A Single Shot (10 page)

He sits in the kitchen, listening to crazed bugs battering the screens. It’s dark down the hill. Frogs croak. They sound like giant frogs. Monstrous frogs. The Night of the Frogs.

He turns on the television set, tunes it to the one station he gets. Something’s wrong with the horizontal hold. He switches the set off. He’s aware of the bugs again. Then the frogs. He plays a game of quarters against himself. He wonders how, in this world, he could ever have thought his luck would be good enough to allow him to walk away unscathed with a case full of cash. The phone rings. He answers after the third one. On the other end, someone hangs up.

Five minutes later, it happens again. Beyond the lighted window, darkness cresting in a watery black wave. Minutes that feel like hours. Hours that feel like days.

He brings the radio over to the kitchen table, sits down, tunes the radio to country music. He listens to three songs. Four. His feet and armpits start to sweat. He kicks off his sneakers, pulls off his T-shirt. A commercial for Delco batteries plays. The phone rings once more. He picks it up. A man’s voice says, “The dog got in the way.”

“Who is this?”

“You know, right?”

“What?”

“How things get in the way.”

“What things?”

The phone clicks dead.

A set of headlights slowly serpentine their way up the hollow. They turn onto Nobies’ road, then continue on up the hill. Sitting on the deck, drinking the last beer in a six-pack, John is too tired and drunk to stand. He reaches down, picks up the .45 from beneath his chair, and flicks off the safety.

The vehicle lurches before skidding to an uncertain stop adjacent to the trailer. It backfires once, then stops running. A loud fart from inside. Raucous laughter. A female voice baying, “Gawd!”

Doors open to a loud creak. Another fart. “Je-zus!”

Simon Breedlove and two naked women exit Simon’s beat-up old Cadillac. “Pool open, John?”

John waveringly sticks his arm holding the pistol straight up into the air and squeezes the trigger. In the still night air, the report is deafening. “He’s worse than you, Simun!”

More laughter.

“I’ll get the lights,” says Simon.

John fires again.

Their loose flesh glabrous and silvery in the moonlight, the women charge hell-bent for the water.

“You must remember big Colette,” Simon insists from the pond’s grassy banks, where they watch the women, yipping and laughing, frolic in the water like overfed seals. “Is married to Ralph Gans.”

“She ain’t familiar.”

“Colette Gans! Ralph’s missus?”

Watching them water-wrestle beneath Simon’s jerry-rigged lights, John has the feeling that this day and night are an eternal hell to which he is doomed. “Don’t know him, either.”

“Sure you do! He’s got that scrap-metal yard outside Blenham. Three, four years ago we hauled a couple demo wrecks over there—was right after the Fair. Bunch of us tied one on after with Gans. I know you remember. Ralph Gans? Had that half ear?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember that set a’ inner tubes she’s carrying? Christ, you got to! She comes sashaying into Gans’s living room ’round midnight wearing this little-bitty nightshirt could see right through and says, ‘Raaaa-lph, these boys gotta go home now! Colette needs tendin’ to!’ Christ, we ’bout died. Who even knew the man was married? Don’t you remember? Said it just like that—Raaaaalph!—funny thing is come to find out that’s how she really talks—takes her ’bout an hour to get a sentence out.”

“Nuh-uh,” says John.

“You’re bullshitting me, right?”

“I don’t remember.”

“The hell you say!”

John shrugs.

“I ran into her earlier this evening at Benders with this other one who’s her cousin and a daughter to Beano Dixon, the mechanic down to the Chevron station? I didn’t even know Beano had a daughter, but turns out he’s got three he’s been sendin’ regular support to all these years up in Red Hook and this one here’s the oldest. She’s got a mountain
lion tattooed to her ass. Got its teeth bared and its claws open. She gets out and shakes herself dry, you’ll see.” Simon caps the gin bottle he’s been drinking from and tosses it into John’s lap. “Figured I’d roust ya. Shape I’m in, don’t know as I’d been able to handle the pair of ’em.” Smiling broadly, he places his elbows into the bank and leans back. “What happened your arm, Johnno?”

