A Single Shot

“I come back East to visit my sister in Boston but couldn’t find her. Somebody there said maybe she’s dead.” She reaches into her sweats for a Tiparillo, places it between her lips, and lights it. “What I seen a’ the East, I could easily forget.”

Her makeup is smeared and now John sees that it had been partly used to conceal a whirligig-shaped scar on the cheek below her bad eye. “How much would ya need?”

“Couple hundred—three, make it—for food ’n all.” She sucks on the cigar, then rolls the smoke out over her tongue. “But you gotta let me take a shower first and change.”

John frowns at her.

“I ain’t gon’ go out in public smelling like piss.”

“You wouldn’t say nothing?”

“Who’d want to hear ’bout it out in Enid?”

John scratches an ear. “Five minutes,” he says.

The woman stands up and walks toward the bathroom. John gets up and follows her. She shuts the bathroom door in his face. A minute later, when the water starts running, he steps inside and leans against the sink. From behind the drawn curtain, Florence lists what she hates most about the Northeast—the weather, people’s lack of manners, too many cars and overweight men, a closed-in feeling she can’t pinpoint, the price of marijuana, beer, and food. When the water stops running, John hands her in a towel and her blond wig. A few moments after, wearing the wig and with the towel snugly wrapped around her, she pulls back the curtain and steps out. Her legs and shoulders are pale white, smooth, and unblemished, as if they are fifteen years younger than her face.

In less than ten minutes, she’s dressed, has put on fresh makeup and packed all her belongings. They walk down the back stairs to the rear parking lot and over to John’s truck. John opens the passenger door and waits for Florence to get in. He shows her his gun and tells her not to move, call out, or honk the horn. She says she wouldn’t anyway. She wants to get back to Enid. John shuts her door, walks the fifty feet over to the lobby’s rear entrance, opens it, sticks his head inside, and tells Skinny Leak, “Weren’t nobody home.”

Leak glances up from the set and shrugs. John pulls out his wallet, takes from it one of the hundred-dollar bills he had removed this morning from the sugar jar, and lays it on the counter where the old man can reach it. “If he asks—or anybody else—I weren’t never here.”

Leak sticks out a bony hand. He picks up the bill, pockets it, and hisses. “You’s one the Fitch boys, ain’t ya?”

John leaves without saying.

The bus station is on the south side of town in the first floor of a retired glue factory. Circled by a high metal fence, the terminal parking lot is potholed dirt. Two buses sit in it. Another, half full of passengers, idles in front of the depot. John parks the truck, then walks with Florence inside and asks the man selling tickets at the counter where the idling bus is headed to. The man says Buffalo.

“That west a’ here?” John asks.

The man says it is.

Florence says, “I need to go to Enid, Oklahoma.”

The man sneers like going to Enid, Oklahoma, is to him a personal insult. From a shelf below his waist, he picks up a little book, opens it, and starts tracing through the schedule with an index finger. After a few minutes, he says, “I can sell you a ticket there, but you’ll have to get off in Buffalo, wait five hours, then change buses.”

“What’m I gon’ do for five hours in Buffalo, New York?” asks Florence.

“I don’t know,” the man tells her. “I’ve never been there.”

“Give me the ticket,” says John.

“This is a real hardship,” Florence whispers to him.

Ignoring her, John pays for the ticket. Handing it to him, the man smiles sarcastically and informs them they’ve got fifteen minutes to say their goodbyes. Florence asks if there’s smoking on the bus. The ticket seller says there isn’t.

“Not even in the can?” asks Florence.

“Nowhere on the vehicle,” the man tells her smugly.

Florence curses and says she needs a smoke now. She and John walk over to the benches against the far wall and sit down across from a large bulletin board with posters of wanted and missing people on it. There’s no windows in the station. The stagnant air is hot and smells like body odor and the bad stink floating out one of the open john doors next to them. Florence lights up one of her little cigars. When she exhales, the smoke unwaveringly floats up to the ceiling, where it merges with an already thick, hovering cloud of it. She tells John again that taking such a roundabout route on a bus that doesn’t allow smoking is a real hardship for her. Then she says she’ll need more than three hundred dollars to make sure she gets to Enid all right. John asks her how much more.

“Two more ought to do it,” she says. “Five, altogether.”

“You mean, five hundred?” asks John, who has left in his wallet, from what he took from the sugar jar, slightly over eight hundred dollars.

“No, dummy. Five million!” She chuckles derisively. “Hand it over.”

“I ain’t got that much,” says John.