A Single Shot

“Got hisself some smarts from his mother, I guess. Wants to do something with computers—make ’em think or something.”

John nods.

“Never used one myself.”

“Me neither.”

“He thinks they’re the best thing since sliced bread. Says I ought to have one for the farm. Keep all my records on it.”

“Maybe ya ought to.”

“I got me an old shoe box works plenty good enough.” Nobie hunches forward, pulls his dick out of his underwear, and starts pissing into the yard. “Once he goes to Rochester, John, I don’t expect we’ll be seeing much of him ’cept Christmas and summertime, when, if we’re lucky, he might help bring the hay in. I’m proud as can be a’ that boy, John, but he ain’t never took to farming and I can’t say his sister do neither. Guess I don’t blame ’em. World out there looks pretty exciting these days and, for sure, there’s no money in farming.” He puts his dick away, then turns toward John. Out on the hollow road an approaching vehicle whines. “We never had us a need for a full-time man before, John, but when Eban goes, it ain’t right his mother should have to take up the slack.”

John throws the last of the coffee he’d been drinking onto the lawn. He hears the vehicle downshift as it heads into the J-curve parallel to Nobies’, then a basso growl as it starts the long ascent up to Ira Hollenbach’s old place.

“If you could see your way round it, John, I’m offering you a job.”

John doesn’t answer.

“A good job. Long-term.”

John nods his head, just to show he’s heard. Nobie’s a fine farmer and, unlike John’s father, a good businessman too. To buy the Moon place, he’d sold, for plenty more than it was worth, the hilly, rock-infested one hundred fifty acres on Briar Hollow he’d grown up on to a real-estate developer who’d put up town houses. He kept John’s parents’ place looking as good or better than when they’d been alive. But work for him? As a hired hand? No way, thinks John. He’d as soon lay blacktop.

“Ain’t that a persistent sumbitch,” says Nobie, nodding at the road several hundred yards above his place.

“Huh?”

“That one nosin’ round Hollenbachs’.” He points a quarter of the way up the hill, beyond the thick foliage, where, glimmering like a beetle in the unobscured sun, a black Chevy Blazer climbs. John’s stomach rolls over. He feels like that heifer, neck deep in the quag. “Second time I seen it go by in twenty-four hours.”

John looks down at the coffee-soaked patch of sunburned grass at his feet, thinking how, from the single pull of a shotgun’s trigger, the world’s turned upside down.

“Maybe after five years somebody’s finally looking to buy the place. Got to be from out the area, though. Wouldn’t ya say, John?”

John shrugs.

“Hell yes! Nobody local, ’specially ones that remember Old Ira and Molly, gon’ move into that place knowing its history. Be like walkin’ on their grave! You believe in ghosts, John?”

“As much as I don’t.”

“Sure. Me too.” Nobie starts stripping off his skivvies. “Course it’s a nice piece a’ land and I s’pose somebody might buy it, tear the house down, and put up a new one, but I don’t think that somebody’d be me.” Naked, holding his underpants in one hand, he nods toward the garden hose. “How ’bout we hose some this muck off, John?”

“I’ll jis’ go up to the trailer,” says John. “Dive in the pond.”

“You sure?”

“Pos’tive.”

Nobie tosses his skivvies on the porch. “I hear Ira’s sister lives down in Philadelphia inher’ted the place and ain’t set foot on it since the murders.” Nobie walks over to the spigot, turns on the water, then bends down and picks up the hose. When the water starts coming out the end, he brings the hose up to his mouth and drinks. Then he aims the spray at his feet. “You let yourself think about it, it can give you the creeps knowing whoever done it could still be living hereabouts.”

“Why would they be?”

“Gotta be living somewhere, ain’t they?”

“Yeah,” says John. He turns, starts walking toward the front of the house, and is stopped by Nobie’s voice.

“Maybe you’ll think ’bout it, huh, John? ’Bout the job?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure. Think it over. There ain’t no hurry.”

Glamorous women in nightgowns, underwear, bathing suits. Marble-skinned, haunted-eyed women. Women dressed in striped ties and suits. Starved-looking women. Women with sour pouts, bored frowns, mad, toothless smiles. Women with weight-trained muscles and gnarly-looking breasts coiled like jack-in-the-boxes beneath their skin-tight outfits. Women who beckon alluringly. Laugh haughtily. Jut out their chins, asses, elbows. Shave their heads. Wear tattoos. Show their nipples beneath their shirts. Dance, sing, stride like racehorses around tartan tracks. Who look right through him as if he is the air they breathe.