A Single Shot (23 page)

The focus of John’s thoughts is like a kitten curled up in the only sun-warmed corner of a dank, dark house: he won’t be responsible for another girl’s death. He stares into Waylon’s anvil-hard face, crisscrossed by pockmarks and tiny rivulets of sweat. “Did you think this son of a bitch was
handsome?” his silent voice angrily asks Ingrid Banes. “Din’ ya see them eyes, colder than anything wild I ever hunted? Or was you just drunk with all his danger?” He lays an unwavering hand palm-down on the rail, then slowly spreads his fingers. Against searing pain, guilt will be his amulet.

“Nice try, John.”

“What?”

“I watched you open the door earlier, remember?”

John gazes blankly at him.

“You’re right-handed, are you not?”

John nods grudgingly.

“That’s the one needs altering, then.” Waylon smiles knowledgeably. His teeth appear well cared for and straight. His slicked-back hair is black as a beaver’s pelt. Momentarily sliding the knife beneath his gun arm, he reaches his free hand into his back pocket and pulls out a linen handkerchief. “You know, John, trigger finger.”

John takes his left hand from the rail and replaces it with his right. He spreads his fingers so that, of the five, his index finger is the closest to Waylon. He remembers his father once telling him about an old Iroquois trick whereby a captured brave, to divert pain inflicted by his torturers, would will the pain into the empty shell of a turtle. Waylon flaps the handkerchief in the air, then carefully lays it over the rail next to John’s hand. Still covering John with the pistol, he takes up the knife again. John empties his mind of everything but an orange-and-black box-turtle shell. Waylon quickly leans forward and, just above the lowest joint, deftly slices off John’s index finger.

John reaches out, grabs the handkerchief, and wraps it
around the bleeding stub of his finger. He’s completely forgotten about the box-turtle shell. He pulls the mutilated limb into his chest and bends his knees with the pain, which is throbbing and deep. The white handkerchief is stained red. His breathing is shallow and fast. He hears his severed finger bounce off the deck floor and looks up in time to see it tumble into the grass below. “It’ll be there when you get back,” says Waylon. He wipes the knife blade on a napkin he’s picked up from the table, drops the napkin, and returns the knife to its sheath.

Doing semi-deep-knee bends, John applies pressure to the hand. Sweat pours from his brow. He swallows what tastes like the crest of vomit. He remembers, during his only attempt at factory work, seeing Burton Doomas lose two fingers in a machine that made bowling pins. One of the fingers had squirted blood like a bottle of hot Coke. The other had barely bled.

“Ten minutes,” says Waylon.

“Less’n I wrap somethin’ round this,” pants John, holding out his injured hand, “I won’t be able to lug the money.”

“Go in get a Band-Aid, whatever,” says Waylon. Aiming the pistol at John, he walks over to Abbie. “But if she wakes up and sees me, all bets are off.” He leans down next to Abbie and, with his non-gun hand, picks her up beneath the armpits and starts dragging her to the road side of the deck.

John turns and walks rapidly through the trailer to the bathroom. Feeling woozy, he removes the handkerchief. Blood oozes rather than spurts from the stump. John is briefly saddened by the look of his four-digit hand, which reminds him of a lizard’s webbed foot. He stanches the wound with
hydrogen-peroxide-soaked cotton, wraps it with gauze, and tapes it. From a jar in the cabinet, he pours into his mouth half a dozen aspirins, chews and swallows them. He looks at himself in the mirror, slaps his cheek with his good hand, and quietly tells himself, “Think, son of a bitch!”

On the deck, he finds Waylon sitting on the chaise longue, facing the mountain, the unconscious Abbie, gagged and blindfolded with two handkerchiefs, reclining between his legs. Waylon’s got his knife pressed to her throat. “How far up’s my money, John?”

“Five hundred yards give-take.”

“Is it with the truck?”

“Near ’bouts. Gon’ have to dig it out from ’neath a rock.”

“Drop your pants.”

“What?”

“Get ’em down.”

John unbuckles his jeans and yanks them down to his knees.

“Turn around.”

John twirls a slow circle on the deck.

“Okay, get ’em up.”

With his uninjured hand, John pulls up his pants and buckles them.

