A Single Shot (13 page)

He stands up and walks down the hallway, the stench getting stronger, into the bathroom, where the medicine cabinet is ransacked, the ballcock to the toilet ripped out and its porcelain top smashed on the floor. Every sheet and towel is thrown from the linen closet. Bottles and cans of cleaning solvents roll on the floor. The trapdoor covering the pipes is open.

He steps back into the hallway, turns left, glances into Nolan’s old nursery, where the closet doors are thrown back and the empty toy chest is turned upside down.

Halfway down the corridor toward the master bedroom,
he sees, through the open doorway, clothes, magazines, and bureau drawers littering the floor. He smells what he smells more distinctly. In a frightened half-jog he enters the room. Lying face up on the bed, her body wrapped below the neck in clear plastic, is the dead girl. Attached to her chest a yellow sheet of paper declares: “John Moon murdered me!” In the middle of the rug, John drops to his knees, puts his hands to his face, and blathers in a mysteriously poignant way.

Beyond cerebration is a place clearer than thought. Equivocations don’t exist in this realm. There is no moral compass. Inside, only him and the dead girl. Outside, the world circling like vultures.

Oblivious to the stench, he sits down on the mattress near her head and studies her pale, bloated face. Her mouth is slightly open and a small particle of food is still lodged between her teeth. Her eyes are closed, her nostrils exaggeratedly flared. The ponytail lies like a thick nest beneath her head. Mashed to her forehead is a dead mosquito. He imagines her voice, medium-pitched and resonant, sounding beyond her years. She laughed often, a free-flowing verse, occasionally at things that others didn’t find amusing. She sometimes cried without provocation. The world struck her as ridiculous or tragic. She wasn’t sure why. She had a weakness for bad men. Mean men. Men who beat her up, then brought her roses.

He reaches down with his forefingers and gently pushes at her eyelids. They’re swollen shut. He pushes harder. The lids open with a quiet pop to eyes the color of deer hide. She kept getting into situations. Her parents were pathetic. Her
friends were the world. She liked sex because they did and she was supposed to, but what really got her hot was pushing things to the limit. She had trouble seeing a point beyond that. She didn’t like to hurt people, though, or to see them hurt. She was compassionate toward those who were helpless. If she could, she would avoid stepping on an ant. She didn’t like to think about growing old. She had a sneaking suspicion she wouldn’t. Old people were like robots. She once dreamed her parents ran on batteries. She wrote a short story about this and while reading it to her English class felt so liberated she thought of becoming a writer but decided she couldn’t spend that much time sitting down.

John lies down next to the girl. He stares up at the ceiling and softly talks to her. He tells her he is sorry he shot her and that most of the time he believes it was an accident but occasionally, when he thinks about how angry the world sometimes makes him and how little he seems able to change things, he’s afraid it wasn’t. He tells her that when he was her age his only plan had been to marry the girl he loved, move her back to his family’s farm, be the best farmer he could be, and raise his children to do the same, and that his father’s having lost everything when John was sixteen crippled John the same as if he’d been in a car accident and lost the use of his legs. He tells her about the many failures in his life and that the only things in it worth holding on to are his wife and son, but that they had left him.

The body is bloated with gas. It occasionally burps or breaks wind. Sometimes it shifts on the mattress. When its right arm jerks out and hits John’s elbow, he stops speaking and gets up from the bed.

Standing over her, he apologizes for talking only about his problems when he at least was alive. He tells her that, no matter what else happens, he will try to find out her name and where she was from and that, if he succeeds, he will somehow notify her family about her death and let them know either where her body can be picked up or that she has received a proper burial.

He lifts up the cadaver, stiff with rigor mortis, and slides the plastic out from around it. He takes off the dead girl’s shoes and socks, then wrestles her out of her jeans and blood-soaked T-shirt. She isn’t wearing a bra. He pulls off her panties because they are soiled and wet. He drops everything into the plastic. Then he takes out his hunting knife. After rolling the cadaver onto its back and eyeballing the bullet’s course through the torso, he goes after the slug with his knife. He locates it just beneath the skin’s surface, embedded in soft flesh. He quickly cuts it out, then drops it onto the clothes.

