Matthew Jones - A Single Shot

He shoves his pistol into his belt, then reaches into his pocket, withdraws a packet of restaurant matches, and, holding the photograph between his teeth, lights a match. In the flame’s dancing cone of light, he again looks at the picture. This time he sees a man and a woman sitting on a couch with their arms around each other and jointly holding a small child. The man is small and wiry, has a jack-o’-lantern’s smile and something a little off with the left side of his head, as if maybe it’s been stove in or he’s missing something there. The woman is big-boned, pretty, taller than the man, and, like him, vaguely familiar to John, but more so. He can’t fathom their pictures—or anyone’s—being taped to a cow’s ass in Simon Breedlove’s kitchen.

John thinks the steer might be asleep. Its head rests almost on the floor and its only movement is a slow, steady, side-to-side list like that of an anchored ship. He tapes the picture back where he found it, then tiptoes past the refrigerator, careful not to slip again, and enters a wood-floored hallway where the molasses stops, but the boards creak beneath his feet. He remembers the hallway leads to a big catch-all room where, John had the impression, Simon does about everything but cook and sleep. He walks around a rounded corner and sees at the corridor’s end a dull, steady light. He pulls out the .45 and tries to make less noise as he walks, though he’s sure anyone in the house can hear his rapid breathing. He’s a step from the doorway when through it rushes, in a mishmash of clucks and feathers, a large chicken.

“Jesus!” hisses John, flattening himself against the wall as the red-and-white pullet sissy steps its way down the hallway toward the kitchen. In the unblinking light falling from the room, the bird’s flaming tuft reminds John, pressed against the oak-log partition abutting the doorway, of the crested hairdo on the woman he’s just seen. As the fowl prissily trots around the corner and disappears, he suddenly remembers who she is. He wonders how Colette Gans’s picture ended up taped to a beef cow’s flank. Or why. Sweat oozes from every pore on his body. More clucking sounds come from the room.

He pokes his head around the corner of the doorway and sees, ten feet in front of a recliner facing it, a television noiselessly playing an off-air signal and illuminating two more pullets absently picking at what look to be kernels of hard corn scattered on the floor. Several open beer cans and an empty gin bottle lie on a throw rug near the chair. Resting atop the recliner’s back, slightly tilted to one side, is the back of a human head.

Purged now of all conscious thought, John’s mind fills with a single image of fate’s darkened corridor whose light-flickering end might be a candle or a muzzle flash; in this narrow, one-way tunnel the sum of his earthly knowledge becomes the floating, transparent cells marring his vision. He slips into the room and, holding the pistol out in front of him in one hand, silently stalks the chair. He is less than five feet from it when a torturous moan sounds from the recliner and the head slowly lolls. John rushes forward and places the gun’s barrel against the base of the head. It moans again, loosely bobs, then rolls back to where it had originally been resting.

“Who’s it?” whispers John.

The chair’s occupant groans. John pushes against the recliner’s back so that it springs forward, then snaps to a stop, throwing its contents onto the floor. Loudly clucking, the chickens dance away from the body. It scrambles to get to its feet. “Don’t try nothin’,” says John.

A man laboriously gets to his knees, then slowly turns around. “Jesus, Johnno.”

John points the gun at him.

“What the hell? Where—you? Son of a bitch, John.”

“What?”

“Put the goddamn gun away. The bad guy’s gone.”

“Huh?”

“Bastard moved ’bout my whole stock in here.” Simon lashes out at one of the chickens, which rises up, squawking. “You seen what he done my kitchen?”

John doesn’t say.

“Plugged it eight times I counted. Mighta been more on’y drunk as I was, I c’udn’t hardly see straight.” He pushes himself with his hands into a semistanding position. John backs off half a step, aiming the gun at him. “What the hell, Johnno? I ought to kick your ass. Why you here?”

John waves the .45 at the couch. “Sit down yonder there,” he says.

“What?”

“Got some questions for ya.”

“You’re holdin’ a gun on me, John. And that’s after you broke in my house. I think I’ll jis’ go back to sleep. Try wakin’ up a whole ’nother way.”

“I seen what you done the Hen,” says John.

Simon straightens up the rest of the way. He runs a hand over his mouth. “Seen what?”

“Over to the Oaks.”

“You seen a piece a’ shit with his throat cut and figured I did it, that what you mean?”

“I seen what I seen. It looked a lot like what the cops said somebody done to Ira and Molly Hollenbach.”

Simon shrugs. “Go ’head shoot me, Johnno. Been workin’ up to doin’ it myself here last couple a’ days.”

Suddenly John’s hand holding the gun is shaking. He can feel his legs begin to quiver like fish flopping on a bank. He’s afraid he’s going to fall down. To prevent it, he puts his free hand on the back of the chair. “Why?” he asks.

“That ain’t never as complicated as people like to make it out, Johnno. Years ’fore I ever heard a’ Vietnam my daddy said I had the same wild hair’s got him dead younger than I am now, o’ny I got far ’nough in school to know wild hairs is called genes and get a damn sight wilder a man’s been drinkin’.” He backs up to the television set. “And like everybody’s mother always warns, I got in with some bad elements, baddest of which is that piece shit you found bleeding all over the Oaks’ rugs.”

“You worked for Ira. He treated you decent.”

“Most times.”

“Decent as my own daddy.”

“Gon’ turn off the set, Johnno.”

“Don’t!”

Simon abruptly reaches down and switches off the television. The room goes black. John hears a rapid movement. He tries to follow the sound with his gun. Simon chuckles. John says, “I know where you are!”

A dull light comes on behind him. “Boo!” says Simon.

John wheels around. Simon’s standing before the couch, aiming a shotgun at him. “Shit, Johnno, din’ you learn nothin’ ’bout what I taught you?”

John lowers the .45. He feels physically and cognitively depleted. “Ain’t like you,” he says.

“Huh?”

“Don’t shoot folks been good to me. Nor slit their throats neither.”

“Ira was s’posed to be to a fireman’s dance that night, ’cordin’ the Hen.” Simon points the shotgun at his own toes. He sits down on the couch. John’s not sure if he’s through covering him with the shotgun or is just taking a rest. “Him and Molly both. I run into Obadiah all growed-up over the Pink Lily in Raburn, this was maybe three, four years after Ira’d shit-canned ’im for skewerin’ that cow and a coupla weeks after he’d done the same to me for not showin’ up two mornings in a row, then wouldn’t pay me no back wages. Hen says he’d been holdin’ Ira’s safe combination all these years—all we’d have to do is walk in and open it.”

At a level deeper than conscious comprehension, John is thinking that the apparent palpability of words, acts, the whole process of human interchange, is a sham. He is mindful, though, only of his physical distress. His trembling extremities. His palpitating heart. “What I notice ’bout myself, Johnno, is the drunker I get, the more reasonable the most un-fucking-reasonable things seem.”

“Guess I’ll sit down,” John tells him, “ ’less’n you’ll shoot me for it.”