A Single Shot (19 page)

The car is in drive, as if someone had simply pulled it up as close to the cabin as he could, turned it off, pushed open the driver-side door, and, drunk, injured, or in a hurry, entered through the back of the house. The floor on the passenger side is dotted with empty beer cans, cardboard fast-food containers, a coiled rope, several hand tools. An unwound cassette dangles from a corner of the open glove box. The shearling smells like beer. On it lies a woman’s sweater, sandals, and a half-zipped gym bag, in which John finds one of Simon’s hand-carved flutes, capable, in Simon’s hands, of playing notes dreamy, sad, or that can transport your mind to a place a thousand miles away.

Now come to John more images of Simon, at about John’s age, showing John how to whistle dozens of birdcalls, how to reassemble a rod-shot tractor engine, cut out a breeched
calf without killing its mother, get downwind from a deer when trailing it, how to carve just about anything from a stick of dead wood. Rifling through the gym bag of clothes and toiletries, John remembers his father once saying of Simon—after he’d punched out that bull, maybe, or during one of his vanishing acts—“If that one were an ocean I’d take a boat clear crosst it but bet your ass I’d never swim in it.”

He finds beneath the clothes more plastic-wrapped tools—various-sized picks, screwdrivers, wrenches, a hand drill. John wonders if they are burglar’s tools. Then he remembers Simon’s penchant for carrying tools, large and small, in his vehicles. Tools are an obsession with him. For lack of the proper tool, he once told John, a man might be stranded in a snowstorm, bleed to death, suffocate in an airless, locked room. John finds wrapped in a T-shirt and cushioned by a leather sheath a large hunting knife. He removes the sheath. The knife’s blade is shiny and sharp. John remembers when Simon purchased the knife at a sporting-goods store in Ralston and how, after using it for anything—even to open an envelope—he meticulously cleans and polishes its blade and handle with a damp rag. Even if the knife had slashed Obadiah Cornish’s throat, thinks John, the Hen’s blood would not be on it.

He slides the knife back into the sheath, drops it in the gym bag, then pushes the bag toward the passenger door. On the vacated patch of seat lies a torn scrap of brown-and-blue computer paper that John recognizes as part of a monthly telephone bill, marred by someone’s ink-scribbled words. He picks the paper up and studies it in the faltering dome light.
Halfway down the page, beneath Simon’s typed name, address, and phone number, is written: “Oaks—room 229.” John exhales a deep breath he isn’t aware he’d been holding. He tries to fit this piece of Simon as torturer and murderer into the whole puzzle of the man. The piece fits only in a hollow, coreless world. A world lacking substance or a center. A world where images adhere more solidly than words to the mind. John drops the paper and backs out of the car.

Treading the grass-flattened path toward the back door of the cabin, he can taste the mist, a pollen-sweetened dew like the aftermath of a syrupy drink. He is fleshless in this soup, like the two shadowed animals—taller than the pigs and rangier—that, in the midst of John’s approach, float like bearded specters through the half-open doorway before vanishing to his left into the darkened, fog-cloaked grass. John reaches down to his belt, yanks out the .45, and thinks, “Goddamn goats now. Sam Hell’s left in the barn?”

Past the two-foot space between the edge of the screen door and the outer wall, he tentatively places a foot into the darkened house, which smells like the molasses earlier flavoring his fingers, varied manures, and gunpowder’s pungent smoke. Though he can’t see much of it, the room has the eerie sense of being alive. John can actually hear it breathing, or imagines he can, and feels its pulse steadily beating in the far corner to his left. His hunter’s sixth sense tells him to back out of the house, as he didn’t in the quarry, but a feeling even stronger assures him he is on fate’s course.

He puts his other foot in front of the first one, and, holding the pistol out in front of him, starts to walk slowly. Suddenly
he feels himself sliding, then, as if his feet have been grabbed by invisible hands, he’s skating unrestrainedly across the floor toward a large, ominously rocking shadow fronting an even bigger one. Halfway there, he goes down and slides the rest of the way on his backside. He hears what he thinks is a moo. A half second later, he collides with the source of the sound.

