A Single Shot (5 page)

John shoves the papers he’d been served across the desk at Pitt, who, fidgeting like a small child on one side of his chair and periodically rubbing his shrunken leg with a dwarfed hand frozen in the shape of a claw, surveys them, making disapproving grunts and groans. John sits there looking past the lawyer, out the window, at the traffic light above Main Street, imagining himself a porous wall through which his guilt oozes like sweat, and thinks, “Maybe I ought to just lay the whole thing on this lawyer,” then, remembering his prior convictions—three for poaching, two for driving under the influence—tells himself no lawyer in the world could convince a judge or jury not to send him to jail for a good long time. Daggard Pitt says something about the papers having been served thirty days ago and the law allowing only twenty days to answer them.

“They got under somethin’,” says John.

“The problem, thankfully, is not fatal.”

“I ain’t interested in a divorce. We don’t see eye to eye on that.”

“I’m awfully sorry,” says Daggard Pitt, slumping in his chair.

“I’m ready to end this thing.”

“How so?”

“She mentioned couns’lin’ once—I’d go now, if it’ll bring her home. Tell her lawyer that.”

“At any rate,” says Daggard Pitt. “We ought to serve them an answer.”

“I never hit her nor nothing.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I certainly am.”

“It ain’t about that.”

“Nor does she allege so.”

“She’s got this idea about the boy.”

“Your son?”

“Nolan. After he—she started to see things different.”

“Different?”

“Suddenly my way of doing things—not that I’m lazy. I always provide—she can’t say I don’t provide.”

“She says you have trouble keeping a job.”

“I’ve kep’ plenty of ’em, just not for long.”

Daggard Pitt smiles encouragingly.

“I was raised to farm—suddenly she wanted me to get a full-time factory job, work nine-to-five indoors like some…” John lets his voice trail off. He thinks of Gerhard Lane, the former college football player who represents his wife, then tries to imagine the Lilliputian Daggard Pitt, with his hangdog look and shriveled limbs and the way he wheezes and makes funny little noises to himself, in the same courtroom with Lane, and his heart sinks. He actually starts to feel sorry for Daggard Pitt. “Look,” he says, “what’s the use? She wants a divorce she’s gonna get one sooner or later, I know that much. If it comes to that, the boy ought to be with her. I’ll pay what I can. There’s no money, only the acre and a half that my trailer’s on that I inher’ted fair and square from my mother.”

“I was acquainted with your parents,” says the lawyer.

John stares blankly at him.

“I wish I had realized it before—I didn’t put the names together.”

“Acquainted how?”

“I represented the bank when it foreclosed. I felt awful about it—we all did. The bank did what it could to keep your father afloat—but the economy at that time, and his having overextended himself, then, of course, him taking sick…” Daggard Pitt stops in midsentence, reaches down, and firmly grasps the emaciated midpoint of his bum leg as if to assure himself it’s still there. When he looks up again, John can see the pain from the leg in the lawyer’s face. “I thought I ought to tell you, in case—though, from my point of view, John, I would like nothing better than to represent you to the absolute best of my lawyerly abilities.”

“How’d you get yourself all mangled up?”

“What?”

“Was you born like it?”

Daggard Pitt frowns sardonically. “ ’Twas the hand I was dealt. Indeed.”

“Least you didn’t have to get used to it later.”

“Pardon?”

“To havin’ to walk crooked.”

Daggard Pitt smiles pleasantly. “I thought it was the rest of the world did.”

“My father was a good farmer,” John says, “and a shit businessman. He died so long ago I can’t hardly remember him.”

“You’d have been in your midteens, as I recall.”

“You still whoring for the bank?”

“Not for almost fourteen years.”

“You’re cheaper than the rest of ’em I called. That mean you ain’t as good?”

“Compensation takes many forms, John.”

“Better not take more’n the half grand I was told.”

“I only meant I have no wife, John. No family. Only my clients and their often sticky and heartfelt situations. Simon Breedlove and I, for example, have known each other for years.”

“He says you got almost a heart.”

