Matthew Jones - A Single Shot

“Christ, John.”

“All right?”

Simon scowls.

John shoves the .45 into his belt. He takes a seat on the edge of the recliner, facing Simon. Simon sighs and says, “Them first coupla years after I got back I weren’t hardly never sober ’cept when I worked for your daddy, who wouldn’t tolerate it, but seems like the longer I’d go ’long his way, worse it’d be when I did let loose, and pretty soon a lost weekend ’id turn into a lost week or two or a whole damn month.” He flicks the barrel of the shotgun at one of the chickens that’s strayed too close to his foot. The chicken squawks and runs off. “Some mess, ain’t it, John?”

John’s not sure if he means his own or the cabin’s. Anyway, he doesn’t answer. It seems to him that Simon’s voice has lost its uniqueness. It sounds like a million other voices.

“Hen drives out Route 9” it says, “and parks in the Conservancy so nobody’d see us comin’ up the hollow, then we hike the woods trail over to Ira’s, getting drunker as we go—I mean, I’m not even carryin’ a gun, Johnno, because to me it’s a sumbitchin’ lark. I figure there’s a safe at all, most’ll be in it is the couple weeks’ wages Ira owes me. We walk up the house whistling, through the front door, turn on a light, and go through the living room to Ira’s office, where the Hen gets to his knees and yanks up a piece a’ rug above where the safe is. He tries openin’ it with some goddamn numbers he’s got writ down but nothin’ happens so he curses and tries ’em a few more times with no more luck and me giving ’im the raspberry ’cause I don’t really give a shit and the Hen finally says fuck it he’ll go upstairs and take some a’ Molly’s jewels and then we’ll leave and though I’m not happy ’bout him ransackin’ the place I go in the kitchen and drink a beer while I wait and maybe he’s up there fifteen, twenty minutes tops and all I e’er heard, Johnno, was a little bangin’ round and once or twice the Hen curse.”

Simon stops talking and runs a hand back through his hair. He’s wearing the same clothes he was two days ago. John wonders if he’s slept in a bed or been less than half-drunk since then. “Look at this shit, Johnno.” He waves the shotgun around the room. “Here’s love makin’ a damn monster out a’ man. You think my homeowner’s ’ll cover what he done?”

John doesn’t say. He’s wondering who the monster is and how far wrong John had read Simon, what exactly his friend is capable of. Could it have been he who had shot Mutt and left the dead girl’s body in the trailer? Was it possible that he had been involved with the Hen in threatening John’s family? The belief that he might have been has on John’s already tortured mind the excruciating pain-followed-by-numbness effect of frigid water.

Balancing the shotgun on his thighs, Simon reaches down with one hand and snatches an open beer can from the floor. “Hair a’ the dog, Johnno,” he says before raising the can to his lips and draining it. Afterwards, he scowls, fixates on a spot on the ceiling above John’s head, and in a flat monotone says, “I hear Hen come back downstairs and I walk out and see ’im covered in blood with a look on his face like the devil’s rooted up and found a home there and in one hand he’s totin’ Ira’s bloody World War II bayonet and in the other his thirty-aught and when I ask ’im what the hell he’s gone and done he walks by me toward the study and says, ‘Ol’ Ira was up there straightenin’ me out on them numbers.’ I run upstairs, Johnno, and find a mess worse than most of what I seen in ’Nam, and Ira, half butchered like he is, moanin’ from Molly’s lap and oglin’ me out the one eye he’s got left and the look he give me, Johnno, ’ll follow me into the ground and a damn sight deeper, and I mumbled to him somethin’ like I was sorry for it, then I took out my huntin’ knife and done for ’im like I would for a wounded deer.”

Simon tosses the shotgun onto the cushion next to him. Particles of dust rise up and, in the dim light around and above his head, spin in a circular pattern monotonous as his words. “Was Hen carrying the aught-six,” he says, rubbing his temples, “so I din’ argue much when he turns it on me and says we ought to split up, with him headin’ with the money back over the Conservancy and me winding my way down the west fork the hollow where my pickup was stashed.”

John reaches down and squeezes his left calf where it’s cramped up. He wonders how long it would take Simon to grab the shotgun and aim it.

“We was gon’ get together in coupla days to see ’bout divvyin’ things up, but I figured from the start I’d seen the last of him and it ain’t but a week later I hear he’s pled to and been sentenced to a six-pack for a string a’ burglaries up in Raburn he was out on bail for at the time the Hollenbach thing and I guessed he musta planned all along to stash whatever we took somewhere till he got out.”

In the dark corners of the room, pieces of furniture silently sit like intrigued jurors. Sporadic clucks sound like the derisive barks of naysayers. “Coulda let the law in on it,” mumbles John.

“In their eyes I’m guilty as him.”

“You din’ have to take the money.”

Simon laughs contemptuously. “You know what a big pile cash does a poor man, don’t ya, John.”

John straightens up. He looks at Simon, trying to figure out if he’s making generalizations or knows that John, in many ways, had come to the same crossroads as Simon and, as John now guiltily realizes, taken the same wrong turn. “Makes ’im greedy,” says John.

“Like a rich man.”

“More you talk, dumber I feel.”

“Dead’s dead, Johnno. On’y sense I e’er made a’ life.”

In John’s mind, beyond fear and disillusionment, lurks his own culpability. Was his hiding the dead girl and taking the money as bad as what Simon had done? He’s not sure. Nor of what Simon knows about John’s own involvement. “Day ’fore yest’day I’m up to the Oaks where Big Colette Gans’s hidin’ from her old man and son of a bitch, Johnno, if I don’t run smack-dab into Hen-shit-for-brains, still with his convict’s tan and hellish s’prised to see me. Probably planned slippin’ in and out town like a ghost with what he come for, though he gives me the song-’n’-dance ’bout lookin’ me up soon’s he had his hands on the cash on’y he swears after it got dug up from where he buried it somebody ’sides him snatched it.”

John flicks his eyes at Simon. “Said it was him dug it up?”

“Din’ say one way the other.”

John glances nervously at the shotgun. “You shoot Mutt?”

“Wouldn’t shoot no dog, John. Not your’n nohow.”

“He say it was me took it?”

“Said he had a hunch. Then I drive up there and find you loaded for bear.”

“Figured I’d be too busy studyin’ on tattooed mountain lions see you’d searched the place?”

“Shit, John. Thought a’ that money got like a cancer in my gut. I couldn’t cut it out and couldn’t live with it. Next morning I drove to town got even drunker. Figured you had it, after a while you’d get to feelin’ scared or upright and give it the law. I weren’t gon’ shoot ya for it. And couldn’t talk to ya ’bout it.” Simon slowly picks up the gun. “ ’Cept I kep’ goin’ over what the Hen might do to you or your’n for it and finally I made up my mind go over there put a sick chicken out its misery.”

“Done more’n that, what I seen.”

“I wouldn’t wasted so much effort killin’ that sumbitch. How I left ’im’s how I found ’im.” He tosses the shotgun at John. John puts out both hands and catches it. “There’s one in the chamber, Johnno. Be ’bliged you’d put it in me.” He reaches down and starts untying his boots. Holding the shotgun, John watches him, acutely aware again of the living sounds and smells in the house, of animals, under darkness’s blanket, eating, scratching, defecating, performing instinctual tasks as boundless as John’s befuddlement. Simon kicks off his boots, then, sighing, reclines on the couch. “Headache weren’t so bad, Johnno,” he says, “till I passed out and was woke up half-sober in the same mess I passed out in.”