A Single Shot Read online

  In John’s head a flat, practical voice says he ought to drag the girl away from the quarry, maybe to Quentin’s swamp, where even hunters don’t venture, weigh her down with stones, then drop her in a deep bog. He can’t do it, though. He can’t even bring himself to dig a hole and put her in it. The thought of covering her with dirt reinforces in his mind a hundredfold his awful act. Burial has a ring of finality to it he can’t yet bear.

  This time carrying in one hand the flashlight and in the other the pick poised in front of him like a spear, he duck-walks into the cave, the sleeping bag draped over his shoulders, listening for telltale rattles, knowing that where one snake lives, so may others. Past the entrance, he is able to three-quarters stand, the jagged granite ceiling acting as a painful reminder not to lift his head too high. The silence starts an ominous hum in his ears. Nervously he thinks of the precariousness of his position, imagining himself an egg beneath an elephant’s ass.

  Crouched near the center of the cave, he moves the light in a slow circle around the oblong interior of dark red and slate-gray rock, two sides of which ooze a moldy dampness. The back wall is dry; in the floor in front of it, John sees a rectangular hole surrounded by freshly dug dirt, gravel, and a long, flat rock. One side of the rock is earth-stained, as if it has recently been removed from the hole, which looks to be slightly bigger than the metal box full of money in the lean-to. A nervous twitch starts in the muscles of John’s injured shoulder. He tries to fathom the man who had crawled into a snake-filled cave with a pick, shovel, and Luger to unearth a box of money, and how the money had come to be there in the first place. A rattle sounds to his right.

  He flashes the light that way and sees, three feet from him, two eyes like hot coals inches from the ground, and behind them, above a coiled, thick body, a tail rapidly vibrating its cacophonous clatter. He could back out of the cave. The rattler wouldn’t bother him. But he thinks of the girl, trapped there with it, and his pent-up emotions from the previous hours coalesce in blind rage.

  Keeping the snake lit, he moves the pick in a silent arc through the dark air in front of him, stopping it a foot above, and a few inches behind, the diamond-shaped skull, before swiftly bringing it down lengthwise. He slams one foot on the pick, pinning the reptile to the floor, then lifts and forces down hard the heel of the other on the snake’s head and grinds until he hears a dull pop. The rattler lies still. After a minute, John picks it up by its tail. He holds it that way while shining the light around the rest of the interior, searching for more snakes and not finding any. He exits the cave, holds the rattler out like a trophy toward the dead girl, hollers, “That there’s the last of ’em,” and tosses its body next to the first one.

  Then he grabs the cadaver by the shoulders and drags it head-first into the cave. After laying the sleeping bag along the driest wall, he places the body on it, folds its hands beneath one side of its face, and gently tucks its knees in at the waist. For a minute or so, he crouches there, studying the girl’s body in the flashlight’s beam, seeing on her cherubic face a child’s peeved, forlorn expression. Then he runs back across the quarry and retrieves her satchel with its contents, and the stuffed lion. He lays the satchel near her feet and the lion on the sleeping bag next to her. Still not satisfied, he unzips the bag, then spends several minutes wrestling the cadaver and the lion into it, so that, when he’s done, just their two heads stick out. Even now, he has trouble leaving the girl. On his knees over her, he prays:

  “As you seen, God, her dyin’ was an accident. Maybe I shot too quick and now I gotta live with it. I ain’t figured it all out yet. Even ’bout the money, which I could dearly use. Anyway, here she is for you to watch over. Thank you. Amen.”

  He emerges from the cave into the midday sun covered with the girl’s blood and feeling like some misunderstood, tragic figure—a latter-day Frankenstein—who’s rapidly evolving into the monster he’s widely believed to be. The buzzards are on the deer carcass again and he chases them off, screaming maniacally, then runs straight from there to the lean-to, where he enters, grabs the metal box and the pillowcase, hauls them outside, and transfers the money from the former to the latter, tying the case, when he’s finished, with a granny knot.

