A Single Shot

He hangs the deer’s hindquarters and the rattlesnake from the rafters in the woodshed, then, carrying the money sack and a length of bailing twine, slithers on his stomach into the crawl space beneath the shed and lashes the pillowcase to the top of one of the heavy foundation beams.

Too exhausted to move afterwards, he lies there, imagining the girl doing likewise in her dank tomb, and wondering if at the quarry he left unattended some minor detail that, like a loose thread in a suit, could lead to a mass unraveling. The wondering, he knows, will end only with his surrender, capture, or death, which leads to his feeling that events are being orchestrated by some higher force and that, like a caged rat, he is the subject of some bizarre experiment.

Halfway down the mountain, Cecil Nobie begins loudly calling in his cows for evening milking—“Cow-bossie! Cow-bossie!”—just as John’s father used to do years ago from the same rear open doorway in the barn. Though it’s fourteen years since he bought the Moon farm at auction from the bank, Nobie’s hollow shout can still give John chills, especially when the foliage blocks, as it does for half the year, his view below the treeline, so that the spectral voice floating up through the heavily leaved terrain might indeed be that of Robert Moon’s ghost. This afternoon, though, John is only amazed that anybody—Cecil Nobie included—is going about his or her everyday affairs as if yesterday’s world were unaltered.

Only after he crawls out from beneath the shed and starts walking down the sloping lawn to the trailer does he realize how much his muscles ache and his shoulder burns. He inwardly vows to show up for work the following day, regardless of the pain. It’s important, he thinks, for him to act and appear normal to the world.

The sun, three-quarters concealed behind the mountain at his back, casts a dark shadow, like a diving whale, on the opposite mountain. A swirl of dust from an ascending vehicle is visible above the hollow road, and John wonders if Waylon might be on his way up to the quarry to retrieve his girl and money and how he will react to losing both.

In the trailer bathroom, he gets undressed, then into the shower, where for several minutes he steels himself against a coarse blast of freezing water. Subsequently, he cleans his shoulder wound with peroxide and wraps it in an aerated bandage.

After drawing the blinds against the dying light, he lies down naked on his bed and tries unsuccessfully to convince himself that it is the morning of the same day and he has just awakened. He thinks about his wife and son, insulated for three months now in their village apartment, making for themselves a new life in which John is to have no part, and he remembers his wife’s departing words to the effect that she doesn’t want the boy to grow up, like his father, thinking there is no life beyond a small patch of mountain that is the last vestige of his ancestors’ homestead.

In the end, thinks John, in a stuporous half sleep, everything boils down to money and death. The whole world. As if he’s counting sheep, he silently repeats, “Money and death, money and death.” The phone rings. He doesn’t answer it. He closes his eyes and sleeps fitfully, dreaming not about the girl or money, but of the wounded buck that like a dying pied piper led him through the woods into a box canyon from which nothing that enters leaves unchanged. Around 3 a.m., he wakes up sweating and disoriented. He puts on his clothes and goes out to the woodshed.

He skins and butchers the buck’s hindquarters, then the rattlesnake. He carries the meat and the deer’s tongue into the cellar beneath the trailer and tosses them into the standup freezer. Afterwards, he sits for several minutes on the front deck with an open beer that he doesn’t drink, and, by the star-filled sky, is reminded of the insignificance of all earthly acts, including his own.

He empties the beer over the deck railing, then goes back to bed. He sleeps until his alarm wakes him two hours later.

MONDAY

HE WORKS most of the morning next to Levi Dean, both of them with shovels, smoothing out the gravel as it slowly slides from the back of Cole Howard’s dump truck onto the undertaker’s driveway. Except for Dean’s mumbled curses, neither man says much while working, both seemingly hypnotized by their own monotonous motions and the metallic ping made by the rearranging pebbles. The hot, hard work is made more so for John by the dull pain radiating from his injured shoulder to his fingers that with nearly every scoop causes him to wince and grunt, and by an apprehensive feeling that someone is watching and judging him. By ten o’clock it is hotter than the day before. Dean and John strip off their shirts, the former’s mammoth, jiggly upper torso sun-pink and obscene against John’s short, compact body, which is, but for his gauze-covered shoulder, deeply tanned.

“Who bit ya?” asks Dean, nodding at the shoulder.

“Ax head broke off.”

“So what?”