A Single Shot Read online

  He lies flat on his back and stares up at a hole in the canopy of trees through which the sun peers, and imagines his former self sucked up into the cosmos through that corridor of light, leaving behind a flesh-and-bone shell free to be about anything.

  He snarls, then reaches out with one hand and swats at the air. He unties his boots, kicks them off, stands up, and peels off his jeans and underpants. Naked, he feels freer than he had. Less encumbered by human plights. And stronger. He rakes his clawed hands through a patch of jewelweed. He bares his teeth and growls. He starts running a circle around the glade. In less than ten feet he trips on a root and pitches sideways into a briar thicket. He loudly curses. His stubbed toe hurts. So does his flesh where it is pierced by the needle-sharp balls. He feels foolish. And embarrassed. Two chattering squirrels seem to be laughing at him. He glances shiftily around to make sure no one else is. It takes him close to ten minutes painfully to extricate himself.

  He quickly dresses, grabs the .45 out of the truck, and bushwhacks down through the woods to the edge of the mown field in which his trailer sits. He starts running in a semicrouch toward it. He is halfway there when, down the road, several blue jays start squawking. Then comes the sound of rapidly clopping hooves. John freezes. He is still searching for a place to hide when into the yard gallops a lathered-up Diablo, carrying Abbie Nobie.

  “John Moon,” she calls out, reining the horse in. “Brought you a home-baked apple pie and three loaves of Momma’s oatmeal bread.”

  John shoves the .45 into his belt and waves.

  “Got something to put on it?”

  “Peanut butter maybe.”

  The horse shakes its head, spraying phlegm. “That all?”

  “Ain’t shopped in a while.”

  “Lucky for you I brought some sauerkraut and fresh-ground sausage.” She swings down from the horse. John nervously glances at the trailer. “Make ya a hoagie.”

  “What?”

  “For lunch.” She’s wearing blue jeans, riding boots, and a sleeveless black jersey that shows off her tanned, muscular arms. She’s too pretty for John to even think about. She unfastens a saddlebag from the girth. “Momma’s starting to worry you’re up here fading away to nothing.”

  “I’m all right,” says John. He starts walking toward her, keeping one eye on the house.

  “Never said you weren’t.” She tosses the saddlebag over her shoulder. “Like to have lunch with ya, is all.”

  She drops the reins. Diablo puts its head down and starts to graze. John stops between Abbie and the trailer. He thinks maybe he sees something move behind the kitchen window. Then he’s not sure. Abbie looks at him and wrinkles her nose. “You need a bath, John Moon.”

  John nods up the hill. “Was choppin’ wood yonder.”

  “Where’s your truck?”

  “Up there with it.”

  “Whyn’t ya jump in the shower.”

  “Huh?”

  “While I make the hoagies.” She smiles and walks by him toward the trailer.

  Showered and in clean clothes, he feels more grounded to the world. Combing his hair in the bathroom, he hears Abbie whistling “Where have you been, Billy Boy.” The events from the past five days give him a temporary reprieve. His recent behavior in the woods now strikes him as someone else’s. He allows himself to pretend he is a man waking from a nightmare. The dead bodies dissolve in the morning light. Ghosts wing away like butterflies. He imagines it to be Moira fixing him lunch in the kitchen while the boy quietly sleeps in his crib.

  The whistling stops. A few seconds later, it begins again, though lower-pitched than before. Or in a different key. Maybe the melody isn’t the same. The sound gets weaker and weaker. The thought strikes John that it’s a different whistler altogether. Not Abbie, but a third person. He runs out to the kitchen. No one is there. The basement door is open and the stair light on.

  “Abbie?” he calls down.

  The whistling stops.

  “That you, Abbie?”

  “Who else. A ghost, John Moon?” She laughs. John hears her pulling at the stand-up freezer door. His heart suddenly feels like a large bird caught in a tar bog, desperately flapping its wings to escape. He charges downstairs. “What you doing?”

  She wheels away from the freezer. She’s holding in her hand a plastic bag of sausage. “This ought to be froze,” she says, looking at him oddly. “What we don’t eat.”

