A Single Shot

He throws open the door to the front deck, then runs over to the stove, where his strip steak and the pan it’s in are in flames. John douses them both with water, then opens all the trailer windows and, loudly cursing, charges around waving at the smoke with a towel. In a few minutes, coughing heavily, he stumbles out to the deck to breathe. Collapsed in a plastic chair, he watches stodgy black smoke twist lazily into the night sky. He thinks about what he went through to get that rattlesnake back to the trailer, then butchered and filleted, and decides it wasn’t meant for him to eat. He goes back into the trailer, gets the burned strip steak and his .45 pistol, comes back out to the porch, tosses the steak onto the lawn, and empties his gun into it.

Then he goes downcellar, pulls from the big freezer what’s left of the rattlesnake, half a dozen venison steaks, and a bag of ice, and takes them all out to his truck, where he tosses everything into the portable cooler. Standing in the driveway afterwards, still three-quarters drunk, he decides that offering mere meat to his family is not enough. A much bigger gesture is needed. He runs up to the woodshed, crawls beneath it, pulls out the pillowcase, withdraws several packets of money, then reattaches the pillowcase to the foundation beam.

Sitting at the kitchen table, he counts the money. Five thousand six hundred dollars. A lot. Much more, certainly, than he’s ever seen at one time. Yet only a tiny percentage of the whole. He wonders, though, if it’s too much. If word got out that he was giving away sums that big, what then? Still, the gesture must be big. A big—great big—not tiny, cash wad is the point. Like John’s cataclysmic orgasms, the gift is meant to speak volumes; to say more than he is able to say in words about his love and concern for his family. He eats two bologna-and-cheese sandwiches, washes them down with a quart of raw milk. He thinks himself nearly sober. He looks around at the kitchen walls streaked with soot. The whole trailer smells like burning charcoal. He decides to give Moira all the money but a thousand dollars. Before he leaves, he rolls up the latter amount and stuffs it into the sugar jar above the sink.

He drives the eight miles to town in a blindered, half-drunk state, foreseeing from his mission only positive results—a grateful Moira, an impressed Moira, a contrite Moira, begging for him to take her back. He parks in front of a liquor store at one end of the street, then, carrying in a paper bag the deer and snake meat and the cash, he walks the two hundred yards to where she lives on the top floor of a three-story, white, flaking clapboard building, half obscured by spruce trees. Her car is out front.

Looking up at the third-floor windows, dark except for a single flickering light, John is suddenly not so sure he’s doing the right thing. It’s later than he thought. Nearly ten o’clock. What if Moira is in bed? Worse yet, what if there’s someone up there with her? The street behind him is so quiet he can hear the buzz of the streetlights. An occasional car passes. John walks back up the street to the liquor store, goes inside, buys a pint of schnapps, then walks back to Moira’s, and, drinking the schnapps, leans against her car, staring at the flickering light, imagining it to be about anything. A firefly lights several times in front of his face. John tries unsuccessfully to catch it in his hand. He wonders what it would feel like to fly, to bypass walking altogether.

A vehicle comes fast down the street, slows up, then turns into the dirt driveway next to the house. It’s a small compact car. Rap music pours from its open windows. While the engine’s still running, the driver’s door opens. A long-haired kid holding a square, flat box steps out. He glances at John, then quickly walks to the outside stairs on the side of the house and starts up them, two at a time. A dog starts barking somewhere in the building. A voice tells it to shut up. John watches the kid climb past the second floor and head for the third. He drops the empty schnapps bottle onto the grass. A horrible image of Moira naked beneath another man flashes into his head. “She don’t even like pizza,” he thinks. “I’ve never seen her eat even a single goddamn slice.”

He starts on a half trot toward the stairs.

He reaches the bottom of the first platform just as the kid, guffawing to himself, steps onto it from above. “Unfucking real, man,” he says, shaking his head. “Some dudes got all the luck!” More to steady himself than anything else, John puts his hand not holding the paper bag on the kid’s chest. The kid stops laughing. “What’s the deal, man?”

The world spins around John. He asks the kid, “Who ordered it?”

“Huh?”

“Who ordered the fucking pizza?”

The kid nods up the stairs. “She did, man. The chick.”