  He looks around at the carnage in the field and thinks if he doesn’t clean up the trail of blood and dead bodies even a moron stumbling on the scene could draw a pretty good picture of what’s happened and maybe even who did it. He buries the shot rattlesnake beneath a slag heap, then, not wanting to waste good meat, wraps the other up in a pair of men’s dungarees that were in the lean-to and brings them and the money over next to the dead deer. Knowing he can’t lug back the entire carcass, especially not along with the money and rattler, he decides to make the rest disappear.

  He kneels down next to the body, pulls out his hunting knife, and with its serrated edge starts sawing just in front of the buck’s hind legs. The torso is hard-boned, gnarled, and muscular from years of fighting and just living and, for nearly thirty minutes, resists John’s efforts to sever it. Afterwards he cuts out the deer’s tongue and wraps it with the snake in the dungarees.

  When he’s finished, his muscles are burning; he’s sweat-soaked and drenched with gore from a half-dozen bodies; his mouth is parched; and he’s weak from hunger and adrenaline overdose. He glances at his watch. Nearly three o’clock. He worries that maybe Waylon will come back early—though if he comes in a vehicle, as he will almost surely have to, it will be a four-wheel drive that John will hear winding up the steep, potholed road a good ten minutes before it arrives, but even that will be cutting it close. He’s concerned, too, about somebody else, a hiker maybe, wandering into the quarry, though the likelihood of it seems slim. Mostly, he just wants to be gone.

  He hoists the buck’s head and upper torso onto his shoulders, walks over to the pond of algae-black water, drops the three-quarters carcass onto the bank, and stuffs it with several pounds of stone. Following the task he is so hot and thirsty that he takes off his pants and shoes, walks into the tepid water, and laps at it. After taking two steps, he drops in over his head. He stays beneath the surface, scrubbing himself, seeing only a few suspended weeds inches in front of his face, until his lungs threaten to burst. He emerges, screaming out the air still in his chest, sucks in some more, then goes down again. He goes down and comes up half a dozen times, before swimming over to the water’s edge to retrieve the rock-laden torso. He hauls the body into the pond with him, then sinks with it to the bottom. When he’s satisfied it will stay there, he swims to the top, climbs from the water, dries himself, and dresses.

  Using the T-shirt he found in the lean-to and a fallen spruce branch, he spends several minutes cleaning up, then smoothing over the grass around and beneath the dead deer, then the path made by the human cadaver from the briars to the cave. When he looks at the field afterwards, he has to remind himself that the girl or the deer ever existed.

  With the sleeping-bag cover he ties the shotgun around his waist; then he drapes over his shoulders the buck’s hindquarters and the snake-and-tongue-filled dungarees, whose combined weight is maybe sixty pounds. He carries the money by his side, on the long walk home alternating the heavy pillowcase between his left and right hand every few minutes.

  He hangs the deer’s hindquarters and the rattlesnake from the rafters in the woodshed, then, carrying the money sack and a length of bailing twine, slithers on his stomach into the crawl space beneath the shed and lashes the pillowcase to the top of one of the heavy foundation beams.

  Too exhausted to move afterwards, he lies there, imagining the girl doing likewise in her dank tomb, and wondering if at the quarry he left unattended some minor detail that, like a loose thread in a suit, could lead to a mass unraveling. The wondering, he knows, will end only with his surrender, capture, or death, which leads to his feeling that events are being orchestrated by some higher force and that, like a caged rat, he is the subject of some bizarre experiment.

  Halfway down the mountai
n, Cecil Nobie begins loudly calling in his cows for evening milking—“Cow-bossie! Cow-bossie!”—just as John’s father used to do years ago from the same rear open doorway in the barn. Though it’s fourteen years since he bought the Moon farm at auction from the bank, Nobie’s hollow shout can still give John chills, especially when the foliage blocks, as it does for half the year, his view below the treeline, so that the spectral voice floating up through the heavily leaved terrain might indeed be that of Robert Moon’s ghost. This afternoon, though, John is only amazed that anybody—Cecil Nobie included—is going about his or her everyday affairs as if yesterday’s world were unaltered.

  Only after he crawls out from beneath the shed and starts walking down the sloping lawn to the trailer does he realize how much his muscles ache and his shoulder burns. He inwardly vows to show up for work the following day, regardless of the pain. It’s important, he thinks, for him to act and appear normal to the world.

