Matthew Jones - A Single Shot

“Maybe somethin’ spooked ’im.”

“Could be turkeys. Been a bunch of ’em around.”

Diablo turns and walks back around to the front of the trailer. John thinks he hears again the gentle banging he heard earlier, while in the cellar. He looks at Abbie, who apparently hasn’t heard it. She breaks into a timorous laugh. “On the subject of trucks,” she says, “that black Chevy Blazer went up toward Hollenbachs’ again last night.”

John subconsciously touches the empty place in his belt where, before he placed it on the bedroom bureau, his .45 had been. “When did it?”

“Late. Real late.” Nervously, John glances into the woods behind her, then up the hill. In his mind, a fuse burns smaller and smaller. He hears Abbie take a swig of root beer, then loudly smack her lips. “ ’Bout an hour ’fore you got home.”

John looks at her again and this time sees one more of the human race better equipped and more informed than he. “I sleep light’s a deer, John Moon.” She smiles coyly. Behind her, the hummingbird is chased off by two sparrows, fighting. “A twig don’t crack out my window I don’t hear.”

“Fell asleep at a friend’s house,” says John.

“Hope you were protected.”

“Huh?”

She laughs uninhibitedly. “You know, John Moon. A rubber.”

Her straight talk embarrasses John. He turns red.

“Having sex with one person’s like having it with twenty-four. I learned that in health class.”

“I didn’t have it with nobody.”

“Doesn’t matter to me if you did.” She shrugs. “Only you ought to be smart, is all. What’s one second of pleasure worth?”

John scowls. He hears or imagines soft music playing somewhere.

“I could lend you one.”

“What?”

“A rubber. I stole some from Eban’s bureau drawer.” She flicks playfully at her hair. “If Moira doesn’t want to come back, John, you’ll find somebody as nice if you’re patient.”

“What?”

“A good-looking guy like you, gentle and with a good sense of humor?” She nods matter-of-factly. “Uh-huh. I think so.”

“Go home,” says John.

She laughs again. “When I decide to give up my virginity, John Moon, it’s going to be to a guy as sweet as you.”

John waves derisively at her. He’s not sure if she’s seducing him or making fun of him. Once he would have thought her incapable of either. Now no one’s motives are clear to him. “You’re almost the perfect catch, John Moon.” She punches him firmly in the arm. Now John guesses she’s only trying to be a good friend. “All’s you need’s a job.”

“Maybe I’ll take it.”

“You ought to, ’fore Daddy offers it to somebody else.”

The music, no longer imagined, gets louder. John abruptly stands up.

“Am I making you nervous, John?”

“I heard somethin’ in the trailer.”

“What?”

“Music, whatever.”

She cocks an ear toward the kitchen, but the sounds John heard he can’t hear now and neither can Abbie. “When’d he come back down?” John asks her.

“Who?”

“One in the black Chevy Blazer.”

“He didn’t. Unless it was while I was in the barn doing chores this morning.” She gets a more serious look on her face. “Kind of a strange time to be searchin’ for someone’s missing, don’t you think, John?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you s’pose he’s up to?”

John shrugs.

“Maybe somebody ought to call the sheriff.”

“I don’t think so,” says John. Suddenly he wishes he hadn’t left his pistol in the bedroom. He decides to go in and get it, just as the music starts in again. This time they both hear it. Somewhere past the kitchen, barely audible, a steel guitar, accompanied by a piano and a mewling, lovesick voice. Abbie looks uncomprehendingly at John. Behind her soft smile, maybe she’s even a little scared. “You leave a radio on inside, John Moon?”

John wheels jerkily toward the door without answering.

“Sounds like it’s moving from one place to another.”

“You ought to get home,” snaps John, turning back around.

“What?”

“Your folks’ll be wonderin’.”

She laughs shrilly, the sound seeming to inject life into a gnarled oak tree, down in the meadow, halfway to her house. As if limbering up for a race, the tree’s foliated branches begin jauntily to bounce, then from them rises up, squawking, a grackle plague, its black smudge scarring the sky’s perfect blue. Abbie, breathing heavily, jumps up from her chair. “Trash birds,” she says.

“Go out this way,” says John, gently shoving her toward the deck steps.

“Do what?” Enhanced by adrenaline, her vital smell provides an antithesis to the death’s scent recently filling John’s nostrils. His vertigo is enhanced. Vague disorientation becomes dissolution of rational thought. There’s a ghost in the trailer, playing Willie Nelson tunes.

“No sense going out through the trailer.”

“I’m not going out any way at all, John Moon,” she says. Backing haughtily away from him, she puts her hands on her hips. Inside, the music is now a low, steady drone, sounding somewhere in the south end of the structure, where John’s bedroom is. “Not till I know if you got a bogeyman.”

John glances toward the room, forty feet to his left. A corner of its single window facing the valley is visible as a patch of mauve curtain, slightly pulled back from the open glass that last John remembers was covered by a screen but now is not. Into his chest enters a searing pain, like a ghost’s bullet fired from that ajar place. He looks at Abbie and she is Ingrid Banes behind a briar thicket in the final moment preceding her death, and a tiny voice in his head says, “Don’t shoot!”

“Got to be the transistor,” he says. “Had it on changin’ my clothes.”

“Weak batteries,” says Abbie with false bravado, “’ll make the sound fade in and out like that.”

“I’ll go turn it off.” John steps toward the deck door.

“I’ll come with you.”

“You stay here.”

“Give a holler if you got a band playing in there, John Moon.” She laughs too loudly.

John opens the door.

Like a straining maestro’s voice, his agitation rises as he steps into that airless, dark place he has inhabited these many years, though, once inside, he feels less as if he has entered his home than as if he’s exited the world of light. Here, where the soul and body of Ingrid Banes rests, more dangerous than what eyes can see, is what the sun can’t touch. Still, he wishes he had a gun. Halfway down the semidark corridor where the kitchen smells loiter, and ten feet from the closed bedroom door beyond which Willie Nelson sings, he remembers the .22 automatic he had hidden behind the toilet. He veers left into the bathroom, reaches down behind the toilet’s back, and finds the pistol. He checks to see that it’s loaded, then, holding it out in one hand, reenters the hallway.

In front of the bedroom door he stops, inclining an ear inward. The music abruptly ends. An ad for Agway fertilizer comes on. “The transistor,” thinks John. “I did leave it on.” He turns the knob and gently pushes the door open.

The radio sits on the bureau to his right. Everything else in the room looks as it had, except the screen that had been covering the window now stands at its base. A light breeze ruffles the curtain and John imagines the softly probing flatus to be a ghost’s inaudible whisper. A foreign scent taints the room, an organic stink concomitant to exorcised life. Now he’s not sure if the bed has been lain in or if the fault marring its center was created in its making. In this spiritually vibrant place, he suddenly feels like an inorganic lump. Like a stone marker in a cemetery. Even the tumultuous beat of his own heart seems like a sound disconnected from his static flesh. A frantic banging maybe, coming from the closet. He takes a deep breath and walks over to it. Brandishing the gun in one hand, he reaches down with the other and yanks open the mirrored door.