Matthew Jones - A Single Shot

“At any rate,” says Daggard Pitt. “We ought to serve them an answer.”

“I never hit her nor nothing.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I certainly am.”

“It ain’t about that.”

“Nor does she allege so.”

“She’s got this idea about the boy.”

“Your son?”

“Nolan. After he—she started to see things different.”

“Different?”

“Suddenly my way of doing things—not that I’m lazy. I always provide—she can’t say I don’t provide.”

“She says you have trouble keeping a job.”

“I’ve kep’ plenty of ’em, just not for long.”

Daggard Pitt smiles encouragingly.

“I was raised to farm—suddenly she wanted me to get a full-time factory job, work nine-to-five indoors like some…” John lets his voice trail off. He thinks of Gerhard Lane, the former college football player who represents his wife, then tries to imagine the Lilliputian Daggard Pitt, with his hangdog look and shriveled limbs and the way he wheezes and makes funny little noises to himself, in the same courtroom with Lane, and his heart sinks. He actually starts to feel sorry for Daggard Pitt. “Look,” he says, “what’s the use? She wants a divorce she’s gonna get one sooner or later, I know that much. If it comes to that, the boy ought to be with her. I’ll pay what I can. There’s no money, only the acre and a half that my trailer’s on that I inher’ted fair and square from my mother.”

“I was acquainted with your parents,” says the lawyer.

John stares blankly at him.

“I wish I had realized it before—I didn’t put the names together.”

“Acquainted how?”

“I represented the bank when it foreclosed. I felt awful about it—we all did. The bank did what it could to keep your father afloat—but the economy at that time, and his having overextended himself, then, of course, him taking sick…” Daggard Pitt stops in midsentence, reaches down, and firmly grasps the emaciated midpoint of his bum leg as if to assure himself it’s still there. When he looks up again, John can see the pain from the leg in the lawyer’s face. “I thought I ought to tell you, in case—though, from my point of view, John, I would like nothing better than to represent you to the absolute best of my lawyerly abilities.”

“How’d you get yourself all mangled up?”

“What?”

“Was you born like it?”

Daggard Pitt frowns sardonically. “ ’Twas the hand I was dealt. Indeed.”

“Least you didn’t have to get used to it later.”

“Pardon?”

“To havin’ to walk crooked.”

Daggard Pitt smiles pleasantly. “I thought it was the rest of the world did.”

“My father was a good farmer,” John says, “and a shit businessman. He died so long ago I can’t hardly remember him.”

“You’d have been in your midteens, as I recall.”

“You still whoring for the bank?”

“Not for almost fourteen years.”

“You’re cheaper than the rest of ’em I called. That mean you ain’t as good?”

“Compensation takes many forms, John.”

“Better not take more’n the half grand I was told.”

“I only meant I have no wife, John. No family. Only my clients and their often sticky and heartfelt situations. Simon Breedlove and I, for example, have known each other for years.”

“He says you got almost a heart.”

“He’s in a position to know.”

John stands up, reaches into his pocket, pulls out the five $100 bills he had taken this morning from the pillowcase, and drops them on Daggard Pitt’s desk. “There’s for your retainer,” he says. “All’s I want’s for you to delay matters long’s ya can, while I try to work things out.”

“Work things out?”

“Get her thinkin’ turned around ’fore the water’s all over the dam.”

“I’ll draft an answer to her complaint—a general denial—for your signature. We’ll get it to Gerhard Lane, then go from there.”

“Don’t do nothin’ fancy,” says John, walking toward the door.

He has the uneasy feeling that he is the focus of the sun’s glare. He stops at the drugstore and buys a bottle of aspirin and a pair of mirrored sunglasses that he puts on. The thought of pouring blacktop in the afternoon heat next to Levi Dean causes the pain in his head to radiate backward from his eyes. He eats three aspirins.

At the municipal parking lot, he sits in his idling pickup truck, its engine growling through an aerated muffler, tormented by images of money and death. He pictures his own guilt as an animal hollowing out his insides and wonders if it’s true what he’s heard that keeping a big enough secret can kill you. He pictures his wife, in cotton smock and jeans, leaning against their open trailer doorway, her long, walnut-colored hair blown back by a gentle summer wind; and the boy, all eyes and facial expressions and herky-jerky movements. He imagines Moira cradling him in her arms the way she does that tiny, fragile body and him telling her all about yesterday’s awful events and the horror then magically vanishing.

Leaving the parking lot, instead of turning right onto Main Street and heading for the undertaker’s, he turns left, toward Puffy’s Diner, the first floor of a two-story red-brick building wedged between two others of like design, to see if Moira is working the lunch shift.

Cruising slowly past the diner, he is unable to see through the foggy plate-glass windows in front, so turns right onto Broad Street and peers in at the dirt parking lot behind Puffy’s. Among a dozen or so vehicles, he spots Moira’s salt-eaten Ford Escort sitting near the building’s far corner, next to Jerry Puffer’s Olds 88, with its busted driver-side shocks.

Now he’s not sure what to do. It’s lunch hour and busy in the diner. Moira will get all flustered and upset if he approaches her. Then John will get upset, and that will make matters worse. John, though, feels driven to speak to her. Or at least to see her. His mind, overloaded with data, is temporarily closed to other options.

Twice more, he cruises by the diner, trying to decide how to proceed. He shoves a Hank Williams, Jr., tape into the cassette deck and turns up the volume. He thinks of Moira’s freckled, spherical face; her strong, angular body, soft only where she is most a woman; her dark brown eyes that remind John, depending on her mood, of gently caressing or sharply probing fingers; the rounded smooth curve of her buttocks where they merge, then sharply intersect with her plump vaginal lips.

He’ll walk into the diner like an ordinary customer, he tells himself, order coffee and a sandwich, and when he catches Moira’s ear, cordially whisper to her that after the lunch crowd thins out, he’d like very much to speak to her. In the meantime, he’ll just sit there, drinking his coffee, hoping that just the sight of her will clear up the ambiguities in his head. She couldn’t, thinks John, driving by Puffy’s for the fourth time, get angry at that.

Puffy’s front door opens and two men emerge—one tall and blond; the other, who is vaguely familiar to John, dark-haired and stocky with a duck-billed cap pulled low over his eyes. They start to cross the street, then, at the same time that John, making the turn onto Broad Street, spots a police car approaching from downtown, change their minds and quickly walk off in the opposite direction.

Still trying to place the second man, John hears a short siren burst. He looks back and sees the police car, its bubble light flashing, follow him onto Broad Street. John turns into Puffy’s parking lot. The police car does the same thing. John feels his heart leap into his throat. He considers slapping the truck into reverse and heading as fast as he can out of town. Then the cruiser comes to a stop in the exit, blocking his retreat.