A Single Shot

Fearing someone might drive up the road and spot him, he takes the same route back up the mountain as he did coming down. Fueled by adrenaline and a belief that from fate his own feebleness cannot swerve him, he pulls the heavy toboggan with his good hand, allowing the other to swing loosely by his side. Over the grassy field leading to the woods, the sled’s slick bottom passes unrestrainedly. The pollen is thick in the air. Several times, John stops to catch his breath or sneeze.

Entering the forest, he is struck by the unusually large number of crows and grackles perched or circling above him. Or else he is suddenly more attuned to their presence. There are seemingly hundreds of the birds, all of them black as night. Their cacophony grates on his ears. Though the toboggan still slides with relative ease over the needle-and-leaf floor, the going is slower. In the eighty-plus-degree heat, the cadaver, beneath its tarpaulin, melts more rapidly. Soon the increasingly flaccid flesh begins shifting side to side, making the job of tugging it harder. Thawed some, the half-rotten corpse again exhales its gone smell. John temporarily engages himself in searching for a nonblack bird.

At the start of the steep grade leading to the pines, the number and size of rocks multiply. John’s upward course becomes more serpentine, and the work intensely taxing. He has trouble keeping his feet beneath him. Every five yards or so, he falls to his knees. Finally, instead of standing up again, he loops the lead rope around his shoulders and, with his three functional limbs, scratches and crawls his way toward the top.

His hand lands on a nest of fire ants. Abruptly rearing back from their bites, he hears behind him a distinct crack. He turns around and the cadaver, now half unveiled beneath the tarpaulin, is sitting upright. John watches its upper torso, the spine completely severed, creakily ease backward until the dead girl is supine on the sled, staring straight up at the sky. A crow drops down and hovers above the body. John shoos it away. He thinks what awful things happen to flesh once it’s dead. More awful even than when it’s alive.

It takes him another half an hour to reach the scrub pasture where the money is stashed. Gasping for air, the rope still circling him like a cinch, he sits down on the rock concealing the sack. Hanging half off the sled, the cadaver, where it has banged against impediments on its upward journey, is scuffed and bruised. One of its eyes, half-dislodged, peers at an impossible angle behind it where two of its teeth must lie. In a way that he can’t describe, John, while eyeing the body, is struck by the irony in mankind’s vaingloriousness, that day-to-day conceit which, like air from a puffball, is instantly expunged by death.

After retrieving the sack, he tucks it, alongside the shovel, between the dead girl’s legs, then once more pulls her upper torso forward, folding her like a wallet over the money. He loops the rope twice around the corpse so it won’t flop backward again, re-covers it with the tarpaulin, and heads into the pines. On the flat terrain, he doesn’t have to work so hard. He has more time to think and feel his pain, now more like a general sickness infecting his body. One minute he is hot. The next, cold. In between, he has surges of energy.

He begins to suspect that he is being followed by the birds. Perched high in the canopy, they chatter among themselves as if making plans. One will occasionally swoop a few feet above his head, stridently squawking. To avoid thinking about them, John converses with the dead girl. He tells her in these woods is where their paths began to coincide. He points to the thistle patch behind which he first saw the dead buck’s antlers as the spot where her death was first assigned to him. He explains to her how he chased the deer for miles before it limped, as if preordained, into the quarry. Beneath these pines, he tells her, is a nice place to be buried. There’s plenty of shade, a gentle stream nearby, and it’s not far from a good view of the valley. Here is where he would be buried, he says, if the state would allow it.

Her response is to plant a snapshot of her parents in his head, as if she is demanding to know why he is hiding her from them. John refuses to answer. Instead, he tells her of his belief, recently arrived at, that souls are liberated by the earth. That once she is in the ground, she will be free to move easier than the wind. She can visit her parents or, if she hasn’t already, go to Hawaii. He realizes that he is talking quite loud, that maybe the fever is causing him to rave. The crows and grackles are yelling back at him. Suddenly he is angry at the dead girl for making him see that he is as much a coward as most of mankind. He stops walking and puts the back of his hand to his forehead. It feels like room-temperature beef. “You’re dead and I ain’t,” he tells her, “and I don’t want to go to jail, all right?”

She doesn’t answer.