A Single Shot (6 page)

Carrying a tray of sandwiches and french fries on one shoulder, she abruptly bursts through the swinging kitchen doors. Spotting John, she raises her eyes, gives a tiny side-to-side shake of her head, then charges right past him, twenty feet or so down the aisle, where she starts distributing food to patrons in three or four different booths.

Seeing her, John feels his spirits raised and lowered at the same time. He remembers her once saying that she loved in him what the world couldn’t see—a gentle soul and a kind heart that injured easily and took forever to heal. She was good with words and could easily have gone to college, yet had married John, who didn’t even graduate from high school. John thinks now that he had always believed she would one day tire of him and leave and that this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Watching her going about her job, he imagines that her movements now contain a self-assuredness that says, louder than words, “I am going forward into the world and not looking back.”

She comes around the counter again, passes the tray she’s carrying to a set of hands behind the swinging doors, then walks over to where John sits, pulls from the front pocket of her wrap-around green smock a pencil and paper pad, and as if John is just another customer, asks him what he would like.

“A cheeseburger,” says John. “Medium rare. Fries. Coffee.”

“What kind of cheese.”

“You know what kind.”

“And a side of slaw, right?”

“I don’t want slaw.”

“No slaw?”

“Tossed salad.”

“Tossed salad? You hate tossed salad.”

“I’m going to give it another shot. Doctor says it’s good for me. Make it a large tossed salad.”

She smiles, barely, and writes down tossed salad. John sees Puffer owlishly peering through the smoke at them. “I just come from my lawyer’s.”

She blows at a strand of hair that’s fallen from the bun atop her head into her eyes. “Who’d you get?”

“Daggard Pitt.” John studies her face for signs of inward laughter, but doesn’t see any. “I told him to tell your guy I’m ready to go to one them couns’lors.”

“Well. I think you ought to.”

“I mean together.”

“Oh, John.”

“Was you who wanted to.”

“That was before.”

“Before what?”

“We separated.”

“We didn’t separate. You moved out.”

“Whatever.”

“I got some things home for you and the boy. I’ll drop them by later.”

“What things?”

“Food things. And money.”

“Can’t you give it to me now?”

“What?”

“I’ve got a class until eight o’clock.”

“What sort of class?”

“I told you, John.”

“Tell me again. I forgot.”

“A college class. Night school. I’m studying to be a teacher.”

“I’ll come by after, then.”

“I’d rather you wouldn’t tonight, John. I might not be there.”

“Why? You got a date?”

“I don’t want to talk about this now, John.”

“And you don’t want to talk about it later. When do you want to talk about it?” Lifting one hand to gesture with, John accidentally nudges the toothless man just as he’s lifting a spoon to his mouth. The spoon flies from his hand, clattering onto the counter. Soup splashes into the man’s lap.

“Sorry,” says John.

“The hell you say.”

Moira picks up John’s spoon and hands it to the man. “Chris’ mighty,” he mouths. “Go fetch me another bowl of soup there, missy. On the house.”

“I don’t know,” says Moira.

“You don’t need more soup,” says John. He sees Puffer grimacing at him through the smoke, his ox-like head angled precariously forward. “You didn’t lose but a spoonful.” He looks at Moira. “I’ll come by and see Nolan then. He’ll be there, right?”

“It’s not such a good time, John. I wish you’d called ahead.”

“I need to see him. And you.”

“We been there all week and you haven’t needed to see us.”

John puts a hand up to his mouth, and whispers, “I got somethin’ important to tell you. ’Bout our future.”

“John, I…” He watches her face, her whole posture sag. His heart sinks. He wants to bury his head in her lap and cry.

“How ’bout my pants?” says the man.

John glares at him. “What about your goddamn pants?”

“They look pissed in.”

John reaches into his pocket, pulls out his wallet, withdraws a ten-dollar bill, and slaps it on the counter in front of the man. “There,” he says. “Go get ’em cleaned!” He looks up to see Moira disappearing through the swinging doors and Jerry Puffer laboriously rising from his stool. John gives him a half wave. “Don’t trouble yourself, Puffy,” he says. “We’re good over here.” He pats the toothless man on the back. “Ain’t we good?”

