A Single Shot

He crouches down, puts his arms beneath the girl’s knees and chest, and lifts her off the bed. Her unbending weight is staggering. That close to his nose, the smell nearly gags him. He labors with her over to the bedroom door, then down the corridor to the top of the basement stairs, where, after leaning her against the wall to switch on the light, he carts her down-cellar and over to the stand-up freezer, the door to which is open, its melting contents scattered on the floor. The compartment is just five feet high. To get the cadaver inside, he vigorously bends and twists it for several minutes, until finally there is the sharp snap of breaking bone and the body folds half-inward from the waist. John pushes it to the back wall, then stacks around and in front of it pieces of the butchered deer and snake so that, when he’s done, what is visible of the cadaver is nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the meat.

Upstairs, he wraps the girl’s old clothes, the bloody sheets and towels, the note, and the rubber gloves in the plastic strip, then takes the plastic out to the incinerator and burns it. He hurls the slug deep into the woods. He enters the woodshed. His tools are on the floor among garden mulch and fertilizer from several sliced-open sacks and rock salt from a tipped-over fifty-pound barrel. He shovels the mulch and fertilizer into trash bins and the rock salt back into the barrel, then rearranges the tools exactly as they had been.

He goes back outside and crawls beneath the shed, where the sack is still attached to the fourth beam. He unties it, carries it into the trailer, dumps the money on the floor, and tries to count it, but after reaching eighty thousand dollars loses his place. He is too tired to start over. He thinks that even if he were to give the money back to the thieves, they would kill him, especially if it came from Ira Hollenbach’s. And if he handed it over to the law, he would implicate himself in at least one death. He puts the money back in the sack, carries it outside, and ties it beneath the truck bed, between the axle and one wheel.

He spends over two hours cleaning up the trailer, repairing what he can, and putting most of his and Moira’s belongings back where they had been. With the dead girl there, he thinks he won’t sleep, but he does. He turns on the television set, lies on the couch, and for less than five minutes watches the horizontally distorted images of a man shooting a pistol at a giant fly.

THURSDAY

The unrestful dead, those who have not by their loved ones been laid to earthly rest, inhabit the trees, bushes, birds, and animals of the mountainside. Their eyes are the sun and moon; when one shuts, the other opens. Their words are the stars. Their sadness the clouds. Their fingers the wind. They watch, talk, and touch, but are not felt by the living…

HE WAKES, in a cold sweat, to the sound of shattering glass. Sensing another’s presence, he lies there in the still-dark morning anticipating a gunshot, a black shadow, or the touch of cold steel against his neck, but hears only the tick of the living-room clock and, through the screened windows, a light wind moving the trees.

Had he been hallucinating? Or dreaming? If he hadn’t, and in a second was killed, would he come face-to-face with the dead girl? Would she forgive him? Would her soul in the afterlife be as beautiful as her body in death? He pictures a place following life—a wood-paneled bar maybe, playing soft country music—where souls, good and bad, dance a few slow ones and reminisce before receiving their permanent assignments to heaven or hell. A place where life’s hatchet is buried and all drink to eternity. He remembers his father, reduced to skin and bones, after wordless weeks, rousing himself to scream at the visiting Pastor McLean, “Weren’t never your call, Reverend! Was mine! Now it’s His!”

An engine roars to life outside.

In one motion, he rolls off the couch and fumbles beneath it for the .45. Powerful lights intrude through the trailer’s back windows. The engine exhorts a labored whine. The lights get brighter. John grasps the gun, cocks it, and jumps up. The engine’s pitch ascends to a high-revved torque. “Son of a bitch’ll ram the trailer!” thinks John.

He dashes away from the sound toward the front deck door. He’s three-quarters there when the bottom of his bare foot feels as if it’s been shot. He goes down. Behind him, the lights blink off. The engine upshifts, reaches a crescendo, then slowly recedes.