Matthew Jones - A Single Shot

The white skin of Abbie’s legs is made to seem even more so by her shockingly black tangle of pubic bush. Her jeans and underwear lie around her ankles. John’s thoughts of the second are quadrangular—rage at him who has exposed her; guilt for John’s own part in contributing to her predicament; fear that he will not be able to save her; and, like the abrupt onset of a scratchless itch, blood-quickening arousal that shames him. Even looking at her, he feels he is violating her. Suddenly one of her feet jerks backward, as if she is kicking at Waylon. Then the other. John sees Waylon’s knife blade flick upward like a silver tongue and Abbie’s shirt and bra fall away, exposing her taut belly and pink-tipped burgeoning breasts. The kicking stops. John instantly shifts his gaze back to Abbie’s face. Now he sees that the blindfold dangles from her left ear, though her eyes are shut tight, and the mouth gag pulsates as she breathes. He moves the crosshairs slightly above the top of her head, locking them in on the furrowed brow of Waylon.

The rifle is John’s sole inheritance from his father, who used it to hunt deer. Though he keeps the gun in his truck as a constant reminder—good or bad—of Robert Moon, John has only occasionally shot it at paper targets. For hunting he prefers his 12-gauge, finding the shorter, more wieldy weapon handier in this thick mountain foliage, where normally one must get close to his prey before shooting it. Until now, he has never had need of the rifle’s magnified scope. When last he used it, it sighted slightly north or south of the crosshairs, making the gun fire high or low. Now John can’t remember which. If he guesses wrong either way, Abbie is dead. From John’s bullet or Waylon’s knife.

“I’ve stripped her naked, you goddamn raccoon-balled son of a bitch!” Waylon’s strident shout cracks the thin air like a hawk’s shriek. “You’re two minutes past the deadline! Where hell you at?”

John thinks the gun shoots high, but is not sure. He lowers his aim to the point of Waylon’s chin, thinking—or hoping—if the bullet rises, it will enter his forehead, and if it sinks, the top of his sternum, inches above the crest of Abbie’s skull. He places his finger on the trigger. Now his hands begin to shake like two days ago when he was aiming at the wild turkeys in his yard. John closes his eyes and silently prays that, at this juncture in his fated journey, he be allowed a steady grip. He takes a deep breath, then gradually blows it out, trying not to think what Waylon might be doing during those few seconds.

He opens his eyes again. Through the scope he sees side by side on a single neck, like the faces of victory and defeat, the heads of Ingrid Banes and the wounded buck. In less than a second, he is made to understand that triumph and tragedy always travel coterminously like this. He sees the dead girl bleed. Imagines her pain. Watches it ooze from her chest and, in a thin stream, trickle down her pale front. She opens her eyes, which, through a moist fog of hurt, beg to be saved. They look straight at John. John raises the rifle’s scope above their gaze. He squeezes the trigger. He watches, almost congruently with the rifle’s report, Abbie and Waylon tumble backward onto the deck.

His eyes won’t open. He cannot say for how long. From that internal dark place, he screams—silently or aloud—at the plague of injustice fated to him; at the curse of history repeating itself. Wordless ruminations, like large, swooping shadows of predatory birds, are reminders of invisible forces more powerful than he. In muted words, he begs, pleads, beseeches, one of these to alter its course. But they are heartless. Pain lopes as athletically as the unwounded buck through their umbrageous world. Fear is the rustling of branches. Death is what lies on their far side.

An external shriek returns him to sound and light. At first he thinks the noise is self-induced. Then, with his eyes open, he hears it again from a far-off place. A nightmarish screech that in its escalating tone incarnates terror. With his good hand still cradling the rifle, he falteringly lifts the scope to his left eye and peers toward the source of the sound.

His blood-soaked redeemer cowers on the deck; on her haunches against the trailer wall, she stares outward in paralytic horror at a half-headless creature staggering toward her on its knees. But for its exposed teeth, frozen in a garish clench, the right side of Waylon’s face below the nose is gone. He still grips his knife. He externalizes his internal monster. John can’t believe he isn’t dead and thanks the invisible forces Abbie isn’t.

He grips the rifle’s stock between his chin and right shoulder, then with his left hand pulls back the bolt and shucks out the empty shell. He levers in another bullet, fits the barrel back into the twig’s crotch, tucks the gun into his shoulder, and puts the crosshairs just beneath Waylon’s right eye. With as little effort as breathing, he pulls the trigger.

Abbie attempts to push John away as he tries to calm her. She looks at him as if he is the monster who has inflicted her pain. That look strikes him as the stare of all humanity and it suddenly frightens him to have this small, naked child in his arms. Finally, she collapses like a felled tree on the deck. In a cataleptic trance, she trembles and begs for Mommy.

John hastily examines her and determines that the blood on her body is mostly Waylon’s, and her cuts, though several, are not severe. He cleans and dresses the wounds as best he can with only one functional hand. Then he wraps her up in one of Moira’s old bathrobes.

She can’t—or won’t—even talk. He worries what her parents will surmise of her condition, let alone the law, which he doesn’t even consider calling. She is his only witness to what has occurred and she looks at him with the same blank stare as she does the half-headless cadaver on John’s deck. He puts her in the front seat of the pickup and drives to her house, to find no one home. He continues directly to the hospital in town, stopping the truck in front of the locked red emergency-room door. He jumps out, hurries round to the passenger side, and helps Abbie down. After walking her over to the door, he pushes the call button and, before running back to his truck, says, “Just say to ’em you need tendin’, Abbie. You’ll be all right!”

The few people he sees on his way back out of town look like rail-thin coyotes circling a kill. He drives the back way up Hollenbachs’ mountain. Halfway to the top, he turns left onto Carter Sey’s old rock-infested lumber road. After a while the terrain flattens out into a field of saw grass and white birch widely spaced enough to drive the pickup between. The earth gets gradually softer and damper beneath the truck’s wheels. A pair of ducks fly overhead. He can smell water. Now he can hear it. Finally he can see it, a small stream trickling off to his right. He fears the pickup will mire down. He parks it on a dry plateau behind a high field of weeds, gets out, and follows the cascading water upward to its source.

He sits on the shore, where as a boy he had sat with his father and watched a loon swim underwater the length of the pond. On its sky-blue surface, lily pads are pandemic. Frogs here are huge and have baritone croaks. His father said this is because they are old, retired frogs. Fish sporadically jump. John gives them scores, one to ten, for height and splash. Hours pass. His right arm so pains him he threatens several times to kill it. He condemns to hell his missing finger. He blocks from his mind all thoughts but those relating to his corporeal self. His hurt. His mutilation. The odd way that his four remaining fingers will suddenly jump of their own accord. Other thoughts hurt too much to think about.

Darkness falls. He listens to a hoot owl and watches a fox and two deer come to the pond and drink. The new moon is a wisp of itself. He grows light-headed and tired. He fears his hand is infected and will become gangrenous. He tries and fails to recall for pain an old Indian recipe—something made of mud and a certain kind of crushed leaf. Like a wounded animal, he retreats several feet into the woods, crawls beneath an upturned stump, and sleeps.