of the road, and in a tree by the river an owl hoots. John stretches his limbs, perfectly at ease in this world. He’s forgotten exactly where he is or how he got here or what he’d dreamed about. Until he remembers, he is just happy to be alive.

  A thin mist covers the narrow road that curls like a looped rope along the east side of the river before crossing over a metal bridge five miles below the hollow where John lives. The truck’s headlights pierce the mist-layered darkness for a hundred feet, giving objects a haloed appearance. He drives slowly, his arm out the window, smelling the night and half wishing he could vanish into it.

  The few houses he passes are not lit. This late, even dogs are asleep. Inarticulable thoughts like voiceless music touch and rouse him in mysterious ways. The dead girl, in her deep sleep, her placid beauty frozen in time, is forever intricately intertwined with him, John Moon—alive or dead—a disturbing thought he finds oddly comforting. In this dynamic, ever-changing world, he suddenly can’t wait to see her static face again. Did he think that, really? He’s not sure. Images in the next moment are forgotten or change into something else. One thing is certain: she is the core around which his random thoughts now spin. The money doesn’t matter anymore. It could blow out the windows and he wouldn’t care.

  A car passes him going the other way, causing him to snap straight up behind the wheel. The memory of zigzagging headlights are spots in his eyes. A drunk, he thinks, heading home after last call. Then he realizes he is traveling less than twenty miles per hour and is afraid to go home, afraid of what might be waiting for him. So why is he? Where else is there for him to go? he asks himself, only subconsciously aware—or able to admit—that the real reason is her, Ingrid Banes.

  He is nearly in front of the dark one-story cabin that is Simon Breedlove’s home, before he remembers it is on this road and understands his actual motive for coming this way. Now his mind’s not laboring at all. Just acting or reacting. Striding moment to moment, a hiker on fate’s predestined course. Two hundred yards past the cabin, he switches off the headlights and ignition and rolls the pickup down a dirt incline into a cornfield of knee-high plants where invisible cicadas make a cumulative buzz.

  The smell is of fertilizer, damp soil, and adolescent growth. The sporadic spark of fireflies intrudes on the darkness. A night, in his past life, for hand-holding, duet whistling, blanket love. John pulls the .45 from the glove box, checks to see that it’s loaded, shoves it down the front of his pants, and steps from the truck. Beneath his feet the dirt is powdery and soft. From his left comes a rustling sound. He wheels that way and sees four sets of glistening eyes that, in less than a second, are gone. Raccoons. He hears them scurrying through the field.

  Standing fifty yards to the right of the cabin, concealed beneath a willow tree, he watches the dark house inhale the night air through its wide-open, sash-covered windows, and thinks how he doesn’t really know Simon, and never did. A hard worker, hunter, drinker, with streaks affable, morose, and mean, he has, like John, few close friends. When was it that John had watched Simon, the two of them whiskey-shitfaced, hand-walk across the five-hundred-yard guide wire atop the Coxsackie Gap Bridge, screaming at John and the cars and river below that he had fucked, fought, drunk, and killed enough for one life and that John ought to shake the wire and knock him off? John can’t remember whether it was before or after the Hollenbach murders, but it was right around then, and he remembers too, before the police had shown up to take Simon to detox, him standing on the far side, telling John, “After the first time, Johnno, even the worst things get like riding a bike…” which John had figured was a reference to Simon’s war experiences, though now he wonders if it hadn’t been meant to encompass more recent events.

  Around back, on the dampened grass lawn, catercorner to the house, sits the Cadillac, its driver-side door open and its dome light dully flickering. Leaf-heavy branches, swaying from an adjacent ash tree, lightly caress the car’s roof, creating a high-pitched mewl. Beneath the tree, amid scattered engine parts, lies a gutted motorcycle, and farther back, parked in front of the small, unpainted barn Simon uses for storage and to house two beef cows and a handful of pigs, goats, and chickens, is his dual-wheel pickup truck. From the barn come clucks, tired groans, and unshod hooves lazily shifting on the cement floor.

