A Single Shot (18 page)

“Uhhh?” says the muffled voice.

“Robert Moon?”

There is no sound from the other side of the pillow, only the ripe pungent smell of the lawyer’s feces. “Not me,” says John. “Nor beg neither. I wished I had.”

The weight behind the pillow goes limp.

Suddenly John realizes he is shaking. He looks at his hand and arm holding the pillow and sees they are tense with exertion. He pulls his finger from the gun’s trigger, then jerks back the pillow. The face behind it is tinged blue. The
head drops to one side of its neck. John’s not sure how much time has elapsed. “Pitt?”

The lawyer doesn’t answer.

“Who with, Pitt?”

The head lolls.

John slaps it.

The lawyer groans. His eyes flutter open. He takes several shallow breaths. Then deeper ones. Spittle rolls from the corner of his disfigured lips. His face looks like it’s been pulled from a vise. “Who with in the Thousand Islands, Pitt? Who took them!”

“She… they… he—boyfriend…”

“Whose boyfriend?”

“I’m awfully sorry, John…”

“Huh?”

“Love’s unraveling—so painful…”

John slaps him again.

“… they know nothing about”—Pitt’s crippled hand flutters in front of his face like a defective parachute—“this…”

“They ain’t kidnapped?”

“Kidnapped? No… ah, the note… Obadiah—bad child…”

“What?”

“… she ought to have told you, John.” He starts panting faster again, as if suddenly remembering the nearness of his own death.

“… he, uh—boyfriend—apparently… on the water—a small camp?—you know, uh—for vacation?”

His small, simple world has turned ambiguously sinister. Heads have two faces, one visible, one not. Words, though spoken
in proper linguistic form, don’t mean what they ought to. From one moment to the next, nothing in this upside-down world is static. Even voices dichotomize, their bifurcating sounds clouding his thoughts, sending his mind reeling first down one path, then down another. Who can be trusted in this world? Humanity itself—the whole great mass—is mutable. John feels ill equipped to deal with it.

Avoiding eye contact with everyone he passes, he walks the three blocks back to the municipal parking lot, dangling the heavy money sack over one shoulder. The smell of hot tar fills the air. At the east end of the lot, his old crew works. As Cole Howard drives his roller over the freshly laid, steam-breathing tar, Levi Dean, his fat, sun-pink torso supported by a shovel, talks to a bald string bean who John guesses might be Gumby Talon. They strike John as three creatures out of a past life from which he has been catapulted like a small stone. He tosses the sack into the passenger seat, then, after ducking into the pickup, quickly pulls out of the west end of the lot.

He takes the less-traveled back river road out of town, passing by the old feed mill, closed nearly a decade now, where once a week he used to come with his father in their old flatbed truck. John remembers Robert Moon always opening each sack of grain, sniffing and running his fingers through the cool, sweet-smelling oat and barley mix to make sure he was getting what he paid for, and the prideful feeling when one day that task was turned over to John. He thinks of the dozens of farmers they used to meet and converse with at the mill, most of whom, like him and his father, now aren’t, and suddenly John understands that whoever is to be blamed for his pitiful state, it is not his father.

Staring to his left at the serpentine course of the river wandering through mostly abandoned pastureland and virgin forest, he thinks of his wife and son, as far away from him as the rest of the life he lived before the dead girl, though he is thankful they are safe. He is not surprised—nor even really angry—that Moira has a boyfriend, though his heart aches with his own failure to be what she had wanted him to be and with the knowledge that she believes his very presence would be poisonous to their son. An odd, ugly duck Daggard Pitt had called him, as if John were the same as Obadiah Cornish or the rest of his down-and-out clients. He shivers at the memory of how he had nearly killed the lawyer—who maybe deserved it. He hadn’t, though, and that’s a thought worth holding on to.

But who had killed Obadiah Cornish? Waylon, maybe, after having discovered that Cornish—with his kidnapping bluff—was trying to recover the money without him? Or was it Simon Breedlove? But why? What was his connection with the other two? And where had the money come from? John remembers how Ira and Molly Hollenbach had been cut up and their throats slit, just as the Hen had been. Too many bad people in the world. Too many unanswerable questions.