  The sun, three-quarters concealed behind the mountain at his back, casts a dark shadow, like a diving whale, on the opposite mountain. A swirl of dust from an ascending vehicle is visible above the hollow road, and John wonders if Waylon might be on his way up to the quarry to retrieve his girl and money and how he will react to losing both.

  In the trailer bathroom, he gets undressed, then into the shower, where for several minutes he steels himself against a coarse blast of freezing water. Subsequently, he cleans his shoulder wound with peroxide and wraps it in an aerated bandage.

  After drawing the blinds against the dying light, he lies down naked on his bed and tries unsuccessfully to convince himself that it is the morning of the same day and he has just awakened. He thinks about his wife and son, insulated for three months now in their village apartment, making for themselves a new life in which John is to have no part, and he remembers his wife’s departing words to the effect that she doesn’t want the boy to grow up, like his father, thinking there is no life beyond a small patch of mountain that is the last vestige of his ancestors’ homestead.

  In the end, thinks John, in a stuporous half sleep, everything boils down to money and death. The whole world. As if he’s counting sheep, he silently repeats, “Money and death, money and death.” The phone rings. He doesn’t answer it. He closes his eyes and sleeps fitfully, dreaming not about the girl or money, but of the wounded buck that like a dying pied piper led him through the woods into a box canyon from which nothing that enters leaves unchanged. Around 3 a.m., he wakes up sweating and disoriented. He puts on his clothes and goes out to the woodshed.

  He skins and butchers the buck’s hindquarters, then the rattlesnake. He carries the meat and the deer’s tongue into the cellar beneath the trailer and tosses them into the standup freezer. Afterwards, he sits for several minutes on the front deck with an open beer that he doesn’t drink, and, by the star-filled sky, is reminded of the insignificance of all earthly acts, including his own.

  He empties the beer over the deck railing, then goes back to bed. He sleeps until his alarm wakes him two hours later.

  MONDAY

  HE WORKS most of the morning next to Levi Dean, both of them with shovels, smoothing out the gravel as it slowly slides from the back of Cole Howard’s dump truck onto the undertaker’s driveway. Except for Dean’s mumbled curses, neither man says much while working, both seemingly hypnotized by their own monotonous motions and the metallic ping made by the rearranging pebbles. The hot, hard work is made more so for John by the dull pain radiating from his injured shoulder to his fingers that with nearly every scoop causes him to wince and grunt, and by an apprehensive feeling that someone is watching and judging him. By ten o’clock it is hotter than the day before. Dean and John strip off their shirts, the former’s mammoth, jiggly upper torso sun-pink and obscene against John’s short, compact body, which is, but for his gauze-covered shoulder, deeply tanned.

  “Who bit ya?” asks Dean, nodding at the shoulder.

  “Ax head broke off.”

  “So what?”

  “Jumped up and jabbed me.”

  “Jumped up from where?”

  “What are you, a goddamn cop? The ax head come off, hit a stone, jumped up, and jabbed me! What else you want to know?”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “Now you ain’t got to.”

  John doesn’t trust his own thoughts. He is uncomfortable in his own head, as if on his first full day in a new life he hasn’t got used to an altered way of thinking. He suspects that people looking at him will discern that he is a man with a deep dark secret. He keeps seeing in his mind the flash of brown-and-white that was the dead girl and the impacted grass on the road he had noticed before he shot her, followed by the pick and shovel standing against the quarry wall. Is there an evil speck on his soul, he wonders, that had foreseen the murder and driven him to it? Could this be the life, that of a thief and murderer, he was meant to live? He thinks of the money that could change his life, that might even bring back his wife and child. But how could he possibly spend it without raising suspicion? Levi Dean slaps the side of the truck loudly to indicate the load is out.

  “This goddamn undertaker’s got an airstrip for a driveway,” he says to John. “Must be he flies in the corpses.”

  John grunts.

  “Who the fuck needs a driveway this long?”

  John shrugs.

  “You get laid this weekend?”

  John doesn’t say.

