A Single Shot Read online

  He begins to suspect that he is being followed by the birds. Perched high in the canopy, they chatter among themselves as if making plans. One will occasionally swoop a few feet above his head, stridently squawking. To avoid thinking about them, John converses with the dead girl. He tells her in these woods is where their paths began to coincide. He points to the thistle patch behind which he first saw the dead buck’s antlers as the spot where her death was first assigned to him. He explains to her how he chased the deer for miles before it limped, as if preordained, into the quarry. Beneath these pines, he tells her, is a nice place to be buried. There’s plenty of shade, a gentle stream nearby, and it’s not far from a good view of the valley. Here is where he would be buried, he says, if the state would allow it.

  Her response is to plant a snapshot of her parents in his head, as if she is demanding to know why he is hiding her from them. John refuses to answer. Instead, he tells her of his belief, recently arrived at, that souls are liberated by the earth. That once she is in the ground, she will be free to move easier than the wind. She can visit her parents or, if she hasn’t already, go to Hawaii. He realizes that he is talking quite loud, that maybe the fever is causing him to rave. The crows and grackles are yelling back at him. Suddenly he is angry at the dead girl for making him see that he is as much a coward as most of mankind. He stops walking and puts the back of his hand to his forehead. It feels like room-temperature beef. “You’re dead and I ain’t,” he tells her, “and I don’t want to go to jail, all right?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  John starts lugging her toward the truck again. He’s on the edge of the fire zone. Although it’s been razed nearly two years, the area still breathes a faint odor of smoke. A hundred feet ahead, he can just see, nearly parallel to the ground in the brush-tufted swale, the pickup’s roof, dully reflecting the sun. Now he starts to consider the difficulties of performing his task. Though the fire-dead earth should be softer to dig, in John’s weakened state, and with only one functional hand, doing so will be torturous at best. That his pain should be commensurate with his deviousness seems to him exactly right.

  At the swale’s edge, he drops the lead rope, climbs down the indention into the pickup, starts the engine, pulls the truck up onto the flat terrain, then shuts it off.

  For several seconds he can hear his raggedy breathing and rivulets of sweat splashing onto the seat. Then the birds start in again. Out the windshield, John sees more crows and grackles than he can count perched in the live trees encircling the dead zone. He jumps from the truck and nearly lands on a porcupine. He leaps back. The porcupine doesn’t move. John prods it with his toe. The varmint just lies there. John rolls it over and sees that only the animal’s head and quills haven’t been eaten. He kicks the carcass into some bushes, then hurries over to the toboggan, draws back the tarp, unties the dead girl, and grabs the shovel from between her legs. “In a coupla years,” he tells her, reentering the swale, “this spot’ll grow up to be beautiful again. And you’ll be a part of it.”

  The digging is even slower and more painful than he had imagined it would be. After each one-handed shovel thrust into the dark loam at the swale’s bottom, he places a foot atop the metal blade and pushes until it sinks to the hilt; then, simultaneously yanking back and lifting the handle, he extracts the blade and, using for ballast the forearm of his injured limb, shakily dumps to the left of the hole what soil he manages not to drop, usually less than he doesn’t. From start to finish, performing the procedure initially takes him close to half a minute, and, as the grave gets deeper, necessitating even higher hoisting of the shovel, successively longer, while each time he removes less dirt. So that he can easily stand while working, he makes the hole about four feet wide. Having started close to five feet below ground level, he soon can’t see beyond the swale’s borders.

