Matthew Jones - A Single Shot

John shoves the .45 into his belt and waves.

“Got something to put on it?”

“Peanut butter maybe.”

The horse shakes its head, spraying phlegm. “That all?”

“Ain’t shopped in a while.”

“Lucky for you I brought some sauerkraut and fresh-ground sausage.” She swings down from the horse. John nervously glances at the trailer. “Make ya a hoagie.”

“What?”

“For lunch.” She’s wearing blue jeans, riding boots, and a sleeveless black jersey that shows off her tanned, muscular arms. She’s too pretty for John to even think about. She unfastens a saddlebag from the girth. “Momma’s starting to worry you’re up here fading away to nothing.”

“I’m all right,” says John. He starts walking toward her, keeping one eye on the house.

“Never said you weren’t.” She tosses the saddlebag over her shoulder. “Like to have lunch with ya, is all.”

She drops the reins. Diablo puts its head down and starts to graze. John stops between Abbie and the trailer. He thinks maybe he sees something move behind the kitchen window. Then he’s not sure. Abbie looks at him and wrinkles her nose. “You need a bath, John Moon.”

John nods up the hill. “Was choppin’ wood yonder.”

“Where’s your truck?”

“Up there with it.”

“Whyn’t ya jump in the shower.”

“Huh?”

“While I make the hoagies.” She smiles and walks by him toward the trailer.

Showered and in clean clothes, he feels more grounded to the world. Combing his hair in the bathroom, he hears Abbie whistling “Where have you been, Billy Boy.” The events from the past five days give him a temporary reprieve. His recent behavior in the woods now strikes him as someone else’s. He allows himself to pretend he is a man waking from a nightmare. The dead bodies dissolve in the morning light. Ghosts wing away like butterflies. He imagines it to be Moira fixing him lunch in the kitchen while the boy quietly sleeps in his crib.

The whistling stops. A few seconds later, it begins again, though lower-pitched than before. Or in a different key. Maybe the melody isn’t the same. The sound gets weaker and weaker. The thought strikes John that it’s a different whistler altogether. Not Abbie, but a third person. He runs out to the kitchen. No one is there. The basement door is open and the stair light on.

“Abbie?” he calls down.

The whistling stops.

“That you, Abbie?”

“Who else. A ghost, John Moon?” She laughs. John hears her pulling at the stand-up freezer door. His heart suddenly feels like a large bird caught in a tar bog, desperately flapping its wings to escape. He charges downstairs. “What you doing?”

She wheels away from the freezer. She’s holding in her hand a plastic bag of sausage. “This ought to be froze,” she says, looking at him oddly. “What we don’t eat.”

His reprieve abruptly come to an end, John snatches the bag from her. “I’ll do it,” he says.

She flicks at her hair peevishly.

“You don’t open it right,” says John, “everythin’ ’ll fall out.”

“All the bodies, ya mean?”

John drops the sausage. They both squat down to pick it up at the same time. The fleshly, live smell of her makes him shudder, fills him with a combination of forbidden desire for her and remorse for the dead girl’s contrary state. Abbie giggles as her hair brushes against John’s cheek. John picks up the bag. “Your hands are shaking, John Moon.”

“Ain’t been myself.”

“Sorry about Moira taking up with that professor.”

John snaps his head back and cocks it at her.

“I’ve seen them together on campus.” She reaches out and lightly touches John’s shoulder. “He teaches in the same building where I take my empowerment course.”

John abruptly stands up.

“He’s not near as good-looking as you, John. Nor as nice, neither. He’s got a haughty attitude. Like teaching freshman English makes him special or something.”

John thinks he hears a noise upstairs. A door being quietly opened and shut maybe. He looks at the stairs, then back at Abbie, who looks like she’s heard it, too. “What was that?” he asks.

“The wind knocking the shutters round, probably.” She reaches her hand out for John to take. He does and pulls her to her feet. She holds on for a second longer, then walks by him and over to the stairs. Before starting up them, she smiles and says, “I bet a dollar she don’t love him, John.”

“Don’t know,” says John.

“I bet if you took that job with Daddy she’d see you’ve got a regular income and a future and she’d come back.”

John shrugs. Suddenly it occurs to him for the first time that maybe she oughtn’t to come back. Not that he doesn’t love and miss her, and Nolan too, but he’s not who he was a week ago and is not sure he trusts his present self to live with anyone. The thought makes him shiver. He watches Abbie walk up the stairs, then turns to the freezer and tugs it open less than an inch. He can feel what’s in there pushing against the door. Without peering inside, he slides the sausage through the crack and quickly slams the door shut.

In adjacent lawn chairs facing the valley, they watch the slow sweep of a solitary white cloud across the horizon. John imagines the invisible wind pushing the cloud as the same relentless force propelling his fated course. What is soon will become what was, then will disappear. He thinks of life’s short flush. Of Simon Breedlove’s decomposing body lying atop his own chicken feed. Of his father dying angry. His mother dying sad. And the dead girl dying for a deer.

He looks at Abbie eating a hoagie, and fixates on her chewing. On the rhythmic pulse of the muscles in her cheeks, like the steady throb beneath her breast. He sees her emerging beauty evolving, imagines her blooming into a full-blown woman who will never again eat hoagies on John Moon’s deck. This is not a guess, he tells himself, but a fact, like the sun coming up in the east and setting in the west. In his suddenly vibrant mind, more insights go off like skyrockets. Moira will learn from her professor perfect grammar and compassion. One day she will come to pity John. And Nolan will come to view him as a dinosaur, a compelling character from backwoods lore. In their world, John will be more akin to the dead than to the living. “Been a murder in town,” says Abbie.

To combat a sudden vertiginous feeling, John takes his feet from the railing and places them flat on the deck.

“Was on the a.m. news. Some fella up to the Oaks. Police aren’t saying who, only that he’s got a long record and roots in the area.”

Past her head, a hummingbird, emitting a relentless buzz, stabs at the honeysuckle. John pictures its needle-shaped beak slowly entering and narcotizing his brain. “They’re searching for a woman was staying two rooms down from him who’s disappeared without checking out.” Abbie opens her eyes wide at him like she’s staring into that dying place and marveling at its vacuousness. “They think maybe she’s in the victim’s truck. ’Cause it’s missing, too.”

Her studied gaze intimidates John. He thinks of Florence staring out her good eye at the endless flat terrain he imagines Oklahoma to be. And addlebrained Skinny Leak peering out from the depths of his slime-green, ravaged recliner, saying, “You’s one the Fitch boys, ain’t ya?” From around front comes a loud chortled neigh, then heavy foot-stomping. “Easy, boy!” Abbie calls out.

The horse sounds off again, then suddenly trots around the corner of the building, tossing its head. “What’s the matter with you?” says Abbie, waving at him. “Wait for me out front. There’s plenty of grass there!” She smiles at John. “Jealous, must be.”