“He’s in a position to know.”

John stands up, reaches into his pocket, pulls out the five $100 bills he had taken this morning from the pillowcase, and drops them on Daggard Pitt’s desk. “There’s for your retainer,” he says. “All’s I want’s for you to delay matters long’s ya can, while I try to work things out.”

“Work things out?”

“Get her thinkin’ turned around ’fore the water’s all over the dam.”

“I’ll draft an answer to her complaint—a general denial—for your signature. We’ll get it to Gerhard Lane, then go from there.”

“Don’t do nothin’ fancy,” says John, walking toward the door.

He has the uneasy feeling that he is the focus of the sun’s glare. He stops at the drugstore and buys a bottle of aspirin and a pair of mirrored sunglasses that he puts on. The
thought of pouring blacktop in the afternoon heat next to Levi Dean causes the pain in his head to radiate backward from his eyes. He eats three aspirins.

At the municipal parking lot, he sits in his idling pickup truck, its engine growling through an aerated muffler, tormented by images of money and death. He pictures his own guilt as an animal hollowing out his insides and wonders if it’s true what he’s heard that keeping a big enough secret can kill you. He pictures his wife, in cotton smock and jeans, leaning against their open trailer doorway, her long, walnut-colored hair blown back by a gentle summer wind; and the boy, all eyes and facial expressions and herky-jerky movements. He imagines Moira cradling him in her arms the way she does that tiny, fragile body and him telling her all about yesterday’s awful events and the horror then magically vanishing.

Leaving the parking lot, instead of turning right onto Main Street and heading for the undertaker’s, he turns left, toward Puffy’s Diner, the first floor of a two-story red-brick building wedged between two others of like design, to see if Moira is working the lunch shift.

Cruising slowly past the diner, he is unable to see through the foggy plate-glass windows in front, so turns right onto Broad Street and peers in at the dirt parking lot behind Puffy’s. Among a dozen or so vehicles, he spots Moira’s salt-eaten Ford Escort sitting near the building’s far corner, next to Jerry Puffer’s Olds 88, with its busted driver-side shocks.

Now he’s not sure what to do. It’s lunch hour and busy in the diner. Moira will get all flustered and upset if he approaches her. Then John will get upset, and that will make matters
worse. John, though, feels driven to speak to her. Or at least to see her. His mind, overloaded with data, is temporarily closed to other options.

Twice more, he cruises by the diner, trying to decide how to proceed. He shoves a Hank Williams, Jr., tape into the cassette deck and turns up the volume. He thinks of Moira’s freckled, spherical face; her strong, angular body, soft only where she is most a woman; her dark brown eyes that remind John, depending on her mood, of gently caressing or sharply probing fingers; the rounded smooth curve of her buttocks where they merge, then sharply intersect with her plump vaginal lips.

He’ll walk into the diner like an ordinary customer, he tells himself, order coffee and a sandwich, and when he catches Moira’s ear, cordially whisper to her that after the lunch crowd thins out, he’d like very much to speak to her. In the meantime, he’ll just sit there, drinking his coffee, hoping that just the sight of her will clear up the ambiguities in his head. She couldn’t, thinks John, driving by Puffy’s for the fourth time, get angry at that.

Puffy’s front door opens and two men emerge—one tall and blond; the other, who is vaguely familiar to John, dark-haired and stocky with a duck-billed cap pulled low over his eyes. They start to cross the street, then, at the same time that John, making the turn onto Broad Street, spots a police car approaching from downtown, change their minds and quickly walk off in the opposite direction.

Still trying to place the second man, John hears a short siren burst. He looks back and sees the police car, its bubble light flashing, follow him onto Broad Street. John turns into
Puffy’s parking lot. The police car does the same thing. John feels his heart leap into his throat. He considers slapping the truck into reverse and heading as fast as he can out of town. Then the cruiser comes to a stop in the exit, blocking his retreat.