  Whenever he stops to rest, he hears the ceaseless yakking of the birds; intermittently one or more of them will dive down out of the trees to peer curiously into the depression. Once, a noise resembling asthmatic wheezing begins above him. John abruptly drops the shovel and scrabbles from the grave to find a pair of red foxes sniffing at the dead girl. He chases them off with a volley of rocks, then ascends to the forest floor, grabs the lead rope of the toboggan, and yanks it to the swale’s edge. He climbs into the grave again and recommences digging. After a while his left arm hurts as much as his right. He suffers periodic dizzy spells; his eyes blur; in his gaze, objects vacillate; rocks become people drowning in the knee-deep pool of blood that he bales. He begins ascribing to the birds’ toneless squawking a blend of poetic insight and cold intelligence. He imagines their varied flights composing silent funeral marches. From the shovel’s blade, his father’s face screams at him, “Was a wolf, I tell ya. A goddamn wolf!”

  The birds abruptly turn mute. A moment later, they start in again, even louder. In that brief interlude of silence, John is certain he heard voices—real ones—from somewhere above him. Once more he exits the grave, this time with more difficulty. With his eyes, he circles the woods and brush above him. To the west, a patch of yarrow sways harder than he thinks this gentle wind could cause it to. Or is it his imagination? He’s not sure. It surprises him to see that the sun is three-quarters of the way toward the horizon. How many hours has he been digging? Three? Four? Reaching up to the toboggan, he whisks several horseflies from the dead girl’s face. “Gotta put ya in deep ’nough,” he tells her, “where somethin’ don’t dig ya up.”

  Again he descends into the grave. He has no idea for how long. Time is like recycled water rising and falling, and John dead wood on its surface. Even his physical distress isn’t reliable; like all human conditions, it can’t maintain its intensity. His pain loses its sharp edge and becomes merely monotonous. Periodic pangs, twinges, and abnormalities remind him he is unhealthily alive. When he spits or swallows, his swollen tongue feels like a live fish wriggling in his mouth. A loud throbbing sound fills his ears. His sweat tastes like bitter almonds. He urinates a burning, dark yellow froth into the bottom of the grave. Twice more he thinks he hears voices and maybe branches cracking at ground level, but, after crawling out to see, spots nothing amiss. The third time, he doesn’t even bother to look; recalling his dying father’s hallucinatory wolf, he dismisses the sounds as audible phantasy.

  Beyond a certain depth, his one hand can barely heft to the lip of the hole an empty shovel, let alone a dirt-loaded one. His efforts prove fruitless. Abruptly dropping the tool, he gets down on his knees and begins scooping up single handfuls of soil, then tossing them out of the grave. At some point during these labors, he becomes convinced that a carnivorous animal is trying to exit through his throat. Gagging, he tries to heave the beast, but having eaten nothing but berries for forty-eight hours, can’t. His skin temperature drops from hot to clammy. An almost peaceful mood attends him. He believes he is dying and is not overly troubled by it. After several seconds he is able to breathe again; then the experience upsets him terribly. “This is gon’ have to do!” he yells up at the dead girl. The floor of the swale is maybe six inches below his shoulders. Shadows half-fill the indenture. John tries to exit the grave, and finds he is unable to.

  Worn out from shoveling, his uninjured limb trembles like jelly while failing to pull him up. His right arm is even more useless; monstrous-looking in its tumescence, it radiates enough pain from even the slightest pressure to present John with a phantasmagorical longing for death as life’s first prize for suffering. He nearly faints. Then, emitting a whimpering sound, he exhaustedly sits down in the grave. Though he’s not seriously concerned with being infinitely trapped there—he can, after all, always refill a portion of the hole with dirt and walk out—the idea of being imprisoned in a pit not even up to his chin infuriates him. He thinks of the hours of labor he spent to confine himself and wonders if burying Ingrid Banes will result only in more suffering for him, rather than less. Then he recalls his father saying that “life is for the living” and John’s ow
n determination at least to try, as had Robert Moon, to be a presence in his son’s life. And how can he do that from a jail cell?