Waylon puts the knife blade next to Abbie’s left kneecap and makes a sawing motion. “Stay in sight long’s ya can, John. Right?”

John nods.

Waylon glances down at his watch, then scowls up at him. “Nine minutes fifty seconds, woodchuck.”

He finds it least painful to run with his bandaged hand tucked like a football against his stomach. Even so, with each jarring step he takes, the missing finger throbs as if being severed anew. Seeing his full-throttled approach, Diablo rears up, then gallops across the road, into the woods there.

At the meadow’s north edge, John plunges into the bushes and scrub pine, where, for another hundred yards or so, until the trees get thicker, he is still visible from the deck. As the forest gets denser, the grade steepens and he is forced to walk, but at least now he is hidden from Waylon. He follows a deer path several hundred feet east through a stand of sugar maple, then again veers north, scrabbling up a leaf-slick berm underlaid with patches of granite and bluestone, where, for purchase, he grabs with his good hand at saplings and grapevines. Seventy-five yards from the giant boulder behind which the pickup is concealed, he stumbles on a root and catches himself with his injured limb. The pain is so severe he howls. A moment later, he hears echoing up through the woods Waylon’s emotionless shout, “Seven minutes, John, ’fore I start playing mumblety-peg!”

Heavily panting, his body drenched in sweat, John starts toward the truck again. He tries emptying his mind of all thoughts except getting there, but he keeps envisioning a glistening knife blade against Abbie’s throat, and eyes as black as the interior of the quarry cave where the dead girl once rested and he knows that, in those eyes, Abbie is already dead and, if he returns with the money, so is he. As he scrambles around the west base of the boulder, where the bushes
that had earlier fed him dig at his face and arms, and into the oak glade, he fights a strong desire to keep on running. Suddenly he views his inability to be as conscienceless as Obadiah Cornish or Waylon as an exploitable weakness, for had Waylon not surmised that John possessed what Waylon did not, he would not have sent John alone into the woods. He understands that John will return with the money, even realizing it will cost him his life, and for that, Waylon surely considers him a weakling.

After scrabbling to the top of the boulder, John peers through the trees to the trailer deck. From this distance, the two intertwined figures in the lounge chair are indistinguishable. They might not be alive except that John can see one of them—probably Waylon—waving something over his head. Even with the use of his normal shooting hand, John, sighting through the high-powered scope of his .308, would have to fire a near-perfect shot to hit either of them. Below the boulder, though, his view to the deck would be blocked by the trees, and past the trees, in the rock-and bush-laden field, Waylon would see him. “I’m gettin’ nervous not knowin’ where you’re at, John!” Waylon yells. “Give me a holler, something!”

John leans forward on his knees and puts his hands to his mouth. He knows he’s not visible from the deck because he’d looked for the boulder from that same spot earlier. “Yo!” he calls out. “I’m at the truck!”

“Ya got the money?”

“Gotta dig it out first! Take me a few minutes!”

John sees the two figures stand up, but can’t tell if Abbie is doing so of her own volition or is being assisted by Waylon;
then he sees the larger figure kneeling next to the smaller one, doing something with its legs. “I’m pulling the girl’s—I’m pulling Abbie’s—pants down, John!” John sees the glint of something from the deck that might be Waylon’s knife blade reflecting the sun. “If you make like a hero—try circling back on me, whatever—I’m gon’ fillet her like a brook trout!” Congruent with the hammering in his mutilated hand, anger pulses in John’s temples. He finds himself involuntarily hissing.

“I’m comin’ ’s fast I can!” he screams.

“You got five minutes get my goddamn money and drive it down here!”

John turns from the valley, drops onto his butt, and, faster than he had anticipated, plummets down the slick, moss-encrusted side of the boulder; three-quarters down, to avoid crashing headlong into the raspberry bushes, he springs upward and out. He lands on his feet in the glade, then pitches sideways into a witch-hazel shrub, its woody fruit, like a gauntlet of blackjacks, painfully pummeling his mutilated stub. His consequent thrashing upsets a possum family, who, screeching in protest, scurry out from beneath him.

