A Single Shot

She can’t—or won’t—even talk. He worries what her parents will surmise of her condition, let alone the law, which he doesn’t even consider calling. She is his only witness to what has occurred and she looks at him with the same blank stare as she does the half-headless cadaver on John’s deck. He puts her in the front seat of the pickup and drives to her house, to find no one home. He continues directly to the hospital in town, stopping the truck in front of the locked red emergency-room door. He jumps out, hurries round to the passenger side, and helps Abbie down. After walking her over to the door, he pushes the call button and, before running back to his truck, says, “Just say to ’em you need tendin’, Abbie. You’ll be all right!”

The few people he sees on his way back out of town look like rail-thin coyotes circling a kill. He drives the back way up Hollenbachs’ mountain. Halfway to the top, he turns left onto Carter Sey’s old rock-infested lumber road. After a while the terrain flattens out into a field of saw grass and white birch widely spaced enough to drive the pickup between. The earth gets gradually softer and damper beneath the truck’s wheels. A pair of ducks fly overhead. He can smell water. Now he can hear it. Finally he can see it, a small stream trickling off to his right. He fears the pickup will mire down. He parks it on a dry plateau behind a high field of weeds, gets out, and follows the cascading water upward to its source.

He sits on the shore, where as a boy he had sat with his father and watched a loon swim underwater the length of the pond. On its sky-blue surface, lily pads are pandemic. Frogs here are huge and have baritone croaks. His father said this is because they are old, retired frogs. Fish sporadically jump. John gives them scores, one to ten, for height and splash. Hours pass. His right arm so pains him he threatens several times to kill it. He condemns to hell his missing finger. He blocks from his mind all thoughts but those relating to his corporeal self. His hurt. His mutilation. The odd way that his four remaining fingers will suddenly jump of their own accord. Other thoughts hurt too much to think about.

Darkness falls. He listens to a hoot owl and watches a fox and two deer come to the pond and drink. The new moon is a wisp of itself. He grows light-headed and tired. He fears his hand is infected and will become gangrenous. He tries and fails to recall for pain an old Indian recipe—something made of mud and a certain kind of crushed leaf. Like a wounded animal, he retreats several feet into the woods, crawls beneath an upturned stump, and sleeps.

He dreams of fire, acres of orange flames high as the trees they devour. A conflagration, pushed by a strong wind. An entire mountainside going up like a Roman candle. A burning that wipes out plants, animals, people; fouls the air with its breath; raises the earth; turns flesh to smoke and bones to ash; that spares no life, large or small. In the blaze’s aftermath, on God’s charred field, lies only dead silence. A dog doesn’t bay. A bird doesn’t chirp. A breath isn’t breathed. On this hardpan, a piss stream would emanate like rifle shots, but there is nothing. Only mute souls in this graveyard, until from the black skeletal remains of a pine break comes a barely audible rustling. Then footsteps, like the harsh popping of virgin snow. Now a buck’s snort, loud as a trumpet blast, and life’s horror begins anew….

SATURDAY

HE WAKES feverish in the deep woods, half buried beneath the roots of a giant upturned oak. Did he hear voices talking? He’s not sure. He quietly lies there, inhaling the smell of rich humus and rot that makes him think of an exhumed grave. Only a narrow shaft of sunlight penetrates this cool, dark cocoon in which tortured horseflies twist in a brown spider’s web and where slugs and beetles are riveted to the decaying walls. The throb in his hand is a reminder of pain’s continuum.

He slowly rolls toward the entrance, unintentionally applying pressure to his injury. The pain is searing. He envisions a pair of tongs gripping his skin below the stub and tearing upward to his shoulder. He bites his lip so as not to scream. Now, beyond the enclosure, sounds splashing water.

John tentatively pokes his head through the opening. Several wood ticks and a mole scurry away. He blinks in the sudden midday glare that reflects harshest off the pond fifty feet to his left. A woman’s head floats atop the water. Then John understands her body is swimming beneath it. Her hair is wavy and long and trails her skull like a tangle of black snakes. A pair of wood ducks float a few feet behind her as if she is one of them.