A Single Shot (14 page)

From the kitchen closet he takes the broom and dustpan, then carries them over to the deck doorway, lays the dustpan on the counter, and starts sweeping up the glass. “Long’s we got the money,” he tells the girl, “I guess they won’t kill me.” He sweeps out from beneath the table, along with several small chunks of glass, a fist-sized stone that is wrapped in yellow paper and circled by a rubber band. John kneels down, picks up the stone, and removes the paper. Ink writing appears on one side. John smooths it out on the floor and reads:

Suddenly he is aware of his own mental denseness, of his intellectual shortcomings. His stupidity looms like a brick wall between uncentered anger and thought. He tries to
remember ever getting an A in school for anything but gym, and can’t. The unfairness of the world hangs before his unconscious gaze like a grotesque masterpiece.

Beneath him at the kitchen table, his legs hop up and down. His hands shake. His vision is marred by floating cells. Adrenaline courses like a drug through him. He can’t sit still, yet his energy is unfocused. He jumps up, runs over to the gun rack, removes every weapon and shell box, then sits down on the living-room floor, tests the mechanism of each gun, looks down its barrel to see that it’s clean, then loads it. He cocks the Winchester thirty-aught-six and returns it to the rack. Then he puts the .45 in his belt, the 12-gauge in a cabinet next to the refrigerator, the .22 pistol behind the bathroom toilet, the .30-30 Greener beneath his bed, and the 16-gauge behind the basement freezer.

He runs back upstairs and dials Moira’s number. The sky out the kitchen window is gray. What wind there was has died down. It will take most of the day for the fog to move. The phone rings four times. Five. The air through the screens is warm and filled with birdcalls. Seven rings. Eight. John rubs his eyes, removes his hand, and waits for his vision to clear. The phone is picked up. A man says, “Hello?”

“Let me talk my son,” says John.

“What?”

“Put him on.”

“I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number.”

“He better be there, you bastard.”

“The only child here, friend, has a vocabulary of less than half-a-dozen words.”

“Wait!”

“What?”

“You didn’t tell me where to leave the money.”

The phone clicks dead.

He sits naked in the unstoppered bathtub beneath the shower’s hard stream of cold water, unconsciously reflecting on how the world’s lee and sway is as paralyzing to him as it had been to his father. He remembers his father pacing back and forth in the kitchen at night, loudly cursing while blindly punching and kicking appliances as if the machines were his creditors and cancer, “The bastards! The dirty, fucking bastards!”

When he steps from the tub, he is beet-red. He rebandages his foot and shoulder, then puts on a clean pair of jeans and T-shirt. The dull light of the heavily fog-shrouded morning comes through the bedroom window. “Nothing off this mountain is real,” he thinks. “If I sit here and do nothing, nothing will be lost.” Then he looks at Moira’s and Nolan’s pictures on the headboard and knows it’s not so. In the living room, he calls their apartment again. This time there is no answer. He redials, lets the phone ring twenty times, then hangs up. He has no idea what to do. He wishes the whole world were as easy as tracking something down and shooting it. He goes down-cellar.

He opens the freezer, takes out a couple of venison steaks, and stares at one side of the girl’s made-up face with its wide-open eye. The smell has dissipated. “I’m trying to figure things out,” he says, “but I got no fuckin’ idea.” He puts the steaks back, closes the freezer, and locks it. He runs around collecting the guns that he had hidden, then starts rehiding them in different places. He is on his way out to the wood
shed with the 16-gauge when the phone rings. He goes back and answers it.

“How’s John Moon getting on?”

“You ain’t said your name.”

“Sorry, John. Daggard Pitt. Thought you recognized my voice.”

“What d’you want?”

“I have those papers ready for you to sign.”

“Did we talk ’bout this?”

“You’re not agreeing to anything. We’re just protecting your rights. Remember?”

John’s not sure if he hears an engine’s whine down the road. He can’t see through the fog beyond a hundred yards.

“Is it convenient for you to stop in this afternoon, John?”

“It ain’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“I can’t make it.”

“Maybe you’ve got another matter you want to discuss?”

“What?”

“Other than the divorce, I mean.”

“What matter?”

“I hope I’m not stepping over the line, John. It’s just that I know lately you’ve been under a lot of pressure and, well—I hear things.” The lawyer pants breathily. “I’d hate to see your whole life get ruined because of a mistake or two.” Suddenly John’s pulse goes ballistic. He feels it rapping like a snare drum against his temple. “And it wouldn’t be just your life, John.”

“What?”

“There’s the boy to think of. Nolan…”

“He ain’t in this!”

“Of course he’s in it, John. He’s your son.”

“You leave my family out of it!”

“I’m sorry I’ve angered you, John, but I’d be less than honest if I didn’t tell you that, for me, your family has always been very much in it. Very much so.” Pitt coughs anemically. Down the road, the whine gets louder. The phone is trembling in John’s hand. “Most problems aren’t as big as they first seem, John. The thing is to deal with them before people get backed into corners.”

“What people?”

The lawyer exhales doggily. “Well, the law for one…”

“The law!”

“I’d hate to think…”

“Who are you whoring for now, Pitt?”

“John?”

“Tell the bastards stay way from my wife and kid or they’ll never get what they want!”

John slams down the phone. Down the road, above the engine’s increased drone, the fog radiates yellow. A vehicle slowly takes shape in the thinning mist, then, two hundred feet below the trailer, a black-and-white county sheriff’s car emerges above the treeline.

Dolan’s wearing mirrored sunglasses, though there’s no sun. He spits on the grass driveway, where John has met him, then strides forward and slaps a folded paper into his hand. “You been legal served.”

John glances down at the paper without reading it.

“The judge don’t want ya around her no more. Your kid, neither. First time I hear of it, I’ll slap the cuffs on ya.”

