A Single Shot (11 page)

He lies there, loudly gasping, too petrified to look, inhaling mud-stink, mountain lilacs, blood, and sexual juices, and hearing what sounds like a light wind rustling a bluestone-based field of nettles and brush. A voice moans, “You ’bout halved me!”

He opens his eyes and sees her, a dead weight on his groin, blankly staring, and imagines a gaping red wound between her breasts.

He tries to scream, but something blocks his throat. He gets up and in the gray, starlit field blindly stumbles toward the pond, retching out the impediment that is everything he’s eaten and drunk since the morning before. He flops belly-down in the mud, lapping at the water, knowing that in this world once familiar to him he is now an alien.

W
HERE’S MY FOOT
! Who took my lucky goddamned foot!”

John wakes up in a pelting rain. The girl is on her hands and knees next to him, shrieking like a starving bird. In the semidarkness, with her pale, mud-streaked skin and hair plastered to her head, she looks like a living cadaver. He reaches out and touches her shoulder. She snarls, “The rain’ll ruin it! Turn it to shit!”

He looks down and sees both her bare feet, mud-stained, but where they ought to be. He wonders if she’s gone insane. Or if he has. “Leave it,” he screams. “We’ll come back for it later!”

A thunderclap blots out her answer.

“Come on! Run for the trailer!”

“Not without my foot!”

She throws his hand off, starts rifling the grass again. John glances up at the trailer. Several lights are on. A shadow fills the basement window, a head and two hands next to the cabinets where his tools are stored, another light in the master bedroom. John tries to stand, but in the slick grass his feet slip out from beneath him. He lands on the girl. She curses
and starts punching him. He stifles her with one hand, then, with his knees, pins her to the grass. Her body feels electrified beneath him. John shouts, “What’s the matter with you!”

She furiously whips her head from side to side, tries to bite him. With his free hand, John twice slaps her face. Her eyes look ready to pop out of her head. Her breath dampens his palm. John fears she is suffocating. He pulls his hand from her mouth. “You cocksucker! Where’s my foot?”

“How would I know!”

She spits at him. “If you don’t give it to me, you’ll burn in hell!”

John is hit with a wave of nausea. His eyes, he thinks, are conspiring against him. He looks at the trailer, where the basement light has just gone out, then back at the girl. A lightning flash illuminates her face. She looks possessed. “My money’s all in there!”

“I ain’t got it!”

“Help me find it, then. Please!” She sobs. Snot trails from her nostrils. She sniffs it back in. John now realizes she is severely addlebrained, if not retarded. “The rain’ll piss it away!”

She quits struggling. John backs off her arms. She rolls her head to one side, pinches a nostril, and blows, then does the same with the other. The surrounding trees sway in a brisk wind. In the trailer, two more lights blink off. Only the kitchen is lit now. John thinks, “On the road to hell I am alone and friendless.” He rolls away from the girl. “Where’d you have it last?”

“Was tied to one my belt loops.”

She gets to her knees. Her slick, nodular breasts bob like
drenched minks’ heads. Water pours from the end of her nose. She starts patting the ground. Three feet away, John does the same. The rain lands like pellets against his back. Night crawlers and slugs intertwine with the wet grass. At regular intervals, lightning fractures the sky. He finds the foot beneath her cutoffs. An orange, furry thing with a zipper in it, attached to a rawhide string. He hands it to the girl. She unzips it, looks inside, and breathes a deep sigh. “It’s still dry,” she says to John.

John nods. He has an urge to apologize, though isn’t sure for what. If he had something left to throw up, he would. “Beano Dixon’s got himself three daughters,” he says. “Unfucking-believable.”

“I had this foot since I was five,” she tells him. “Gettin’ it wet inside’s worse luck than losing it.”

His shoes and boots are at odd angles in the bottom of the bedroom closet. The bureau drawers are not quite shut. One corner of the mattress spread is hanging from the spring as if, it seems to John, someone had lifted it to look under the bed.