  Rejecting the disheartening and painful prospect of refilling what he has dug in order to escape, he stands up, grabs the shovel, and lays it on the swale’s floor near the edge of the hole. With his good arm, he pulls himself as far as he can up the wall, then grips it with his knees, the swale’s floor with his elbow, and the shovel’s handle with his left hand. Slowly he inches the blade toward the toboggan’s lead rope where, six feet from him, it dangles from the forest floor into the swale. Several times he falls back into the grave. Each failed effort brings the blade closer to the looped rope. Finally, he manages to work the blade into the loop and, pulling the rope gradually toward him, removes most of its slack. Hoping to stop the sled next to the grave, he begins easing it gingerly down the steep bank of the swale. Suddenly he again loses his balance and, still holding the shovel, tumbles backward into the hole. In the split second that the toboggan and its contents career down the abrupt embankment toward where he lies face-up in the grave, John is aware of the birds’ heightened screeching and, once more, voices, real or imagined.

  Either he has been unconscious for a day or only for a few seconds, because the hole is still half filled with dying light and overhead the crows and grackles swoop and cry. There are other noises, too. Snapping brush. Frantic whispering. Wedged by the sled’s bow against the grave’s floor, John stares into the nondislodged eye of the dead girl, catapulted by the collision onto him. She reeks a stench that begs for the warm blanket of mother earth. Spoken words float like pollen in the air above them.

  “He dead?”

  “Looks to be.”

  I’m not! says John, only he can’t hear his own voice or feel his mouth speaking it.

  “Couple peas in a pod, their eyes open that way.”

  “Think he killed her?”

  On’y killed one person in my life purposeful, John inwardly yells, and that one needed it!

  “Blew a hole in her chest, I’d say.”

  “Was a while ago, by the smell of her.”

  “Wonder where he’s been keeping her at.”

  “Someplace wet by the look of her.”

  “Jesus, baby, you don’t suppose he had her in tha…?”

  “Nah! She’s been froze, then thawed, looks like.”

  John is no longer aware of the pain in his hand. In fact, none of him hurts at all. He envisions his body as a car wreck, being appraised for junk.

  “Where you guess all that money came from?”

  “Someplace it oughtn’t to have, for sure.”

  He’s not quite certain where all his parts are or which of them he can move. Then, horrified, he suddenly realizes he is—and has been for several seconds—trying and failing to make all or any of them move. He screams a cry as muted as a shout from the center of the earth.

  “Jump down there, baby, and gather up the cash. Put it back in the sack.”

  “Not me, brave boy. Something spooky ’bout that hole.”

  “It’s just a hole with a sled, a mountain of dough, and two dead people in it.”

  “Like you see corpses every day, right?”

  “It’s not doing them any good.”

  His eyes won’t move left or right, forward or back. He can see only straight up, which is why he can’t see who’s talking. Beyond the dead girl’s face, past the tops of the trees, the sun-setting sky resembles in his slightly fractured vision a gently blowing field of goldenrod.

  “Promise you’ll fuck me on the plane to Paris, lover?”

  “Once in the can, then in the cockpit. Now get your cute ass down there and help me.”

  A thud vibrates in his ears. Then another. A moment later, he is aware of the dead girl being rolled from his chest onto the ground next to him or maybe onto his legs, he can’t tell for sure. Then the toboggan is lifted from him and two pairs of arms thrust it over his head toward the swale’s floor, where it lands with a wooden slap. For a few minutes he hears the two people picking up the bills and stuffing them back into the sack from which they must have spilled.

  “Jesus, let’s get out of here. The stench is killing me!”

  “We haven’t got all the cash.”

  “We’ve got most of it. You believe this amount of cabbage?”

  “Like manna from heaven!”

  “Hey, look at this. Snapshots.” John hears someone pull the Polaroids out of the waterproof envelope he’d placed them in. “Of the girl, I guess.”

  “Christ, she looks half dead in ’em.”

  “Why would he bury them with her?”

  “Who cares? Let’s get out of here. This whole scene gives me the creeps!”

  “There’s some kind of note stuck in with ’em.”

  “Do me a favor, will ya? Don’t read it.”

  “Whadda ya mean, don’t read it?”