  Tiptoeing toward the Cadillac, John is hit with an eerie sensation that this little one-acre patch with its unkempt cabin and barn, like the secrets in its inhabitant’s mind, exists solely in a zone beyond the expected and civilized. The image of Simon, his childhood mentor and hunting buddy, becomes the mysterious man who, with no regular income, vanishes for weeks at a time and, upon his return, only gets together with John on his own terms, suddenly showing up at the trailer or by phone arranging to meet him in a bar or the woods somewhere. In the twelve years since Simon built his cabin, John can count on one hand the occasions he has been in it and then only to wait while Simon showered, changed clothes, or retrieved something he had forgotten. The last time, several years before, that he stopped by the cabin uninvited, Simon had snarled through a crack in the front door that he was busy and would call John when he wasn’t, which turned out to be weeks later.

  John steps on a slick spot in the lawn and his feet go out from under him. Exhaling a muffled grunt, he lands with a dull thump in the half-foot-high grass, then lies ten feet from the Cadillac, holding his breath, waiting to see if the noise has roused anyone in the house. Visible in the flickering shaft of light half-illuminating the interior of the car is the silvery reflection of keys dangling in the ignition and a white, shearling-covered seat. To his left, the back door to the cabin is ajar. Suddenly something bursts through the opening into the moonlit semiblackness between John and the building, charges noisily across it, and slams, snorting, into John’s chest.

  John punches the thing. Emitting a manic squeal, it backs off, then charges again; short-legged and bristly, its muscular body rams like a torpedo into John’s ribs.

  “Git!” hisses John, hammering the hard torso with his fists.

  The beast runs off a few feet. John sees framed in a patch of moonlight, its blush-colored hide spotted on its head and neck by dark, moist blotches as if it’s had a pail of paint thrown at it, a boxer-sized pig. He looks down at his hands. They are smeared with the same wet, sticky substance as that marring the pig. He smells his fingers, then touches them to his tongue. They taste sweet. Like molasses. He jumps to his feet. Throatily grunting, the pig scampers off toward the barn, its front door, John now sees, standing wide open.

  He leans down and wipes his hands on the lawn. He looks at the house again. The dark shape of another pig darts out through the door. Releasing chortled grunts, the night-shrouded swine beats a grass-shivering path through the unmowed lawn toward the barn. His pulse hammering a staccato in his ears, John quickly strides over to t
he front seat of the Cadillac, in which an Albany banker and his teenage girlfriend had died before Simon salvaged it from a junkyard, restored its body, and gave it a V-8 engine from a rusted-out Ford Bronco. Could he have imagined seeing it parked that afternoon at the Oaks? wonders John.

  The car is in drive, as if someone had simply pulled it up as close to the cabin as he could, turned it off, pushed open the driver-side door, and, drunk, injured, or in a hurry, entered through the back of the house. The floor on the passenger side is dotted with empty beer cans, cardboard fast-food containers, a coiled rope, several hand tools. An unwound cassette dangles from a corner of the open glove box. The shearling smells like beer. On it lies a woman’s sweater, sandals, and a half-zipped gym bag, in which John finds one of Simon’s hand-carved flutes, capable, in Simon’s hands, of playing notes dreamy, sad, or that can transport your mind to a place a thousand miles away.

  Now come to John more images of Simon, at about John’s age, showing John how to whistle dozens of birdcalls, how to reassemble a rod-shot tractor engine, cut out a breeched calf without killing its mother, get downwind from a deer when trailing it, how to carve just about anything from a stick of dead wood. Rifling through the gym bag of clothes and toiletries, John remembers his father once saying of Simon—after he’d punched out that bull, maybe, or during one of his vanishing acts—“If that one were an ocean I’d take a boat clear crosst it but bet your ass I’d never swim in it.”

