Matthew Jones - A Single Shot

“I don’t know. It’s school, John. That’s all. A lot of work…”

John hears what sounds like a rifle shot outside. He watches Mutt’s body lift a foot in the air, fall to the ground, and lie still. “Jesus…”

“John?”

“I got to go. They shot Mutt!”

John cries when he sees him. Half his head’s been blown off. He’s got a mouthful of grass and foam and lies on his side like he’s been thrown there. The bullet’s buried itself in the dirt or flown off into the woods. The shot looks to have come from down the hill, on the town side of Nobies’.

Cecil answers John’s call on the barn phone. John hears mooing, buckets clanging, the whir of milking machines. “He leave?”

“What, John?”

“The son of a bitch shot Mutt!”

“Who shot Mutt?”

“Who was there?”

“The one in the black Chevy Blazer. Had a picture of some girl. Wanted to know if we’d seen her.”

“What’d he look like?”

“Long drink a’ water. Said he was a private investigator hired by the girl’s family. Her boyfriend’s from these parts. S’posedly they was seen two days ago headin’ into the east entrance the preserve. That’s why he’s been nosin’ round.”

“He show ya a badge?”

“Somethin’ in plastic. Said the parents are offerin’ twenty thousand dollars to whoever helps find the girl. I said he ought to talk to you, seeing as how half your life’s lived in the woods round. He didn’t come see ya?”

“No.”

“If the girl’s found—dead or alive—with all her b’longings, the twenty thousand, he said, ’ll be paid no questions asked.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Go figure.”

“He involve the law?”

“Weren’t my bus’ness ta ask.”

“Bastard killed my dog, Cecil! Didn’t ya hear the shot?”

“I can’t hear nothin’ ’bove this racket. Why would he shoot Mutt?”

“I’d like to know. You watch him leave?”

“Had better things to do. I saw him walk out the barn, get in his car, and head for the hollow road’s all. You gon’ call the sheriff?”

“I ain’t. Don’t you neither.”

“I got nothin’ ta say to him.”

The first time he showed up at the trailer he had a faceful of porcupine quills. Moira and John had been married less than a year. They spent two hours with pliers, pulling the quills out. Mutt, who was only half grown, never even whimpered. “You’re one tough mutt, Mutt,” Moira kept telling him.

He was a fighter. He fought for fun—raccoons, foxes, even a bobcat once. Following his bouts, he’d drop in at the trailer, showing off his wounds, looking to be patched up, fed, patted, bedded down for a few nights on the living-room floor. Then he’d get restless. He was a good dog. Never caused any problems. Just lived his life. Someone had house-trained him once or he’d learned himself. Moira was real impressed with his cleanliness. She called him “a mannered rogue.”

John picks the dog up in his arms, carries him over next to the garden, lays him on the grass. He digs a hole in the soft loam there, places Mutt in the hole, then slowly covers him with dirt. Afterwards, he sticks a large flat stone vertically into the soil. Standing above the grave, he folds his hands, closes his eyes, and thinks about Mutt’s wagging tail causing his whole body to whip side to side like a rod yanked by a hooked fish. He thinks of the three of them—Mutt, Moira, and John—lying together in front of a fire on cold winter nights. He says a short prayer. He asks God to let Mutt fight in heaven.

He sits in the kitchen, listening to crazed bugs battering the screens. It’s dark down the hill. Frogs croak. They sound like giant frogs. Monstrous frogs. The Night of the Frogs.

He turns on the television set, tunes it to the one station he gets. Something’s wrong with the horizontal hold. He switches the set off. He’s aware of the bugs again. Then the frogs. He plays a game of quarters against himself. He wonders how, in this world, he could ever have thought his luck would be good enough to allow him to walk away unscathed with a case full of cash. The phone rings. He answers after the third one. On the other end, someone hangs up.

Five minutes later, it happens again. Beyond the lighted window, darkness cresting in a watery black wave. Minutes that feel like hours. Hours that feel like days.

He brings the radio over to the kitchen table, sits down, tunes the radio to country music. He listens to three songs. Four. His feet and armpits start to sweat. He kicks off his sneakers, pulls off his T-shirt. A commercial for Delco batteries plays. The phone rings once more. He picks it up. A man’s voice says, “The dog got in the way.”

“Who is this?”

“You know, right?”

“What?”

“How things get in the way.”

“What things?”

The phone clicks dead.

A set of headlights slowly serpentine their way up the hollow. They turn onto Nobies’ road, then continue on up the hill. Sitting on the deck, drinking the last beer in a six-pack, John is too tired and drunk to stand. He reaches down, picks up the .45 from beneath his chair, and flicks off the safety.

The vehicle lurches before skidding to an uncertain stop adjacent to the trailer. It backfires once, then stops running. A loud fart from inside. Raucous laughter. A female voice baying, “Gawd!”

Doors open to a loud creak. Another fart. “Je-zus!”

Simon Breedlove and two naked women exit Simon’s beat-up old Cadillac. “Pool open, John?”

John waveringly sticks his arm holding the pistol straight up into the air and squeezes the trigger. In the still night air, the report is deafening. “He’s worse than you, Simun!”

More laughter.

“I’ll get the lights,” says Simon.

John fires again.

Their loose flesh glabrous and silvery in the moonlight, the women charge hell-bent for the water.

“You must remember big Colette,” Simon insists from the pond’s grassy banks, where they watch the women, yipping and laughing, frolic in the water like overfed seals. “Is married to Ralph Gans.”

“She ain’t familiar.”

“Colette Gans! Ralph’s missus?”

Watching them water-wrestle beneath Simon’s jerry-rigged lights, John has the feeling that this day and night are an eternal hell to which he is doomed. “Don’t know him, either.”

“Sure you do! He’s got that scrap-metal yard outside Blenham. Three, four years ago we hauled a couple demo wrecks over there—was right after the Fair. Bunch of us tied one on after with Gans. I know you remember. Ralph Gans? Had that half ear?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember that set a’ inner tubes she’s carrying? Christ, you got to! She comes sashaying into Gans’s living room ’round midnight wearing this little-bitty nightshirt could see right through and says, ‘Raaaa-lph, these boys gotta go home now! Colette needs tendin’ to!’ Christ, we ’bout died. Who even knew the man was married? Don’t you remember? Said it just like that—Raaaaalph!—funny thing is come to find out that’s how she really talks—takes her ’bout an hour to get a sentence out.”

“Nuh-uh,” says John.

“You’re bullshitting me, right?”

“I don’t remember.”

“The hell you say!”

John shrugs.

“I ran into her earlier this evening at Benders with this other one who’s her cousin and a daughter to Beano Dixon, the mechanic down to the Chevron station? I didn’t even know Beano had a daughter, but turns out he’s got three he’s been sendin’ regular support to all these years up in Red Hook and this one here’s the oldest. She’s got a mountain lion tattooed to her ass. Got its teeth bared and its claws open. She gets out and shakes herself dry, you’ll see.” Simon caps the gin bottle he’s been drinking from and tosses it into John’s lap. “Figured I’d roust ya. Shape I’m in, don’t know as I’d been able to handle the pair of ’em.” Smiling broadly, he places his elbows into the bank and leans back. “What happened your arm, Johnno?”