John sits in the middle of the lot, one foot on the clutch, glancing frantically around the cab, wondering if he should open the door and run for it. He hears laughter to his right and sees two kids, standing in the alley between Puffy’s and the barbershop next door, holding up their middle fingers at the police car. Another short blast of the siren, then a microphoned voice calls out, “I know you, you little hellraisers.”

The kids run off down the alley. Above the music in the cab, John hears someone yell, “Fuck you, chief!”

Then the microphoned voice says, “Park her, Moon, shut her the hell down and sit there with your hands on the wheel!”

John slowly pulls the pickup into a space between a flatbed truck and a minivan. He ejects the tape and shuts off the engine. If this is how it’s meant to be, he thinks, okay. He even feels a little relieved.

The cruiser’s driver door opens. Undersheriff Ralph Dolan steps out, yanks his belt and holster up over his melon-shaped gut, and, in his exaggerated hip roll, starts walking the fifty feet to John’s truck. John thinks, “Of all the cops in the world, goddamn Ralph Dolan.” He tells himself not to mouth off, though knows that around Ralph Dolan he sometimes can’t help it. Dolan pokes his big head through the window.

“What’s in the cooler, John?”

“Popsicles,” says John.

“Wouldn’t be beer, would it?”

“Might be one or two in there, Undersheriff. I can’t remember.”

“How many of ’em you already drunk?”

“None so far. Wouldn’t take much to start, though.”

“You puffing me, John?”

“No, sir, Undersheriff.” John emphasizes the “Under,” though he knows better. “I ain’t puffing you.” Grimacing, he waves his hand at Dolan’s breath, which smells like a taco burger. “I’m inhaling you.”

Dolan backs out of the truck and glares at him. “Take off those fucking sunglasses, Moon.”

John takes off the glasses, blinking in the sudden glare.

“You look shit-faced, Moon.”

“I been workin’ too hard. Ain’t had enough sleep.”

“Maybe you been working on jackin’ deer and that’s why you ain’t slept. That right, jacker? You the one was heard blasting away in the preserve early yesterday morning?”

“Weren’t me, Undersheriff, on account of you scared me so bad last time I sold all my guns. I don’t even eat meat no more.”

“How ’bout I take a look in that cooler, John?”

“I don’t guess today. Less’n of course you got a warrant.”

Dolan leans back on his heels and surveys John’s truck. By now John figures it’s just one of Dolan’s pull-over-and-harass stops, though he’s not sure if there’s any substance to the comment about the preserve or if Dolan was just fishing. As he watches himself being written up, John curses himself for not holding his tongue. “Got you a bad muffler, John,” says
Dolan, ripping off the ticket and handing it to him. “Heard ya clear to the other end of town.”

John bites his tongue. He folds the ticket, then puts it in his wallet. “Can I get out now?” he asks, reaching for the door. “Go about my business?”

“Maybe I ought to see if you can walk a straight line.”

“I’ll piss one if you want me to.”

Dolan closes his ticket book, then slips it into his back pocket. “Just don’t cause no trouble at Puffy’s, John.”

“I’m gonna eat lunch.”

“Way I hear it,” says Dolan, adjusting his wide-brimmed hat, “she don’t want to be bothered.” John steps out of the truck. “Not by you, anyway.”

John smiles, though it’s the last thing he feels like doing. “You oughta run for sheriff again next time around, Ralph,” he says. “I’ll bet the same two people voted for ya before would again.”

“Fix that goddamn muffler, Moon,” says Dolan, waddling back to the cruiser.

His three hundred twenty pounds engulfed in a cloud of blue-white smoke, Jerry Puffer bobs the burning cigarette between his lips at John, who answers with a curt nod. In response to a few other greetings, he barely grunts.

He sits in Moira’s station, at the end of the counter opposite Puffer, and next to a thin, toothless man eating soup.

He grabs a menu, pretends to read it, then puts it back on the counter. He drinks some water, then picks up a napkin and coughs into it. He puts his fingers onto his temples where his head still hurts, and pushes. The smoke is stifling
around the counter. He wonders how Moira, who wouldn’t allow smoking in the trailer, stands it.