“We got her straightened out, Puffy,” yips the man. He picks up the ten dollars and shoves it into his pants pocket, then goes back to eating his soup. Puffer silently lowers himself back onto his stool, picks up his cigarette, sucks it with his fat lips down to the filter.

John stands up and walks toward the exit. Everyone in the place, it seems to him, is waiting for him to do something. He pulls his dark glasses from his shirt pocket and puts them on. His head throbs. He senses rather than sees Moira reenter the dining room through the swinging doors behind him. Pushing open the glass door to the street, he barks over his shoulder, “Cancel my order, Puffy!”

Harsh laughter behind him. The afternoon heat in his face.

The two men he had earlier seen leaving Puffy’s are back
where they had started. They glance left, right, then cross the street in front of John and climb into a black Chevy Blazer. John definitely remembers the dark one from somewhere—his small, piercing eyes, the blocky look of his skull.

He hears the Blazer start up, then watches it pull into the street and drive off toward the east edge of town. John feels haunted, pursued. He turns onto Broad Street and heads for Puffy’s parking lot. A minute or so later, as he’s climbing into his truck, it hits him—Waylon. The man in the dead girl’s photograph.

The tree was felled by spring lightning. Three months before, John had dragged it with Cecil Nobie’s John Deere in four pieces into his back yard, then sawed the pieces into logs. A quarter of the wood will go to Nobie. The rest John will burn or sell. He owns a gas log splitter and chain saw, but this afternoon he uses an ax. The work is as hard or harder than laying blacktop and he doesn’t get a paycheck. Neither, though, does he have to listen to Levi Dean or Cole Howard, and from his mountain perch he has a grand view of the valley.

About an hour into the work, he begins to marvel at the multitudinous ways in which chopped wood splits. Two nearly identical-looking logs when struck with equal force in their direct center by an ax head will splinter in entirely different manners. He finds this as intriguing as the varied echoes produced by his chopping. Thump. Bang. Whop. Like the rumblings from a giant’s belly. For a while, he even manages to block out the pain in his shoulder. He works
shirtless, stopping only to wipe his brow or to drink a beer from the cooler on the grass near him. He is as impressed with his own physical stamina and prowess as he would be watching a horse or a tractor at work.

He thinks about the land, how it shouldn’t be bought or sold for money, but possessed, as in pioneer days, by those best able to work it. His father, thinks John—and he, too—should have lived back then, before dairy co-ops, sixty-thousand-dollar tractors, milk inspectors, grain monopolies, double-digit interest rates, major land developers. He feels his anger slowly boiling, as it hasn’t for years. More chronic than acute, it is directed at everything, but at nothing specific. Even after all these years, he isn’t astute enough to know for sure if losing the farm was the fault of his father’s reckless spending, the bank’s greed, the economy’s collapse, or cursed luck landing like an incubus on the Moon family.

The loss of the land. His birthright. Every misfortune or failure, every hurt and tragedy, John sees as being born of that deprivation: his father’s death—never mind the doctor’s talk about cancer and metastasizing tumors—and, four years later, his mother’s, whose heart just quit in the middle of dinner one night; his own hermetic existence, living like Cecil Nobie’s serf on an acre and a half of mountain, forced to pilfer and poach from the land that should be his; his abandonment by his wife and son. In this roundabout way, his errant, self-pitying anger meanders and slowly comes back to its fuse, that black, impenetrable spot in his mind that he wishes were a dream.

The same questions over and over. Could he, an experienced hunter, have prevented her death? Could he have
foreseen it? In some unconscious way, even wished for it? In his mind he has already separated the money from the tragedy that begat it. Much has been taken from him in his life and very little returned. He sees the money not as a road to a more exorbitant life but as the way back to his wife and son. Maybe he could even buy a large parcel of land—start his own farm, off this mountain—for the three of them. Then he thinks again of Waylon. Had he already returned to the quarry, or might he have been on his way there when John saw him? And what has John left behind that might lead Waylon to him?

