Matthew Jones - A Single Shot

“What?”

“Dancing?”

“Nobody’d pay me otherwise…”

John moves farther into the room. His balance seems affected. He has a feeling he’s listing to the right. The framed vase of flowers on the wall appears to get shorter and fatter as he looks at it. “It’s like when I shot the girl,” he says, barely aware of his own words. “We was all there.”

“What?”

“Her. The deer. Me.” He wads the underpants into a tight ball. “Who knows why? Just happened that way.”

The woman pants a little maniacally. John pictures in his mind a set of dull claws scratching at a smooth wall. He’s back in the quarry maybe, trying to scale its sheer sides. He thinks the woman’s probably a mother. Her drooping breasts and wide hips. Her disconsolate gaze. Her breathlessness. “A beer bottle.” She huffs. “Some guy…”

“What?” says John. He moves closer to her.

She half sobs, “My eye.”

“You cain’t see out it?”

She shakes her head.

“Can you see these?” John holds the wadded underpants out to the side of the woman’s bad eye. She doesn’t even try to look. She starts to cry hysterically. John leans down and claps a hand over her mouth, warm and moist as a hot sponge. In his mind he sees only the pointlessly scraping claws. “Shhh,” he whispers, bringing the underpants down and putting them where his spit-damp hand had been. “Shhh. This ain’t gon’ hurt you much. And that’s a promise.”

Her blond wig falls off. John carefully replaces it, as if later he might point to this small act as proof of something. He lays her in the bathtub and pulls shut the curtain. Before leaving her room, he hangs out the “Do Not Disturb” sign.

The sun is heating up. On John’s shoulders it rests like flesh warmer than his. Below him, last night’s moisture steams from the cracked parking lot, where a half-bald dog simultaneously laps and pisses into an oil-filmed puddle and four cars sit, all but one on the short side of the L. From the roof’s overhang, several filthy-looking pigeons coo. Laughter sounds down near the office and John watches two maids emerge from there and disappear around back.

He takes out the .45, again walks to room 229, and crouches next to the door’s keyhole. He hears what he did before, except now a soap opera plays and the gurgling sound has stopped. He is overcome by the same unbalanced sensation as earlier in the woman’s room. He thinks of Simon Breedlove, the closest person to a father he still has, and of his wife and son, whom he experiences now as bodiless dreams from which he has awakened desiring to reenter while sadly realizing he can’t. He decides he will buy the boy a gift. A thing they can enjoy together. A replica of a farm maybe, with lifelike animals that neigh, moo, or oink. Then, suddenly remembering about the money, he thinks, “Why not buy him a real horse, cow, and pig?” A phone begins to ring in the room, abruptly returning John to the present. Ten times it rings, then stops.

John stands up. He knocks on the door. No one answers. John backs up a step and lifts his foot to his waist. He kicks in the door and rushes in after it.

Belted to a wooden desk chair, Obadiah Cornish is naked from the waist up, his head inclining precariously to one side and his mouth agape as if in stunned disbelief, reacting to what’s playing on the television in front of him. Cut clear to the spine, his throat oozes a thin line of his blood, and the rug beneath him is soaked where much of it has already pumped out. His face and chest are marred by circular red lesions that look like cigarette burns. The tip of his nose, his upper lip, and his left ear have been sliced off.

John shuts the door, sits down on the bed, closes his eyes, and pictures the boy, in wide-eyed wonderment, petting, naming, and feeding these real-life creatures that John will buy for him. He imagines him asking questions about the animals, questions for which John actually will be able to provide answers. He imagines his son regarding him in awe for his vast knowledge of the world.

He opens his eyes, leans forward, and switches off the television set. He becomes acutely aware of the leaky-faucet-like noise of Obadiah Cornish’s blood sporadically hitting the floor. He walks over and studies the mutilated corpse, not so much shocked or unnerved by what he sees as curious.

He walks over to the bureau, but there is nothing on it. He rifles the drawers and finds only clothes. In the bathroom, he finds atop the sink a wallet belonging to Cornish and inside it a paper containing a list of telephone numbers, among them Moira’s, his own, and another that is familiar to him, though he can’t immediately think why. The phone rings again. Following the fourth ring, John walks back into the bedroom and picks it up.

“I’m very disappointed in your behavior,” a voice says.

“Wha…?” mumbles John.

“Your making threats has put me in a very delicate situation. I thought we’d agreed that I would handle things…”

Then John recognizes the voice and recalls to whom the third number belongs. The phone’s mouthpiece smells like diseased breath. He hangs it up and, not touching anything else, leaves the room.

Upon seeing him again, the woman starts to squirm, gnaw at her gag, and frantically roll her head from side to side. Her obvious fear of him makes John wonder if his looks are as frightening as her reaction to them and he peers in the bathroom mirror and thinks, “No, they ain’t.” On the contrary, he sees, as clear as pimples on his face, a kind nature, tempered some by the bad hand he’s been dealt. “Cut it out,” he tells the woman, slightly perturbed, as he leans down to straighten her wig, which, skewed again, reveals beneath it a red patch of moss-thin hair on an onion-colored scalp. “I tol’ ya I ain’t gon’ hurt ya none.”

He helps her out of the tub, removes the stockings binding her wrists and ankles, leads her over to the bed, and sits her down on the edge of it. The room’s light is dull. One of the two overhead bulbs is burned out; crawling in the dirt-smeared lamp, half-dead houseflies cast gray shadows on the woman’s thighs. She smells of terror, emitted like a tomcat’s perfumed scent, and urine where she’s peed herself. On all accounts, John feels awful—for her, himself, and the situation in general. “I’m in a terr’ble bind,” he tells her.

She reaches up and claws at the underpants in her mouth.

“No! No! No!” says John. He grabs her hand and slaps it firmly back in her lap. He realizes in doing so he’s frightened her even more, but he thinks hearing a hysterical voice right now would push him over an abyss whose edge he is barely clinging to. “Let me tell ya why I am, first.”

She opens wide at him her good eye with its already dilated pupil, but John can’t tell if it’s wide with fear, curiosity, or disbelief. “It’s been one thing after ’nother,” he says. Not sure where to go from there, he sighs and drops his forearms on his legs. He sees his hands are shaking and so are his knees. “It all started less’n a week ago, but it feels more like a year.” He looks at the woman and imagines her being quite pretty once, before she got hit with the beer bottle maybe, and then he envisions her life as a water droplet rolling north to south toward the edge of a map. “You e’er had a spell like that? When one thing keeps foll’wing ’nother and everythin’ you do to change it just digs a hole deeper till you’re so far in, you can’t see the top?”

She slowly nods, but John already knows in looking at her that she’s had more than one such spell and likely considers herself to be in one now. “If I told ya half of it, you wouldn’t even believe me,” he says.

She shrugs.