A Single Shot (27 page)

Rejecting the disheartening and painful prospect of refilling what he has dug in order to escape, he stands up, grabs the shovel, and lays it on the swale’s floor near the edge of the hole. With his good arm, he pulls himself as far as he can up the wall, then grips it with his knees, the swale’s floor with his elbow, and the shovel’s handle with his left hand. Slowly he inches the blade toward the toboggan’s lead rope where, six feet from him, it dangles from the forest floor into the swale. Several times he falls back into the grave. Each failed effort brings the blade closer to the looped rope. Finally, he manages to work the blade into the loop and, pulling the rope gradually toward him, removes most of its slack. Hoping to stop the sled next to the grave, he begins easing it gingerly down the steep bank of the swale. Suddenly he again
loses his balance and, still holding the shovel, tumbles backward into the hole. In the split second that the toboggan and its contents career down the abrupt embankment toward where he lies face-up in the grave, John is aware of the birds’ heightened screeching and, once more, voices, real or imagined.

Either he has been unconscious for a day or only for a few seconds, because the hole is still half filled with dying light and overhead the crows and grackles swoop and cry. There are other noises, too. Snapping brush. Frantic whispering. Wedged by the sled’s bow against the grave’s floor, John stares into the nondislodged eye of the dead girl, catapulted by the collision onto him. She reeks a stench that begs for the warm blanket of mother earth. Spoken words float like pollen in the air above them.

“He dead?”

“Looks to be.”

I’m not! says John, only he can’t hear his own voice or feel his mouth speaking it.

“Couple peas in a pod, their eyes open that way.”

“Think he killed her?”

On’y killed one person in my life purposeful, John inwardly yells, and that one needed it!

“Blew a hole in her chest, I’d say.”

“Was a while ago, by the smell of her.”

“Wonder where he’s been keeping her at.”

“Someplace wet by the look of her.”

“Jesus, baby, you don’t suppose he had her in tha…?”

“Nah! She’s been froze, then thawed, looks like.”

John is no longer aware of the pain in his hand. In fact, none of him hurts at all. He envisions his body as a car wreck, being appraised for junk.

“Where you guess all that money came from?”

“Someplace it oughtn’t to have, for sure.”

He’s not quite certain where all his parts are or which of them he can move. Then, horrified, he suddenly realizes he is—and has been for several seconds—trying and failing to make all or any of them move. He screams a cry as muted as a shout from the center of the earth.

“Jump down there, baby, and gather up the cash. Put it back in the sack.”

“Not me, brave boy. Something spooky ’bout that hole.”

“It’s just a hole with a sled, a mountain of dough, and two dead people in it.”

“Like you see corpses every day, right?”

“It’s not doing them any good.”

His eyes won’t move left or right, forward or back. He can see only straight up, which is why he can’t see who’s talking. Beyond the dead girl’s face, past the tops of the trees, the sun-setting sky resembles in his slightly fractured vision a gently blowing field of goldenrod.

“Promise you’ll fuck me on the plane to Paris, lover?”

“Once in the can, then in the cockpit. Now get your cute ass down there and help me.”

A thud vibrates in his ears. Then another. A moment later, he is aware of the dead girl being rolled from his chest onto the ground next to him or maybe onto his legs, he can’t tell for sure. Then the toboggan is lifted from him and two pairs of arms thrust it over his head toward the swale’s floor, where
it lands with a wooden slap. For a few minutes he hears the two people picking up the bills and stuffing them back into the sack from which they must have spilled.

“Jesus, let’s get out of here. The stench is killing me!”

“We haven’t got all the cash.”

“We’ve got most of it. You believe this amount of cabbage?”

“Like manna from heaven!”

“Hey, look at this. Snapshots.” John hears someone pull the Polaroids out of the waterproof envelope he’d placed them in. “Of the girl, I guess.”

“Christ, she looks half dead in ’em.”

“Why would he bury them with her?”

“Who cares? Let’s get out of here. This whole scene gives me the creeps!”

“There’s some kind of note stuck in with ’em.”

“Do me a favor, will ya? Don’t read it.”

“Whadda ya mean, don’t read it?”

“It’s bad luck.”

“Bad luck?”

“Stick it back in the envelope with the pictures and leave ’em, lover, or count me out of the whole thing!”

“All right, all right!” John hears the envelope fall next to him, then the labored breathing of one or both people rearranging the cadaver in the hole. Seconds later, female legs straddle his head; above them are a body and a face out of which poignantly stare the black she-devil’s eyes that followed John’s frantic flight from Hidden Pond. “Jesus,” she says, “you sure he isn’t alive?”

“He’s dead as this one,” says the man. Another dull thump
sounds in the ground, followed by one of the dead girl’s slightly swollen hands flopping across John’s face and staying there. He hears the man and the woman exit the grave and, after a slight pause, the shovel being picked up.

“Earth to earth,” intones the man.

“Dust to dust,” adds the woman.

