A Single Shot Read online

Pushing horrific images from his mind, he opens with his left hand the pickup door, reaches above the cab’s rear window, and takes down his .308. He leans the rifle against the truck, then, absently shoving the money sack to one side, crawls across the seat, yanks open the glove box, and takes out a carton of shells. He opens the carton, removes four bullets, then crawls out of the truck and, with his one good hand, spends more seconds than he can afford getting the shells into the clip and the clip into the gun. Afterwards, he hastily slings the rifle by its strap over one shoulder and again runs through the glade, reaching the base of the boulder just as he hears shouted up through the dense foliage, “Three minutes, John, till I have a slice!”

  Several times while clambering up the boulder, he bangs his wound and curses. He’s halfway to the top when the rifle falls from his shoulder. Suddenly remembering he has forgotten to check the gun’s safety mechanism, John, as the weapon slams into the rock, braces himself for its discharge. The gun doesn’t fire, but he loses thirty seconds retrieving it. From the bottom of the boulder, he restarts his assault. Pain throbs from his stub to his right ear. John envisions the absent finger, inverted in his flesh, cannibalistically headed toward his brain. All traces of white have vanished from the gauze covering the stump. Out of the soaked dressing, sporadic drops of blood fall.

  By the time he reaches the boulder’s crest, he feels feverish. He’s not sure if the flush he is experiencing is from infection or the afternoon heat. His head spins. Maybe he is delirious. In his mind the bloated image of Ingrid Banes presents his severed digit to him like a conciliatory gift. It strikes John that she views his mutilation as partial recompense for her death. Then he thinks maybe he does, too. In a body-sized indenture in the rock, he lies flat on his stomach, giving himself, through the tops of two trees, a narrow view of the trailer deck. He pulls the rifle into his right shoulder, then quickly realizes that the pain and swelling in that hand, now half again the size of its mate, have rendered the four remaining digits useless as trigger fingers. He tries reaching back with his left hand to manipulate the trigger, while steadying the gun with his right, but it is too cumbersome and impedes his aim. “Talk to me, John!” yells Waylon.

  The shout to John seems inflected this time with hysteria. He envisions a new paranoid monster, more dangerous even than the old cocksure one. He switches the rifle’s stock to his opposite shoulder, so that now his left eye peers through the scope and his good hand falls naturally on the trigger. “I’ve got the money!” he hollers.

  The view through his off eye is skewed. Or the world is. Objects look as if they have inclined slightly toward the valley. This affects his depth perception, negatively or positively. He’s not sure which, only that his take on things is slightly altered.

  “Don’t fuck with me, woodchuck! Your voice ain’t moved none!”

  “I’m luggin’ it back the truck!”

  Through the magnified glass, it takes him several seconds to locate the deck and its occupants. He no sooner zeros in on them than they disappear again. Twice more, he finds, then loses, them as, beneath his mummified hand, the rifle’s stock bounces precariously. Sweat drips into his eyes. He envisions pulling the trigger and seeing his awry shot slam into the skull of Abbie, who is being held like a shield in front of Waylon’s body.

  “I don’t hear an engine start in sixty seconds, John, I’m cutting off everything sticks out from her knees up!”

  John lays down the rifle. He hastily eyes the top of the boulder for a makeshift stand. To his right, he finds a fallen Y-shaped branch. He snaps off the stem of the branch, leaving about six inches, then quickly inserts the stem into a small crack at the front of the indenture. He picks up the rifle again, lies back down in the crevice, places the gun’s butt against his left shoulder, its stock onto his injured hand and its barrel into the Y, then peers through the scope.

  This time he quickly locates the deck. With an unwavering base supporting the gun, he is able to focus on the two figures. He is shocked at how close to him they seem, how physically intertwined they are, and how, in less than ten minutes, their appearances have so drastically altered. Waylon is visible behind Abbie only from the shoulders up and midcalves down. His godless eyes dart left and right, as if expecting at any moment to see John come rushing out of the bushes. His tongue squirts repetitively back and forth like a small fish across his lips. His knife is pressed against Abbie’s throat. A thin line of blood is visible there. John thinks he looks about ready to crack. Like he is on the verge of mania.

