A Single Shot

Again he descends into the grave. He has no idea for how long. Time is like recycled water rising and falling, and John dead wood on its surface. Even his physical distress isn’t reliable; like all human conditions, it can’t maintain its intensity. His pain loses its sharp edge and becomes merely monotonous. Periodic pangs, twinges, and abnormalities remind him he is unhealthily alive. When he spits or swallows, his swollen tongue feels like a live fish wriggling in his mouth. A loud throbbing sound fills his ears. His sweat tastes like bitter almonds. He urinates a burning, dark yellow froth into the bottom of the grave. Twice more he thinks he hears voices and maybe branches cracking at ground level, but, after crawling out to see, spots nothing amiss. The third time, he doesn’t even bother to look; recalling his dying father’s hallucinatory wolf, he dismisses the sounds as audible phantasy.

Beyond a certain depth, his one hand can barely heft to the lip of the hole an empty shovel, let alone a dirt-loaded one. His efforts prove fruitless. Abruptly dropping the tool, he gets down on his knees and begins scooping up single handfuls of soil, then tossing them out of the grave. At some point during these labors, he becomes convinced that a carnivorous animal is trying to exit through his throat. Gagging, he tries to heave the beast, but having eaten nothing but berries for forty-eight hours, can’t. His skin temperature drops from hot to clammy. An almost peaceful mood attends him. He believes he is dying and is not overly troubled by it. After several seconds he is able to breathe again; then the experience upsets him terribly. “This is gon’ have to do!” he yells up at the dead girl. The floor of the swale is maybe six inches below his shoulders. Shadows half-fill the indenture. John tries to exit the grave, and finds he is unable to.

Worn out from shoveling, his uninjured limb trembles like jelly while failing to pull him up. His right arm is even more useless; monstrous-looking in its tumescence, it radiates enough pain from even the slightest pressure to present John with a phantasmagorical longing for death as life’s first prize for suffering. He nearly faints. Then, emitting a whimpering sound, he exhaustedly sits down in the grave. Though he’s not seriously concerned with being infinitely trapped there—he can, after all, always refill a portion of the hole with dirt and walk out—the idea of being imprisoned in a pit not even up to his chin infuriates him. He thinks of the hours of labor he spent to confine himself and wonders if burying Ingrid Banes will result only in more suffering for him, rather than less. Then he recalls his father saying that “life is for the living” and John’s own determination at least to try, as had Robert Moon, to be a presence in his son’s life. And how can he do that from a jail cell?

Rejecting the disheartening and painful prospect of refilling what he has dug in order to escape, he stands up, grabs the shovel, and lays it on the swale’s floor near the edge of the hole. With his good arm, he pulls himself as far as he can up the wall, then grips it with his knees, the swale’s floor with his elbow, and the shovel’s handle with his left hand. Slowly he inches the blade toward the toboggan’s lead rope where, six feet from him, it dangles from the forest floor into the swale. Several times he falls back into the grave. Each failed effort brings the blade closer to the looped rope. Finally, he manages to work the blade into the loop and, pulling the rope gradually toward him, removes most of its slack. Hoping to stop the sled next to the grave, he begins easing it gingerly down the steep bank of the swale. Suddenly he again loses his balance and, still holding the shovel, tumbles backward into the hole. In the split second that the toboggan and its contents career down the abrupt embankment toward where he lies face-up in the grave, John is aware of the birds’ heightened screeching and, once more, voices, real or imagined.

Either he has been unconscious for a day or only for a few seconds, because the hole is still half filled with dying light and overhead the crows and grackles swoop and cry. There are other noises, too. Snapping brush. Frantic whispering. Wedged by the sled’s bow against the grave’s floor, John stares into the nondislodged eye of the dead girl, catapulted by the collision onto him. She reeks a stench that begs for the warm blanket of mother earth. Spoken words float like pollen in the air above them.

“He dead?”

“Looks to be.”

I’m not! says John, only he can’t hear his own voice or feel his mouth speaking it.

“Couple peas in a pod, their eyes open that way.”

“Think he killed her?”

On’y killed one person in my life purposeful, John inwardly yells, and that one needed it!

“Blew a hole in her chest, I’d say.”

“Was a while ago, by the smell of her.”

“Wonder where he’s been keeping her at.”

“Someplace wet by the look of her.”

“Jesus, baby, you don’t suppose he had her in tha…?”