A scoop of falling dirt lands on John’s face. Then a second. And third. Mother earth numbly slaps his cheeks. Blackens his vision. Fouls his throat and nostrils. His mind is as disconnected from his body as a circling hawk from the world. He understands he is out of time. His panic becomes a panacea. He gives thanks for being granted on this journey the touch and scent of another human being. He fears not what comes next, but only that the dead girl might. John mutely assures her that her soul is headed to Hawaii and that only her spirit-abandoned flesh will rest here with his own, the Polaroids he took of her, and a handwritten note, telling the world:

A novel by

Matthew F. Jones

A Single Shot
is in many ways a different breed of noir than other, less daring works of crime fiction—particularly in regard to the way the novel ends. Was choosing a fate for Moon difficult for you? Or did it simply seem like the natural conclusion all the way through your writing process? (Did you have this beginning in mind right from the start?)

I had no idea how the novel would end when I began it or, in fact, until the moment it unfolded while I was writing it. Once I have the characters I’m writing about in mind—i.e., once I feel that I know them—I try to think as little as possible while writing. And I never outline or plan out in advance what will happen in a novel or to the people in it. Once I’ve created the characters, the story as I see it comes more from them than from me. I do my best to follow wherever they lead me and, through my own filter, accurately record their accounts. I’ve never had much luck in trying to manipulate anything to come out a certain way in my own life, and doubt I’d be any better at it in the lives of fictional characters. Plus I can’t imagine the monotony of writing
from an outline. I sit down to write each day with only a vague idea of where I’m headed—and never knowing where I might end up—which for me makes writing more of an adventure than a task.

What are some of your personal favorite novels, and do you see any of their influence in
A Single Shot,
looking back on it now?

I’m an eclectic reader and a lover of many novels, though two unifying elements are found in the ones I admire most: indelible characters whose stories are compelling because of who they are; and a rich evocation of the particular world they live in. In that vein, some that, in no particular order, come readily to mind are
Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath,
Flannery O’Connor’s short stories,
The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Collector, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Sheltering Sky, Augie Marsh, A Flag for Sunrise, The Quiet American, The Stars at Noon, Suttree, The Killer Inside Me, The Risk Pool, The Cement Garden, Paris Trout, The Professional, Mystic River, Affliction, Fat City,
etc.

I don’t in truth see the influence of anyone else’s work in
A Single Shot
(or, for that matter, in any of my work except possibly in my novel
Deepwater
, the opening scene of which, in retrospect, may have its inspiration in a favorite novel of mine) any more than I think the way in which I speak is influenced by the voices of other people I admire or care about.

More objective readers of the work might see something I don’t, I’m not sure. It would be interesting for me to know.

Were you struck at any point by parallels in your writing to your own experiences, or was
A Single Shot
created, out of necessity, from deep research?

A Single Shot
came directly out of my own experiences and/or knowledge, though obviously the actual events (anyway, most of them) are fictional. I grew up in that world and with the people who inhabit it. The mountain, the quarry, the farm were all based on the actual mountainside I grew up on. Daggard Pitt’s law office above Newberry’s was modeled on the office I practiced law out of for three years. The only research I ever do in my writing is for technical purposes (the caliber of a particular gun, the model of a car or tractor, for example).

Have you known anyone like Moon in the course of your life? How did you go about creating the character—and the situation in which he finds himself?

John was formed partially out of a composite of a few people I knew growing up. I knew, for example, several people who hunted deer all year long. They did it to feed their families and to live on. Jobs were—and are—scarce in that part of the country and deer nearly as plentiful as squirrels.

I went about creating John the same way I do every character I write about. Before starting the book I put him in a number of imagined situations and wrote pages of him conversing with various people in those situations. When I felt I knew him well enough to have an idea, without having to think about it, of how he would react in any type
of circumstance, I wrote the opening scene to the book and, from there—from John walking up the mountainside with his twelve gauge at the crack of dawn—I trusted my knowledge of him enough to follow him into whatever he led me to.

Daniel Woodrell, author of
Winter’s Bone,
was kind enough to contribute a foreword for A Single Shot. What are your thoughts on how he’s prefaced the new edition? Would you say you’re as much a fan of Woodrell’s work as he is of yours?

Well, I’m not sure what to make of him calling me “a twisted motherfucker,” though in context of the rest of what he wrote I’m pretty sure he meant it as a compliment! In all honesty, when I heard Daniel had offered to write a foreword to
A Single Shot
I was thrilled, largely because—as I told him when I thanked him after I’d read it—I didn’t have to pretend I was a huge fan of his work, I actually am one and have been for a good long time. A review he wrote in the
Washington Post
of
A Single Shot
when it came out in 1996 first alerted me to his work. Not long after that I purchased a copy of
The Ones You Do,
and from there I was hooked and have gone on to read all of his novels. He is one of a very few authors whose release of a new book is an event I eagerly anticipate. In my mind he is “the voice” for that part of the world he writes about. If I hadn’t been such a recluse I would have contacted him to thank him after he wrote that first review of
A Single Shot
—I’m glad he didn’t hold it against me! And I’m honored that he feels about my work the way I do about his.