  His reprieve abruptly come to an end, John snatches the bag from her. “I’ll do it,” he says.

  She flicks at her hair peevishly.

  “You don’t open it right,” says John, “everythin’ ’ll fall out.”

  “All the bodies, ya mean?”

  John drops the sausage. They both squat down to pick it up at the same time. The fleshly, live smell of her makes him shudder, fills him with a combination of forbidden desire for her and remorse for the dead girl’s contrary state. Abbie giggles as her hair brushes against John’s cheek. John picks up the bag. “Your hands are shaking, John Moon.”

  “Ain’t been myself.”

  “Sorry about Moira taking up with that professor.”

  John snaps his head back and cocks it at her.

  “I’ve seen them together on campus.” She reaches out and lightly touches John’s shoulder. “He teaches in the same building where I take my empowerment course.”

  John abruptly stands up.

  “He’s not near as good-looking as you, John. Nor as nice, neither. He’s got a haughty attitude. Like teaching freshman English makes him special or something.”

  John thinks he hears a noise upstairs. A door being quietly opened and shut maybe. He looks at the stairs, then back at Abbie, who looks like she’s heard it, too. “What was that?” he asks.

  “The wind knocking the shutters round, probably.” She reaches her hand out for John to take. He does and pulls her to her feet. She holds on for a second longer, then walks by him and over to the stairs. Before starting up them, she smiles and says, “I bet a dollar she don’t love him, John.”

  “Don’t know,” says John.

  “I bet if you took that job with Daddy she’d see you’ve got a regular income and a future and she’d come back.”

  John shrugs. Suddenly it occurs to him for the first time that maybe she oughtn’t to come back. Not that he doesn’t love and miss her, and Nolan too, but he’s not who he was a week ago and is not sure he trusts his present self to live with anyone. The thought makes him shiver. He watches Abbie walk up the stairs, then turns to the freezer and tugs it open less than an inch. He can feel what’s in there pushing against the door. Without peering inside, he slides the sausage through the crack and quickly slams the door shut.

  In adjacent lawn chairs facing the valley, they watch the slow sweep of a solitary white cloud across the horizon. John imagines the invisible wind pushing the cloud as the same relentless force propelling his fated course. What is soon will become what was, then will disappear. He thinks of life’s short flush. Of Simon Breedlove’s decomposing body lying atop his own chicken feed. Of his father dying angry. His mother dying sad. And the dead girl dying for a deer.

  He looks at Abbie eating a hoagie, and fixates on her chewing. On the rhythmic pulse of the muscles in her cheeks, like the steady throb beneath her breast. He sees her emerging beauty evolving, imagines her blooming into a full-blown woman who will never again eat hoagies on John Moon’s deck. This is not a guess, he tells himself, but a fact, like the sun coming up in the east and setting in the west. In his suddenly vibrant mind, more insights go off like skyrockets. Moira will learn from her professor perfect grammar and compassion. One day she will come to pity John. And Nolan will come to view him as a dinosaur, a compelling character from backwoods lore. In their world, John will be more akin to the dead than to the living. “Been a murder in town,” says Abbie.

  To combat a sudden vertiginous feeling, John takes his feet from the railing and places them flat on the deck.

  “W
as on the a.m. news. Some fella up to the Oaks. Police aren’t saying who, only that he’s got a long record and roots in the area.”

  Past her head, a hummingbird, emitting a relentless buzz, stabs at the honeysuckle. John pictures its needle-shaped beak slowly entering and narcotizing his brain. “They’re searching for a woman was staying two rooms down from him who’s disappeared without checking out.” Abbie opens her eyes wide at him like she’s staring into that dying place and marveling at its vacuousness. “They think maybe she’s in the victim’s truck. ’Cause it’s missing, too.”

  Her studied gaze intimidates John. He thinks of Florence staring out her good eye at the endless flat terrain he imagines Oklahoma to be. And addlebrained Skinny Leak peering out from the depths of his slime-green, ravaged recliner, saying, “You’s one the Fitch boys, ain’t ya?” From around front comes a loud chortled neigh, then heavy foot-stomping. “Easy, boy!” Abbie calls out.