  He finds beneath the clothes more plastic-wrapped tools—various-sized picks, screwdrivers, wrenches, a hand drill. John wonders if they are burglar’s tools. Then he remembers Simon’s penchant for carrying tools, large and small, in his vehicles. Tools are an obsession with him. For lack of the proper tool, he once told John, a man might be stranded in a snowstorm, bleed to death, suffocate in an airless, locked room. John finds wrapped in a T-shirt and cushioned by a leather sheath a large hunting knife. He removes the sheath. The knife’s blade is shiny and sharp. John remembers when Simon purchased the knife at a sporting-goods store in Ralston and how, after using it for anything—even to open an envelope—he meticulously cleans and polishes its blade and handle with a damp rag. Even if the knife had slashed Obadiah Cornish’s throat, thinks John, the Hen’s blood would not be on it.

  He slides the knife back into the sheath, drops it in the gym bag, then pushes the bag toward the passenger door. On the vacated patch of seat lies a torn scrap of brown-and-blue computer paper that John recognizes as part of a monthly telephone bill, marred by someone’s ink-scribbled words. He picks the paper up and studies it in the faltering dome light. Halfway down the page, beneath Simon’s typed name, address, and phone number, is written: “Oaks—room 229.” John exhales a deep breath he isn’t aware he’d been holding. He tries to fit this piece of Simon as torturer and murderer into the whole puzzle of the man. The piece fits only in a hollow, coreless world. A world lacking substance or a center. A world where images adhere more solidly than words to the mind. John drops the paper and backs out of the car.

  Treading the grass-flattened path toward the back door of the cabin, he can taste the mist, a pollen-sweetened dew like the aftermath of a syrupy drink. He is fleshless in this soup, like the two shadowed animals—taller than the pigs and rangier—that, in the midst of John’s approach, float like bearded specters through the half-open doorway before vanishing to his left into the darkened, fog-cloaked grass. John reaches down to his belt, yanks out the .45, and thinks, “Goddamn goats now. Sam Hell’s left in the barn?”

  Past the two-foot space between the edge of the screen door and the outer wall, he tentatively places a foot into the darkened house, which smells like the molasses earlier flavoring his fingers, varied manures, and gunpowder’s pungent smoke. Though he can’t see much of it, the room has the eerie sense of being alive. John can actually hear it breathing, or imagines he can, and feels its pulse steadily beating in the far corner to his left. His hunter’s sixth sense tells him to back out of the house, as he didn’t in the quarry, but a feeling even stronger assures him he is on fate’s course.

  He puts his other foot in front of the first one, and, holding the pistol out in front of him, starts to walk slowly. Suddenly he feels himself sliding, then, as if his feet have been grabbed by invisible hands, he’s skating unrestrainedly across the floor toward a large, ominously rocking shadow fronting an even bigger one. Halfway there, he goes down and slides the rest of the way on his backside. He hears what he thinks is a moo. A half second later, he collides with the source of the sound.

  For a moment he lies, panting, entangled in four muscular legs. He is close enough to see that he is beneath an emasculated bull. It swishes its tail, then restlessly shifts its stance. John carefully rolls out from under it. He’s covered with molasses, manure, and whatever else is on the floor. He grabs onto the steer’s tail for support and pulls himself to his feet. The animal lows and shakes its head, the motion creating a clanking sound in the small room. “Shhhh!” whispers John, reaching for its neck to cease the sway and finding the neck encircled by a chain. The chain is looped around and padlocked to the refrigerator before which the animal stands. In the center of the refrigerator, which is leaking water, are two circular, rough-edged holes that John guesses were made by shotgun blasts.