He chops until he has produced half a cord of firewood, and, at his back, the descending sun is a huge, fiery ball. His naked torso is a knotted, slick muscle. Now he is aware again of the pain in his shoulder. He takes off the blood-damp bandage, dabs at the open wound with his T-shirt, then, deciding to let the cut air, sits down on the grass near the cooler. He eats three more aspirins, washing them down with beer.

He thinks of the deer carcass sitting with his 12-gauge slug in it at the bottom of Hollenbachs’ pond. And the dead girl in the cave. If Waylon finds her, wonders John, how long will it take him to figure out some local hunter had killed her and stolen his money?

Only the stars and Nobies’ houselights, filtering up through the trees, illuminate the mountain. The temperature has dropped fifteen degrees. John’s slick sweat has dried, penetrated his skin, and turned rank. Where it has sat for three hours on the back-yard grass, his rear is stiff and sore. The
empties from two six-packs form a roofless, four-sided building between his feet. Somewhere back on the hill, a coyote yips. Nocturnal birds and animals fly and scurry through the woods to his right. From the spring-fed pond below the trailer comes a cacophony of peeps and croaks.

John takes off his shoes, then shakily stands up, pulls off his jeans and underwear, and walks naked into the trailer. He gets a rattlesnake strip steak from the refrigerator, fillets it, cooks it for five minutes beneath the broiler, then rolls it in olive oil and cornmeal, and leaves it to slowly panfry on the stove while he showers, dresses his wound, and puts on clean clothes.

Before leaving the bedroom, he takes from the closet, then carefully lays on the bed, one of the few articles of clothing Moira had overlooked when packing to leave: a long, blue-and-white-striped, country-style dress that John best remembers her wearing, six months after they were married, to a heart fund benefit square dance at the old armory. He puts his face to the dress and smells her. Then he sees her, stately and beautiful. Her hair up and in dancing clogs, she is several inches taller than John this evening. John feels the envious eyes of the other men—eyes envying him. Moira wins a cake in the raffle, three layers of sour-cream chocolate. Later, lounging naked where the dress now rests, they feed the cake to each other, then spend half the night in a lingering, nerve-tingling, impacted embrace from which Moira occasionally reaches down, gently squeezes the leaking tip of John’s inflamed penis, and whispers, “Rein it in, cowboy. Rein it in. This ain’t no race. It’s a swoon!”

John never knew love could last that long. When, finally,
he comes, he is a river, emptying into her not just his seed but all the words describing what he feels for her but is not adept enough to say. Looking at the dress now, he sees the moment as clear as if he were watching it on film: Moira’s wide-open eyes, like full moons in the dark; lean hands clutching his buttocks; vaginal muscles firmly milking him. Her throaty voice passionately urging, “Okay, John! Now!” A pulsating throb, like a crashing wave. Warm breath. That musky, just-fucked smell… John charges across the room and rummages through her bureau until he finds an overlooked pair of her briefs. Smothering his face in them, he inhales.

Then he drops his pants, lies down on the bed, and, ardently calling out her name, masturbates into the underwear.

He feels embarrassed afterwards. Then cuckolded. Looking at himself in the bureau mirror, he imagines his face is slowly evolving into a coarser, meaner him. Then he thinks, no. It looks like a clay lump that could turn out to be anything. He thinks of the crippled Daggard Pitt, who had helped steal John’s birthright, suddenly showing up in his life at this time, of all times. “I’m drunk,” he says aloud, as if that explains something. He thinks his face looks too predictable. He decides he will grow a beard. He puts Moira’s underwear on the headboard, goes out to the kitchen, and finds it engulfed in smoke.

He throws open the door to the front deck, then runs over to the stove, where his strip steak and the pan it’s in are in flames. John douses them both with water, then opens all the trailer windows and, loudly cursing, charges around waving
at the smoke with a towel. In a few minutes, coughing heavily, he stumbles out to the deck to breathe. Collapsed in a plastic chair, he watches stodgy black smoke twist lazily into the night sky. He thinks about what he went through to get that rattlesnake back to the trailer, then butchered and filleted, and decides it wasn’t meant for him to eat. He goes back into the trailer, gets the burned strip steak and his .45 pistol, comes back out to the porch, tosses the steak onto the lawn, and empties his gun into it.