A Single Shot (22 page)

“I don’t think so,” says John. Suddenly he wishes he hadn’t left his pistol in the bedroom. He decides to go in and get it, just as the music starts in again. This time they both hear it. Somewhere past the kitchen, barely audible, a steel guitar, accompanied by a piano and a mewling, lovesick voice. Abbie looks uncomprehendingly at John. Behind her soft smile, maybe she’s even a little scared. “You leave a radio on inside, John Moon?”

John wheels jerkily toward the door without answering.

“Sounds like it’s moving from one place to another.”

“You ought to get home,” snaps John, turning back around.

“What?”

“Your folks’ll be wonderin’.”

She laughs shrilly, the sound seeming to inject life into a gnarled oak tree, down in the meadow, halfway to her house. As if limbering up for a race, the tree’s foliated branches begin jauntily to bounce, then from them rises up, squawking, a grackle plague, its black smudge scarring the sky’s perfect blue. Abbie, breathing heavily, jumps up from her chair. “Trash birds,” she says.

“Go out this way,” says John, gently shoving her toward the deck steps.

“Do what?” Enhanced by adrenaline, her vital smell provides an antithesis to the death’s scent recently filling John’s nostrils. His vertigo is enhanced. Vague disorientation becomes dissolution of rational thought. There’s a ghost in the trailer, playing Willie Nelson tunes.

“No sense going out through the trailer.”

“I’m not going out any way at all, John Moon,” she says. Backing haughtily away from him, she puts her hands on her hips. Inside, the music is now a low, steady drone, sounding somewhere in the south end of the structure, where John’s bedroom is. “Not till I know if you got a bogeyman.”

John glances toward the room, forty feet to his left. A corner of its single window facing the valley is visible as a patch of mauve curtain, slightly pulled back from the open glass that last John remembers was covered by a screen but now is not. Into his chest enters a searing pain, like a ghost’s bullet fired from that ajar place. He looks at Abbie and she is Ingrid Banes behind a briar thicket in the final moment preceding her death, and a tiny voice in his head says, “Don’t shoot!”

“Got to be the transistor,” he says. “Had it on changin’ my clothes.”

“Weak batteries,” says Abbie with false bravado, “ ’ll make the sound fade in and out like that.”

“I’ll go turn it off.” John steps toward the deck door.

“I’ll come with you.”

“You stay here.”

“Give a holler if you got a band playing in there, John Moon.” She laughs too loudly.

John opens the door.

Like a straining maestro’s voice, his agitation rises as he steps into that airless, dark place he has inhabited these many years, though, once inside, he feels less as if he has entered his home than as if he’s exited the world of light. Here, where the soul and body of Ingrid Banes rests, more dangerous than what eyes can see, is what the sun can’t touch. Still, he wishes he had a gun. Halfway down the semidark corridor where
the kitchen smells loiter, and ten feet from the closed bedroom door beyond which Willie Nelson sings, he remembers the .22 automatic he had hidden behind the toilet. He veers left into the bathroom, reaches down behind the toilet’s back, and finds the pistol. He checks to see that it’s loaded, then, holding it out in one hand, reenters the hallway.

In front of the bedroom door he stops, inclining an ear inward. The music abruptly ends. An ad for Agway fertilizer comes on. “The transistor,” thinks John. “I did leave it on.” He turns the knob and gently pushes the door open.

The radio sits on the bureau to his right. Everything else in the room looks as it had, except the screen that had been covering the window now stands at its base. A light breeze ruffles the curtain and John imagines the softly probing flatus to be a ghost’s inaudible whisper. A foreign scent taints the room, an organic stink concomitant to exorcised life. Now he’s not sure if the bed has been lain in or if the fault marring its center was created in its making. In this spiritually vibrant place, he suddenly feels like an inorganic lump. Like a stone marker in a cemetery. Even the tumultuous beat of his own heart seems like a sound disconnected from his static flesh. A frantic banging maybe, coming from the closet. He takes a deep breath and walks over to it. Brandishing the gun in one hand, he reaches down with the other and yanks open the mirrored door.

A whoosh of dust-filled air exits.

