Matthew Jones - A Single Shot

“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.