John exits the shrub and, still moaning, stumbles the fifteen feet across the glade to where the truck sits. He unconsciously reaches to open the driver-side door with his bandaged hand, sending additional pain waves through the stump and reinforcing in his mind the many tasks made easier with an index finger. The word “cripple” flashes through his mind. He thinks of Burton Doomas gripping cigarettes between his pinky and his fourth finger and the odd, rubbery feel of his three-digit handshakes. John’s internal organs tense at
the thought of the human monstrosity who blithesomely commits such mutilations. Fiends are found only among men. Never in the wild has he encountered a creature as evil. If John fails in his one slim chance to rescue Abbie, Waylon, for all his jesting tone, John knows, will inflict on her body every act he has enumerated, and several more.

Pushing horrific images from his mind, he opens with his left hand the pickup door, reaches above the cab’s rear window, and takes down his .308. He leans the rifle against the truck, then, absently shoving the money sack to one side, crawls across the seat, yanks open the glove box, and takes out a carton of shells. He opens the carton, removes four bullets, then crawls out of the truck and, with his one good hand, spends more seconds than he can afford getting the shells into the clip and the clip into the gun. Afterwards, he hastily slings the rifle by its strap over one shoulder and again runs through the glade, reaching the base of the boulder just as he hears shouted up through the dense foliage, “Three minutes, John, till I have a slice!”

Several times while clambering up the boulder, he bangs his wound and curses. He’s halfway to the top when the rifle falls from his shoulder. Suddenly remembering he has forgotten to check the gun’s safety mechanism, John, as the weapon slams into the rock, braces himself for its discharge. The gun doesn’t fire, but he loses thirty seconds retrieving it. From the bottom of the boulder, he restarts his assault. Pain throbs from his stub to his right ear. John envisions the absent finger, inverted in his flesh, cannibalistically headed toward his brain. All traces of white have vanished from the
gauze covering the stump. Out of the soaked dressing, sporadic drops of blood fall.

By the time he reaches the boulder’s crest, he feels feverish. He’s not sure if the flush he is experiencing is from infection or the afternoon heat. His head spins. Maybe he is delirious. In his mind the bloated image of Ingrid Banes presents his severed digit to him like a conciliatory gift. It strikes John that she views his mutilation as partial recompense for her death. Then he thinks maybe he does, too. In a body-sized indenture in the rock, he lies flat on his stomach, giving himself, through the tops of two trees, a narrow view of the trailer deck. He pulls the rifle into his right shoulder, then quickly realizes that the pain and swelling in that hand, now half again the size of its mate, have rendered the four remaining digits useless as trigger fingers. He tries reaching back with his left hand to manipulate the trigger, while steadying the gun with his right, but it is too cumbersome and impedes his aim. “Talk to me, John!” yells Waylon.

The shout to John seems inflected this time with hysteria. He envisions a new paranoid monster, more dangerous even than the old cocksure one. He switches the rifle’s stock to his opposite shoulder, so that now his left eye peers through the scope and his good hand falls naturally on the trigger. “I’ve got the money!” he hollers.

The view through his off eye is skewed. Or the world is. Objects look as if they have inclined slightly toward the valley. This affects his depth perception, negatively or positively. He’s not sure which, only that his take on things is slightly altered.

“Don’t fuck with me, woodchuck! Your voice ain’t moved none!”

“I’m luggin’ it back the truck!”

Through the magnified glass, it takes him several seconds to locate the deck and its occupants. He no sooner zeros in on them than they disappear again. Twice more, he finds, then loses, them as, beneath his mummified hand, the rifle’s stock bounces precariously. Sweat drips into his eyes. He envisions pulling the trigger and seeing his awry shot slam into the skull of Abbie, who is being held like a shield in front of Waylon’s body.

“I don’t hear an engine start in sixty seconds, John, I’m cutting off everything sticks out from her knees up!”

John lays down the rifle. He hastily eyes the top of the boulder for a makeshift stand. To his right, he finds a fallen Y-shaped branch. He snaps off the stem of the branch, leaving about six inches, then quickly inserts the stem into a small crack at the front of the indenture. He picks up the rifle again, lies back down in the crevice, places the gun’s butt against his left shoulder, its stock onto his injured hand and its barrel into the Y, then peers through the scope.