John reaches in and runs a hand through the closet’s sparse, dangling contents—two pairs of dress slacks, his one suit coat, half a dozen skirts or dresses left behind by Moira. He exhales pantingly, then shuts the door. He turns back to the
bed. He thinks about looking under it but even in his revenant state thinks he won’t find anything significant in the couple of inches between the floor and two-by-four-raised spring. On the radio, a promo for the upcoming County Fair ends. A loud whinny sounds from the front of the trailer. Diablo’s uncharacteristic skittishness reregisters itself with John. He walks over to the radio, on which a Garth Brooks song now plays. He switches it off. Through the window, from the deck, he hears a sharp, dual-toned whistle like somebody calling a dog or remarking on a pretty girl. The sound repeats itself. John moves over to the curtain, pulls it back, and sticks his head out.

Standing on the deck behind a limp-looking Abbie, one of his hands holding a clump of her hair and the other a long knife against her throat, is Waylon. “I give you three seconds ’fore I make her look like the Hen, John,” he calls out. “Have you seen the Hen lately?”

John doesn’t say. His gaze is intent on Abbie’s languid face with its closed eyes and slack mouth.

“Offers me buried treasure for drugs! I go along as a favor to him—even dig the shit up for him ’cause he’s afraid a’ snakes or some damn thing, then I give ’im his merchandise and when I come back for my money, not only is it gone, but my girl, too, and when I see the Hen about it, he can’t understand how it’s his problem and I tell him he’ll understand if I don’t get back the cash or the drugs in seventy-two hours—I even offered to let him keep Ingrid, who anyway was getting to be a pain in my ass.” His speech is high-pitched and staccato, the clipped words running wild and tripping over each other in their hurry to get out, and listening to it,
John is furious at the dead girl for being infatuated with insanity.

“Three days later he tells me the drugs are sold, he hasn’t got the money, my girl’s been shot by a haybale, and basically, ‘Fuck you, Waylon,’ and that’s what I get for trusting a guy I met in prison!”

“Why ain’t her eyes open?” hollers John.

“What?”

“Abbie’s eyes ain’t open!”

“Choker hold’ll do that, John.”

“She ain’t dead, is she?”

“She’ll wake up when I start carving on her.”

“I’ll give you the money,” says John.

“Of course you’ll give me the money, you stupid cowdonged son of a bitch. Now drop the pistol and get your woodchuck ass out here!”

Waylon’s handling of Abbie has a ritualistic quality. He lowers her to the chaise longue, then gently rolls her on her back. Watching from the kitchen doorway, John thinks of the dispassionate way his father’s home health aides, their eyes slyly diverted, would hoist and turn his cancer-ridden body that to them might have been a side of pork or a car lodged in a ditch. “Gotta hand it to ya,” says Waylon, straightening up and pulling from his belt a 9-millimeter pistol. “Not every half-assed dirt farmer seen a chance like what you did would take it.”

He waves John out onto the deck. John steps outside. His hunter’s eye automatically probes the muscular torso in front of him for its weakest link. He thinks it might be the knees.
Waylon signals him to a stop ten feet from where he leans against the rail, facing the valley. “Tell you the truth, at first I didn’t believe Obadiah when he swore a woodchuck had stole my money and murdered my Ingrid—figured he had or they were in on it together.” He’s wearing dress chinos, a jersey marred by briars, and what look like brand-new L. L. Bean hiking boots. White froth stains his beard and armpits. He smells lathered up, like an exercised horse. John guesses he’s bushwhacked through the woods from where he’s dumped Obadiah Cornish’s pickup. “Time I’d sliced off his nose, though, he’d convinced me.”

“Was an accident.”

Waylon smiles. “Which? Stealing my money or shooting her?”

“I took her for a deer.”

“A deer? She didn’t look anything like a deer.”

“Was a mistake.”

Waylon slides the knife into a sheath on the other side of his belt. “That crazy son of a bitch really dump her in your bed?”

John nods.

“Where is she now?”

“I buried her,” says John, suddenly not wanting Waylon ever again to cast his eyes on her. “I dug a hole up in the woods and put her in it. I can take you there.”

