A Single Shot

John reaches down and jerks open the driver-side door. Fresh air enters like a shout. He stumbles into it, voraciously hungry all of a sudden. He walks over to the boulder, around the base of which grow Saint-John’s-wort and raspberry bushes, and starts foraging for berries. A cottontail darts out of the thicket and the ground there is rife with deer and bear droppings.

John strips off his sweat-drenched shirt, twists it into a two-cornered sack, and tosses the picked berries into it. When it’s full, he sits down with his back to the truck and eats what he’s picked, once snarling at a chipmunk that wanders too close to his cache. Nothing in his recent memory has tasted better. When the shirt is empty, he fills and empties it again, remembering that he has not eaten in nearly twenty-four hours. Afterwards, partially sated, he climbs to the top of the boulder and gazes several hundred yards down through the trees to where his half-obscured trailer sits. His hunter’s eye spots nothing amiss, but his brain is no more convinced now than it was hours before when he drove up the road in the fading dark.

Standing again on the floor of dogbane and clover, he is overcome by the enormity of his life’s upheaval. He longs to be an anonymous part of the mountain’s wildlife. Another nonhumanoid who at the merest whiff of man’s odious stink retreats deep into the woods. He falls, trembling, to his knees. Inspiring his own foul-smelling exhalations, he sees his father, even while breathing death’s rattle, mumbling, “Weren’t no damn dog, tell ya. Was a wolf. A goddamn wolf!” What had he meant? No one in the family knew or had ever hazarded a guess. And Simon? While pulling the trigger on his life of excess, what enduring image had he tried to carry into the next world?

He lies flat on his back and stares up at a hole in the canopy of trees through which the sun peers, and imagines his former self sucked up into the cosmos through that corridor of light, leaving behind a flesh-and-bone shell free to be about anything.

He snarls, then reaches out with one hand and swats at the air. He unties his boots, kicks them off, stands up, and peels off his jeans and underpants. Naked, he feels freer than he had. Less encumbered by human plights. And stronger. He rakes his clawed hands through a patch of jewelweed. He bares his teeth and growls. He starts running a circle around the glade. In less than ten feet he trips on a root and pitches sideways into a briar thicket. He loudly curses. His stubbed toe hurts. So does his flesh where it is pierced by the needle-sharp balls. He feels foolish. And embarrassed. Two chattering squirrels seem to be laughing at him. He glances shiftily around to make sure no one else is. It takes him close to ten minutes painfully to extricate himself.

He quickly dresses, grabs the .45 out of the truck, and bushwhacks down through the woods to the edge of the mown field in which his trailer sits. He starts running in a semicrouch toward it. He is halfway there when, down the road, several blue jays start squawking. Then comes the sound of rapidly clopping hooves. John freezes. He is still searching for a place to hide when into the yard gallops a lathered-up Diablo, carrying Abbie Nobie.

“John Moon,” she calls out, reining the horse in. “Brought you a home-baked apple pie and three loaves of Momma’s oatmeal bread.”

John shoves the .45 into his belt and waves.

“Got something to put on it?”

“Peanut butter maybe.”

The horse shakes its head, spraying phlegm. “That all?”

“Ain’t shopped in a while.”

“Lucky for you I brought some sauerkraut and fresh-ground sausage.” She swings down from the horse. John nervously glances at the trailer. “Make ya a hoagie.”

“What?”

“For lunch.” She’s wearing blue jeans, riding boots, and a sleeveless black jersey that shows off her tanned, muscular arms. She’s too pretty for John to even think about. She unfastens a saddlebag from the girth. “Momma’s starting to worry you’re up here fading away to nothing.”

“I’m all right,” says John. He starts walking toward her, keeping one eye on the house.

“Never said you weren’t.” She tosses the saddlebag over her shoulder. “Like to have lunch with ya, is all.”

She drops the reins. Diablo puts its head down and starts to graze. John stops between Abbie and the trailer. He thinks maybe he sees something move behind the kitchen window. Then he’s not sure. Abbie looks at him and wrinkles her nose. “You need a bath, John Moon.”

John nods up the hill. “Was choppin’ wood yonder.”

“Where’s your truck?”

“Up there with it.”

“Whyn’t ya jump in the shower.”

“Huh?”

“While I make the hoagies.” She smiles and walks by him toward the trailer.