Matthew Jones: A Single Shot

He stands up, walks over to the blue satchel, picks it up, carries it back over to the rock where he had been sitting, sits down again, then opens the satchel. Inside he finds a woman’s pink bikini underpants, matching gray socks adorned by galloping horses, a T-shirt with a winding, white-capped river on its front and, on back, “Ride the Wild Snake,” a wax-paper bag containing a partially eaten tuna-fish sandwich, a half-filled plastic water bottle, two rolled marijuana cigarettes, an open box of Kools, a nylon tan wallet, and a jackknife.

John takes the items from the satchel, places them in a neat circle on the ground between his feet, and, for several minutes, sits there looking at them, feeling as if he’s opened a door to the dead girl’s life and not sure he’s up to walking through it. Again he’s hit with the uneasy feeling that he’s not alone, that someone is watching to see what he’ll do next. When he hears a small plane fly over the mountain, he wonders, for a panicked moment, if someone might be searching for the girl. He looks up, shielding his eyes from the sun. The plane is so high it’s only a silvery dot marring his vision. Beneath it, a hundred or so yards above the quarry, a large pair of turkey vultures casually circle. John silently screams, “Why’d you put her here today, God, of all days?”

He doesn’t get an answer.

He picks up the wallet, flips it open, and sees, enclosed in plastic, a photograph of the dead girl sitting with two others about the same age on a large boulder near a waterfall. Smiling, her arms around the others’ shoulders, each girl is holding up three fingers of one hand. John pulls the photograph out of the plastic, turns it over, and sees, in a looping scrawl, “All for one, one for all. The Three Senoritas—Man, Tools, and Germ—6 /94.” Behind the first picture are two others, one of a couple who look to be in their fifties, he burly, with horn-rimmed glasses and a large drinker’s nose, she plumpish and smiling in a pantsuit that’s too small. The other is of the dead girl again, this time arm in arm with a heavyset man in his late twenties or early thirties, with slick black hair, dark eyes, and tight lips curled upward at the corners in a grudging half smile.

John slips the pictures back into the plastic, then searches the rest of the wallet, and finds fifty-two dollars, two condoms in tinfoil, and a book of stamps. There is no driver’s license; no credit, membership, or social security cards; nothing at all with the girl’s—or anyone else’s—name or address on it. John drops the wallet and for several seconds sits there, the enormity of the situation sweeping like a tidal wave over him, thinking, “Why me?” And, “She couldn’t have just dropped out of the sky.”

He stands up and walks several fast, tight circles around the rock, stops and kicks it, then hurries back over to the dead girl. He bends over, thrusts a hand into her pants pocket, groping for whatever’s there, but finds the pocket gone and his fingers kneading a thigh so warm, soft, and lifelike that he half expects the girl to giggle, moan, or cry out. Panting as if he’d just run a race, he quickly pulls back his hand and shakes it. “Son of a bitch!” he hisses, then quietly to the dead girl, “Sorry. Weren’t your fault.”

Gritting his teeth, he leans down and rolls the cadaver toward him, causing it to exhale and loudly break wind. John, gasping, feels he ought to apologize to the girl again, but instead goes ahead and searches her other pocket, finding in it several coins, a pencil stub, and a folded piece of paper that he unfolds and discovers is a half-written, unaddressed letter to the girl in the photograph named Tools. Standing over the cadaver, John reads the letter, written in the same awkward scrawl as the note on the back of the photograph.

Dear Tools:

By now I guess you know I’m gone. I couldn’t take it no more—not so much Daddy’s drinking and losing his temper and Ma pretending nothing was wrong as me bein fraid I’d end up like em which is dead inside. Like a pair of corpses. I wish I could have said goodbye but there weren’t no time and that you’d of got to know Waylon’s goodside (well, not too well!) He’s sweet and treats me better than all them grabass highschool boys (like Donnie LaTrec—the pig!) plus the way he loves me—for the first time I know what all the fuss is about (wow!)—and is smart but got in trouble from bad breaks. Talk about childhoods—you ought to hear bout his! Anyway, I don’t hold it gainst him he was in jail—he calls it his college education. And it weren’t for naught. He’d kill me if I told you—or even found out I was writing you as he made me throw out my address book—but soon as Waylon gets back tonight we’re heading somewhere starts with an H where there’s ocean, good weather, lays and coconuts (remember—wasn’t me who told you!) I can’t say no more, only that it’s like we always talked about—I can’t believe it’s been hardly a week since passing notes in geometry class! I’m not sure how it’s going to end up, Tools, and sometimes that scares me but it’s like Waylon says, better to go out like a Roman Candle than a wet log. All I know is for the first time ever I feel like I’m really living stead of—I got to stop for awhile, Tools—you won’t believe what just come hobbling in here with me, poor, dear thing, looks shot or something…

John refolds the letter, shoves it into his hip pocket, then, having decided what he must do—and quickly, before Waylon returns—glances down uneasily at the dead girl, half fearing she will open her eyes and say, “There’s the life you took from me and now you’re doing with me worse than you would a shot deer!”

Bending over, John grabs the girl under the arms and starts hauling her toward the near end of the bushes, the cadaver emitting noises like a couple of drunks eating beans around a campfire. John is so embarrassed for her that his cheeks burn and he thinks if the whole world could see itself dead there’d be no vanity left. Near the end of the bushes, one of her sneakers comes off. John stops and puts it back on, and her foot, in a baby-blue socklet, is so warm and alive he suddenly wishes he had known her when she was, a thought too disturbing to dwell on. He hurriedly picks up the corpse again and starts dragging it across the quarry floor, making a trail of blood, urine, and matted grass, toward the small pond and dug-out place on the far side, thinking, “The first thing is to get her hid somewhere, so I can think.”

He is halfway across the field when, from directly behind him, comes a loud hiss and a hollow thumping sound. With a startled yelp, he drops the cadaver and wheels around and there, over the dead buck, their huge wings flapping and red wattles trembling, hover the two turkey vultures. John runs at them, waving his arms and sibilating, and the birds, in their lumbering, unhurried way, fly off, one with deer meat dangling from its beak.

John walks back to the girl, bends to pick her up, and is shocked to find her staring straight at him. Her head banging against the ground must have caused her eyes to pop open. “It won’t do nobody,” John loudly blurts out, “you, your boyfriend, your family wherever they are, me, or my little one countin’ on me to feed ’im—one bit a good for me to go to jail which is jis’ what’id happen if the law found out ’bout this and even did accept it was an accident!” He reaches down, pushes her eyes shut again, then drags her the rest of the way across the quarry’s rock floor, through which grass and weeds sprout, past the water hole, to the opening in the wall, a dynamited cavern maybe four feet high and twice as deep, from which, years before, Old Man Hollenbach mined slate.

Breathing heavily, John lays the girl down on a bluestone slab in front of the opening, its floor marred by raccoon droppings, bat shit, and two or three cigarette stubs. John bends down, picks up a stub, sniffs it, and smells recently burned tobacco. “What the hell?” he thinks. He drops to his hands and knees in front of the cavern, carefully examines the entrance, and sees several crushed weeds, their broken stems oozing fresh fluid, and a large patch of imploded grass.