A Single Shot

As he drives back down the lumber road to where it intersects with the cleared swath leading over the mountain to the Nobie side of the preserve, his behavior is no longer determined, if ever it was, by deliberate thought. He is the artist striving to complete a mosaic for which no blueprint exists. Not that he is acting aimlessly. On the contrary. Each of his actions, like a domino, follows by rote the act preceding it.

Barely wider than the pickup, the steep path through a stand of white pine said to be among the oldest in the state is not intended for vehicles. Several times he has to stop and get out to drag fallen trees from the road. Even with four-wheel drive and all-terrain tires, the truck gets hung up in a creek bed. Next to the water lies a mound of bear scat so fresh it steams. John listens for the bear, but can’t hear it. With his one good arm, it takes him half an hour to wedge enough flat rocks under the pickup’s tires to free it.

Beneath the weald’s dense canopy, headed for the mountaintop, he is like an exhausted homeward-bound horse spurred on by a single thought—the piercing eye of the mounted woman in Hidden Pond: in his mind it becomes the omniscient stare of Ingrid Banes, to whom he has given his solemn oath not to abandon her. Though his mind is not altruistically pure. What if the law discovers her in his freezer? Far better for him that they find her someplace else or not at all. And if she is found already? He tries not to think about it. Either way, they will be out combing the woods for him. Possibly they are waiting for him even now at the trailer.

At the top of the mountain, the forest tunnel empties into a rolling plain where, before the Conservancy requisitioned it, John’s father and grandfather grazed the few sheep they owned. The brown blanket of knee-high grass is stained purple and yellow by Indian paintbrush, goldenrod, and trefoil. Up here, Simon Breedlove and John once saw a mountain lion, though they’re supposedly extinct this far east. They were sitting in a deer stand in the pines when it loped through the snow—a huge cat—twenty feet from them. It was like seeing God’s light. For the rest of the day, they didn’t want to shoot anything. They kept looking at each other and shaking their heads. Then Simon told John about the only girl he ever loved, Ling something or other, a Vietnamese girl whom, Simon said, if she hadn’t stepped on a land mine and been killed, he would have married and had about a dozen babies with. The memory causes in John a sharp pang of grief for his friend. No one, he thinks, ever knows anyone else’s real story.

He drives across the field to the east edge of the pines, where, six days before, with the sound of trodden branches, his nightmare began. Turning right and skirting the woods for another mile or so would bring him to the dirt road heading down the west side of the mountain to the hollow. Instead, he veers left several hundred yards before easing the truck through a narrow opening in the trees that leads to a half acre of void forest razed by a lightning fire. Blurred by a thin layer of clouds, the sun’s light casts a greasy veneer on this dead hole striving to be reborn. The few sounds are magnified—a hollow wind whistling through the charred remains, small animals rifling the new growth, the chirps of passing birds finding few trees to land in. John pulls the pickup into an abrupt swale concealed on either side by yarrow and briars, turns off the engine, grabs the .308 and the money sack, gets out, and scrambles up the steep embankment to the forest floor.

He carries the rifle over his right shoulder, the money sack over his left. His footsteps make a crunching sound on the charred earth. As he exits the fire zone, his pain mysteriously subsides. Suddenly he is aware only of an erratic, surgy pulse at the end of his right arm and, emanating from his torso, a moist heat like the internal steam from a heap of corn silage. He looks down at the blood-soaked bandage, beneath which his injured hand, hanging like a butchered loin by his side, is purply and fat. For maybe five minutes, his mental state is close to euphoric. Then the pain comes back. And he begins to sweat. By the time he steps from the far side of the forest into the scrub pasture a half mile above the trailer, his whole body is drenched.

He drops the money sack and sits down on a rock. Through the scope of the .308 he eyes the trailer below. Everything looks the same as it did, except from this high up he can’t tell if Waylon’s body is still on the deck. There are no vehicles in the drive and no signs of life but for two hawks circling above the structure. It strikes him that he has spent most of the last six days sneaking into or out of places. He thinks of his father, who always walked upright, chin jutted out, into a room. “Must be the world one day just twisted under him,” thinks John, “like it can to anybody. Weren’t nothing he could do, probably.”