A Single Shot Read online

  About an hour into the work, he begins to marvel at the multitudinous ways in which chopped wood splits. Two nearly identical-looking logs when struck with equal force in their direct center by an ax head will splinter in entirely different manners. He finds this as intriguing as the varied echoes produced by his chopping. Thump. Bang. Whop. Like the rumblings from a giant’s belly. For a while, he even manages to block out the pain in his shoulder. He works shirtless, stopping only to wipe his brow or to drink a beer from the cooler on the grass near him. He is as impressed with his own physical stamina and prowess as he would be watching a horse or a tractor at work.

  He thinks about the land, how it shouldn’t be bought or sold for money, but possessed, as in pioneer days, by those best able to work it. His father, thinks John—and he, too—should have lived back then, before dairy co-ops, sixty-thousand-dollar tractors, milk inspectors, grain monopolies, double-digit interest rates, major land developers. He feels his anger slowly boiling, as it hasn’t for years. More chronic than acute, it is directed at everything, but at nothing specific. Even after all these years, he isn’t astute enough to know for sure if losing the farm was the fault of his father’s reckless spending, the bank’s greed, the economy’s collapse, or cursed luck landing like an incubus on the Moon family.

  The loss of the land. His birthright. Every misfortune or failure, every hurt and tragedy, John sees as being born of that deprivation: his father’s death—never mind the doctor’s talk about cancer and metastasizing tumors—and, four years later, his mother’s, whose heart just quit in the middle of dinner one night; his own hermetic existence, living like Cecil Nobie’s serf on an acre and a half of mountain, forced to pilfer and poach from the land that should be his; his abandonment by his wife and son. In this roundabout way, his errant, self-pitying anger meanders and slowly comes back to its fuse, that black, impenetrable spot in his mind that he wishes were a dream.

  The same questions over and over. Could he, an experienced hunter, have prevented her death? Could he have foreseen it? In some unconscious way, even wished for it? In his mind he has already separated the money from the tragedy that begat it. Much has been taken from him in his life and very little returned. He sees the money not as a road to a more exorbitant life but as the way back to his wife and son. Maybe he could even buy a large parcel of land—start his own farm, off this mountain—for the three of them. Then he thinks again of Waylon. Had he already returned to the quarry, or might he have been on his way there when John saw him? And what has John left behind that might lead Waylon to him?

  He chops until he has produced half a cord of firewood, and, at his back, the descending sun is a huge, fiery ball. His naked torso is a knotted, slick muscle. Now he is aware again of the pain in his shoulder. He takes off the blood-damp bandage, dabs at the open wound with his T-shirt, then, deciding to let the cut air, sits down on the grass near the cooler. He eats three more aspirins, washing them down with beer.

  He thinks of the deer carcass sitting with his 12-gauge slug in it at the bottom of Hollenbachs’ pond. And the dead girl in the cave. If Waylon finds her, wonders John, how long will it take him to figure out some local hunter had killed her and stolen his money?

  Only the stars and Nobies’ houselights, filtering up through the trees, illuminate the mountain. The temperature has dropped fifteen degrees. John’s slick sweat has dried, penetrated his skin, and turned rank. Where it has sat for three hours on the back-yard grass, his rear is stiff and sore. The empties from two six-packs form a roofless, four-sided building between his feet. Somewhere back on the hill, a coyote yips. Nocturnal birds and animals fly and scurry through the woods to his right. From the spring-fed pond below the trailer comes a cacophony of peeps and croaks.

  John takes off his shoes, then shakily stands up, pulls off his jeans and underwear, and walks naked into the trailer. He gets a rattlesnake strip steak from the refrigerator, fillets it, cooks it for five minutes beneath the broiler, then rolls it in olive oil and cornmeal, and leaves it to slowly panfry on the stove while he showers, dresses his wound, and puts on clean clothes.