  “It’s bad luck.”

  “Bad luck?”

  “Stick it back in the envelope with the pictures and leave ’em, lover, or count me out of the whole thing!”

  “All right, all right!” John hears the envelope fall next to him, then the labored breathing of one or both people rearranging the cadaver in the hole. Seconds later, female legs straddle his head; above them are a body and a face out of which poignantly stare the black she-devil’s eyes that followed John’s frantic flight from Hidden Pond. “Jesus,” she says, “you sure he isn’t alive?”

  “He’s dead as this one,” says the man. Another dull thump sounds in the ground, followed by one of the dead girl’s slightly swollen hands flopping across John’s face and staying there. He hears the man and the woman exit the grave and, after a slight pause, the shovel being picked up.

  “Earth to earth,” intones the man.

  “Dust to dust,” adds the woman.

  A scoop of falling dirt lands on John’s face. Then a second. And third. Mother earth numbly slaps his cheeks. Blackens his vision. Fouls his throat and nostrils. His mind is as disconnected from his body as a circling hawk from the world. He understands he is out of time. His panic becomes a panacea. He gives thanks for being granted on this journey the touch and scent of another human being. He fears not what comes next, but only that the dead girl might. John mutely assures her that her soul is headed to Hawaii and that only her spirit-abandoned flesh will rest here with his own, the Polaroids he took of her, and a handwritten note, telling the world:

  A terble thing happned here. Weren’t nobody’s fault, but a bad turn of events. This was a pretty girl, as anyone can see from her pictures. Her name was Ingrid Banes. She died on 6 /18 /95. She knows the truth of things and so do I. I didn’t tell nobody bout what happned—even her parents who maybe are better off thinkin she’s still alive and happy—cause I was fraid I’d not be blieved and would spend my life in jail for it. I din keep none the money cept twenty thousand dollers for my lawyer, round four thousand I tried to giv my wife, and five hunred to a one eyed lady from Oklahoma. It was stoled in the year 1990 from Ira and Molly Hollenbach by one bad man and another not so bad, who was my best friend. How it ended up with me’s a long story.

  John Moon

  6 /24 /95

  Reading Group Guide

  A SINGLE

  SHOT

  A novel by

  Matthew F. Jones

  An conversation with Matthew F. Jones

  A Single Shot is in many ways a different breed of noir than other, less daring works of crime fiction—particularly in regard to the way the novel ends. Was choosing a fate for Moon difficult for you? Or did it simply seem like the natural conclusion all the way through your writing process? (Did you have this beginning in mind right from the start?)

  I had no idea how the novel would end when I began it or, in fact, until the moment it unfolded while I was writing it. Once I have the characters I’m writing about in mind—i.e., once I feel that I know them—I try to think as little as possible while writing. And I never o
utline or plan out in advance what will happen in a novel or to the people in it. Once I’ve created the characters, the story as I see it comes more from them than from me. I do my best to follow wherever they lead me and, through my own filter, accurately record their accounts. I’ve never had much luck in trying to manipulate anything to come out a certain way in my own life, and doubt I’d be any better at it in the lives of fictional characters. Plus I can’t imagine the monotony of writing from an outline. I sit down to write each day with only a vague idea of where I’m headed—and never knowing where I might end up—which for me makes writing more of an adventure than a task.

  What are some of your personal favorite novels, and do you see any of their influence in A Single Shot, looking back on it now?

  I’m an eclectic reader and a lover of many novels, though two unifying elements are found in the ones I admire most: indelible characters whose stories are compelling because of who they are; and a rich evocation of the particular world they live in. In that vein, some that, in no particular order, come readily to mind are Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Collector, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Sheltering Sky, Augie Marsh, A Flag for Sunrise, The Quiet American, The Stars at Noon, Suttree, The Killer Inside Me, The Risk Pool, The Cement Garden, Paris Trout, The Professional, Mystic River, Affliction, Fat City, etc.