A Single Shot

“Who’s in here?” he whispers.

“I don’t know.” The woman gasps. The cigar drops from her mouth. “And I don’t fucking want to know.” One of her eyes looks like a clump of frog’s eggs. The other is half taken up by its dilated pupil. Her sweatsuit’s too tight. “I’m from Oklahoma. This shit’s all new to me. I ain’t had no breakfast, no coffee—I just got in last night.”

With his pistol John waves her back into her room.

“I gotta go breakfast,” she whines.

John walks toward her, vaguely aware that his life is spiraling downward from bad to worse, and against the descent, his own sense of powerlessness. A part of his mind, already faded, blinks off. He thinks if the whole world boils down to a person’s last view of it, his won’t be of the Oaks, but someone’s might. He’s three steps from the woman before she moves, then she does so hesitantly, backing into the room as if she’s forgotten something inside but not sure what. John follows her in, then quietly shuts the door.

The woman moans.

The air smells of cheap perfume over cheap detergent and cigar smoke. A faucet drips in the bathroom. In the center of the stained yellow rug lies a large, open suitcase. John reaches into it and picks up a pair of stockings and underpants. The woman’s mouth falls open. She keeps backing up until her knees hit the bed. She lets out a little groan and sits down. “What happened your eye?” asks John.

“My eye?”

“Are you blind in it?”

“A man…”

“What man?”

“Some guy in a bar where I was dancing…” She takes a deep breath like she’s having trouble breathing. John shoves the pistol into his belt. “I was a dancer…”

“A dancer?”

“You’re scaring me.”

“I ain’t tryin’ to.”

“You are, though.”

“I know it. Me too.”

The woman looks at him confusedly.

“Was you with your clothes off?”

“What?”

“Dancing?”

“Nobody’d pay me otherwise…”

John moves farther into the room. His balance seems affected. He has a feeling he’s listing to the right. The framed vase of flowers on the wall appears to get shorter and fatter as he looks at it. “It’s like when I shot the girl,” he says, barely aware of his own words. “We was all there.”

“What?”

“Her. The deer. Me.” He wads the underpants into a tight ball. “Who knows why? Just happened that way.”

The woman pants a little maniacally. John pictures in his mind a set of dull claws scratching at a smooth wall. He’s back in the quarry maybe, trying to scale its sheer sides. He thinks the woman’s probably a mother. Her drooping breasts and wide hips. Her disconsolate gaze. Her breathlessness. “A beer bottle.” She huffs. “Some guy…”

“What?” says John. He moves closer to her.

She half sobs, “My eye.”

“You cain’t see out it?”

She shakes her head.

“Can you see these?” John holds the wadded underpants out to the side of the woman’s bad eye. She doesn’t even try to look. She starts to cry hysterically. John leans down and claps a hand over her mouth, warm and moist as a hot sponge. In his mind he sees only the pointlessly scraping claws. “Shhh,” he whispers, bringing the underpants down and putting them where his spit-damp hand had been. “Shhh. This ain’t gon’ hurt you much. And that’s a promise.”

Her blond wig falls off. John carefully replaces it, as if later he might point to this small act as proof of something. He lays her in the bathtub and pulls shut the curtain. Before leaving her room, he hangs out the “Do Not Disturb” sign.

The sun is heating up. On John’s shoulders it rests like flesh warmer than his. Below him, last night’s moisture steams from the cracked parking lot, where a half-bald dog simultaneously laps and pisses into an oil-filmed puddle and four cars sit, all but one on the short side of the L. From the roof’s overhang, several filthy-looking pigeons coo. Laughter sounds down near the office and John watches two maids emerge from there and disappear around back.

He takes out the .45, again walks to room 229, and crouches next to the door’s keyhole. He hears what he did before, except now a soap opera plays and the gurgling sound has stopped. He is overcome by the same unbalanced sensation as earlier in the woman’s room. He thinks of Simon Breedlove, the closest person to a father he still has, and of his wife and son, whom he experiences now as bodiless dreams from which he has awakened desiring to reenter while sadly realizing he can’t. He decides he will buy the boy a gift. A thing they can enjoy together. A replica of a farm maybe, with lifelike animals that neigh, moo, or oink. Then, suddenly remembering about the money, he thinks, “Why not buy him a real horse, cow, and pig?” A phone begins to ring in the room, abruptly returning John to the present. Ten times it rings, then stops.

John stands up. He knocks on the door. No one answers. John backs up a step and lifts his foot to his waist. He kicks in the door and rushes in after it.