  Leaning against the steer, John gazes in wonderment around the kitchen, his eyes now enough adjusted to the dark to see that the stove next to the refrigerator is also shot and that, above it, the food cabinets have been blasted or their doors torn open and the food that was inside thrown onto the floor for the pigs, goats, and whatever else to pick at. The oddity of this scene has an almost calming effect on John, as if he is in a dream in which the worst possible thing that could result is for him to wake up screaming. On the left flank of the cow is what looks to be a glistening wound or a large, glossy strip of paper. John looks closer and sees that a color photograph has been taped to the steer’s hide. He pulls off the picture and holds it inches from his eyes, but can make out only the dark outlines of two people side by side and a smaller person or an animal crouched or lying between them.

  He shoves his pistol into his belt, then reaches into his pocket, withdraws a packet of restaurant matches, and, holding the photograph between his teeth, lights a match. In the flame’s dancing cone of light, he again looks at the picture. This time he sees a man and a woman sitting on a couch with their arms around each other and jointly holding a small child. The man is small and wiry, has a jack-o’-lantern’s smile and something a little off with the left side of his head, as if maybe it’s been stove in or he’s missing something there. The woman is big-boned, pretty, taller than the man, and, like him, vaguely familiar to John, but more so. He can’t fathom their pictures—or anyone’s—being taped to a cow’s ass in Simon Breedlove’s kitchen.

  John thinks the steer might be asleep. Its head rests almost on the floor and its only movement is a slow, steady, side-to-side list like that of an anchored ship. He tapes the picture back where he found it, then tiptoes past the refrigerator, careful not to slip again, and enters a wood-floored hallway where the molasses stops, but the boards creak beneath his feet. He remembers the hallway leads to a big catch-all room where, John had the impression, Simon does about everything but cook and sleep. He walks around a rounded corner and sees at the corridor’s end a dull, steady light. He pulls out the .45 and tries to make less noise as he walks, though he’s sure anyone in the house can hear his rapid breathing. He’s a step from the doorway when through it rushes, in a mishmash of clucks and feathers, a large chicken.

  “Jesus!” hisses John, flattening himself against the wall as the red-and-white pullet sissy steps its way down the hallway toward the kitchen. In the unblinking light falling from the room, the bird’s flaming tuft reminds John, pressed against the oak-log partition abutting the doorway, of the crested hairdo on the woman he’s just seen. As the fowl prissily trots around the corner and disappears, he suddenly remembers who she is. He wonders ho
w Colette Gans’s picture ended up taped to a beef cow’s flank. Or why. Sweat oozes from every pore on his body. More clucking sounds come from the room.

  He pokes his head around the corner of the doorway and sees, ten feet in front of a recliner facing it, a television noiselessly playing an off-air signal and illuminating two more pullets absently picking at what look to be kernels of hard corn scattered on the floor. Several open beer cans and an empty gin bottle lie on a throw rug near the chair. Resting atop the recliner’s back, slightly tilted to one side, is the back of a human head.

  Purged now of all conscious thought, John’s mind fills with a single image of fate’s darkened corridor whose light-flickering end might be a candle or a muzzle flash; in this narrow, one-way tunnel the sum of his earthly knowledge becomes the floating, transparent cells marring his vision. He slips into the room and, holding the pistol out in front of him in one hand, silently stalks the chair. He is less than five feet from it when a torturous moan sounds from the recliner and the head slowly lolls. John rushes forward and places the gun’s barrel against the base of the head. It moans again, loosely bobs, then rolls back to where it had originally been resting.

  “Who’s it?” whispers John.

  The chair’s occupant groans. John pushes against the recliner’s back so that it springs forward, then snaps to a stop, throwing its contents onto the floor. Loudly clucking, the chickens dance away from the body. It scrambles to get to its feet. “Don’t try nothin’,” says John.

  A man laboriously gets to his knees, then slowly turns around. “Jesus, Johnno.”

  John points the gun at him.

  “What the hell? Where—you? Son of a bitch, John.”

  “What?”

  “Put the goddamn gun away. The bad guy’s gone.”

  “Huh?”

  “Bastard moved ’bout my whole stock in here.” Simon lashes out at one of the chickens, which rises up, squawking. “You seen what he done my kitchen?”