  The white skin of Abbie’s legs is made to seem even more so by her shockingly black tangle of pubic bush. Her jeans and underwear lie around her ankles. John’s thoughts of the second are quadrangular—rage at him who has exposed her; guilt for John’s own part in contributing to her predicament; fear that he will not be able to save her; and, like the abrupt onset of a scratchless itch, blood-quickening arousal that shames him. Even looking at her, he feels he is violating her. Suddenly one of her feet jerks backward, as if she is kicking at Waylon. Then the other. John sees Waylon’s knife blade flick upward like a silver tongue and Abbie’s shirt and bra fall away, exposing her taut belly and pink-tipped burgeoning breasts. The kicking stops. John instantly shifts his gaze back to Abbie’s face. Now he sees that the blindfold dangles from her left ear, though her eyes are shut tight, and the mouth gag pulsates as she breathes. He moves the crosshairs slightly above the top of her head, locking them in on the furrowed brow of Waylon.

  The rifle is John’s sole inheritance from his father, who used it to hunt deer. Though he keeps the gun in his truck as a constant reminder—good or bad—of Robert Moon, John has only occasionally shot it at paper targets. For hunting he prefers his 12-gauge, finding the shorter, more wieldy weapon handier in this thick mountain foliage, where normally one must get close to his prey before shooting it. Until now, he has never had need of the rifle’s magnified scope. When last he used it, it sighted slightly north or south of the crosshairs, making the gun fire high or low. Now John can’t remember which. If he guesses wrong either way, Abbie is dead. From John’s bullet or Waylon’s knife.

  “I’ve stripped her naked, you goddamn raccoon-balled son of a bitch!” Waylon’s strident shout cracks the thin air like a hawk’s shriek. “You’re two minutes past the deadline! Where hell you at?”

  John thinks the gun shoots high, but is not sure. He lowers his aim to the point of Waylon’s chin, thinking—or hoping—if the bullet rises, it will enter his forehead, and if it sinks, the top of his sternum, inches above the crest of Abbie’s skull. He places his finger on the trigger. Now his hands begin to shake like two days ago when he was aiming at the wild turkeys in his yard. John closes his eyes and silently prays that, at this juncture in his fated journey, he be allowed a steady grip. He takes a deep breath, then gradually blows it out, trying not to think what Waylon might be doing during those few seconds.

  He opens his eyes again. Through the scope he sees side by side on a single neck, like the faces of victory and defeat, the heads of Ingrid Banes and the wounded buck. In less than a second, he is made to understand that triumph and tragedy always travel coterminously like this. He sees the dead girl bleed. Imagines her pain. Watches it ooze from her chest and, in a thin stream, trickle down her pale front. She opens her eyes, which, through a moist fog of hurt, beg to be saved. They look straight at John. John raises the rifle’s scope above their gaze. He squeezes the trigger. He watches, almost congruently with the rifle’s report, Abbie and Waylon tumble backward onto the deck.

  His eyes won’t open. He cannot say for how long. From that internal dark place, he screams—silently or aloud—at the plague of injustice fated to him; at the curse of history repeating itself. Wordless ruminations, like large, swooping shadows of predatory birds, are reminders of invisible forces more powerful than he. In muted words, he begs, pleads, beseeches, one of these to alter its course. But they are heartless. Pain lopes as athletically as the unwounded buck through their umb
rageous world. Fear is the rustling of branches. Death is what lies on their far side.

  An external shriek returns him to sound and light. At first he thinks the noise is self-induced. Then, with his eyes open, he hears it again from a far-off place. A nightmarish screech that in its escalating tone incarnates terror. With his good hand still cradling the rifle, he falteringly lifts the scope to his left eye and peers toward the source of the sound.

  His blood-soaked redeemer cowers on the deck; on her haunches against the trailer wall, she stares outward in paralytic horror at a half-headless creature staggering toward her on its knees. But for its exposed teeth, frozen in a garish clench, the right side of Waylon’s face below the nose is gone. He still grips his knife. He externalizes his internal monster. John can’t believe he isn’t dead and thanks the invisible forces Abbie isn’t.