  The horse sounds off again, then suddenly trots around the corner of the building, tossing its head. “What’s the matter with you?” says Abbie, waving at him. “Wait for me out front. There’s plenty of grass there!” She smiles at John. “Jealous, must be.”

  “Maybe somethin’ spooked ’im.”

  “Could be turkeys. Been a bunch of ’em around.”

  Diablo turns and walks back around to the front of the trailer. John thinks he hears again the gentle banging he heard earlier, while in the cellar. He looks at Abbie, who apparently hasn’t heard it. She breaks into a timorous laugh. “On the subject of trucks,” she says, “that black Chevy Blazer went up toward Hollenbachs’ again last night.”

  John subconsciously touches the empty place in his belt where, before he placed it on the bedroom bureau, his .45 had been. “When did it?”

  “Late. Real late.” Nervously, John glances into the woods behind her, then up the hill. In his mind, a fuse burns smaller and smaller. He hears Abbie take a swig of root beer, then loudly smack her lips. “ ’Bout an hour ’fore you got home.”

  John looks at her again and this time sees one more of the human race better equipped and more informed than he. “I sleep light’s a deer, John Moon.” She smiles coyly. Behind her, the hummingbird is chased off by two sparrows, fighting. “A twig don’t crack out my window I don’t hear.”

  “Fell asleep at a friend’s house,” says John.

  “Hope you were protected.”

  “Huh?”

  She laughs uninhibitedly. “You know, John Moon. A rubber.”

  Her straight talk embarrasses John. He turns red.

  “Having sex with one person’s like having it with twenty-four. I learned that in health class.”

  “I didn’t have it with nobody.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me if you did.” She shrugs. “Only you ought to be smart, is all. What’s one second of pleasure worth?”

  John scowls. He hears or imagines soft music playing somewhere.

  “I could lend you one.”

  “What?”

  “A rubber. I stole some from Eban’s bureau drawer.” She flicks playfully at her hair. “If Moira doesn’t want to come back, John, you’ll find somebody as nice if you’re patient.”

  “What?”

  “A good-looking guy like you, gentle and with a good sense of humor?” She nods matter-of-factly. “Uh-huh. I think so.”

  “Go home,” says John.

  She laughs again. “When I decide to give up my virginity, John Moon, it’s going to be to a guy as sweet as you.”

  John waves derisively at her. He’s not sure if she’s seducing him or making fun of him. Once he would have thought her incapable of either. Now no one’s motives are clear to him. “You’re almost the perfect catch, John Moon.” She punches him firmly in the arm. Now John guesses she’s only trying to be a good friend. “All’s you need’s a job.”

  “Maybe I’ll take it.”

  “You ought to, ’fore Daddy offers it to somebody else.”

  The music, no longer imagined, gets louder. John abruptly stands up.

  “Am I making you nervous, John?”

  “I heard somethin’ in the trailer.”

  “What?”

  “Music, whatever.”

  She cocks an ear toward the kitchen, but the sounds John heard he can’t hear now and neither can Abbie. “When’d he come back down?” John asks her.

  “Who?”

  “One in the black Chevy Blazer.”

  “He didn’t. Unless it was while I was in the barn doing chores this morning.” She gets a more serious look on her face. “Kind of a strange time to be searchin’ for someone’s missing, don’t you think, John?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you s’pose he’s up to?”

  John shrugs.

  “Maybe somebody ought to call the sheriff.”

  “I don’t think so,” says John. Suddenly he wishes he hadn’t left his pistol in the bedroom. He decides to go in and get it, just as the music starts in again. This time they both hear it. Somewhere past the kitchen, barely audible, a steel guitar, accompanied by a piano and a mewling, lovesick voice. Abbie looks uncomprehendingly at John. Behind her soft smile, maybe she’s even a little scared. “You leave a radio on inside, John Moon?”

  John wheels jerkily toward the door without answering.

  “Sounds like it’s moving from one place to another.”

  “You ought to get home,” snaps John, turning back around.

  “What?”

  “Your folks’ll be wonderin’.”

