Matthew Jones - A Single Shot

Leak glances up from the set and shrugs. John pulls out his wallet, takes from it one of the hundred-dollar bills he had removed this morning from the sugar jar, and lays it on the counter where the old man can reach it. “If he asks—or anybody else—I weren’t never here.”

Leak sticks out a bony hand. He picks up the bill, pockets it, and hisses. “You’s one the Fitch boys, ain’t ya?”

John leaves without saying.

The bus station is on the south side of town in the first floor of a retired glue factory. Circled by a high metal fence, the terminal parking lot is potholed dirt. Two buses sit in it. Another, half full of passengers, idles in front of the depot. John parks the truck, then walks with Florence inside and asks the man selling tickets at the counter where the idling bus is headed to. The man says Buffalo.

“That west a’ here?” John asks.

The man says it is.

Florence says, “I need to go to Enid, Oklahoma.”

The man sneers like going to Enid, Oklahoma, is to him a personal insult. From a shelf below his waist, he picks up a little book, opens it, and starts tracing through the schedule with an index finger. After a few minutes, he says, “I can sell you a ticket there, but you’ll have to get off in Buffalo, wait five hours, then change buses.”

“What’m I gon’ do for five hours in Buffalo, New York?” asks Florence.

“I don’t know,” the man tells her. “I’ve never been there.”

“Give me the ticket,” says John.

“This is a real hardship,” Florence whispers to him.

Ignoring her, John pays for the ticket. Handing it to him, the man smiles sarcastically and informs them they’ve got fifteen minutes to say their goodbyes. Florence asks if there’s smoking on the bus. The ticket seller says there isn’t.

“Not even in the can?” asks Florence.

“Nowhere on the vehicle,” the man tells her smugly.

Florence curses and says she needs a smoke now. She and John walk over to the benches against the far wall and sit down across from a large bulletin board with posters of wanted and missing people on it. There’s no windows in the station. The stagnant air is hot and smells like body odor and the bad stink floating out one of the open john doors next to them. Florence lights up one of her little cigars. When she exhales, the smoke unwaveringly floats up to the ceiling, where it merges with an already thick, hovering cloud of it. She tells John again that taking such a roundabout route on a bus that doesn’t allow smoking is a real hardship for her. Then she says she’ll need more than three hundred dollars to make sure she gets to Enid all right. John asks her how much more.

“Two more ought to do it,” she says. “Five, altogether.”

“You mean, five hundred?” asks John, who has left in his wallet, from what he took from the sugar jar, slightly over eight hundred dollars.

“No, dummy. Five million!” She chuckles derisively. “Hand it over.”

“I ain’t got that much,” says John.

She gives him a weird look. “You’re a strange one,” she tells him. Then she says, “I don’t believe you killed no one.”

“I didn’t on purpose,” says John. “Was an accident.”

“And you say someone’s snatched your wife and kid?”

John stares blankly at the bulletin board, not answering. It hurts too much to think about it. Florence lightly places a hand on his wrist. “I get vibes sometimes—and I’m not just talking bullshit now—like life forces—positive or negative—and in your case I’m definitely sensing positive.” She takes her hand from his arm and smokes more of her cigar. “Really. Don’t ask me how I do it, though.”

John doesn’t. Every time Florence inhales, her lips make a wet, snappy sound. Two black men come out of the john, strut through the glass doors and onto the bus. The man at the desk says into a microphone that the bus to Buffalo is leaving in ten minutes. He frowns at John and Florence. John takes from his wallet five hundred dollars. It doesn’t feel like money to him. When he hands it to Florence he feels like he’s giving her scrap paper with scribbles on it. She rolls the money up, shoves it down her shirt, between her breasts, and says, “You ought to go the cops ’bout your wife and kid.”

“Cain’t.”

“If whatever you done was an accident…”

“There’s more to it than that,” says John. He looks back at the bulletin board. A face there gnaws at him, though he can’t put his finger on why. Florence drops her cigar butt on the floor and steps on it. John stands up. Blowing out smoke, Florence does, too. “I got to go to the can,” she says.

John nods. He picks up her bag, watches her walk into the ladies’ room, then strides over to the bulletin board and peers at a photograph of a girl with dirty-blond hair combed neatly over her forehead and ears, making her look even younger than the sixteen he had guessed she was. Her name is Ingrid Banes. She’s from Rock Gap, Pennsylvania. Any remaining thoughts that John has of his being on an uncharted course instantly vanish. He feels a distinct pressure from a hand that is leading him along some path whose markers are known only to Him.

He tears the poster from the board, carefully folds it, and slides it into his front pants pocket. Then he takes Florence’s suitcase out to the bus and hands it to the driver, who tosses it in with the rest of the luggage. He asks John if that’s all there is. John says that’s it. He imagines something like an invisible hawk flying circles above him. The bus driver closes up the luggage compartment and climbs into the bus. Florence comes out through the glass doors. John hands her the ticket to Enid. “I sense it’ll be all right for you,” she says. “Really.”

John says, “What happened the one hit you with a bottle?”

She shrugs.

“You ain’t got no idea?”

She gives him the weird look again. “He weren’t from Enid, so how would I?”

John watches her get on the bus, sit down in a window seat near the back, and, a few minutes later, the bus leave. He waves at her, but she’s already talking to her seatmate, and doesn’t notice.

Lugging the heavy sack over one shoulder, he takes the side entrance up to the second floor of the J. J. Newberry building, tries the door to the lawyer’s office, and finds it locked. He drops the sack and sits down to wait in the rickety wooden corridor whose yellowing wallpaper portrays farm scenes and emanates a musty, aged smell. He pulls all the coins from his pocket and, one at a time, rolls them across the corridor, trying to stop them as close to the wall as he can. Afterwards, he doesn’t bother to pick them up. Staring at his feet, he imagines a flat, soundless field of high grass concealing dead bodies and the secrets they died with.

Soon he hears a thump-slide-grunt from the stairs, and a minute later, tightly gripping the rail and breathing heavily, Daggard Pitt appears at their top. Spying John, he flashes a big, toothy smile and, rattling the cardboard box he carries in one hand, gaspingly calls out, “I wonder if John Moon’s a doughnut eater?”

John doesn’t say if he is.

Wearing a lime-green suit that bags on his crippled side and is coffee-stained, the lawyer hobbles through the fallen coins as if they aren’t there. He doesn’t act surprised to see John or the sack. He leads him into the office, saying something about his secretary getting a molar capped. “Have a seat, have a seat,” he tells John, placing the box on the desk and grabbing some papers from its top.

John, glancing warily around, remains standing just inside the doorway. On the wall across from him, a Syracuse law degree hangs between a photograph of Pitt waving from the deck of a sailboat John would never have guessed he could afford and framed words in a foreign language. A small metal plaque on the desk says “Thank You For Not Smoking,” and just above it sits an ashtray. John thinks about his father, hat in hand, coming here to beg, and of Daggard Pitt tugging at his misshapen leg and regretfully clawing at the air with his frozen hand. Pitt says, “Did you know I once had political ambitions, John?”