  He grips the rifle’s stock between his chin and right shoulder, then with his left hand pulls back the bolt and shucks out the empty shell. He levers in another bullet, fits the barrel back into the twig’s crotch, tucks the gun into his shoulder, and puts the crosshairs just beneath Waylon’s right eye. With as little effort as breathing, he pulls the trigger.

  Abbie attempts to push John away as he tries to calm her. She looks at him as if he is the monster who has inflicted her pain. That look strikes him as the stare of all humanity and it suddenly frightens him to have this small, naked child in his arms. Finally, she collapses like a felled tree on the deck. In a cataleptic trance, she trembles and begs for Mommy.

  John hastily examines her and determines that the blood on her body is mostly Waylon’s, and her cuts, though several, are not severe. He cleans and dresses the wounds as best he can with only one functional hand. Then he wraps her up in one of Moira’s old bathrobes.

  She can’t—or won’t—even talk. He worries what her parents will surmise of her condition, let alone the law, which he doesn’t even consider calling. She is his only witness to what has occurred and she looks at him with the same blank stare as she does the half-headless cadaver on John’s deck. He puts her in the front seat of the pickup and drives to her house, to find no one home. He continues directly to the hospital in town, stopping the truck in front of the locked red emergency-room door. He jumps out, hurries round to the passenger side, and helps Abbie down. After walking her over to the door, he pushes the call button and, before running back to his truck, says, “Just say to ’em you need tendin’, Abbie. You’ll be all right!”

  The few people he sees on his way back out of town look like rail-thin coyotes circling a kill. He drives the back way up Hollenbachs’ mountain. Halfway to the top, he turns left onto Carter Sey’s old rock-infested lumber road. After a while the terrain flattens out into a field of saw grass and white birch widely spaced enough to drive the pickup between. The earth gets gradually softer and damper beneath the truck’s wheels. A pair of ducks fly overhead. He can smell water. Now he can hear it. Finally he can see it, a small stream trickling off to his right. He fears the pickup will mire down. He parks it on a dry plateau behind a high field of weeds, gets out, and follows the cascading water upward to its source.

  He sits on the shore, where as a boy he had sat with his father and watched a loon swim underwater the length of the pond. On its sky-blue surface, lily pads are pandemic. Frogs here are huge and have baritone croaks. His father said this is because they are old, retired frogs. Fish sporadically jump. John gives them scores, one to ten, for height and splash. Hours pass. His right arm so pains him he threatens several times to kill it. He condemns to hell his missing finger. He blocks from his mind all thoughts but those relating to his corporeal self. His hurt. His mutilation. The odd way that his four remaining fingers will suddenly jump of their own accord. Other thoughts hurt too much to think about.

  Darkness falls. He listens to a hoot owl and watches a fox and two deer come to the pond and drink. The new moon is a wisp of itself. He grows light-headed and tired. He fears his hand is infected and will become gangrenous. He tries and fails to recall for pain an old Indian recipe—something made of mud and a certain kind of crushed leaf. Like a wounded animal, he retreats several feet into the woods, crawls beneath an upturned stump, and sleeps.

  He dreams of fire, acres of orange flames high as the trees they devour. A conflagration, pushed by a strong wind. An entire mountainside going up like a Roman candle. A burning that wipes out plants, animals, people; fouls the air with its breath; raises the earth; turns flesh to smoke and bones to ash; that spares no life, large or small. In the blaze’s aftermath, on God’s charred field, lies only dead silence. A dog doesn’t bay. A bird doesn’t chirp. A breath isn’t breathed. On this hardpan, a piss stream would emanate like rifle shots, but there is nothing. Only mute souls in this graveyard, until from the black skeletal remains of a pine break comes a barely audible rustling. Then footsteps, like the harsh popping of virgin snow. Now a buck’s snort, loud as a trumpet blast, and life’s horror begins anew….

  SATURDAY

  HE WAKES feverish in the deep woods, half buried beneath the roots of a giant upturned oak. Did he hear voices talking? He’s not sure. He quietly lies there, inhaling the smell of rich humus and rot that makes him think of an exhumed grave. Only a narrow shaft of sunlight penetrates this cool, dark cocoon in which tortured horseflies twist in a brown spider’s web and where slugs and beetles are riveted to the decaying walls. The throb in his hand is a reminder of pain’s continuum.