In the bathroom, the towels in the linen closet seem to have been hastily rearranged. Beneath the sink, a can of Ajax lies on its side. Someone has taken his 12-gauge from the living-room rack and returned it to a different slot. Each oddity has a reasonable explanation. Simon and Colette were up early. After showering and using John’s bedroom to change into their clothes, Simon had gone down-cellar to get some venison sausage from the big freezer, while Colette had started breakfast.

After changing his clothes, he enters a subdued kitchen.
The others have eaten. He’s not hungry. The four of them sit there quietly drinking coffee. John wonders if he has interrupted a conversation about himself or if, like him, they are just hungover, now sober, seeing one another clearly, and not liking it much. Maybe they’re just let down. He suspects they know his darkest secret and are conspiring against him. He trusts no one, not even Simon. The phone rings. Before he can answer it, Simon does, listens for a few seconds, then slowly hangs up.

“Nobody, Johnno.” He wrinkles his brow. “Wrong number.”

“Don’t ya hate that shit,” says Big Colette. She gulps her coffee, half a cup at one time, whereas Mincy lowers her face to hers and laps like a dog at it.

“ ’Specially,” she says, “when you’re just settin’ there, waiting for it to ring so’s you can talk somebody—anybody—’fore you go out your fuckin’ mind, then ‘brrrriiing!’—the asshole slams down on ya!”

John thinks if she’s not retarded she’s on hard drugs.

“Had me this breather one time,” says Colette, in her constipated drawl, “so I breathed right back to ’im, started huffin’ like I was ’bouht gon’ blow my nuht. Mistah puhdpuller gets so scared he hangs upon me.”

“Cops’ll trace that shit, ya ask ’em.”

“I w’udn’t ask ’em.”

“Was in
The Star
’bout a prevert had ’em walk right in with the phone in one hand and his little red pencil in t’other. Was talkin’ to Joan Collins.”

“Gawd! Talk ’bout red-faced!”

“Red-penciled, ya mean.”

“I wish you girls’d shut up,” says Simon. “I got a headache.”

“That ain’t the tone you used last night, Si-mun!”

“Last night I was so drunk I could hardly see.”

“Well, I don’t much like what I’m lookin’ at here this mornin’ neither.”

John walks over to the gun rack and gets down the 12-gauge.

“Still huntin’ with them slugs, Johnno?”

John nods.

“They don’t leave much question, do they?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Men and their great big guhns,” says Colette.

Mincy laps at her coffee. “Or eensy beensy ’uns.”

Simon frowns sardonically. “I just got off a two-month bridge construction job up near Syracuse. This here’s my vacation. Ain’t that a pisser.”

John removes the shotgun’s bolt, stares down the barrel, sees tiny filaments lining the bore. He gets out his cleaning rod, cloth patches, and solvent. He starts cleaning the gun. The girl puts her head down on the table. She looks asleep. Simon throws out a cold cup of coffee and pours a fresh one. Rain loudly pummels the windows and trailer roof. Light slowly comes to the mountain.

“Ain’t this fun,” says Colette.

“Shut up,” says Simon.

“You ask me nihce.”

“Please don’t open your big fat mouth again until we’re back to town and you’re dropped off someplace I ain’t got to listen to it.” Simon finishes his coffee and stands up. He claps John on the back. “One day it just hits ya, Johnno,” he says.
“I’m too old for this shit. Too fucking old.” He walks out the door. The two females get up and follow him. The girl walks into the doorframe on her way out, but doesn’t seem to feel it. She gazes over her shoulder at John, smiles dumbly, and wiggles the tips of her fingers at him.

A minute later, through rain-streaked glass, John watches the Cadillac slowly wind its way down the mountain.

The potent, wet smell of the woods affirms in his mind life’s cyclic nature. What is beaten down does or doesn’t sprout back up. Lingering dampness accentuates the forest’s darker colors—the greens, auburns, onyxes, browns. Brightness hides beneath a thin ground cover of mist. Bowing tree limbs, leaden with water, issue an eerie cacophony of protesting creaks and groans. The pulpy soil gives beneath him, each ground-sucking step confirming his live weight. The rain has abated to a slow drizzle. In the muggy air, beneath his waterproof poncho, he sweats profusely the alcohol he has consumed in recent days.

