Matthew Jones - A Single Shot

After scrabbling to the top of the boulder, John peers through the trees to the trailer deck. From this distance, the two intertwined figures in the lounge chair are indistinguishable. They might not be alive except that John can see one of them—probably Waylon—waving something over his head. Even with the use of his normal shooting hand, John, sighting through the high-powered scope of his .308, would have to fire a near-perfect shot to hit either of them. Below the boulder, though, his view to the deck would be blocked by the trees, and past the trees, in the rock-and bush-laden field, Waylon would see him. “I’m gettin’ nervous not knowin’ where you’re at, John!” Waylon yells. “Give me a holler, something!”

John leans forward on his knees and puts his hands to his mouth. He knows he’s not visible from the deck because he’d looked for the boulder from that same spot earlier. “Yo!” he calls out. “I’m at the truck!”

“Ya got the money?”

“Gotta dig it out first! Take me a few minutes!”

John sees the two figures stand up, but can’t tell if Abbie is doing so of her own volition or is being assisted by Waylon; then he sees the larger figure kneeling next to the smaller one, doing something with its legs. “I’m pulling the girl’s—I’m pulling Abbie’s—pants down, John!” John sees the glint of something from the deck that might be Waylon’s knife blade reflecting the sun. “If you make like a hero—try circling back on me, whatever—I’m gon’ fillet her like a brook trout!” Congruent with the hammering in his mutilated hand, anger pulses in John’s temples. He finds himself involuntarily hissing.

“I’m comin’ ’s fast I can!” he screams.

“You got five minutes get my goddamn money and drive it down here!”

John turns from the valley, drops onto his butt, and, faster than he had anticipated, plummets down the slick, moss-encrusted side of the boulder; three-quarters down, to avoid crashing headlong into the raspberry bushes, he springs upward and out. He lands on his feet in the glade, then pitches sideways into a witch-hazel shrub, its woody fruit, like a gauntlet of blackjacks, painfully pummeling his mutilated stub. His consequent thrashing upsets a possum family, who, screeching in protest, scurry out from beneath him.

John exits the shrub and, still moaning, stumbles the fifteen feet across the glade to where the truck sits. He unconsciously reaches to open the driver-side door with his bandaged hand, sending additional pain waves through the stump and reinforcing in his mind the many tasks made easier with an index finger. The word “cripple” flashes through his mind. He thinks of Burton Doomas gripping cigarettes between his pinky and his fourth finger and the odd, rubbery feel of his three-digit handshakes. John’s internal organs tense at the thought of the human monstrosity who blithesomely commits such mutilations. Fiends are found only among men. Never in the wild has he encountered a creature as evil. If John fails in his one slim chance to rescue Abbie, Waylon, for all his jesting tone, John knows, will inflict on her body every act he has enumerated, and several more.

Pushing horrific images from his mind, he opens with his left hand the pickup door, reaches above the cab’s rear window, and takes down his .308. He leans the rifle against the truck, then, absently shoving the money sack to one side, crawls across the seat, yanks open the glove box, and takes out a carton of shells. He opens the carton, removes four bullets, then crawls out of the truck and, with his one good hand, spends more seconds than he can afford getting the shells into the clip and the clip into the gun. Afterwards, he hastily slings the rifle by its strap over one shoulder and again runs through the glade, reaching the base of the boulder just as he hears shouted up through the dense foliage, “Three minutes, John, till I have a slice!”

Several times while clambering up the boulder, he bangs his wound and curses. He’s halfway to the top when the rifle falls from his shoulder. Suddenly remembering he has forgotten to check the gun’s safety mechanism, John, as the weapon slams into the rock, braces himself for its discharge. The gun doesn’t fire, but he loses thirty seconds retrieving it. From the bottom of the boulder, he restarts his assault. Pain throbs from his stub to his right ear. John envisions the absent finger, inverted in his flesh, cannibalistically headed toward his brain. All traces of white have vanished from the gauze covering the stump. Out of the soaked dressing, sporadic drops of blood fall.

By the time he reaches the boulder’s crest, he feels feverish. He’s not sure if the flush he is experiencing is from infection or the afternoon heat. His head spins. Maybe he is delirious. In his mind the bloated image of Ingrid Banes presents his severed digit to him like a conciliatory gift. It strikes John that she views his mutilation as partial recompense for her death. Then he thinks maybe he does, too. In a body-sized indenture in the rock, he lies flat on his stomach, giving himself, through the tops of two trees, a narrow view of the trailer deck. He pulls the rifle into his right shoulder, then quickly realizes that the pain and swelling in that hand, now half again the size of its mate, have rendered the four remaining digits useless as trigger fingers. He tries reaching back with his left hand to manipulate the trigger, while steadying the gun with his right, but it is too cumbersome and impedes his aim. “Talk to me, John!” yells Waylon.

The shout to John seems inflected this time with hysteria. He envisions a new paranoid monster, more dangerous even than the old cocksure one. He switches the rifle’s stock to his opposite shoulder, so that now his left eye peers through the scope and his good hand falls naturally on the trigger. “I’ve got the money!” he hollers.

The view through his off eye is skewed. Or the world is. Objects look as if they have inclined slightly toward the valley. This affects his depth perception, negatively or positively. He’s not sure which, only that his take on things is slightly altered.

“Don’t fuck with me, woodchuck! Your voice ain’t moved none!”

“I’m luggin’ it back the truck!”

Through the magnified glass, it takes him several seconds to locate the deck and its occupants. He no sooner zeros in on them than they disappear again. Twice more, he finds, then loses, them as, beneath his mummified hand, the rifle’s stock bounces precariously. Sweat drips into his eyes. He envisions pulling the trigger and seeing his awry shot slam into the skull of Abbie, who is being held like a shield in front of Waylon’s body.

“I don’t hear an engine start in sixty seconds, John, I’m cutting off everything sticks out from her knees up!”

John lays down the rifle. He hastily eyes the top of the boulder for a makeshift stand. To his right, he finds a fallen Y-shaped branch. He snaps off the stem of the branch, leaving about six inches, then quickly inserts the stem into a small crack at the front of the indenture. He picks up the rifle again, lies back down in the crevice, places the gun’s butt against his left shoulder, its stock onto his injured hand and its barrel into the Y, then peers through the scope.

This time he quickly locates the deck. With an unwavering base supporting the gun, he is able to focus on the two figures. He is shocked at how close to him they seem, how physically intertwined they are, and how, in less than ten minutes, their appearances have so drastically altered. Waylon is visible behind Abbie only from the shoulders up and midcalves down. His godless eyes dart left and right, as if expecting at any moment to see John come rushing out of the bushes. His tongue squirts repetitively back and forth like a small fish across his lips. His knife is pressed against Abbie’s throat. A thin line of blood is visible there. John thinks he looks about ready to crack. Like he is on the verge of mania.