Matthew Jones - A Single Shot

“Was it Waylon killed ’im?”

Simon scowls confusedly at him. “Don’t know no Waylon.”

“Stocky guy with a beard? Got somethin’ do with the money?”

“Not Ira’s money.”

“Was boyfriend to the girl.”

“What girl?”

“Cornish din’ mention her? Or ’bout havin’ a partner?”

Cocking his head at John, Simon reaches down and picks up another half-dead beer. “Want to tell me what you been up to last couple a’ days, Johnno?”

John shrugs. “Found some money, that’s all.”

Simon puts the can to his lips, drinks from it, then drops it on the floor. He scowls. “Why you here?”

“Was ridin’ round confused.”

“Guess Moira ain’t come back.”

“Got herself a boyfriend. My lawyer told me.”

“ ’Member what I said ’bout the end of the world, John?”

“Yeah.”

“That ain’t it.”

“Okay.”

Simon turns sideways and puts his feet up on the couch. “Keep in touch with your son, though. My daddy never did with me like your’n did with you.”

“Yeah.”

“Mean somethin’ to him later.”

“Okay.”

Simon sighs. “What you gon’ do with the money.”

“Ain’t figured it out.”

“I’d burn it’s what.” He puts his hands behind his head. “Less’n you want to end up that fiery place Old Ira already sentenced me to, I’d stick a match to her, John.”

“Maybe I’ll give it the cops.”

“They can spend it good’s anybody else.”

“I’ll keep your name out a’ it.”

“Don’t matter either way, Johnno. Like I told you, I grew too old for this shit.” He nods at the room. “Got to admire the man who can still feel the monster a’ love this bad, though, don’t ya?”

“You gon’ tell me who or ain’t ya?”

“Left his calling card on my steer’s ass. Din’ ya see it?”

“Gans?”

“Had that half ear, Johnno, ’member?”

John three-quarter smiles.

“Tell me ya do.”

“I think maybe I do. Got a junkyard ’hind his house?”

“Filled with nothin’ but American-made wrecks.”

“Weren’t barely full-grown?”

“Widdled-down son of a bitch din’ know how bad the monster had him till Big Colette walked out.” Simon reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out one of his hand-carved harmonicas. “Guess he’da shot me too, if I’da been here.”

“Prob’ly too drunk to aim straight.”

“I feel kind bad ’bout it, Johnno. Man that afflicted.”

John stands up from the recliner.

“Guess you ain’t gon’ do me no favor either, huh, Johnno?”

“Not tonight,” said John. “Not never.”

“Bring that 12-gauge over here then and put it down next the couch ’fore ya leave. And there ought be a pint a’ Beefeater’s lying there somewhere.”

John finds the half-drunk Beefeater’s. He carries the bottle and shotgun over to the couch and places them on the floor next to Simon’s head. “You’re a good boy, Johnno. Just like your old daddy taught ya. He don’t call ya first, couple days you ring up Daggard Pitt.”

John stares wordlessly down at Simon. “He ain’t a bad little fella, John, for a lawyer. Just too easily took in, is all. Thinks all his clients—like you, me, and the Hen—is troublesome kids, gon’ one day grow up.” Simon rests his head against the arm of the couch, then reaches up and shuts off the light. “Good night, Johnno.”

Feeling for objects with his hands, John starts blindly making his way out of the darkened house. Behind him the harmonica softly plays the sad but spirited tune that Simon often plays as the two of them, after a long hunt, exhaustedly tread their way back through the woods toward home. As John steps out of the cabin, the music, rather than abruptly ending, gradually fades out. Shivers of first light, like parasitic worms, riddle the night’s dying body. The dispersing fog exhales a slumbering, organic smell. John crosses the road, then starts walking parallel to the cornfield toward his truck. From the cabin comes a single shotgun blast.

FORGETTING HE had slept, he wakes with his hands gripping the wheel. In his head the memory of a gunshot echoes the last remnant of his fitful dreams. The unimpeded sun is straight up in a harsh blue sky. The truck is locked, its windows sealed. In a glade of red oak, it sits behind a large boulder draped in fox scat. The unregenerated air is stodgy and moist, hard to breathe.

John reaches down and jerks open the driver-side door. Fresh air enters like a shout. He stumbles into it, voraciously hungry all of a sudden. He walks over to the boulder, around the base of which grow Saint-John’s-wort and raspberry bushes, and starts foraging for berries. A cottontail darts out of the thicket and the ground there is rife with deer and bear droppings.

John strips off his sweat-drenched shirt, twists it into a two-cornered sack, and tosses the picked berries into it. When it’s full, he sits down with his back to the truck and eats what he’s picked, once snarling at a chipmunk that wanders too close to his cache. Nothing in his recent memory has tasted better. When the shirt is empty, he fills and empties it again, remembering that he has not eaten in nearly twenty-four hours. Afterwards, partially sated, he climbs to the top of the boulder and gazes several hundred yards down through the trees to where his half-obscured trailer sits. His hunter’s eye spots nothing amiss, but his brain is no more convinced now than it was hours before when he drove up the road in the fading dark.

Standing again on the floor of dogbane and clover, he is overcome by the enormity of his life’s upheaval. He longs to be an anonymous part of the mountain’s wildlife. Another nonhumanoid who at the merest whiff of man’s odious stink retreats deep into the woods. He falls, trembling, to his knees. Inspiring his own foul-smelling exhalations, he sees his father, even while breathing death’s rattle, mumbling, “Weren’t no damn dog, tell ya. Was a wolf. A goddamn wolf!” What had he meant? No one in the family knew or had ever hazarded a guess. And Simon? While pulling the trigger on his life of excess, what enduring image had he tried to carry into the next world?

He lies flat on his back and stares up at a hole in the canopy of trees through which the sun peers, and imagines his former self sucked up into the cosmos through that corridor of light, leaving behind a flesh-and-bone shell free to be about anything.

He snarls, then reaches out with one hand and swats at the air. He unties his boots, kicks them off, stands up, and peels off his jeans and underpants. Naked, he feels freer than he had. Less encumbered by human plights. And stronger. He rakes his clawed hands through a patch of jewelweed. He bares his teeth and growls. He starts running a circle around the glade. In less than ten feet he trips on a root and pitches sideways into a briar thicket. He loudly curses. His stubbed toe hurts. So does his flesh where it is pierced by the needle-sharp balls. He feels foolish. And embarrassed. Two chattering squirrels seem to be laughing at him. He glances shiftily around to make sure no one else is. It takes him close to ten minutes painfully to extricate himself.

He quickly dresses, grabs the .45 out of the truck, and bushwhacks down through the woods to the edge of the mown field in which his trailer sits. He starts running in a semicrouch toward it. He is halfway there when, down the road, several blue jays start squawking. Then comes the sound of rapidly clopping hooves. John freezes. He is still searching for a place to hide when into the yard gallops a lathered-up Diablo, carrying Abbie Nobie.

“John Moon,” she calls out, reining the horse in. “Brought you a home-baked apple pie and three loaves of Momma’s oatmeal bread.”