He walks down the hall to the bathroom, picks up from the floor a towel and washcloth, dampens the latter with soap and water, then returns to the bedroom and spends several minutes scrubbing blood, sweat, and dirt from the cadaver. He sees no star-shaped birthmark; no scar on her knee; no blood-red bull’s-eyes. Far from being large and womanly, her breasts, surrounding the bullet hole, are small and girlish. She has almost no pubic bush. For these things alone, he is thankful.

He pulls on a pair of Moira’s rubber cleaning gloves, then from the floor takes one of her combs, a tube of red lipstick, black eyeliner, and blush. After combing several hair strands away from the dead girl’s forehead, he unties her ponytail,
combs out the snarls, and catches the hair again in a rubber band. He applies the eyeliner and a thin gloss of lipstick. Still, he thinks, she is too pale. He dabs blush on her cheeks and, less so, her temples.

After tearing the tags from one of Moira’s panties and a T-shirt, he puts the underwear on the dead girl. He considers outfitting her in a blouse and skirt, but is afraid they might somehow be traced to Moira, so settles for a label-less pair of her jeans. He dresses the corpse one side at a time, using a hand to hold the rigid body upright and another to slowly thread a leg into the pants. It takes him close to half an hour. All the while, the cadaver makes noises and jumps. The smell starts to make him nauseous. He rolls up the jeans, slightly long on the dead girl, then snaps them. He puts her old socks and sneakers back on, then props the body in a mostly sitting position against the headboard. He pushes with his fingers at the corners of her mouth, removing some of its slackness.

Afterwards, he stands back to appraise her. He thinks she looks almost alive and that if she were, she’d be beautiful. He tells her so. Then he runs and gets the Polaroid. Eight shots remain in the camera. He uses them all in a dull light, taking her portrait from midchest up at three different angles. He lays the photographs on the bureau. Now he’s not sure what to do with the body. What would make things worse or better? And for which of them? A part of him feels as dead as the girl. He’s tired enough to fall over. He wonders if in the morning the sun will shine everywhere but on the trailer, and in that sliver of darkness the world will see what awful secrets he is hiding.

He crouches down, puts his arms beneath the girl’s knees and chest, and lifts her off the bed. Her unbending weight is staggering. That close to his nose, the smell nearly gags him. He labors with her over to the bedroom door, then down the corridor to the top of the basement stairs, where, after leaning her against the wall to switch on the light, he carts her down-cellar and over to the stand-up freezer, the door to which is open, its melting contents scattered on the floor. The compartment is just five feet high. To get the cadaver inside, he vigorously bends and twists it for several minutes, until finally there is the sharp snap of breaking bone and the body folds half-inward from the waist. John pushes it to the back wall, then stacks around and in front of it pieces of the butchered deer and snake so that, when he’s done, what is visible of the cadaver is nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the meat.

Upstairs, he wraps the girl’s old clothes, the bloody sheets and towels, the note, and the rubber gloves in the plastic strip, then takes the plastic out to the incinerator and burns it. He hurls the slug deep into the woods. He enters the woodshed. His tools are on the floor among garden mulch and fertilizer from several sliced-open sacks and rock salt from a tipped-over fifty-pound barrel. He shovels the mulch and fertilizer into trash bins and the rock salt back into the barrel, then rearranges the tools exactly as they had been.

He goes back outside and crawls beneath the shed, where the sack is still attached to the fourth beam. He unties it, carries it into the trailer, dumps the money on the floor, and tries to count it, but after reaching eighty thousand dollars loses his place. He is too tired to start over. He thinks that
even if he were to give the money back to the thieves, they would kill him, especially if it came from Ira Hollenbach’s. And if he handed it over to the law, he would implicate himself in at least one death. He puts the money back in the sack, carries it outside, and ties it beneath the truck bed, between the axle and one wheel.

He spends over two hours cleaning up the trailer, repairing what he can, and putting most of his and Moira’s belongings back where they had been. With the dead girl there, he thinks he won’t sleep, but he does. He turns on the television set, lies on the couch, and for less than five minutes watches the horizontally distorted images of a man shooting a pistol at a giant fly.

