A Single Shot

The deck screen door creaks open. Something enters. The door bangs shut. Mutt, the three-colored stray that lives at John’s when it feels like it, shoves its wet nose in his lap. “Where you been, Mutt?”

Mutt wags its tail.

John stands up, walks to the refrigerator, pulls out leftover spaghetti, dumps it with milk in Mutt’s bowl. Mutt greedily gulps the food. Idly scratching the dog’s burr-impacted neck, John gazes down the valley at the slowly rising fog while mentally trying to reconstruct the previous evening, which in response to his thoughts roils like a quagmire of ambiguities. He remembers Obadiah Cornish openly referring to John’s poaching and, later—had he been dreaming?—the dead girl’s transmogrifying body and his orgasmic spasm entering it like a gunshot.

The phone rings again. This time he answers it. It’s Cecil Nobie wanting John to come down and give him a hand pulling a heifer out of the muck.

“Anne and the kids is to her sister’s for the day’s why I troubled ya.” Nobie spits, then shakes his head, too large for his bandy-legged little body that’s wearing fishing waders. The cow’s in up to the tops of its legs in a quag at the rear side of the barn where runoff from the meadow and mountain pools.

“What happened the fence?”

“Power went dead.”

“And she walked right through her?”

“Like muck was molasses.”

“Goddamn dumb.”

“As a tongueless Polack. Figured we didn’t get a rope round her pretty quick, she’d be clear to China.”

Standing at the edge of the quag, John grips Nobie’s left hand while he wanders as far as he can into the slime before tossing the looped rope he’s holding at the cow. He tries unsuccessfully several times to lasso the animal, which lows, exhales phlegm, and sinks deeper. With each failure, Nobie’s ruddy, sun-chapped face gets redder. In John’s injured shoulder, the burn intensifies.

“Widen the goddamn loop, Cecil.”

“She’s wider’n a whore’s legs a’ready. She’s so covered with muck, though, I can’t toss her straight!”

When finally he gets the rope around the cow, it slips down onto her neck, so pulling on it would strangle her. “Now I can’t reach the friggin’ thing to get it off, John.”

“Let me run get a pitchfork. We’ll get a prong into that loop, then run it back over her ass.”

“Just don’t leave me here in the goddamn quag, John. I might not be here when ye get back.”

After yanking Nobie from the muck, John gets a pitchfork from the barn. Ten minutes later, the loop surrounds the cow, though only her head and the upper third of her torso are still above the muck. Nobie and John are slime-covered. The pitchfork is lost to the quag. When the two men pull on the rope, the cow doesn’t budge.

“I better run get the John Deere.”

“I wouldn’t spend much time talkin’ ’bout it,” says John.

Nobie runs for the barn, his waders making wet, sloshing sounds.

Kneeling by the quag’s edge, John, watching fog patches move like ghosts over the damp meadow, talks softly to the cow. Working to break through the haze, the sun tinges the grass gold. The organic smell of that world is an opiate to John’s frayed nerves. He daydreams being fifteen years old and working, not with Cecil Nobie, but with his father.

As Nobie backs the John Deere up to the quag, half his herd gathers round. John ties the loose end of the rope to the tractor’s drawbar. He pulls the rope until the loop closes tightly around the cow. “Ease her forward till she’s taut, Cecil. I’ll sit down on her. Maybe keep her from jumping.”

Nobie drives the tractor ahead until the rope is like a tightwire over the slime. Feeling the loop’s pressure, the cow moos protestingly. Still gripping the rope, John sits down on it. “Steady she goes, Cecil.”

Nobie gives the tractor a little gas.

“Don’t jerk her, now.”

Nobie eases out the clutch. The rear wheels briefly spin, then take hold. The cow groans. It lifts up some, comes forward a foot or so, lifts up higher, then, bellowing, falls on one side in the muck and is pulled free. “Whoooa!” yells John.

Nobie stops the tractor. He lets it roll back a little. With the clutch in, he guns the engine victoriously.

John jumps from the rope, pulls the loop from the muck-encrusted heifer, then stands back as the animal scrabbles to its feet. Blowing its nose, shitting and pissing at the same time, it angrily charges toward the pasture, while John, watching it go, thinks if only he’d had a similar chance to save the dead girl.

Stinking to high heaven, they stand in the back yard of the house John grew up in, while the last of the fog lifts.

“Got ye any work, John?”

“Just chopped up that old lightning-struck oak.”

“Any a’ the paying kind?”

“That’ll pay me something come fall when I can sell her.”

“Thought you was doing some blacktopping.”

“Nah.”

Nobie strips off his waders, then, in his skivvies, leans back against the porch railing and starts scratching different parts of his wiry, hair-covered self. “My oldest boy, Eban, he’s done with school come spring. Already got hisself into college. Place in Rochester.”

“Good for him.”