“Buck gored me.”

“No shit?”

“Dry-gulched me after I wounded it, then chased it for miles. Keep it yourself.”

Simon grunts. “When haven’t I?”

“I mean, don’t even breathe it.”

“You thinking it’s like a vampire buck or what?”

John flicks his eyes at him.

“It’s the middle of the night, Johnno.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re sitting here shit-faced with a loaded pistol.”

“And you’re sitting next to me.” John plucks a piece of hay from the field and starts chewing on it.

“I guess Moira ain’t changed her mind?”

“She’s educating herself. Worries about missing classes.”

“That ain’t so bad. Wished I’d had a little more.”

“Why didn’t ya?”

“Vietnam come along fucked with my aspiration. I was gonna be a nuclear fizzy—you know like Einstein was?”

“I think she’s got a boyfriend.”

“That ain’t the end of nobody’s world neither. The end of the world’s when your heart stops beating.”

“Yeah,” says John. He thinks of the dead girl, the end of
her world a 12-gauge slug. He remembers Simon, thirteen years older than John, once saying that the world is divided into those who’ve killed someone and those who haven’t and that the second group doesn’t know how lucky it is or about the danger it’s in. That was the closest he’d ever come to discussing the war with John. “You ever heard of a guy named Obadiah Cornish?”

Simon raises his eyes at John. “I don’t brag on it. Why?”

“He pulled a gun on me last night over to Moira’s.”

“You don’t mean to say, Moira…?”

John waves dismissively. “Cornish was over there balling the babysitter. He seemed to know a lot about me. I don’t know diddly ’bout him.”

“Last I heard, he was upstate, though that was a lot of years ago.”

“How come I can’t place him and he can place me?”

“He ain’t much to place is why you can’t him. Probably why he can you is ’cause he was foster kid one summer to Old Ira Hollenbach. This was back ’fore the killings—when Ira had the stone quarry. Cornish I guess got sent to Ira’s after he wore out ’bout every other family in the county. Reason I know is I used to work for Ira. I was there when this psycho Obadiah stabs one Ira’s cows to death.”

“A cow?”

“One of Ira’s top milkers. Kicks a pail of milk over onto Cornish and he runs and gets a pitchfork and jabs it straight through the cow’s heart.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. Ira sent him the hell back the county after that.”

John spits out the grass.

“He was one the hundreds the police talked to after Old Ira and Molly got sliced up. Has himself little Daggard Pitt for a lawyer, same as me.” Simon pulls off his boots, then lies back on the bank and wriggles out of his jeans. Beefier and taller than John, he’s got a long scar on his leg that he brought back from Vietnam and never talks about. As much as John’s father, he’d taught John how to hunt. “Rule numero uno, Johnno,” he used to say. “Don’t shoot at rustlin’ branches, footsteps, farts, or hallucinations.” A few years back, after a downstate hunter had shot and killed his companion for a deer, Simon claimed the guy must’ve done it on purpose. Nobody, he’d said, could make a mistake that bad. And John had agreed with him. “Where’s that three-colored mutt a’ yourn?”

John whips his head around. He stares wordlessly down at Simon.

“He’s usually slobbering all over me, I show up.”

“I don’t remember you ever giving a rat’s ass.”

“Still don’t.” Pantless, Simon stands up. He starts unbuttoning his shirt. “Just wonderin’ where it’s at, that’s all.” When he came back from the war, he’d gone to work for John’s father, milking cows. He had a temper back then—once he’d gotten mad, punched a breed bull in the snout, and nearly killed it, and later spent time in jail for having similar run-ins with people. For weeks at a time he would disappear, then show up looking for his job back, and John’s father would give it to him because finding good help was nearly impossible and Simon Breedlove, John’s father used to say, could work the tits off a mule. He hadn’t stayed long, maybe a year or two, but by then he’d become like an older
brother to John, sometimes like a father, even though John didn’t have any idea, and still doesn’t, what Simon did on his long absences.

