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A Single Shot

“Jumped up and jabbed me.”

“Jumped up from where?”

“What are you, a goddamn cop? The ax head come off, hit a stone, jumped up, and jabbed me! What else you want to know?”

“I’m just asking.”

“Now you ain’t got to.”

John doesn’t trust his own thoughts. He is uncomfortable in his own head, as if on his first full day in a new life he hasn’t got used to an altered way of thinking. He suspects that people looking at him will discern that he is a man with a deep dark secret. He keeps seeing in his mind the flash of brown-and-white that was the dead girl and the impacted grass on the road he had noticed before he shot her, followed by the pick and shovel standing against the quarry wall. Is there an evil speck on his soul, he wonders, that had foreseen the murder and driven him to it? Could this be the life, that of a thief and murderer, he was meant to live? He thinks of the money that could change his life, that might even bring back his wife and child. But how could he possibly spend it without raising suspicion? Levi Dean slaps the side of the truck loudly to indicate the load is out.

“This goddamn undertaker’s got an airstrip for a driveway,” he says to John. “Must be he flies in the corpses.”

John grunts.

“Who the fuck needs a driveway this long?”

John shrugs.

“You get laid this weekend?”

John doesn’t say.

“I did,” says Dean. “I never seen nobody do what she done. She got down on her hands and knees and backed my prick into her then had me pick up her ass and legs and wheel her around the room like that till she got off. So I did. Then she blew me.”

“Ask him how much it cost him,” Howard yells out the truck window.

“Yeah,” says Dean. “Go over to Cole’s house and ask his wife how much.”

“Two men together couldn’t hold up my wife’s ass,” says Howard.

“She wanted me to slap her ass, too,” says Dean, “and yell giddyup. But I told her she’d have to get Cole to do that.”

“Did she french-fuck your tits, Dean?”

“I think this is gonna be my last day,” says John.

“What?” says Howard.

“I ain’t sure yet. I’ll let ya know.”

“Let me know?”

“I’m pretty sure it will be.”

“Yeah, right,” says Howard. “Three months. That’s about how long I heard you were good for.”

Dean laughs. “Give him a raise, Cole,” he says. “Bring him up to minimum. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”

“I’ll give him shit,” says Howard, lowering the truck’s rear end onto the bed. “He can work for a living or sit on the side that goddamn mountain he holes up on and keep feeding his wife and kid with jacked deer meat. It’s no skin off my ass.”

He spends his lunch hour in the office of Daggard Pitt, the attorney he had made an appointment with last week, on Simon Breedlove’s recommendation, to discuss his divorce. Pitt turns out to be a tiny, maimed man who drags one shriveled leg like a tail when he walks and always seems to be apologizing. He occupies two rooms above J. J. Newberry’s. His receptionist/secretary, who looks like she might be Pitt’s sister, for the entire half hour of John’s visit talks loudly on the outer-office telephone to a veterinary hospital about scheduling her cat to have a tumor removed.

John shoves the papers he’d been served across the desk at Pitt, who, fidgeting like a small child on one side of his chair and periodically rubbing his shrunken leg with a dwarfed hand frozen in the shape of a claw, surveys them, making disapproving grunts and groans. John sits there looking past the lawyer, out the window, at the traffic light above Main Street, imagining himself a porous wall through which his guilt oozes like sweat, and thinks, “Maybe I ought to just lay the whole thing on this lawyer,” then, remembering his prior convictions—three for poaching, two for driving under the influence—tells himself no lawyer in the world could convince a judge or jury not to send him to jail for a good long time. Daggard Pitt says something about the papers having been served thirty days ago and the law allowing only twenty days to answer them.

“They got under somethin’,” says John.

“The problem, thankfully, is not fatal.”

“I ain’t interested in a divorce. We don’t see eye to eye on that.”

“I’m awfully sorry,” says Daggard Pitt, slumping in his chair.

“I’m ready to end this thing.”

“How so?”

“She mentioned couns’lin’ once—I’d go now, if it’ll bring her home. Tell her lawyer that.”

“At any rate,” says Daggard Pitt. “We ought to serve them an answer.”

“I never hit her nor nothing.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I certainly am.”

“It ain’t about that.”

“Nor does she allege so.”