A Single Shot

“I was raised to farm—suddenly she wanted me to get a full-time factory job, work nine-to-five indoors like some…” John lets his voice trail off. He thinks of Gerhard Lane, the former college football player who represents his wife, then tries to imagine the Lilliputian Daggard Pitt, with his hangdog look and shriveled limbs and the way he wheezes and makes funny little noises to himself, in the same courtroom with Lane, and his heart sinks. He actually starts to feel sorry for Daggard Pitt. “Look,” he says, “what’s the use? She wants a divorce she’s gonna get one sooner or later, I know that much. If it comes to that, the boy ought to be with her. I’ll pay what I can. There’s no money, only the acre and a half that my trailer’s on that I inher’ted fair and square from my mother.”

“I was acquainted with your parents,” says the lawyer.

John stares blankly at him.

“I wish I had realized it before—I didn’t put the names together.”

“Acquainted how?”

“I represented the bank when it foreclosed. I felt awful about it—we all did. The bank did what it could to keep your father afloat—but the economy at that time, and his having overextended himself, then, of course, him taking sick…” Daggard Pitt stops in midsentence, reaches down, and firmly grasps the emaciated midpoint of his bum leg as if to assure himself it’s still there. When he looks up again, John can see the pain from the leg in the lawyer’s face. “I thought I ought to tell you, in case—though, from my point of view, John, I would like nothing better than to represent you to the absolute best of my lawyerly abilities.”

“How’d you get yourself all mangled up?”

“What?”

“Was you born like it?”

Daggard Pitt frowns sardonically. “ ’Twas the hand I was dealt. Indeed.”

“Least you didn’t have to get used to it later.”

“Pardon?”

“To havin’ to walk crooked.”

Daggard Pitt smiles pleasantly. “I thought it was the rest of the world did.”

“My father was a good farmer,” John says, “and a shit businessman. He died so long ago I can’t hardly remember him.”

“You’d have been in your midteens, as I recall.”

“You still whoring for the bank?”

“Not for almost fourteen years.”

“You’re cheaper than the rest of ’em I called. That mean you ain’t as good?”

“Compensation takes many forms, John.”

“Better not take more’n the half grand I was told.”

“I only meant I have no wife, John. No family. Only my clients and their often sticky and heartfelt situations. Simon Breedlove and I, for example, have known each other for years.”

“He says you got almost a heart.”

“He’s in a position to know.”

John stands up, reaches into his pocket, pulls out the five $100 bills he had taken this morning from the pillowcase, and drops them on Daggard Pitt’s desk. “There’s for your retainer,” he says. “All’s I want’s for you to delay matters long’s ya can, while I try to work things out.”

“Work things out?”

“Get her thinkin’ turned around ’fore the water’s all over the dam.”

“I’ll draft an answer to her complaint—a general denial—for your signature. We’ll get it to Gerhard Lane, then go from there.”

“Don’t do nothin’ fancy,” says John, walking toward the door.

He has the uneasy feeling that he is the focus of the sun’s glare. He stops at the drugstore and buys a bottle of aspirin and a pair of mirrored sunglasses that he puts on. The thought of pouring blacktop in the afternoon heat next to Levi Dean causes the pain in his head to radiate backward from his eyes. He eats three aspirins.

At the municipal parking lot, he sits in his idling pickup truck, its engine growling through an aerated muffler, tormented by images of money and death. He pictures his own guilt as an animal hollowing out his insides and wonders if it’s true what he’s heard that keeping a big enough secret can kill you. He pictures his wife, in cotton smock and jeans, leaning against their open trailer doorway, her long, walnut-colored hair blown back by a gentle summer wind; and the boy, all eyes and facial expressions and herky-jerky movements. He imagines Moira cradling him in her arms the way she does that tiny, fragile body and him telling her all about yesterday’s awful events and the horror then magically vanishing.

Leaving the parking lot, instead of turning right onto Main Street and heading for the undertaker’s, he turns left, toward Puffy’s Diner, the first floor of a two-story red-brick building wedged between two others of like design, to see if Moira is working the lunch shift.

Cruising slowly past the diner, he is unable to see through the foggy plate-glass windows in front, so turns right onto Broad Street and peers in at the dirt parking lot behind Puffy’s. Among a dozen or so vehicles, he spots Moira’s salt-eaten Ford Escort sitting near the building’s far corner, next to Jerry Puffer’s Olds 88, with its busted driver-side shocks.