For a moment he lies, panting, entangled in four muscular legs. He is close enough to see that he is beneath an emasculated bull. It swishes its tail, then restlessly shifts its stance. John carefully rolls out from under it. He’s covered with molasses, manure, and whatever else is on the floor. He grabs onto the steer’s tail for support and pulls himself to his feet. The animal lows and shakes its head, the motion creating a clanking sound in the small room. “Shhhh!” whispers John, reaching for its neck to cease the sway and finding the neck encircled by a chain. The chain is looped around and padlocked to the refrigerator before which the animal stands. In the center of the refrigerator, which is leaking water, are two circular, rough-edged holes that John guesses were made by shotgun blasts.

Leaning against the steer, John gazes in wonderment around the kitchen, his eyes now enough adjusted to the dark to see that the stove next to the refrigerator is also shot and that, above it, the food cabinets have been blasted or their doors torn open and the food that was inside thrown onto the floor for the pigs, goats, and whatever else to pick at. The oddity of this scene has an almost calming effect on John, as if he is in a dream in which the worst possible thing that could result is for him to wake up screaming. On the left flank of the
cow is what looks to be a glistening wound or a large, glossy strip of paper. John looks closer and sees that a color photograph has been taped to the steer’s hide. He pulls off the picture and holds it inches from his eyes, but can make out only the dark outlines of two people side by side and a smaller person or an animal crouched or lying between them.

He shoves his pistol into his belt, then reaches into his pocket, withdraws a packet of restaurant matches, and, holding the photograph between his teeth, lights a match. In the flame’s dancing cone of light, he again looks at the picture. This time he sees a man and a woman sitting on a couch with their arms around each other and jointly holding a small child. The man is small and wiry, has a jack-o’-lantern’s smile and something a little off with the left side of his head, as if maybe it’s been stove in or he’s missing something there. The woman is big-boned, pretty, taller than the man, and, like him, vaguely familiar to John, but more so. He can’t fathom their pictures—or anyone’s—being taped to a cow’s ass in Simon Breedlove’s kitchen.

John thinks the steer might be asleep. Its head rests almost on the floor and its only movement is a slow, steady, side-to-side list like that of an anchored ship. He tapes the picture back where he found it, then tiptoes past the refrigerator, careful not to slip again, and enters a wood-floored hallway where the molasses stops, but the boards creak beneath his feet. He remembers the hallway leads to a big catch-all room where, John had the impression, Simon does about everything but cook and sleep. He walks around a rounded corner and sees at the corridor’s end a dull, steady light. He pulls out the .45 and tries to make less noise as he walks, though he’s sure
anyone in the house can hear his rapid breathing. He’s a step from the doorway when through it rushes, in a mishmash of clucks and feathers, a large chicken.

“Jesus!” hisses John, flattening himself against the wall as the red-and-white pullet sissy steps its way down the hallway toward the kitchen. In the unblinking light falling from the room, the bird’s flaming tuft reminds John, pressed against the oak-log partition abutting the doorway, of the crested hairdo on the woman he’s just seen. As the fowl prissily trots around the corner and disappears, he suddenly remembers who she is. He wonders how Colette Gans’s picture ended up taped to a beef cow’s flank. Or why. Sweat oozes from every pore on his body. More clucking sounds come from the room.

He pokes his head around the corner of the doorway and sees, ten feet in front of a recliner facing it, a television noiselessly playing an off-air signal and illuminating two more pullets absently picking at what look to be kernels of hard corn scattered on the floor. Several open beer cans and an empty gin bottle lie on a throw rug near the chair. Resting atop the recliner’s back, slightly tilted to one side, is the back of a human head.

Purged now of all conscious thought, John’s mind fills with a single image of fate’s darkened corridor whose light-flickering end might be a candle or a muzzle flash; in this narrow, one-way tunnel the sum of his earthly knowledge becomes the floating, transparent cells marring his vision. He slips into the room and, holding the pistol out in front of him in one hand, silently stalks the chair. He is less than five feet from it when a torturous moan sounds from the recliner
and the head slowly lolls. John rushes forward and places the gun’s barrel against the base of the head. It moans again, loosely bobs, then rolls back to where it had originally been resting.

“Who’s it?” whispers John.

