Matthew Jones - A Single Shot

The sun, three-quarters concealed behind the mountain at his back, casts a dark shadow, like a diving whale, on the opposite mountain. A swirl of dust from an ascending vehicle is visible above the hollow road, and John wonders if Waylon might be on his way up to the quarry to retrieve his girl and money and how he will react to losing both.

In the trailer bathroom, he gets undressed, then into the shower, where for several minutes he steels himself against a coarse blast of freezing water. Subsequently, he cleans his shoulder wound with peroxide and wraps it in an aerated bandage.

After drawing the blinds against the dying light, he lies down naked on his bed and tries unsuccessfully to convince himself that it is the morning of the same day and he has just awakened. He thinks about his wife and son, insulated for three months now in their village apartment, making for themselves a new life in which John is to have no part, and he remembers his wife’s departing words to the effect that she doesn’t want the boy to grow up, like his father, thinking there is no life beyond a small patch of mountain that is the last vestige of his ancestors’ homestead.

In the end, thinks John, in a stuporous half sleep, everything boils down to money and death. The whole world. As if he’s counting sheep, he silently repeats, “Money and death, money and death.” The phone rings. He doesn’t answer it. He closes his eyes and sleeps fitfully, dreaming not about the girl or money, but of the wounded buck that like a dying pied piper led him through the woods into a box canyon from which nothing that enters leaves unchanged. Around 3 a.m., he wakes up sweating and disoriented. He puts on his clothes and goes out to the woodshed.

He skins and butchers the buck’s hindquarters, then the rattlesnake. He carries the meat and the deer’s tongue into the cellar beneath the trailer and tosses them into the standup freezer. Afterwards, he sits for several minutes on the front deck with an open beer that he doesn’t drink, and, by the star-filled sky, is reminded of the insignificance of all earthly acts, including his own.

He empties the beer over the deck railing, then goes back to bed. He sleeps until his alarm wakes him two hours later.

HE WORKS most of the morning next to Levi Dean, both of them with shovels, smoothing out the gravel as it slowly slides from the back of Cole Howard’s dump truck onto the undertaker’s driveway. Except for Dean’s mumbled curses, neither man says much while working, both seemingly hypnotized by their own monotonous motions and the metallic ping made by the rearranging pebbles. The hot, hard work is made more so for John by the dull pain radiating from his injured shoulder to his fingers that with nearly every scoop causes him to wince and grunt, and by an apprehensive feeling that someone is watching and judging him. By ten o’clock it is hotter than the day before. Dean and John strip off their shirts, the former’s mammoth, jiggly upper torso sun-pink and obscene against John’s short, compact body, which is, but for his gauze-covered shoulder, deeply tanned.

“Who bit ya?” asks Dean, nodding at the shoulder.

“Ax head broke off.”

“So what?”

“Jumped up and jabbed me.”

“Jumped up from where?”

“What are you, a goddamn cop? The ax head come off, hit a stone, jumped up, and jabbed me! What else you want to know?”

“I’m just asking.”

“Now you ain’t got to.”

John doesn’t trust his own thoughts. He is uncomfortable in his own head, as if on his first full day in a new life he hasn’t got used to an altered way of thinking. He suspects that people looking at him will discern that he is a man with a deep dark secret. He keeps seeing in his mind the flash of brown-and-white that was the dead girl and the impacted grass on the road he had noticed before he shot her, followed by the pick and shovel standing against the quarry wall. Is there an evil speck on his soul, he wonders, that had foreseen the murder and driven him to it? Could this be the life, that of a thief and murderer, he was meant to live? He thinks of the money that could change his life, that might even bring back his wife and child. But how could he possibly spend it without raising suspicion? Levi Dean slaps the side of the truck loudly to indicate the load is out.

“This goddamn undertaker’s got an airstrip for a driveway,” he says to John. “Must be he flies in the corpses.”

John grunts.

“Who the fuck needs a driveway this long?”

John shrugs.

“You get laid this weekend?”

John doesn’t say.

“I did,” says Dean. “I never seen nobody do what she done. She got down on her hands and knees and backed my prick into her then had me pick up her ass and legs and wheel her around the room like that till she got off. So I did. Then she blew me.”

“Ask him how much it cost him,” Howard yells out the truck window.

“Yeah,” says Dean. “Go over to Cole’s house and ask his wife how much.”

“Two men together couldn’t hold up my wife’s ass,” says Howard.

“She wanted me to slap her ass, too,” says Dean, “and yell giddyup. But I told her she’d have to get Cole to do that.”

“Did she french-fuck your tits, Dean?”

“I think this is gonna be my last day,” says John.

“What?” says Howard.

“I ain’t sure yet. I’ll let ya know.”

“Let me know?”

“I’m pretty sure it will be.”

“Yeah, right,” says Howard. “Three months. That’s about how long I heard you were good for.”

Dean laughs. “Give him a raise, Cole,” he says. “Bring him up to minimum. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”

“I’ll give him shit,” says Howard, lowering the truck’s rear end onto the bed. “He can work for a living or sit on the side that goddamn mountain he holes up on and keep feeding his wife and kid with jacked deer meat. It’s no skin off my ass.”

He spends his lunch hour in the office of Daggard Pitt, the attorney he had made an appointment with last week, on Simon Breedlove’s recommendation, to discuss his divorce. Pitt turns out to be a tiny, maimed man who drags one shriveled leg like a tail when he walks and always seems to be apologizing. He occupies two rooms above J. J. Newberry’s. His receptionist/secretary, who looks like she might be Pitt’s sister, for the entire half hour of John’s visit talks loudly on the outer-office telephone to a veterinary hospital about scheduling her cat to have a tumor removed.

John shoves the papers he’d been served across the desk at Pitt, who, fidgeting like a small child on one side of his chair and periodically rubbing his shrunken leg with a dwarfed hand frozen in the shape of a claw, surveys them, making disapproving grunts and groans. John sits there looking past the lawyer, out the window, at the traffic light above Main Street, imagining himself a porous wall through which his guilt oozes like sweat, and thinks, “Maybe I ought to just lay the whole thing on this lawyer,” then, remembering his prior convictions—three for poaching, two for driving under the influence—tells himself no lawyer in the world could convince a judge or jury not to send him to jail for a good long time. Daggard Pitt says something about the papers having been served thirty days ago and the law allowing only twenty days to answer them.

“They got under somethin’,” says John.

“The problem, thankfully, is not fatal.”

“I ain’t interested in a divorce. We don’t see eye to eye on that.”

“I’m awfully sorry,” says Daggard Pitt, slumping in his chair.

“I’m ready to end this thing.”

“How so?”

“She mentioned couns’lin’ once—I’d go now, if it’ll bring her home. Tell her lawyer that.”