Matthew Jones - A Single Shot

John steps on a slick spot in the lawn and his feet go out from under him. Exhaling a muffled grunt, he lands with a dull thump in the half-foot-high grass, then lies ten feet from the Cadillac, holding his breath, waiting to see if the noise has roused anyone in the house. Visible in the flickering shaft of light half-illuminating the interior of the car is the silvery reflection of keys dangling in the ignition and a white, shearling-covered seat. To his left, the back door to the cabin is ajar. Suddenly something bursts through the opening into the moonlit semiblackness between John and the building, charges noisily across it, and slams, snorting, into John’s chest.

John punches the thing. Emitting a manic squeal, it backs off, then charges again; short-legged and bristly, its muscular body rams like a torpedo into John’s ribs.

“Git!” hisses John, hammering the hard torso with his fists.

The beast runs off a few feet. John sees framed in a patch of moonlight, its blush-colored hide spotted on its head and neck by dark, moist blotches as if it’s had a pail of paint thrown at it, a boxer-sized pig. He looks down at his hands. They are smeared with the same wet, sticky substance as that marring the pig. He smells his fingers, then touches them to his tongue. They taste sweet. Like molasses. He jumps to his feet. Throatily grunting, the pig scampers off toward the barn, its front door, John now sees, standing wide open.

He leans down and wipes his hands on the lawn. He looks at the house again. The dark shape of another pig darts out through the door. Releasing chortled grunts, the night-shrouded swine beats a grass-shivering path through the unmowed lawn toward the barn. His pulse hammering a staccato in his ears, John quickly strides over to the front seat of the Cadillac, in which an Albany banker and his teenage girlfriend had died before Simon salvaged it from a junkyard, restored its body, and gave it a V-8 engine from a rusted-out Ford Bronco. Could he have imagined seeing it parked that afternoon at the Oaks? wonders John.

The car is in drive, as if someone had simply pulled it up as close to the cabin as he could, turned it off, pushed open the driver-side door, and, drunk, injured, or in a hurry, entered through the back of the house. The floor on the passenger side is dotted with empty beer cans, cardboard fast-food containers, a coiled rope, several hand tools. An unwound cassette dangles from a corner of the open glove box. The shearling smells like beer. On it lies a woman’s sweater, sandals, and a half-zipped gym bag, in which John finds one of Simon’s hand-carved flutes, capable, in Simon’s hands, of playing notes dreamy, sad, or that can transport your mind to a place a thousand miles away.

Now come to John more images of Simon, at about John’s age, showing John how to whistle dozens of birdcalls, how to reassemble a rod-shot tractor engine, cut out a breeched calf without killing its mother, get downwind from a deer when trailing it, how to carve just about anything from a stick of dead wood. Rifling through the gym bag of clothes and toiletries, John remembers his father once saying of Simon—after he’d punched out that bull, maybe, or during one of his vanishing acts—“If that one were an ocean I’d take a boat clear crosst it but bet your ass I’d never swim in it.”

He finds beneath the clothes more plastic-wrapped tools—various-sized picks, screwdrivers, wrenches, a hand drill. John wonders if they are burglar’s tools. Then he remembers Simon’s penchant for carrying tools, large and small, in his vehicles. Tools are an obsession with him. For lack of the proper tool, he once told John, a man might be stranded in a snowstorm, bleed to death, suffocate in an airless, locked room. John finds wrapped in a T-shirt and cushioned by a leather sheath a large hunting knife. He removes the sheath. The knife’s blade is shiny and sharp. John remembers when Simon purchased the knife at a sporting-goods store in Ralston and how, after using it for anything—even to open an envelope—he meticulously cleans and polishes its blade and handle with a damp rag. Even if the knife had slashed Obadiah Cornish’s throat, thinks John, the Hen’s blood would not be on it.

He slides the knife back into the sheath, drops it in the gym bag, then pushes the bag toward the passenger door. On the vacated patch of seat lies a torn scrap of brown-and-blue computer paper that John recognizes as part of a monthly telephone bill, marred by someone’s ink-scribbled words. He picks the paper up and studies it in the faltering dome light. Halfway down the page, beneath Simon’s typed name, address, and phone number, is written: “Oaks—room 229.” John exhales a deep breath he isn’t aware he’d been holding. He tries to fit this piece of Simon as torturer and murderer into the whole puzzle of the man. The piece fits only in a hollow, coreless world. A world lacking substance or a center. A world where images adhere more solidly than words to the mind. John drops the paper and backs out of the car.

Treading the grass-flattened path toward the back door of the cabin, he can taste the mist, a pollen-sweetened dew like the aftermath of a syrupy drink. He is fleshless in this soup, like the two shadowed animals—taller than the pigs and rangier—that, in the midst of John’s approach, float like bearded specters through the half-open doorway before vanishing to his left into the darkened, fog-cloaked grass. John reaches down to his belt, yanks out the .45, and thinks, “Goddamn goats now. Sam Hell’s left in the barn?”

Past the two-foot space between the edge of the screen door and the outer wall, he tentatively places a foot into the darkened house, which smells like the molasses earlier flavoring his fingers, varied manures, and gunpowder’s pungent smoke. Though he can’t see much of it, the room has the eerie sense of being alive. John can actually hear it breathing, or imagines he can, and feels its pulse steadily beating in the far corner to his left. His hunter’s sixth sense tells him to back out of the house, as he didn’t in the quarry, but a feeling even stronger assures him he is on fate’s course.

He puts his other foot in front of the first one, and, holding the pistol out in front of him, starts to walk slowly. Suddenly he feels himself sliding, then, as if his feet have been grabbed by invisible hands, he’s skating unrestrainedly across the floor toward a large, ominously rocking shadow fronting an even bigger one. Halfway there, he goes down and slides the rest of the way on his backside. He hears what he thinks is a moo. A half second later, he collides with the source of the sound.

For a moment he lies, panting, entangled in four muscular legs. He is close enough to see that he is beneath an emasculated bull. It swishes its tail, then restlessly shifts its stance. John carefully rolls out from under it. He’s covered with molasses, manure, and whatever else is on the floor. He grabs onto the steer’s tail for support and pulls himself to his feet. The animal lows and shakes its head, the motion creating a clanking sound in the small room. “Shhhh!” whispers John, reaching for its neck to cease the sway and finding the neck encircled by a chain. The chain is looped around and padlocked to the refrigerator before which the animal stands. In the center of the refrigerator, which is leaking water, are two circular, rough-edged holes that John guesses were made by shotgun blasts.

Leaning against the steer, John gazes in wonderment around the kitchen, his eyes now enough adjusted to the dark to see that the stove next to the refrigerator is also shot and that, above it, the food cabinets have been blasted or their doors torn open and the food that was inside thrown onto the floor for the pigs, goats, and whatever else to pick at. The oddity of this scene has an almost calming effect on John, as if he is in a dream in which the worst possible thing that could result is for him to wake up screaming. On the left flank of the cow is what looks to be a glistening wound or a large, glossy strip of paper. John looks closer and sees that a color photograph has been taped to the steer’s hide. He pulls off the picture and holds it inches from his eyes, but can make out only the dark outlines of two people side by side and a smaller person or an animal crouched or lying between them.