Waylon waves at him. “I don’t like corpses. They give me the creeps.” He frowns. “I’m just wondering, though, John, did you fuck her?”

“Did I what?”

“If you didn’t, you really missed out on something. That
girl was three rolled into one.” He shakes his head. “Was ’bout all I could do to hold on her once she took to bucking.”

“Wrote in a letter how she loved you,” John angrily says.

“What?”

“Said you was going take her to Hawaii.”

Waylon glances curiously at him. His black, dilated pupils suggest oil splats in saucers of thick, heavy cream. “You read my Ingrid’s mail, John?”

“Was tryin’ to put a name to her. Was you gonna?”

“What?”

“Take her Hawaii?”

“Oh well, you know how women like to hear about sand and water, John. Now let me ask you—did you fuck her before or after you shot her?” He rolls his head exaggeratedly. “Or d’ya try her both ways?”

John rushes angrily forward. Waylon thrusts his pistol straight out. John comes to an abrupt halt three feet from the end of its barrel. “Come over here, John,” says Waylon. Moving a few feet sideways along the rail, he points at the spot he’s just vacated. John walks over to the spot and stops. Down on the pond, half a dozen ducks float motionless as decoys. Two oaks on the water’s far side cast dark shadows on half its surface. The air smells like tansy and wild violets. “Put your hand there on the rail, fingers spread.”

“What for?”

“If you don’t, I’m going to shoot the girl in both knees.”

“Ain’t we gon’ go get the money?”

“No. You’re going to go get the money. I’m going to stay here with the girl—what’s her name?”

“Abbie.”

“She and I are going to stay here for the two minutes you’re gone.”

“It’ll take more than that.”

“More than what?”

“Two minutes.”

“I’ll give you ten, then I’ll cut off one of her kneecaps.” He nods down at Abbie’s placid-looking face, which suggests she might be dreaming pleasantly. “Another five, another kneecap. A joint-to-joint thing, get it?”

John says, “I’ll go as fast as I can.”

“I know you will, John. Now, where exactly is it?”

“On the mountain side the trailer. Up in the woods.”

“You’ll point me there so that I can sit here with Abbie and watch you go up and come back.”

“You’ll have to move the far end the deck, past the trailer’s edge.”

“That’s not a problem. Now, John, where’s your truck? I’m told you have a truck.”

“Up there with it.”

“You’ll bring it down for me, won’t you? So that I can borrow it?”

“Yes.”

He reaches into the sheath with his free hand and pulls out the knife again. “I’m not like the Hen, John, who gets off on cutting people up, okay? I admit, I’m not at all pleased that you killed Ingrid—she was a sweet kid and a tremendous fuck—and because of it I don’t think you and I could ever be good friends, but you say it was an accident and that you gave her a proper burial and I accept that. So, about Ingrid, bygones are bygones.” He nods at the rail. “Fingers
splayed, John, like I asked. Unless you’d prefer I take an eye. Would you rather I take an eye?”

John doesn’t say. Adrenaline and bile race into his stomach, so that for a few seconds he’s afraid he’s going to be sick. He glances at Abbie and wonders how long someone who’s had done to them whatever Waylon did to her stays unconscious. “How do I know you won’t hurt her once you got the money?”

“I’ve just explained to you, John, that was the Hen’s trip. Not mine. I’m a businessman. That’s all. Like every other employed slob in the world, I got people I got to answer to. I need my money back, John, or I’m the next one gets put in the ground. That’s how life works. Get paid, so you can pay. You think what I sold to the Hen was a gift to me? No. Life is a big wheel—somebody fucks with a cog like you did, John, and the whole wheel is shot. So, I’ve got to fix the wheel, okay? How am I going to do that? First you need to know that the girl will look like a totem pole if you’re not back with the money in ten minutes. Second, I need to know that while you’re up there in the outback that should you get to feeling like Davy Crockett and scrounge yourself up a musket and a lead ball, I can feel secure that the ball won’t end up in my brainpan. So what’s it to be, John? I take one of ten fingers, leaving you nine? Or one of two eyes, leaving you a cyclops? I know what I’d do.”