Matthew Jones - A Single Shot

It takes him another half an hour to reach the scrub pasture where the money is stashed. Gasping for air, the rope still circling him like a cinch, he sits down on the rock concealing the sack. Hanging half off the sled, the cadaver, where it has banged against impediments on its upward journey, is scuffed and bruised. One of its eyes, half-dislodged, peers at an impossible angle behind it where two of its teeth must lie. In a way that he can’t describe, John, while eyeing the body, is struck by the irony in mankind’s vaingloriousness, that day-to-day conceit which, like air from a puffball, is instantly expunged by death.

After retrieving the sack, he tucks it, alongside the shovel, between the dead girl’s legs, then once more pulls her upper torso forward, folding her like a wallet over the money. He loops the rope twice around the corpse so it won’t flop backward again, re-covers it with the tarpaulin, and heads into the pines. On the flat terrain, he doesn’t have to work so hard. He has more time to think and feel his pain, now more like a general sickness infecting his body. One minute he is hot. The next, cold. In between, he has surges of energy.

He begins to suspect that he is being followed by the birds. Perched high in the canopy, they chatter among themselves as if making plans. One will occasionally swoop a few feet above his head, stridently squawking. To avoid thinking about them, John converses with the dead girl. He tells her in these woods is where their paths began to coincide. He points to the thistle patch behind which he first saw the dead buck’s antlers as the spot where her death was first assigned to him. He explains to her how he chased the deer for miles before it limped, as if preordained, into the quarry. Beneath these pines, he tells her, is a nice place to be buried. There’s plenty of shade, a gentle stream nearby, and it’s not far from a good view of the valley. Here is where he would be buried, he says, if the state would allow it.

Her response is to plant a snapshot of her parents in his head, as if she is demanding to know why he is hiding her from them. John refuses to answer. Instead, he tells her of his belief, recently arrived at, that souls are liberated by the earth. That once she is in the ground, she will be free to move easier than the wind. She can visit her parents or, if she hasn’t already, go to Hawaii. He realizes that he is talking quite loud, that maybe the fever is causing him to rave. The crows and grackles are yelling back at him. Suddenly he is angry at the dead girl for making him see that he is as much a coward as most of mankind. He stops walking and puts the back of his hand to his forehead. It feels like room-temperature beef. “You’re dead and I ain’t,” he tells her, “and I don’t want to go to jail, all right?”

She doesn’t answer.

John starts lugging her toward the truck again. He’s on the edge of the fire zone. Although it’s been razed nearly two years, the area still breathes a faint odor of smoke. A hundred feet ahead, he can just see, nearly parallel to the ground in the brush-tufted swale, the pickup’s roof, dully reflecting the sun. Now he starts to consider the difficulties of performing his task. Though the fire-dead earth should be softer to dig, in John’s weakened state, and with only one functional hand, doing so will be torturous at best. That his pain should be commensurate with his deviousness seems to him exactly right.

At the swale’s edge, he drops the lead rope, climbs down the indention into the pickup, starts the engine, pulls the truck up onto the flat terrain, then shuts it off.

For several seconds he can hear his raggedy breathing and rivulets of sweat splashing onto the seat. Then the birds start in again. Out the windshield, John sees more crows and grackles than he can count perched in the live trees encircling the dead zone. He jumps from the truck and nearly lands on a porcupine. He leaps back. The porcupine doesn’t move. John prods it with his toe. The varmint just lies there. John rolls it over and sees that only the animal’s head and quills haven’t been eaten. He kicks the carcass into some bushes, then hurries over to the toboggan, draws back the tarp, unties the dead girl, and grabs the shovel from between her legs. “In a coupla years,” he tells her, reentering the swale, “this spot’ll grow up to be beautiful again. And you’ll be a part of it.”

The digging is even slower and more painful than he had imagined it would be. After each one-handed shovel thrust into the dark loam at the swale’s bottom, he places a foot atop the metal blade and pushes until it sinks to the hilt; then, simultaneously yanking back and lifting the handle, he extracts the blade and, using for ballast the forearm of his injured limb, shakily dumps to the left of the hole what soil he manages not to drop, usually less than he doesn’t. From start to finish, performing the procedure initially takes him close to half a minute, and, as the grave gets deeper, necessitating even higher hoisting of the shovel, successively longer, while each time he removes less dirt. So that he can easily stand while working, he makes the hole about four feet wide. Having started close to five feet below ground level, he soon can’t see beyond the swale’s borders.

Whenever he stops to rest, he hears the ceaseless yakking of the birds; intermittently one or more of them will dive down out of the trees to peer curiously into the depression. Once, a noise resembling asthmatic wheezing begins above him. John abruptly drops the shovel and scrabbles from the grave to find a pair of red foxes sniffing at the dead girl. He chases them off with a volley of rocks, then ascends to the forest floor, grabs the lead rope of the toboggan, and yanks it to the swale’s edge. He climbs into the grave again and recommences digging. After a while his left arm hurts as much as his right. He suffers periodic dizzy spells; his eyes blur; in his gaze, objects vacillate; rocks become people drowning in the knee-deep pool of blood that he bales. He begins ascribing to the birds’ toneless squawking a blend of poetic insight and cold intelligence. He imagines their varied flights composing silent funeral marches. From the shovel’s blade, his father’s face screams at him, “Was a wolf, I tell ya. A goddamn wolf!”

The birds abruptly turn mute. A moment later, they start in again, even louder. In that brief interlude of silence, John is certain he heard voices—real ones—from somewhere above him. Once more he exits the grave, this time with more difficulty. With his eyes, he circles the woods and brush above him. To the west, a patch of yarrow sways harder than he thinks this gentle wind could cause it to. Or is it his imagination? He’s not sure. It surprises him to see that the sun is three-quarters of the way toward the horizon. How many hours has he been digging? Three? Four? Reaching up to the toboggan, he whisks several horseflies from the dead girl’s face. “Gotta put ya in deep ’nough,” he tells her, “where somethin’ don’t dig ya up.”

Again he descends into the grave. He has no idea for how long. Time is like recycled water rising and falling, and John dead wood on its surface. Even his physical distress isn’t reliable; like all human conditions, it can’t maintain its intensity. His pain loses its sharp edge and becomes merely monotonous. Periodic pangs, twinges, and abnormalities remind him he is unhealthily alive. When he spits or swallows, his swollen tongue feels like a live fish wriggling in his mouth. A loud throbbing sound fills his ears. His sweat tastes like bitter almonds. He urinates a burning, dark yellow froth into the bottom of the grave. Twice more he thinks he hears voices and maybe branches cracking at ground level, but, after crawling out to see, spots nothing amiss. The third time, he doesn’t even bother to look; recalling his dying father’s hallucinatory wolf, he dismisses the sounds as audible phantasy.