  Before leaving the bedroom, he takes from the closet, then carefully lays on the bed, one of the few articles of clothing Moira had overlooked when packing to leave: a long, blue-and-white-striped, country-style dress that John best remembers her wearing, six months after they were married, to a heart fund benefit square dance at the old armory. He puts his face to the dress and smells her. Then he sees her, stately and beautiful. Her hair up and in dancing clogs, she is several inches taller than John this evening. John feels the envious eyes of the other men—eyes envying him. Moira wins a cake in the raffle, three layers of sour-cream chocolate. Later, lounging naked where the dress now rests, they feed the cake to each other, then spend half the night in a lingering, nerve-tingling, impacted embrace from which Moira occasionally reaches down, gently squeezes the leaking tip of John’s inflamed penis, and whispers, “Rein it in, cowboy. Rein it in. This ain’t no race. It’s a swoon!”

  John never knew love could last that long. When, finally, he comes, he is a river, emptying into her not just his seed but all the words describing what he feels for her but is not adept enough to say. Looking at the dress now, he sees the moment as clear as if he were watching it on film: Moira’s wide-open eyes, like full moons in the dark; lean hands clutching his buttocks; vaginal muscles firmly milking him. Her throaty voice passionately urging, “Okay, John! Now!” A pulsating throb, like a crashing wave. Warm breath. That musky, just-fucked smell… John charges across the room and rummages through her bureau until he finds an overlooked pair of her briefs. Smothering his face in them, he inhales.

  Then he drops his pants, lies down on the bed, and, ardently calling out her name, masturbates into the underwear.

  He feels embarrassed afterwards. Then cuckolded. Looking at himself in the bureau mirror, he imagines his face is slowly evolving into a coarser, meaner him. Then he thinks, no. It looks like a clay lump that could turn out to be anything. He thinks of the crippled Daggard Pitt, who had helped steal John’s birthright, suddenly showing up in his life at this time, of all times. “I’m drunk,” he says aloud, as if that explains something. He thinks his face looks too predictable. He decides he will grow a beard. He puts Moira’s underwear on the headboard, goes out to the kitchen, and finds it engulfed in smoke.

  He throws open the door to the front deck, then runs over to the stove, where his strip steak and the pan it’s in are in flames. John douses them both with water, then opens all the trailer windows and, loudly cursing, charges around waving at the smoke with a towel. In a few minutes, coughing heavily, he stumbles out to the deck to breathe. Collapsed in a plastic chair, he watches stodgy black smoke twist lazily into the night sky. He thinks about what he went through to get that rattlesnake back to the trailer, then butchered and filleted, and decides it wasn’t meant for him to eat. He goes back into the trailer, gets the burned strip steak and his .45 pistol, comes back out to the porch, tosses the steak onto the lawn, and empties his gun into it.

  Then he goes downcellar, pulls from the big freezer what’s left of the rattlesnake, half a dozen venison steaks, and a bag of ice, and takes them all out to his truck, where he tosses everything into the portable cooler. Standing in the driveway afterwards, still three-quarters drunk, he decides that offering mere meat to his family is not enough. A much bigger gesture is needed. He runs up to the woodshed, crawls beneath it, pulls out the pillowcase, withdraws several packets of money, then reattaches the pillowcase to the foundation beam.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, he counts the money. Five thousand six hundred dollars. A lot. Much more, certainly, than he’s ever seen at one time. Yet only a tiny percentage of the whole. He wonders, though, if it’s too much. If word got out that he was giving away sums that big, what then? Still, the gesture must be big. A big—great big—not tiny, cash wad is the point. Like John’s cataclysmic orgasms, the gift is meant to speak volumes; to say
more than he is able to say in words about his love and concern for his family. He eats two bologna-and-cheese sandwiches, washes them down with a quart of raw milk. He thinks himself nearly sober. He looks around at the kitchen walls streaked with soot. The whole trailer smells like burning charcoal. He decides to give Moira all the money but a thousand dollars. Before he leaves, he rolls up the latter amount and stuffs it into the sugar jar above the sink.

  He drives the eight miles to town in a blindered, half-drunk state, foreseeing from his mission only positive results—a grateful Moira, an impressed Moira, a contrite Moira, begging for him to take her back. He parks in front of a liquor store at one end of the street, then, carrying in a paper bag the deer and snake meat and the cash, he walks the two hundred yards to where she lives on the top floor of a three-story, white, flaking clapboard building, half obscured by spruce trees. Her car is out front.