H
E WAKES
, in a cold sweat, to the sound of shattering glass. Sensing another’s presence, he lies there in the still-dark morning anticipating a gunshot, a black shadow, or the touch of cold steel against his neck, but hears only the tick of the living-room clock and, through the screened windows, a light wind moving the trees.

Had he been hallucinating? Or dreaming? If he hadn’t, and in a second was killed, would he come face-to-face with the dead girl? Would she forgive him? Would her soul in the afterlife be as beautiful as her body in death? He pictures a place following life—a wood-paneled bar maybe, playing soft country music—where souls, good and bad, dance a few slow ones and reminisce before receiving their permanent
assignments to heaven or hell. A place where life’s hatchet is buried and all drink to eternity. He remembers his father, reduced to skin and bones, after wordless weeks, rousing himself to scream at the visiting Pastor McLean, “Weren’t never your call, Reverend! Was mine! Now it’s His!”

An engine roars to life outside.

In one motion, he rolls off the couch and fumbles beneath it for the .45. Powerful lights intrude through the trailer’s back windows. The engine exhorts a labored whine. The lights get brighter. John grasps the gun, cocks it, and jumps up. The engine’s pitch ascends to a high-revved torque. “Son of a bitch’ll ram the trailer!” thinks John.

He dashes away from the sound toward the front deck door. He’s three-quarters there when the bottom of his bare foot feels as if it’s been shot. He goes down. Behind him, the lights blink off. The engine upshifts, reaches a crescendo, then slowly recedes.

Through the broken glass of the deck door, John watches the outline of the vehicle, darker even than the surrounding dark, vanish down the hollow road.

Panting heavily, he gets to his knees. He fumbles for the wall switch and turns on the light. Glass from the door’s middle panel lies in fragments on the linoleum floor. A piece of it has lodged in his foot, which is bleeding.

He stands up, then, trailing blood, tiptoes through the glass and down the hall to the bathroom, where he gets a towel, tweezers, gauze, waterproof tape, and a bottle of peroxide. He brings everything back to the couch, sits down, and, mumbling a string of pained curses, with the tweezers
pokes around in the wound for the glass. His foot trembles. So do his hands. He laughs giddily from pain and at his shaking extremities, then loudly commands himself to shut up and act like a man. Soon he finds the glass, a half-a-peanut-sized chunk, and pulls it out. He pours peroxide on the towel and, wincing, cleans the wound, which is not very deep, then tapes gauze around it.

Afterwards, he is drenched in sweat. His heart beats loud in his ears. He pinches the glass chunk in the tweezers, holds it up to the light, and stares at it. He imagines himself as the glass, the dead girl his wound, and Waylon, Obadiah Cornish—and maybe Simon Breedlove—the tweezers. Aloud, he asks the girl how she had ever fallen for a guy like Waylon, who obviously grieved more for his lost money than for her. He gets mad thinking about it and tells her so. “Look how he disrespected your body and even when you was alive made you throw out your history like it didn’t matter!”

He places the glass chunk on the coffee table, then leans back against the couch, and, gazing at the blank television set, remembers it playing when he fell asleep. He leans forward and sees that the set is still turned on and plugged in. “Ain’t that great? Along with the rest of it, the fuckin’ tube is shot!” Then, lowering his voice, he tells the girl, “This Waylon guy’s a loser. You should never a’ run off with him in the first place, then you w’udn’t a’ been in the quarry and ’id still be alive and I w’udn’t be respons’ble for ya!”

He straightens up, leans forward, puts on his socks and boots, then gets up, goes into the kitchen, and makes a pot of coffee. He turns on the deck light. The sky is starting to lighten some. The fog is still thick. In places, it’s as high as
the trees. From the upper pasture comes the invisible mooing and bell-jangling of Nobie’s herd. Any minute will sound his hollow shout. John thinks of Abbie Nobie and her empowerment theory. “I’d guess she’s about the same age as you,” he tells the dead girl. “She worries after me. Reckon she thinks I’ve become like a hermit without Moira. When Nolan was here, she used to come up and beg Moira to hold him and sometimes Moira would call her ’count of Nolan was colicky and Abbie was so good at gettin’ him to stop crying. Moira said she’s got a love in her heart and the kid could feel it.”