John starts tapping the paper rapidly against his forehead. He can’t think quick enough to keep up with the images in his head. His thoughts swim in a consciousness dark as mud. Dolan points at the .45 in his belt.

“You got a license for that, Moon?”

John steps toward him. “She’s loaded too, Ralph.”

“Is that some kind of threat?”

“You just come from there?”

“Where?”

“Pitt’s?”

“Who?”

“My fucking lawyer, crook!”

“Why would I?”

“Who give ya this, then?”

“I’m an officer of the court, Moon.”

“That who sent ya here?”

“Who the hell else?”

“I tried to talk my kid and some guy answered the phone.” Taking a step forward, John puts his mouth six inches from Dolan’s. “I don’t s’pose you or Pitt know ’bout that or ’bout the fuckin’ rock through my window!”

Backing against the car, Dolan puts a hand on his holster. John slaps the hand away. “What the hell are you talking about, Moon?”

“I don’t feel good.”

“What?”

“I see shit everywhere.”

“You’re jumpy as a bug, Moon.” Again he puts his hand on his holster. Again John slaps it away. “Just calm down.”

“I’m tryin’ to figure out why you’re here. You want me to hand the package o’er you! Is that it?”

Dolan gets his hand on his holster a third time and starts fumbling with the strap. John knocks his sunglasses off. Dolan gives up on the strap to grab the glasses. He shoves them into his pocket.

“Where’s my wife and kid, Ralph?”

Dolan tries to slide out around John. His lips are working, but nothing’s coming out.

“I’m holdin’ you ’countable.”

“Wha?”

“They ain’t better be a hair touched on their heads!” John uses his chest to pin Dolan to the side of the car.

“I’m just serving a court order, Moon.”

John backs up, turns around, and walks into the trailer.

The village is still heavily shrouded in haze when he arrives at the municipal parking lot. He wanders like a ghost in that soup down Main Street to Puffy’s, enters through the front door, nods at Puffer, who seems not to have moved in the preceding three days, sits down opposite the fat proprietor at the counter, and of Carla demands, “Coffee.”

“ ’Bout the other night,” she says, trying to hand him a menu, which John lets drop on the counter. “Moira weren’t aware…”

“Where’s she at?”

“She don’t work this morning.”

John raises his eyes at her.

“Said somethin’ ’bout going out of town.”

“Where to?”

Carla shrugs.

“How ’bout Nolan?”

“With them, I’d guess.”

“Them?”

“I don’t know nothin’ ’bout it.”

“I’m askin’.”

“Not the right person, you ain’t.”

“I guess you know your boyfriend’s a psycho.”

She pours coffee into a cup, puts it down in front of him, then heads into the dining room. Smoke hovers below the ceiling like fog oozing through the vents. Voices drone like static. John gulps down half his coffee. The whole world feels to him like a whisper, with him stone-deaf. Someone drops a plate in the kitchen. Puffy rolls his thick head at the sound. Carla walks back up the aisle from the dining room. Spinning round, John catches her by the arm. “You as dumb as you act?”

“Mitts off, John.”

“Where’s he at?”

“Why?”

“We got business.”

“Then I guess he knows where to find ya.”

John gives her arm a squeeze.

“Hey!”

“What’s goin’ on, John?” Puffy’s smoke-raggedy voice floats quietly across the counter. John glances at him, but doesn’t answer. The pharmacist, Leonard Pine, walks in and sits down two stools from John. John grimaces menacingly
at him. Pine gets up and moves to a booth. Carla tries to pull her arm free. John pinches it harder. Puffy says, “How can I help?”

“It’s up to her,” says John.

Puffer casually blows smoke Carla’s way.

“I don’t even know what he wants.”

“I’d as soon break your arm,” whispers John.

“If he’s got a question, Carla,” Puffer says, crunching out his cigarette and slowly pulling another from the pack in his shirt pocket, “why not give him an answer?”

“I ain’t got the one he’s wantin’.”

“Try, though,” says Puffer.

“ ’Bliged to ya, fat man,” says Carla. “You’re a real prince.”

Puffer ignites the fresh cigarette, drags on it, then, folding his hands on the counter, lets it dangle from one corner of his mouth while exhaling twin lines of smoke through his nose. “Leonard Pine sets over there in a booth ’stead of at the counter where he has for ten years waitin’ for his coffee to drink and a menu to read.”

“Coffee black, eggs over easy, rye toast with grape jelly!” Carla barks into the kitchen. “ ’Kay, Puffy?”

“Had a pretty young thing in here the other day wants to waitress,” Puffy rasps barely above a whisper. “Had tits the size of cantaloupes. I told her leave her number.”

“Bet she’s just holding her breath, too,” hisses Carla. She frowns loathsomely at John. “Last I knew, he was staying over to the Oaks.”

“What room?”

“My memory ain’t what it was. Somethin’ in the two-twenties.”

John lets go her arm and stands up. Puffy says, “Best you don’t come back in for a while, John.”

“Big man,” snorts Carla.

John strides past her toward the exit.

At the south end of town, he turns left and heads through Shantytown, a single dirt street of unpainted clapboard shacks and grassless, junk-marred yards, where yapping dogs and half-naked kids run in the street. From behind a gutted jalopy something flies out and lands loudly in the back of the truck. The kids start laughing and hooting. A few of them yell at John to stop. He keeps driving, not slowing down until after he comes to the top of the gradual, mile-long hill where sits the Oaks.

He’s above the fog. The unimpeded sun illuminates the two-story, paint-chipped motel, L-shaped and most recently yellow. Half a dozen cars sit in the lot. None of them is the black Chevy Blazer, though at the far end of the longest row of rooms sits a rusted-out blue-white Cadillac that at a glance John thinks might be Simon Breedlove’s.