A Single Shot

John steps on a slick spot in the lawn and his feet go out from under him. Exhaling a muffled grunt, he lands with a dull thump in the half-foot-high grass, then lies ten feet from the Cadillac, holding his breath, waiting to see if the noise has roused anyone in the house. Visible in the flickering shaft of light half-illuminating the interior of the car is the silvery reflection of keys dangling in the ignition and a white, shearling-covered seat. To his left, the back door to the cabin is ajar. Suddenly something bursts through the opening into the moonlit semiblackness between John and the building, charges noisily across it, and slams, snorting, into John’s chest.

John punches the thing. Emitting a manic squeal, it backs off, then charges again; short-legged and bristly, its muscular body rams like a torpedo into John’s ribs.

“Git!” hisses John, hammering the hard torso with his fists.

The beast runs off a few feet. John sees framed in a patch of moonlight, its blush-colored hide spotted on its head and neck by dark, moist blotches as if it’s had a pail of paint thrown at it, a boxer-sized pig. He looks down at his hands. They are smeared with the same wet, sticky substance as that marring the pig. He smells his fingers, then touches them to his tongue. They taste sweet. Like molasses. He jumps to his feet. Throatily grunting, the pig scampers off toward the barn, its front door, John now sees, standing wide open.

He leans down and wipes his hands on the lawn. He looks at the house again. The dark shape of another pig darts out through the door. Releasing chortled grunts, the night-shrouded swine beats a grass-shivering path through the unmowed lawn toward the barn. His pulse hammering a staccato in his ears, John quickly strides over to the front seat of the Cadillac, in which an Albany banker and his teenage girlfriend had died before Simon salvaged it from a junkyard, restored its body, and gave it a V-8 engine from a rusted-out Ford Bronco. Could he have imagined seeing it parked that afternoon at the Oaks? wonders John.

The car is in drive, as if someone had simply pulled it up as close to the cabin as he could, turned it off, pushed open the driver-side door, and, drunk, injured, or in a hurry, entered through the back of the house. The floor on the passenger side is dotted with empty beer cans, cardboard fast-food containers, a coiled rope, several hand tools. An unwound cassette dangles from a corner of the open glove box. The shearling smells like beer. On it lies a woman’s sweater, sandals, and a half-zipped gym bag, in which John finds one of Simon’s hand-carved flutes, capable, in Simon’s hands, of playing notes dreamy, sad, or that can transport your mind to a place a thousand miles away.

Now come to John more images of Simon, at about John’s age, showing John how to whistle dozens of birdcalls, how to reassemble a rod-shot tractor engine, cut out a breeched calf without killing its mother, get downwind from a deer when trailing it, how to carve just about anything from a stick of dead wood. Rifling through the gym bag of clothes and toiletries, John remembers his father once saying of Simon—after he’d punched out that bull, maybe, or during one of his vanishing acts—“If that one were an ocean I’d take a boat clear crosst it but bet your ass I’d never swim in it.”

He finds beneath the clothes more plastic-wrapped tools—various-sized picks, screwdrivers, wrenches, a hand drill. John wonders if they are burglar’s tools. Then he remembers Simon’s penchant for carrying tools, large and small, in his vehicles. Tools are an obsession with him. For lack of the proper tool, he once told John, a man might be stranded in a snowstorm, bleed to death, suffocate in an airless, locked room. John finds wrapped in a T-shirt and cushioned by a leather sheath a large hunting knife. He removes the sheath. The knife’s blade is shiny and sharp. John remembers when Simon purchased the knife at a sporting-goods store in Ralston and how, after using it for anything—even to open an envelope—he meticulously cleans and polishes its blade and handle with a damp rag. Even if the knife had slashed Obadiah Cornish’s throat, thinks John, the Hen’s blood would not be on it.