The chair’s occupant groans. John pushes against the recliner’s back so that it springs forward, then snaps to a stop, throwing its contents onto the floor. Loudly clucking, the chickens dance away from the body. It scrambles to get to its feet. “Don’t try nothin’,” says John.

A man laboriously gets to his knees, then slowly turns around. “Jesus, Johnno.”

John points the gun at him.

“What the hell? Where—you? Son of a bitch, John.”

“What?”

“Put the goddamn gun away. The bad guy’s gone.”

“Huh?”

“Bastard moved ’bout my whole stock in here.” Simon lashes out at one of the chickens, which rises up, squawking. “You seen what he done my kitchen?”

John doesn’t say.

“Plugged it eight times I counted. Mighta been more on’y drunk as I was, I c’udn’t hardly see straight.” He pushes himself with his hands into a semistanding position. John backs off half a step, aiming the gun at him. “What the hell, Johnno? I ought to kick your ass. Why you here?”

John waves the .45 at the couch. “Sit down yonder there,” he says.

“What?”

“Got some questions for ya.”

“You’re holdin’ a gun on me, John. And that’s after you broke in my house. I think I’ll jis’ go back to sleep. Try wakin’ up a whole ’nother way.”

“I seen what you done the Hen,” says John.

Simon straightens up the rest of the way. He runs a hand over his mouth. “Seen what?”

“Over to the Oaks.”

“You seen a piece a’ shit with his throat cut and figured I did it, that what you mean?”

“I seen what I seen. It looked a lot like what the cops said somebody done to Ira and Molly Hollenbach.”

Simon shrugs. “Go ’head shoot me, Johnno. Been workin’ up to doin’ it myself here last couple a’ days.”

Suddenly John’s hand holding the gun is shaking. He can feel his legs begin to quiver like fish flopping on a bank. He’s afraid he’s going to fall down. To prevent it, he puts his free hand on the back of the chair. “Why?” he asks.

“That ain’t never as complicated as people like to make it out, Johnno. Years ’fore I ever heard a’ Vietnam my daddy said I had the same wild hair’s got him dead younger than I am now, o’ny I got far ’nough in school to know wild hairs is called genes and get a damn sight wilder a man’s been drinkin’.” He backs up to the television set. “And like everybody’s mother always warns, I got in with some bad elements, baddest of which is that piece shit you found bleeding all over the Oaks’ rugs.”

“You worked for Ira. He treated you decent.”

“Most times.”

“Decent as my own daddy.”

“Gon’ turn off the set, Johnno.”

“Don’t!”

Simon abruptly reaches down and switches off the television. The room goes black. John hears a rapid movement. He tries to follow the sound with his gun. Simon chuckles. John says, “I know where you are!”

A dull light comes on behind him. “Boo!” says Simon.

John wheels around. Simon’s standing before the couch, aiming a shotgun at him. “Shit, Johnno, din’ you learn nothin’ ’bout what I taught you?”

John lowers the .45. He feels physically and cognitively depleted. “Ain’t like you,” he says.

“Huh?”

“Don’t shoot folks been good to me. Nor slit their throats neither.”

“Ira was s’posed to be to a fireman’s dance that night, ’cordin’ the Hen.” Simon points the shotgun at his own toes. He sits down on the couch. John’s not sure if he’s through covering him with the shotgun or is just taking a rest. “Him and Molly both. I run into Obadiah all growed-up over the Pink Lily in Raburn, this was maybe three, four years after Ira’d shit-canned ’im for skewerin’ that cow and a coupla weeks after he’d done the same to me for not showin’ up two mornings in a row, then wouldn’t pay me no back wages. Hen says he’d been holdin’ Ira’s safe combination all these years—all we’d have to do is walk in and open it.”

At a level deeper than conscious comprehension, John is thinking that the apparent palpability of words, acts, the whole process of human interchange, is a sham. He is mindful, though, only of his physical distress. His trembling extremities. His palpitating heart. “What I notice ’bout myself,
Johnno, is the drunker I get, the more reasonable the most un-fucking-reasonable things seem.”

“Guess I’ll sit down,” John tells him, “ ’less’n you’ll shoot me for it.”