A Single Shot

He takes the less-traveled back river road out of town, passing by the old feed mill, closed nearly a decade now, where once a week he used to come with his father in their old flatbed truck. John remembers Robert Moon always opening each sack of grain, sniffing and running his fingers through the cool, sweet-smelling oat and barley mix to make sure he was getting what he paid for, and the prideful feeling when one day that task was turned over to John. He thinks of the dozens of farmers they used to meet and converse with at the mill, most of whom, like him and his father, now aren’t, and suddenly John understands that whoever is to be blamed for his pitiful state, it is not his father.

Staring to his left at the serpentine course of the river wandering through mostly abandoned pastureland and virgin forest, he thinks of his wife and son, as far away from him as the rest of the life he lived before the dead girl, though he is thankful they are safe. He is not surprised—nor even really angry—that Moira has a boyfriend, though his heart aches with his own failure to be what she had wanted him to be and with the knowledge that she believes his very presence would be poisonous to their son. An odd, ugly duck Daggard Pitt had called him, as if John were the same as Obadiah Cornish or the rest of his down-and-out clients. He shivers at the memory of how he had nearly killed the lawyer—who maybe deserved it. He hadn’t, though, and that’s a thought worth holding on to.

But who had killed Obadiah Cornish? Waylon, maybe, after having discovered that Cornish—with his kidnapping bluff—was trying to recover the money without him? Or was it Simon Breedlove? But why? What was his connection with the other two? And where had the money come from? John remembers how Ira and Molly Hollenbach had been cut up and their throats slit, just as the Hen had been. Too many bad people in the world. Too many unanswerable questions.

He takes out the dead girl’s picture and, driving with one hand, unfolds it on the steering wheel. She is five feet six inches tall, weighs one hundred eighteen pounds, likes motorcycle riding, outdoor sports, and is daughter to Bob and Melanie Banes, whose address and phone number appear beneath the words “Please help us find our daughter.” The picture, he thinks, doesn’t do her justice. She looks better with her hair behind her ears and wearing a little makeup, as in the Polaroids he took. He folds the poster and puts it in his pocket again, then abruptly pulls the truck off the road. He drives several hundred yards into an overgrown pasture of goldenrod and hawkweed and parks behind an abandoned bridge stanchion fifty feet above the river.

When he gets out, his limbs are rubbery and soft. To keep from falling over, he leans back against the crumbling concrete stanchion, then slowly sits down. The rest of the bridge, except for a similarly decrepit abutment on the far side of the water, is missing. The field before him is hip-high. Past it, the water is low and barely moving. A blue heron stands statuesquely at its edge. Where it still peeks above the horizon, the sun is blood red. Two hawks circle beneath it. John closes his eyes. His brain feels like mush sprinkled with raisins, in an indiscernible mass his few discernible thoughts.

His half-conscious imaginings become increasingly bizarre, though he doesn’t recognize them as such. It strikes him that Waylon is not flesh and blood, but a devilish specter, always hauntingly present, but seldom seen. Ingrid Banes, from Rock Gap, Pennsylvania, appears before him as a winged messenger carrying God’s personal agenda for John, but His handwriting’s illegible. John falls asleep.

He wakes beneath a cloudless sky breached by stars. The windless air is pleasantly warm. A symphony of frogs and peepers plays. The field’s flowered scent is like that from a greenhouse. A coyote bays somewhere on the mountain on the other side of the road, and in a tree by the river an owl hoots. John stretches his limbs, perfectly at ease in this world. He’s forgotten exactly where he is or how he got here or what he’d dreamed about. Until he remembers, he is just happy to be alive.

A thin mist covers the narrow road that curls like a looped rope along the east side of the river before crossing over a metal bridge five miles below the hollow where John lives. The truck’s headlights pierce the mist-layered darkness for a hundred feet, giving objects a haloed appearance. He drives slowly, his arm out the window, smelling the night and half wishing he could vanish into it.