A Single Shot

Then he grabs the cadaver by the shoulders and drags it head-first into the cave. After laying the sleeping bag along the driest wall, he places the body on it, folds its hands beneath one side of its face, and gently tucks its knees in at the waist. For a minute or so, he crouches there, studying the girl’s body in the flashlight’s beam, seeing on her cherubic face a child’s peeved, forlorn expression. Then he runs back across the quarry and retrieves her satchel with its contents, and the stuffed lion. He lays the satchel near her feet and the lion on the sleeping bag next to her. Still not satisfied, he unzips the bag, then spends several minutes wrestling the cadaver and the lion into it, so that, when he’s done, just their two heads stick out. Even now, he has trouble leaving the girl. On his knees over her, he prays:

“As you seen, God, her dyin’ was an accident. Maybe I shot too quick and now I gotta live with it. I ain’t figured it all out yet. Even ’bout the money, which I could dearly use. Anyway, here she is for you to watch over. Thank you. Amen.”

He emerges from the cave into the midday sun covered with the girl’s blood and feeling like some misunderstood, tragic figure—a latter-day Frankenstein—who’s rapidly evolving into the monster he’s widely believed to be. The buzzards are on the deer carcass again and he chases them off, screaming maniacally, then runs straight from there to the lean-to, where he enters, grabs the metal box and the pillowcase, hauls them outside, and transfers the money from the former to the latter, tying the case, when he’s finished, with a granny knot.

He looks around at the carnage in the field and thinks if he doesn’t clean up the trail of blood and dead bodies even a moron stumbling on the scene could draw a pretty good picture of what’s happened and maybe even who did it. He buries the shot rattlesnake beneath a slag heap, then, not wanting to waste good meat, wraps the other up in a pair of men’s dungarees that were in the lean-to and brings them and the money over next to the dead deer. Knowing he can’t lug back the entire carcass, especially not along with the money and rattler, he decides to make the rest disappear.

He kneels down next to the body, pulls out his hunting knife, and with its serrated edge starts sawing just in front of the buck’s hind legs. The torso is hard-boned, gnarled, and muscular from years of fighting and just living and, for nearly thirty minutes, resists John’s efforts to sever it. Afterwards he cuts out the deer’s tongue and wraps it with the snake in the dungarees.

When he’s finished, his muscles are burning; he’s sweat-soaked and drenched with gore from a half-dozen bodies; his mouth is parched; and he’s weak from hunger and adrenaline overdose. He glances at his watch. Nearly three o’clock. He worries that maybe Waylon will come back early—though if he comes in a vehicle, as he will almost surely have to, it will be a four-wheel drive that John will hear winding up the steep, potholed road a good ten minutes before it arrives, but even that will be cutting it close. He’s concerned, too, about somebody else, a hiker maybe, wandering into the quarry, though the likelihood of it seems slim. Mostly, he just wants to be gone.

He hoists the buck’s head and upper torso onto his shoulders, walks over to the pond of algae-black water, drops the three-quarters carcass onto the bank, and stuffs it with several pounds of stone. Following the task he is so hot and thirsty that he takes off his pants and shoes, walks into the tepid water, and laps at it. After taking two steps, he drops in over his head. He stays beneath the surface, scrubbing himself, seeing only a few suspended weeds inches in front of his face, until his lungs threaten to burst. He emerges, screaming out the air still in his chest, sucks in some more, then goes down again. He goes down and comes up half a dozen times, before swimming over to the water’s edge to retrieve the rock-laden torso. He hauls the body into the pond with him, then sinks with it to the bottom. When he’s satisfied it will stay there, he swims to the top, climbs from the water, dries himself, and dresses.

Using the T-shirt he found in the lean-to and a fallen spruce branch, he spends several minutes cleaning up, then smoothing over the grass around and beneath the dead deer, then the path made by the human cadaver from the briars to the cave. When he looks at the field afterwards, he has to remind himself that the girl or the deer ever existed.

With the sleeping-bag cover he ties the shotgun around his waist; then he drapes over his shoulders the buck’s hindquarters and the snake-and-tongue-filled dungarees, whose combined weight is maybe sixty pounds. He carries the money by his side, on the long walk home alternating the heavy pillowcase between his left and right hand every few minutes.