Just beyond the border of the preserve, from a wet swale of tangled goldenrod and dogbane, comes a pained mewl, like a baby’s cry. John looks into the swale and sees, pinned beneath a tree limb, a spring fawn with faded spots still on its coat. The limb is maybe six inches in circumference and has fallen from a white pine standing at one edge of the swale onto the left hindquarters of the deer.

At John’s approach the fawn thrashes so that he fears if its back or legs aren’t already broken they soon will be. Its round glistening eyes stare at death and, through the power and mystery of evolution, are terrified of the view. He wonders
where its mother is. Another clueless enigma. To the fawn he talks soothingly as he is unable to do with his own son, though he is oblivious to the dichotomy. It’s likely crippled, thinks John, and if he frees it, with or without its mother, it will die slowly or fall prey to wild dogs or a bobcat. He ought to kill it and be on his way. Four days ago, he would have. Now, though, he fixates on its frantic stare and sees, beyond its trepidation, a nameless plea.

He lays down his shotgun, tosses aside his pack, and, to keep the fawn from thrashing, heavily places one hand on its steaming, rain-and perspiration-soaked chest, then runs the other back along its spine until he reaches the tree limb. He tries to lift the limb, but it’s too heavy for his one hand.

Still holding the deer, he sits down with his back against the swale’s edge and extends his legs until, with his knees slightly bent, his feet are against the limb. His head is so close to the deer’s that the latter’s warm breath, with its sharp, musky smell, dampens his cheek. Now the animal quits struggling as if understanding that John is there to help. John straightens his legs, then, pushing with his back, tries to move the limb. It edges forward a few inches, then stops. The deer groans. John pushes harder. The log rolls off the deer. For a few seconds the fawn lies there, failing to comprehend its good fortune. Then, trembling, it gets to its feet, glances once at John, and, without a noticeable limp, bounds up out of the swale and off through the woods. Listening to it go, John allows himself to think, “Might maybe make it, after all.”

Before he reaches the quarry road, on the near side of the abandoned pasture, he turns left and bushwhacks through a
tangle of vines and brush that border the woods. On one of the sharp needles of a thorn-apple tree, blown there by the recent gale, a skewered purple finch twists. A three-legged fox plunges into the brush. There’s still no sign of the sun. The sky is the color of slate.

He enters a forest of virgin pine. Inside, it’s dark and steamy. John can’t see his feet for the mist. The canopy leaks water. Needles, cones, dislodged branches drop all around him. He stumbles into an elderberry thicket. Before finding his way out, he fills his hat with the sweet fruit. On the far side, he sits on a tree stump and eats what he’s picked. Perched overhead, a pair of grackles angrily squawk at him. He watches a pileated woodpecker drill for bugs in a rotten stump. Idly he wonders if, in these mountains, he might forever elude his pursuers. He knows he could survive. And what of his current life would he miss? His wife, who is trying to divorce him? His son, who cries at the sight of him? Yes. He would miss them both, but that would be all he would miss, and they might be better off without him.

Past the forest, he turns right again. Now several hundred yards beyond the quarry, he walks parallel to it. He crosses over a small stream, made bigger by the rain, then quickly skirts the outer edge of Quentin’s swamp, where the mosquitoes and black flies are thick, passes through an older stand of birch, oak, and elm, the last half-devoured by caterpillars, and emerges on the back side of the hill leading to the cliffs above the quarry. He walks along the spine of the wooded hill, undergrown with field grass, hawkweed, and patches of soft moss, until he reaches the quarry’s upper lip, where he lies down on his stomach between two mountain-
laurel bushes, places the 12-gauge on the ground next to him, and through binoculars gazes a hundred feet down into the rock bowl.

Not exactly sure what he is looking for or how to react if he sees something unusual, he peers behind the bushes and into the crevices in the quarry walls. Everything looks the same as it did three days before, except the stone is water-stained, the plastic top of the lean-to sags beneath the recent rain, and John doesn’t remember if he left the pick and shovel lying, as they are now, in the entrance to the cave or standing next to it.