  Looking up at the third-floor windows, dark except for a single flickering light, John is suddenly not so sure he’s doing the right thing. It’s later than he thought. Nearly ten o’clock. What if Moira is in bed? Worse yet, what if there’s someone up there with her? The street behind him is so quiet he can hear the buzz of the streetlights. An occasional car passes. John walks back up the street to the liquor store, goes inside, buys a pint of schnapps, then walks back to Moira’s, and, drinking the schnapps, leans against her car, staring at the flickering light, imagining it to be about anything. A firefly lights several times in front of his face. John tries unsuccessfully to catch it in his hand. He wonders what it would feel like to fly, to bypass walking altogether.

  A vehicle comes fast down the street, slows up, then turns into the dirt driveway next to the house. It’s a small compact car. Rap music pours from its open windows. While the engine’s still running, the driver’s door opens. A long-haired kid holding a square, flat box steps out. He glances at John, then quickly walks to the outside stairs on the side of the house and starts up them, two at a time. A dog starts barking somewhere in the building. A voice tells it to shut up. John watches the kid climb past the second floor and head for the third. He drops the empty schnapps bottle onto the grass. A horrible image of Moira naked beneath another man flashes into his head. “She don’t even like pizza,” he thinks. “I’ve never seen her eat even a single goddamn slice.”

  He starts on a half trot toward the stairs.

  He reaches the bottom of the first platform just as the kid, guffawing to himself, steps onto it from above. “Unfucking real, man,” he says, shaking his head. “Some dudes got all the luck!” More to steady himself than anything else, John puts his hand not holding the paper bag on the kid’s chest. The kid stops laughing. “What’s the deal, man?”

  The world spins around John. He asks the kid, “Who ordered it?”

  “Huh?”

  “Who ordered the fucking pizza?”

  The kid nods up the stairs. “She did, man. The chick.”

  John pushes past the kid. Holding on to both rails for support, he lurches up the wooden stairs to the third-floor platform. He leans against the entrance-way door, hearing inside, above soft music, piggish grunts, moans, one-and two-syllable verbal barks. Through the door he sees past the kitchen into the living room, where the light flickers. He thinks, “How can the world end in a single day?” He is past reason, several drinks beyond thought. He puts his hand on the door handle and turns. The door is locked. He smashes the paper bag into the lowest section of glass, reaches through the hole, unlocks the door, yanks it open, and runs through the kitchen into the living room, where a naked woman holding a pizza slice sits cross-legged on the floor before a television set. John starts to speak, then hears behind him a click and a man’s voice. “Drop the goddamn bag.”

  John doesn’t recognize the voice or the woman. He’s not sure he recognizes the house. People are fucking on the television. He says, “Is this 1201 Belmont?”

  The woman giggles.

  The voice says, “I’m not shitting you, man.”

  John drops the bag.

  “Now, who the fuck are you and what do you want?”

  “I think I got the wrong house,” says John.

  “Most fucking likely.”

  “No,” says the woman. She tosses the half-eaten pizza slice into the box next to her. She looks sweat-soaked or greased. Her nipples are red flares. She’s bald between her legs. “No, he don’t.”

  “How do you know?” says the voice.

  “That’s John.”

  “John?”

  “The husband.”

  John hears a baby cry in back. “What’s going on here?”

  Frowning sheepishly, the woman pulls a blanket from the couch, wraps it around herself from the neck down. “I’m Moira’s friend, Carla. From Puffy’s?”

  John’s thoughts can’t find anywhere to land. He looks more closely at the woman and thinks maybe he’s seen her around. He recognizes the blanket covering her as the one Moira’s mother made them for a wedding present. That’s their television set playing. Their couch. “What are you doing in Moira’s house?”

  “Babysitting.”

  “Babysitting?”

  “For Nolan.” The woman stands up. “Moira’s out.”

  “Out where?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Christ,” says John. “You’re watching porno movies.”

  “We got a constitutional right,” says the voice.

  “You got a fucking gun on me?”

  “I put it away.”

  John doesn’t turn around. “And fucking in front of my kid!”