He takes out the dead girl’s picture and, driving with one hand, unfolds it on the steering wheel. She is five feet six inches tall, weighs one hundred eighteen pounds, likes motorcycle riding, outdoor sports, and is daughter to Bob and Melanie Banes, whose address and phone number appear beneath the words “Please help us find our daughter.” The picture, he thinks, doesn’t do her justice. She looks better
with her hair behind her ears and wearing a little makeup, as in the Polaroids he took. He folds the poster and puts it in his pocket again, then abruptly pulls the truck off the road. He drives several hundred yards into an overgrown pasture of goldenrod and hawkweed and parks behind an abandoned bridge stanchion fifty feet above the river.

When he gets out, his limbs are rubbery and soft. To keep from falling over, he leans back against the crumbling concrete stanchion, then slowly sits down. The rest of the bridge, except for a similarly decrepit abutment on the far side of the water, is missing. The field before him is hip-high. Past it, the water is low and barely moving. A blue heron stands statuesquely at its edge. Where it still peeks above the horizon, the sun is blood red. Two hawks circle beneath it. John closes his eyes. His brain feels like mush sprinkled with raisins, in an indiscernible mass his few discernible thoughts.

His half-conscious imaginings become increasingly bizarre, though he doesn’t recognize them as such. It strikes him that Waylon is not flesh and blood, but a devilish specter, always hauntingly present, but seldom seen. Ingrid Banes, from Rock Gap, Pennsylvania, appears before him as a winged messenger carrying God’s personal agenda for John, but His handwriting’s illegible. John falls asleep.

He wakes beneath a cloudless sky breached by stars. The windless air is pleasantly warm. A symphony of frogs and peepers plays. The field’s flowered scent is like that from a greenhouse. A coyote bays somewhere on the mountain on the other side of the road, and in a tree by the river an owl hoots. John stretches his limbs, perfectly at ease in this world.
He’s forgotten exactly where he is or how he got here or what he’d dreamed about. Until he remembers, he is just happy to be alive.

A thin mist covers the narrow road that curls like a looped rope along the east side of the river before crossing over a metal bridge five miles below the hollow where John lives. The truck’s headlights pierce the mist-layered darkness for a hundred feet, giving objects a haloed appearance. He drives slowly, his arm out the window, smelling the night and half wishing he could vanish into it.

The few houses he passes are not lit. This late, even dogs are asleep. Inarticulable thoughts like voiceless music touch and rouse him in mysterious ways. The dead girl, in her deep sleep, her placid beauty frozen in time, is forever intricately intertwined with him, John Moon—alive or dead—a disturbing thought he finds oddly comforting. In this dynamic, ever-changing world, he suddenly can’t wait to see her static face again. Did he think that, really? He’s not sure. Images in the next moment are forgotten or change into something else. One thing is certain: she is the core around which his random thoughts now spin. The money doesn’t matter anymore. It could blow out the windows and he wouldn’t care.

A car passes him going the other way, causing him to snap straight up behind the wheel. The memory of zigzagging headlights are spots in his eyes. A drunk, he thinks, heading home after last call. Then he realizes he is traveling less than twenty miles per hour and is afraid to go home, afraid of what might be waiting for him. So why is he? Where else is there for him to go? he asks himself, only subconsciously
aware—or able to admit—that the real reason is her, Ingrid Banes.

He is nearly in front of the dark one-story cabin that is Simon Breedlove’s home, before he remembers it is on this road and understands his actual motive for coming this way. Now his mind’s not laboring at all. Just acting or reacting. Striding moment to moment, a hiker on fate’s predestined course. Two hundred yards past the cabin, he switches off the headlights and ignition and rolls the pickup down a dirt incline into a cornfield of knee-high plants where invisible cicadas make a cumulative buzz.

The smell is of fertilizer, damp soil, and adolescent growth. The sporadic spark of fireflies intrudes on the darkness. A night, in his past life, for hand-holding, duet whistling, blanket love. John pulls the .45 from the glove box, checks to see that it’s loaded, shoves it down the front of his pants, and steps from the truck. Beneath his feet the dirt is powdery and soft. From his left comes a rustling sound. He wheels that way and sees four sets of glistening eyes that, in less than a second, are gone. Raccoons. He hears them scurrying through the field.

