A Single Shot

Through the broken glass of the deck door, John watches the outline of the vehicle, darker even than the surrounding dark, vanish down the hollow road.

Panting heavily, he gets to his knees. He fumbles for the wall switch and turns on the light. Glass from the door’s middle panel lies in fragments on the linoleum floor. A piece of it has lodged in his foot, which is bleeding.

He stands up, then, trailing blood, tiptoes through the glass and down the hall to the bathroom, where he gets a towel, tweezers, gauze, waterproof tape, and a bottle of peroxide. He brings everything back to the couch, sits down, and, mumbling a string of pained curses, with the tweezers pokes around in the wound for the glass. His foot trembles. So do his hands. He laughs giddily from pain and at his shaking extremities, then loudly commands himself to shut up and act like a man. Soon he finds the glass, a half-a-peanut-sized chunk, and pulls it out. He pours peroxide on the towel and, wincing, cleans the wound, which is not very deep, then tapes gauze around it.

Afterwards, he is drenched in sweat. His heart beats loud in his ears. He pinches the glass chunk in the tweezers, holds it up to the light, and stares at it. He imagines himself as the glass, the dead girl his wound, and Waylon, Obadiah Cornish—and maybe Simon Breedlove—the tweezers. Aloud, he asks the girl how she had ever fallen for a guy like Waylon, who obviously grieved more for his lost money than for her. He gets mad thinking about it and tells her so. “Look how he disrespected your body and even when you was alive made you throw out your history like it didn’t matter!”

He places the glass chunk on the coffee table, then leans back against the couch, and, gazing at the blank television set, remembers it playing when he fell asleep. He leans forward and sees that the set is still turned on and plugged in. “Ain’t that great? Along with the rest of it, the fuckin’ tube is shot!” Then, lowering his voice, he tells the girl, “This Waylon guy’s a loser. You should never a’ run off with him in the first place, then you w’udn’t a’ been in the quarry and ’id still be alive and I w’udn’t be respons’ble for ya!”

He straightens up, leans forward, puts on his socks and boots, then gets up, goes into the kitchen, and makes a pot of coffee. He turns on the deck light. The sky is starting to lighten some. The fog is still thick. In places, it’s as high as the trees. From the upper pasture comes the invisible mooing and bell-jangling of Nobie’s herd. Any minute will sound his hollow shout. John thinks of Abbie Nobie and her empowerment theory. “I’d guess she’s about the same age as you,” he tells the dead girl. “She worries after me. Reckon she thinks I’ve become like a hermit without Moira. When Nolan was here, she used to come up and beg Moira to hold him and sometimes Moira would call her ’count of Nolan was colicky and Abbie was so good at gettin’ him to stop crying. Moira said she’s got a love in her heart and the kid could feel it.”

From the kitchen closet he takes the broom and dustpan, then carries them over to the deck doorway, lays the dustpan on the counter, and starts sweeping up the glass. “Long’s we got the money,” he tells the girl, “I guess they won’t kill me.” He sweeps out from beneath the table, along with several small chunks of glass, a fist-sized stone that is wrapped in yellow paper and circled by a rubber band. John kneels down, picks up the stone, and removes the paper. Ink writing appears on one side. John smooths it out on the floor and reads:

Two eyes fer an eye. Two teeth fer a tooth. We gut your wife, murdrer. We gut your kid. Git the package the Hen. Or Bang! Bang!

P.S. Why don’t ya call the law? Hah. Hah.

Suddenly he is aware of his own mental denseness, of his intellectual shortcomings. His stupidity looms like a brick wall between uncentered anger and thought. He tries to remember ever getting an A in school for anything but gym, and can’t. The unfairness of the world hangs before his unconscious gaze like a grotesque masterpiece.

Beneath him at the kitchen table, his legs hop up and down. His hands shake. His vision is marred by floating cells. Adrenaline courses like a drug through him. He can’t sit still, yet his energy is unfocused. He jumps up, runs over to the gun rack, removes every weapon and shell box, then sits down on the living-room floor, tests the mechanism of each gun, looks down its barrel to see that it’s clean, then loads it. He cocks the Winchester thirty-aught-six and returns it to the rack. Then he puts the .45 in his belt, the 12-gauge in a cabinet next to the refrigerator, the .22 pistol behind the bathroom toilet, the .30-30 Greener beneath his bed, and the 16-gauge behind the basement freezer.