  “He was asleep,” says the woman.

  “Till you woke him, John.”

  “Fuck you,” says John. He glances at the television screen, on which three men in wolves’ masks are screwing Little Red Riding-Hood. “Both of you!”

  “I’ll get him,” says the woman, starting for the back bedroom.

  “No, you don’t,” says John. “You don’t go in there with my kid!” He looks around at the room filled with empty beer cans, a half-full vodka bottle, ashtrays with butts of something smoked in them. “You better have your clothes on when I come back,” he barks over his shoulder at the man. “I don’t want to see your sorry ass naked in my wife’s house! Christ, what’s the matter with Moira?” He reaches down, switches off the television set. In the ensuing hush, the kid’s wail becomes more pronounced. John starts toward it.

  “Better let me,” says the woman.

  “What?”

  “He ain’t used to seeing you.”

  “Ain’t what?”

  “You’re apt to scare him.”

  “I’d punch you in the mouth,” says John, pushing past her, toward the sound. “ ’Cept I been taught better!”

  “Okay,” says John. “Okay. Easy now.” His arms and legs pedaling madly, the kid lies on his back, squawking like a bird begging for a worm. John’s words have no effect on him. He’s like a lump of wood standing there. “Daddy’s here.”

  Above the crib hangs a mobile of small animals. Pushing one with his finger, John makes them spin. The kid wails louder. John grabs the animals to stop them. The mobile pulls free from its mooring and lands in the crib. The kid screams like he’s dying. John tosses the mobile onto the vanity. A Vaseline jar is knocked to the floor. The kid hollers, “Mommy!”

  John didn’t know he could talk. Part of him is elated. He leans into the crib and gushes, “I’m Daddy. Can you say Daddy?”

  The kid looks mortified.

  He hates me, thinks John. Already he’s decided. Probably thinks I abandoned him. Or he knows I’m evil inside. Can see right into my soul. Christ, he tells himself, he ain’t a year old. How can he know anything? Why won’t he stop crying, though. What would Moira do? Pick him up, maybe? He reaches down, puts his arms beneath Nolan’s back. He lifts him. The boy goes completely still. A moment later, he lets out such a scream John nearly drops him. “What’s the matter?” he asks, in a panicked voice that petrifies b
oth of them. “Did I hurt you? Did someone else? For Christ sake. Show me where!”

  The wailing builds to a crescendo. John turns the boy over in his hands several times, looking for bruises or cuts, some sign of an injury. Then he thinks maybe it’s one of those scars you can’t see, some mental pain having to do with the fucking he must have overheard in the next room. He thinks about Moira leaving their son with these people. And he’d always believed she was a perfect mother. I’ll go for custody, he thinks. Raise the boy myself. “Stop now,” he begs. “Cut it out, Nolan. You’re scaring Daddy!” He puts the boy against one shoulder, starts patting his back. Then the woman, Carla, is there, her hands reaching out. “Easy now, John. Just give ’im over gentle.”

  She’s wearing blue jeans and a pullover black jersey. Her wild, frizzy hair is still sweaty at the temples. John says, “What’s the matter with him? What did you people do to him!”

  “He’s fine. Just a little scared’s all. And hungry. Poor little man.” John hands her the boy. She deftly cradles him in one arm. With her free hand, she places a bottle in his mouth. He stops crying, then starts making wet suckling noises. The woman softly rubs his back, rocks him to and fro, coos gibberish in his ear. John glares at her. He wants to say something but isn’t sure what. Reaching out a hand, he gingerly touches one of his son’s socked feet. The whole foot is smaller than John’s finger. He touches the other foot. He counts five tiny toes through the cloth. There’s tears in his eyes. Incredible, he thinks. Absolutely unbelievable what Moira and I done. “He looks like you,” says the woman.

  John grimaces at her.

  “Yeah. You know, round the eyes.”

  “I’m gonna tell Moira what I found here,” says John.

  The woman shrugs.

  John places a hand on the boy’s head, feels the heat there, the silk-soft hair. He thinks about taking him back, but is afraid his son will cry again.

  “Got Moira’s long legs, though,” says the woman, “and gentle temperament.”