A Single Shot

He enters a forest of virgin pine. Inside, it’s dark and steamy. John can’t see his feet for the mist. The canopy leaks water. Needles, cones, dislodged branches drop all around him. He stumbles into an elderberry thicket. Before finding his way out, he fills his hat with the sweet fruit. On the far side, he sits on a tree stump and eats what he’s picked. Perched overhead, a pair of grackles angrily squawk at him. He watches a pileated woodpecker drill for bugs in a rotten stump. Idly he wonders if, in these mountains, he might forever elude his pursuers. He knows he could survive. And what of his current life would he miss? His wife, who is trying to divorce him? His son, who cries at the sight of him? Yes. He would miss them both, but that would be all he would miss, and they might be better off without him.

Past the forest, he turns right again. Now several hundred yards beyond the quarry, he walks parallel to it. He crosses over a small stream, made bigger by the rain, then quickly skirts the outer edge of Quentin’s swamp, where the mosquitoes and black flies are thick, passes through an older stand of birch, oak, and elm, the last half-devoured by caterpillars, and emerges on the back side of the hill leading to the cliffs above the quarry. He walks along the spine of the wooded hill, undergrown with field grass, hawkweed, and patches of soft moss, until he reaches the quarry’s upper lip, where he lies down on his stomach between two mountain-laurel bushes, places the 12-gauge on the ground next to him, and through binoculars gazes a hundred feet down into the rock bowl.

Not exactly sure what he is looking for or how to react if he sees something unusual, he peers behind the bushes and into the crevices in the quarry walls. Everything looks the same as it did three days before, except the stone is water-stained, the plastic top of the lean-to sags beneath the recent rain, and John doesn’t remember if he left the pick and shovel lying, as they are now, in the entrance to the cave or standing next to it.

He lets the binoculars dangle from his neck and, delaying the inevitable for close to an hour, stares with his naked eyes into the quarry. He curses himself for being so stupid as to have left the body aboveground, even temporarily, with a slug from his gun in it and covered with his fingerprints. Then he remembers that when he should have buried the girl the thought felt like killing her all over again. Doing so now will be even harder, but he must. This time he’ll keep her photograph and personal items so that when she is lost to the rest of the world she won’t be to him. The money is a separate issue. It had been no more hers than John’s, Waylon’s, Obadiah Cornish’s, or whoever else might know of its existence. Despairingly John thinks again of Simon Breedlove showing up in the middle of the night, asking after Mutt, and of his feeling that morning that the trailer had been searched.

He walks the two hundred yards around the rim to the west edge of the bowl, where he stops and through the binoculars gazes down the mountain toward Hollenbachs’. The farm is hidden around a sharp bend a mile below, though John can see a short stretch of the rock-infested dirt road winding from there up to the quarry. He puts the binoculars away, then picks his way down the front side of the slope to where the cliff ends in less than a ten-foot drop near the quarry’s entrance. The road is puddled and muddy. Any tire tracks have been obliterated.

His ingress commences a cacophony of caws and squawks. To his left, a Scotch pine shimmers and bounces beneath the weight of hundreds of crows that have gathered there to escape from the storm. Sweeping his eyes and the shotgun left-to-right, John feels an edgy, life-lived-in-a-second adrenaline tug that must be what soldiers feel when going into battle. Barely glancing at the patch of nettles behind which he shot the girl, he walks straight for the cave, stopping before he gets there next to the pond, which is roily and brown from the recent rain. There is no sign of the deer carcass. No footprints mar the bank, though mostly it’s rock, and where it isn’t, the rain would have washed them away.

John wishes he were a smoker so that he could sit and slowly smoke a cigarette before going farther. He pulls out his water bottle, drinks, then puts the bottle away. The drizzle is now a mist more than a rain. Heavy, post-storm air covers the bowl like a warm, drenched blanket. John’s sweat smells of beer. He considers removing his poncho, but doesn’t want to carry it. The cave’s entrance is mostly fog-filled. Approaching it, John wonders if the cadaver will be at all decomposed.

He picks up the shovel and pick, leans them and his shotgun against the quarry wall, then pulls off his pack, takes out his flashlight, and lays the pack on the ground.