“Was shot,” says John.

“Dead?”

“Yeah.” John gazes down at the pond, where the smaller woman, her naked backside to the bank, has climbed on the shoulders of Colette, standing waist-high in the water. “Don’t know by who.”

“When?”

“Earlier this evening.”

“What for?”

John’s seeing tracers in front of his eyes. “How would I know?”

“I mean, might somebody had a reason?”

“I’d guess not.”

“Well, shit.”

“I buried him up by the garden.”

“Musta been a reason.”

Now John’s ears are ringing. He doesn’t answer.

“Nothing you can think of?”

“I loved that dog, Simon.”

“Yeah, well, I know, John, but the thing to remember is—he was just a dog—not a human being—ya know?”

“We’re getting awful lonely down here, boys!” The small woman, gyrating her backside, stands on Colette’s shoulders. Simon shakes his head admiringly.

“Ain’t that Colette a strong one, John?”

John doesn’t say.

“With that equipment she must’ve fucked little-bitty Ralph
Gans right down to a carrot stub. ’Member how godawful small he was? Like a mouse. Had that half ear?”

“Can’t place him,” says John.

“Me, I never forget a face,” says Simon. “You want to go swimming?”

John slowly gets to his feet. His head spins.

“Way you stink, she ain’t gon’ get near you less’n you do.” Simon nods at the pond just as the small woman dives head-first into the water, yelling, “Banzai!”

“Did you see the mountain lion, John?”

John unbuckles his pants.

“Later she’ll make it roar for ya.”

“Me?”

“She’s too young and skinny for me. I’m gon’ tangle with big Colette see if we can’t liven up the valley with tit-farts.” Simon turns and sprints for the water.

On a blanket in the high grass above the pond, the girl moistens an index finger and presses it to her upraised nipples, one, then the other, as if she’s playing pinball. Her taut, water-slick body reminds John of a coiled spring ready to pop. She tells him her younger sisters nicknamed her Mincy because when she used to get mad at them she would threaten to make them into mincemeat. She makes him feel her arm muscles, gnarly knots about the size of handballs, and says in her senior year of high school she wrestled with the boys’ varsity and didn’t lose a match. In the moonlight, her swollen areolae look to John like plump red tomatoes. He tells her he’s married and wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t drunk. She laughs and says that’s most men’s story, then helps him to
remove his underpants. Naked, on their backs, they count shooting stars to the groveling, baying, flesh-quacking sounds of Simon and Colette on the opposite shore.

Rolling a leg onto John, Mincy tells him he’s got a nice muscular little body, then reaches down and, while in his ear wetly whispering that the fucking across the water is making her as horny as she’s ever been, plays like a kitten with his genitals. John says he’s never cheated on his wife and Mincy places her pinky finger at the base of his balls, stretches her thumb as far up his penis as she can, which is nowhere near the tip, and coquettishly asks if maybe he’s exaggerating a few inches. Then she’s sitting up on John’s knees, sliding his penis slowly back and forth between her squeezed-together breasts and saying that in her wallet is a condom she ought to slip on him, and John says okay, but instead of making a move to get it, she groans, “Oh, Christ,” rolls off him onto her stomach, hoists her bottom with its snarling green-and-purple mountain lion an inch or two off the blanket, and with a self-conscious little smile says, “Like this, ’kay, little John? Hard as ya can, and deep.”

Then John is inside of her and she’s bucking backward into him and screaming for him to do it harder, and John, violently striking out with his groin, as lost in that world as he had been earlier in his wood-chopping, fixates on the back of her flying hair, which in front of his amazed eyes suddenly turns from an auburn pageboy to a dirty-blond clump.

He lets out a terrified scream.

Mincy, thinking he’s about ready to come, barks over her shoulder for him to pull out, so John pitches back and she deftly rolls onto her back beneath him, then takes his penis
deep into her throat, where John explodes, and in his mind sees a 12-gauge slug tearing into the chest of the dead girl.