  He slowly rolls toward the entrance, unintentionally applying pressure to his injury. The pain is searing. He envisions a pair of tongs gripping his skin below the stub and tearing upward to his shoulder. He bites his lip so as not to scream. Now, beyond the enclosure, sounds splashing water.

  John tentatively pokes his head through the opening. Several wood ticks and a mole scurry away. He blinks in the sudden midday glare that reflects harshest off the pond fifty feet to his left. A woman’s head floats atop the water. Then John understands her body is swimming beneath it. Her hair is wavy and long and trails her skull like a tangle of black snakes. A pair of wood ducks float a few feet behind her as if she is one of them.

  Suddenly a loud whistle comes from the shore closest to John. The swimmer glances that way. She exhales a sharp bark that sounds like cold ice breaking. From a high stand of pussy willows wades a naked man. He is muscular and tall, with hair the same color as the woman’s, in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. He walks toward her until he is in up to his knees, then stops. Treading water twenty feet away, the woman warily watches him. The man reaches down with both hands and splashes water at her. The woman takes in a mouthful of the pond and spits it his way. The ducks nervously flap their wings and back up several feet.

  John is immediately transfixed by the couple. He wonders who they are, how they got here, and in what manner they are intertwined with his fate. He thinks maybe they are predisposed to interact in a way that will determine the course of his own life.

  The man splashes more vigorously at the woman, almost as if he is angry. Now John sees that the man’s penis is erect; long and thick, it curls steeply upward and back, touching his stomach above the belly button. The woman rasps stridently. She paddles several feet closer to the man, rising up out of the water enough so that her unclothed breasts float atop it like two more heads. Like the rest of her, except for her blood-red areolae and nipples, they are the color of fresh cream. They strike John as being filled with that substance. She hisses at the man.

  John thinks maybe they aren’t acquainted. But how could that be? Out here, in the middle of nowhere, strangers colliding? Still, their manner of circling one another suggests two wandering curs sniffing each other. They are to John beautiful and ugly at the same time, like the corpse of Ingrid Banes.

  With her chin the woman beckons at the man, challenging him to come farther into the pond. The man slaps more water at her, but doesn’t move. The woman swims to within five feet of him, then stands up and darts her tongue at him. The pond
is halfway up her thighs. Drops of it trickle from her pubic bush, which is dense as briars and comes to a sharp point an inch below her navel. She reaches down and runs several fingers through it. As if in response, the man wraps a hand around his penis.

  The woman haughtily tosses her head. Then she pointedly slips a finger into her vagina and begins steadily thrusting it in and out. Her hips increasingly pulsate. The man snorts. He starts yanking at his erection. The water’s surface gently ripples from their movements, which are like an intensifying dance. Neither has uttered a word since John has been watching them. Their openmouthed, wide-eyed glaring at one another suggests two cats vying for the same spot on a couch.

  Precipitately they rush toward each other. Releasing himself, the man grasps at the woman, who throws her arms out to the sides like someone doing a swan dive. The man loudly slaps his hands on her buttocks. The woman lets out a loud yelp. The man jerks her out of the water, his prominent deltoids rippling, and hoists her breasts up to his face. He starts biting and suckling at her nipples. The woman gyrates side to side so that he can’t keep one in his mouth for more than a second. She wraps her legs around his waist and starts baying like a hyena. He sounds as if he’s growling.

  John tells himself that these are Conservancy hikers fucking, but in his feverish state he doesn’t believe it. He feels as if he’s being made to watch two devils mating or murdering each other. Or both. Now they are turned sideways to him and the woman is gripping the man’s penis, which looks big as a bludgeon. She points it straight up toward her crotch and the man, in a way that makes John wince, pushes her down onto it. The woman yelps again. Then she’s throwing her whole body at him as if she’s trying to knock him into the lake. Their splashing heightens. In a rush of wings, the ducks take flight and John, witnessing this hell’s dance, suddenly wants to do the same.