  “I did,” says Dean. “I never seen nobody do what she done. She got down on her hands and knees and backed my prick into her then had me pick up her ass and legs and wheel her around the room like that till she got off. So I did. Then she blew me.”

  “Ask him how much it cost him,” Howard yells out the truck window.

  “Yeah,” says Dean. “Go over to Cole’s house and ask his wife how much.”

  “Two men together couldn’t hold up my wife’s ass,” says Howard.

  “She wanted me to slap her ass, too,” says Dean, “and yell giddyup. But I told her she’d have to get Cole to do that.”

  “Did she french-fuck your tits, Dean?”

  “I think this is gonna be my last day,” says John.

  “What?” says Howard.

  “I ain’t sure yet. I’ll let ya know.”

  “Let me know?”

  “I’m pretty sure it will be.”

  “Yeah, right,” says Howard. “Three months. That’s about how long I heard you were good for.”

  Dean laughs. “Give him a raise, Cole,” he says. “Bring him up to minimum. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”

  “I’ll give him shit,” says Howard, lowering the truck’s rear end onto the bed. “He can work for a living or sit on the side that goddamn mountain he holes up on and keep feeding his wife and kid with jacked deer meat. It’s no skin off my ass.”

  He spends his lunch hour in the office of Daggard Pitt, the attorney he had made an appointment with last week, on Simon Breedlove’s recommendation, to discuss his divorce. Pitt turns out to be a tiny, maimed man who drags one shriveled leg like a tail when he walks and always seems to be apologizing. He occupies two rooms above J. J. Newberry’s. His receptionist/secretary, who looks like she might be Pitt’s sister, for the entire half hour of John’s visit talks loudly on the outer-office telephone to a veterinary hospital about scheduling her cat to have a tumor removed.

  John shoves the papers he’d been served across the desk at Pitt, who, fidgeting like a small child on one side of his chair and periodically rubbing his shrunken leg with a dwarfed hand frozen in the shape of a claw, surveys them, making disapproving grunts and groans. John sits there looking past the lawyer, out the window, at the traffic light above Main Street, imagining himself a porous wall through which his guilt oozes like sweat, and thinks, “Maybe I ought to just lay the whole thing on this lawyer,” then, remembering his prior convictions—three for poaching, two for driving under the influence—tells himself no lawyer in the world could convince a judge or jury
not to send him to jail for a good long time. Daggard Pitt says something about the papers having been served thirty days ago and the law allowing only twenty days to answer them.

  “They got under somethin’,” says John.

  “The problem, thankfully, is not fatal.”

  “I ain’t interested in a divorce. We don’t see eye to eye on that.”

  “I’m awfully sorry,” says Daggard Pitt, slumping in his chair.

  “I’m ready to end this thing.”

  “How so?”

  “She mentioned couns’lin’ once—I’d go now, if it’ll bring her home. Tell her lawyer that.”

  “At any rate,” says Daggard Pitt. “We ought to serve them an answer.”

  “I never hit her nor nothing.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. I certainly am.”

  “It ain’t about that.”

  “Nor does she allege so.”

  “She’s got this idea about the boy.”

  “Your son?”

  “Nolan. After he—she started to see things different.”

  “Different?”

  “Suddenly my way of doing things—not that I’m lazy. I always provide—she can’t say I don’t provide.”

  “She says you have trouble keeping a job.”

  “I’ve kep’ plenty of ’em, just not for long.”

  Daggard Pitt smiles encouragingly.

  “I was raised to farm—suddenly she wanted me to get a full-time factory job, work nine-to-five indoors like some…” John lets his voice trail off. He thinks of Gerhard Lane, the former college football player who represents his wife, then tries to imagine the Lilliputian Daggard Pitt, with his hangdog look and shriveled limbs and the way he wheezes and makes funny little noises to himself, in the same courtroom with Lane, and his heart sinks. He actually starts to feel sorry for Daggard Pitt. “Look,” he says, “what’s the use? She wants a divorce she’s gonna get one sooner or later, I know that much. If it comes to that, the boy ought to be with her. I’ll pay what I can. There’s no money, only the acre and a half that my trailer’s on that I inher’ted fair and square from my mother.”