Matthew Jones: A Single Shot

He glances at the dead girl, thinking of the Kools in her duffel, then at the cavern, where, past the entrance, it’s pitch dark. He looks at the shovel and pick against the near wall, tools left from Old Man Hollenbach’s days, and, as he had right before he’d discovered the dead girl, wonders why they are standing, as if recently placed there, rather than lying haphazardly on the ground. He reaches out, grabs the shovel, and sees rust everywhere but at the tip, which is shiny and chipped. He looks at the pick and sees the same thing. He wonders why, other than for the reason he had planned to, anyone would be digging in the cave.

He sticks his head a foot or so into the cavern. Along with the dankness, he smells the faint odor of smoke. He’s not sure it’s tobacco smoke. It smells more like gunpowder. He thinks of the thousand tons of dirt and stone above him, and suddenly remembers why, as a child, he had never dared enter the cave. “I ought to make me a flare,” he thinks. He starts to back out of the opening and his right hand lands on a coil of thick flesh that, from experience, he knows will instantly strike or slither away. It does neither. John, his pulse resonating in his injured shoulder, ears, and belly, gingerly picks the thing up, backs out of the cave, drops it at his feet, and sees a timber rattlesnake, fat as his fist, several feet long, with most of its head blown off.

“What the hell have you all been up to?” John says aloud, glancing down at the dead girl, then disgustedly kicking the snake away from the opening. He runs past her and from beneath a bush near the pond picks up a short stick of ironwood, then glances around for something to make a flare with, but, other than the girl’s clothes or his own, can’t find anything, so runs back across the quarry toward the lean-to, realizing as he traverses the gruesome trail left by the dead girl that everything he’s done since reaching into her pockets has further undermined his credibility with the law should he get caught or decide to turn himself in, the latter option, under the circumstances and with his prior record, one he’s pretty far from considering.

Without hesitating, he pulls back the plastic strip covering the front of the lean-to and plunges inside, hoping to find among the abandoned tools and moth-eaten recliner he knows are there a dry piece of cloth to make his flare with. He is struck first by the smoke-filled air, then by the pungent smell of marijuana smoke mixed with beer and sweat. A few articles of clothing and an open newspaper lie atop a zipped sleeping bag stretched out on one side of the ground. John at first thinks someone is in the bag, until he sees protruding from its top the furry head of a large stuffed lion, the sight of which, when he realizes who must have owned the toy, causes in him a despondent pain, worse even than when he first discovered the dead girl. He pictures her nestled comfortably in the sleeping bag—like John’s own son nestled beneath the covers of his crib—cheek to jowl with the lion, smiling and dreaming about her future, and he feels like going out right then, getting his gun, and shooting himself.

Instead, he sits down on the sleeping bag and, breathing in that putrid air, thinks of his little boy, Nolan, being raised in town without him, and what it would feel like for the kid to learn when he grows up that his father had killed a young girl, then killed himself, and how no one would be there to cast any light on the situation, to put a positive spin on the old man, certainly not his wife, who, from John, wants only child support and an uncontested divorce. This train of thought transports him deeper into self-pity, where he mentally bemoans all he has lost and had taken from him in his thirty years, beginning with his birthright, the family farm, on which he had planned, like his father and grandfather, to raise his family, and followed shortly thereafter by his father, whom John remembers near the end, when the banks were starting to foreclose, grim-faced and determined one day, angry and violent the next, getting thinner, smaller, paler, until, to his sixteen-year-old child, he vanished like a ghost, as if he never was, and John thinks he wouldn’t mind dying, but he doesn’t want to be a ghost in the mind of a son who never knew him. “The girl is dead,” he emphatically tells himself as he stands, “and my bein’ so too—or goin’ to jail—won’t bring her back!”

From the sleeping bag he picks up a T-shirt—a man’s size 42—wraps it twice around one end of the ironwood, and ties it securely. Then, suddenly thinking the girl ought to have some company in that dark hole, he reaches down for the stuffed lion and, in lifting it, pulls back the sleeping bag to reveal inside a cone-shaped flashlight, a carton of 9-millimeter shells, and a Luger pistol. “This ain’t here for shooting rattlesnakes,” thinks John, picking the pistol up and hefting it in his hand. He ruefully wonders if here is what the girl might have been running for when he shot her, but thinking of the stuffed toy and her half-written letter, he can’t fathom it. Then he thinks, “Whoever this Waylon character is, I don’t want to be here when he gets back.” He drops the gun on the pillow, where it lands with a metallic thud.

John looks at the pillow, bulky and misshapen, thinking he’s had enough surprises for one day and he ought to just leave, but like a man falling downstairs who can’t stop his own descent, he reaches down and with his knuckles lightly taps it. The pillow is hard. John pushes it. It barely moves. He grabs the closed end of the pillowcase and vigorously pulls it until he’s holding in his hands just the case and gazing down at a dented, dirt-stained, large metal container. Feeling like a tumbleweed caught in a tornado whose eye is his own tragic act, John bends down next to the container. Fumbling with trembling hands to open the rusted latch, he hears a voice in his head say every life has a defining moment; here comes your second. He opens the case, looks inside, and sees piles and piles of haphazardly stacked bills in various denominations.

In John’s head a flat, practical voice says he ought to drag the girl away from the quarry, maybe to Quentin’s swamp, where even hunters don’t venture, weigh her down with stones, then drop her in a deep bog. He can’t do it, though. He can’t even bring himself to dig a hole and put her in it. The thought of covering her with dirt reinforces in his mind a hundredfold his awful act. Burial has a ring of finality to it he can’t yet bear.

This time carrying in one hand the flashlight and in the other the pick poised in front of him like a spear, he duck-walks into the cave, the sleeping bag draped over his shoulders, listening for telltale rattles, knowing that where one snake lives, so may others. Past the entrance, he is able to three-quarters stand, the jagged granite ceiling acting as a painful reminder not to lift his head too high. The silence starts an ominous hum in his ears. Nervously he thinks of the precariousness of his position, imagining himself an egg beneath an elephant’s ass.

Crouched near the center of the cave, he moves the light in a slow circle around the oblong interior of dark red and slate-gray rock, two sides of which ooze a moldy dampness. The back wall is dry; in the floor in front of it, John sees a rectangular hole surrounded by freshly dug dirt, gravel, and a long, flat rock. One side of the rock is earth-stained, as if it has recently been removed from the hole, which looks to be slightly bigger than the metal box full of money in the lean-to. A nervous twitch starts in the muscles of John’s injured shoulder. He tries to fathom the man who had crawled into a snake-filled cave with a pick, shovel, and Luger to unearth a box of money, and how the money had come to be there in the first place. A rattle sounds to his right.