  She laughs shrilly, the sound seeming to inject life into a gnarled oak tree, down in the meadow, halfway to her house. As if limbering up for a race, the tree’s foliated branches begin jauntily to bounce, then from them rises up, squawking, a grackle plague, its black smudge scarring the sky’s perfect blue. Abbie, breathing heavily, jumps up from her chair. “Trash birds,” she says.

  “Go out this way,” says John, gently shoving her toward the deck steps.

  “Do what?” Enhanced by adrenaline, her vital smell provides an antithesis to the death’s scent recently filling John’s nostrils. His vertigo is enhanced. Vague disorientation becomes dissolution of rational thought. There’s a ghost in the trailer, playing Willie Nelson tunes.

  “No sense going out through the trailer.”

  “I’m not going out any way at all, John Moon,” she says. Backing haughtily away from him, she puts her hands on her hips. Inside, the music is now a low, steady drone, sounding somewhere in the south end of the structure, where John’s bedroom is. “Not till I know if you got a bogeyman.”

  John glances toward the room, forty feet to his left. A corner of its single window facing the valley is visible as a patch of mauve curtain, slightly pulled back from the open glass that last John remembers was covered by a screen but now is not. Into his chest enters a searing pain, like a ghost’s bullet fired from that ajar place. He looks at Abbie and she is Ingrid Banes behind a briar thicket in the final moment preceding her death, and a tiny voice in his head says, “Don’t shoot!”

  “Got to be the transistor,” he says. “Had it on changin’ my clothes.”

  “Weak batteries,” says Abbie with false bravado, “ ’ll make the sound fade in and out like that.”

  “I’ll go turn it off.” John steps toward the deck door.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “You stay here.”

  “Give a holler if you got a band playing in there, John Moon.” She laughs too loudly.

  John opens the door.

  Like a straining maestro’s voice, his agitation rises as he steps into that airless, dark place he has inhabited these many years, though, once inside, he feels less as if he has entered his home than as if he’s exited the world of light. Here, where the soul and body of Ingrid Banes rests, more dangerous than what eyes can see, is what the sun can’t touch. Still, he wishes he had a gun. Halfway down the semidark corridor where the kitchen smells loiter, and ten feet from the
closed bedroom door beyond which Willie Nelson sings, he remembers the .22 automatic he had hidden behind the toilet. He veers left into the bathroom, reaches down behind the toilet’s back, and finds the pistol. He checks to see that it’s loaded, then, holding it out in one hand, reenters the hallway.

  In front of the bedroom door he stops, inclining an ear inward. The music abruptly ends. An ad for Agway fertilizer comes on. “The transistor,” thinks John. “I did leave it on.” He turns the knob and gently pushes the door open.

  The radio sits on the bureau to his right. Everything else in the room looks as it had, except the screen that had been covering the window now stands at its base. A light breeze ruffles the curtain and John imagines the softly probing flatus to be a ghost’s inaudible whisper. A foreign scent taints the room, an organic stink concomitant to exorcised life. Now he’s not sure if the bed has been lain in or if the fault marring its center was created in its making. In this spiritually vibrant place, he suddenly feels like an inorganic lump. Like a stone marker in a cemetery. Even the tumultuous beat of his own heart seems like a sound disconnected from his static flesh. A frantic banging maybe, coming from the closet. He takes a deep breath and walks over to it. Brandishing the gun in one hand, he reaches down with the other and yanks open the mirrored door.

  A whoosh of dust-filled air exits.

  John reaches in and runs a hand through the closet’s sparse, dangling contents—two pairs of dress slacks, his one suit coat, half a dozen skirts or dresses left behind by Moira. He exhales pantingly, then shuts the door. He turns back to the bed. He thinks about looking under it but even in his revenant state thinks he won’t find anything significant in the couple of inches between the floor and two-by-four-raised spring. On the radio, a promo for the upcoming County Fair ends. A loud whinny sounds from the front of the trailer. Diablo’s uncharacteristic skittishness reregisters itself with John. He walks over to the radio, on which a Garth Brooks song now plays. He switches it off. Through the window, from the deck, he hears a sharp, dual-toned whistle like somebody calling a dog or remarking on a pretty girl. The sound repeats itself. John moves over to the curtain, pulls it back, and sticks his head out.