Standing fifty yards to the right of the cabin, concealed beneath a willow tree, he watches the dark house inhale the night air through its wide-open, sash-covered windows, and thinks how he doesn’t really know Simon, and never did. A hard worker, hunter, drinker, with streaks affable, morose, and mean, he has, like John, few close friends. When was it that John had watched Simon, the two of them whiskey-shitfaced, hand-walk across the five-hundred-yard guide wire
atop the Coxsackie Gap Bridge, screaming at John and the cars and river below that he had fucked, fought, drunk, and killed enough for one life and that John ought to shake the wire and knock him off? John can’t remember whether it was before or after the Hollenbach murders, but it was right around then, and he remembers too, before the police had shown up to take Simon to detox, him standing on the far side, telling John, “After the first time, Johnno, even the worst things get like riding a bike…” which John had figured was a reference to Simon’s war experiences, though now he wonders if it hadn’t been meant to encompass more recent events.

Around back, on the dampened grass lawn, catercorner to the house, sits the Cadillac, its driver-side door open and its dome light dully flickering. Leaf-heavy branches, swaying from an adjacent ash tree, lightly caress the car’s roof, creating a high-pitched mewl. Beneath the tree, amid scattered engine parts, lies a gutted motorcycle, and farther back, parked in front of the small, unpainted barn Simon uses for storage and to house two beef cows and a handful of pigs, goats, and chickens, is his dual-wheel pickup truck. From the barn come clucks, tired groans, and unshod hooves lazily shifting on the cement floor.

Tiptoeing toward the Cadillac, John is hit with an eerie sensation that this little one-acre patch with its unkempt cabin and barn, like the secrets in its inhabitant’s mind, exists solely in a zone beyond the expected and civilized. The image of Simon, his childhood mentor and hunting buddy, becomes the mysterious man who, with no regular income, vanishes for weeks at a time and, upon his return, only gets together with John on his own terms, suddenly showing up
at the trailer or by phone arranging to meet him in a bar or the woods somewhere. In the twelve years since Simon built his cabin, John can count on one hand the occasions he has been in it and then only to wait while Simon showered, changed clothes, or retrieved something he had forgotten. The last time, several years before, that he stopped by the cabin uninvited, Simon had snarled through a crack in the front door that he was busy and would call John when he wasn’t, which turned out to be weeks later.

John steps on a slick spot in the lawn and his feet go out from under him. Exhaling a muffled grunt, he lands with a dull thump in the half-foot-high grass, then lies ten feet from the Cadillac, holding his breath, waiting to see if the noise has roused anyone in the house. Visible in the flickering shaft of light half-illuminating the interior of the car is the silvery reflection of keys dangling in the ignition and a white, shearling-covered seat. To his left, the back door to the cabin is ajar. Suddenly something bursts through the opening into the moonlit semiblackness between John and the building, charges noisily across it, and slams, snorting, into John’s chest.

John punches the thing. Emitting a manic squeal, it backs off, then charges again; short-legged and bristly, its muscular body rams like a torpedo into John’s ribs.

“Git!” hisses John, hammering the hard torso with his fists.

The beast runs off a few feet. John sees framed in a patch of moonlight, its blush-colored hide spotted on its head and neck by dark, moist blotches as if it’s had a pail of paint thrown at it, a boxer-sized pig. He looks down at his hands. They are smeared with the same wet, sticky substance as that
marring the pig. He smells his fingers, then touches them to his tongue. They taste sweet. Like molasses. He jumps to his feet. Throatily grunting, the pig scampers off toward the barn, its front door, John now sees, standing wide open.

He leans down and wipes his hands on the lawn. He looks at the house again. The dark shape of another pig darts out through the door. Releasing chortled grunts, the night-shrouded swine beats a grass-shivering path through the unmowed lawn toward the barn. His pulse hammering a staccato in his ears, John quickly strides over to the front seat of the Cadillac, in which an Albany banker and his teenage girlfriend had died before Simon salvaged it from a junkyard, restored its body, and gave it a V-8 engine from a rusted-out Ford Bronco. Could he have imagined seeing it parked that afternoon at the Oaks? wonders John.