A Single Shot

“Nah! She’s been froze, then thawed, looks like.”

John is no longer aware of the pain in his hand. In fact, none of him hurts at all. He envisions his body as a car wreck, being appraised for junk.

“Where you guess all that money came from?”

“Someplace it oughtn’t to have, for sure.”

He’s not quite certain where all his parts are or which of them he can move. Then, horrified, he suddenly realizes he is—and has been for several seconds—trying and failing to make all or any of them move. He screams a cry as muted as a shout from the center of the earth.

“Jump down there, baby, and gather up the cash. Put it back in the sack.”

“Not me, brave boy. Something spooky ’bout that hole.”

“It’s just a hole with a sled, a mountain of dough, and two dead people in it.”

“Like you see corpses every day, right?”

“It’s not doing them any good.”

His eyes won’t move left or right, forward or back. He can see only straight up, which is why he can’t see who’s talking. Beyond the dead girl’s face, past the tops of the trees, the sun-setting sky resembles in his slightly fractured vision a gently blowing field of goldenrod.

“Promise you’ll fuck me on the plane to Paris, lover?”

“Once in the can, then in the cockpit. Now get your cute ass down there and help me.”

A thud vibrates in his ears. Then another. A moment later, he is aware of the dead girl being rolled from his chest onto the ground next to him or maybe onto his legs, he can’t tell for sure. Then the toboggan is lifted from him and two pairs of arms thrust it over his head toward the swale’s floor, where it lands with a wooden slap. For a few minutes he hears the two people picking up the bills and stuffing them back into the sack from which they must have spilled.

“Jesus, let’s get out of here. The stench is killing me!”

“We haven’t got all the cash.”

“We’ve got most of it. You believe this amount of cabbage?”

“Like manna from heaven!”

“Hey, look at this. Snapshots.” John hears someone pull the Polaroids out of the waterproof envelope he’d placed them in. “Of the girl, I guess.”

“Christ, she looks half dead in ’em.”

“Why would he bury them with her?”

“Who cares? Let’s get out of here. This whole scene gives me the creeps!”

“There’s some kind of note stuck in with ’em.”

“Do me a favor, will ya? Don’t read it.”

“Whadda ya mean, don’t read it?”

“It’s bad luck.”

“Bad luck?”

“Stick it back in the envelope with the pictures and leave ’em, lover, or count me out of the whole thing!”

“All right, all right!” John hears the envelope fall next to him, then the labored breathing of one or both people rearranging the cadaver in the hole. Seconds later, female legs straddle his head; above them are a body and a face out of which poignantly stare the black she-devil’s eyes that followed John’s frantic flight from Hidden Pond. “Jesus,” she says, “you sure he isn’t alive?”

“He’s dead as this one,” says the man. Another dull thump sounds in the ground, followed by one of the dead girl’s slightly swollen hands flopping across John’s face and staying there. He hears the man and the woman exit the grave and, after a slight pause, the shovel being picked up.

“Earth to earth,” intones the man.

“Dust to dust,” adds the woman.

A scoop of falling dirt lands on John’s face. Then a second. And third. Mother earth numbly slaps his cheeks. Blackens his vision. Fouls his throat and nostrils. His mind is as disconnected from his body as a circling hawk from the world. He understands he is out of time. His panic becomes a panacea. He gives thanks for being granted on this journey the touch and scent of another human being. He fears not what comes next, but only that the dead girl might. John mutely assures her that her soul is headed to Hawaii and that only her spirit-abandoned flesh will rest here with his own, the Polaroids he took of her, and a handwritten note, telling the world:

A terble thing happned here. Weren’t nobody’s fault, but a bad turn of events. This was a pretty girl, as anyone can see from her pictures. Her name was Ingrid Banes. She died on 6 /18 /95. She knows the truth of things and so do I. I didn’t tell nobody bout what happned—even her parents who maybe are better off thinkin she’s still alive and happy—cause I was fraid I’d not be blieved and would spend my life in jail for it. I din keep none the money cept twenty thousand dollers for my lawyer, round four thousand I tried to giv my wife, and five hunred to a one eyed lady from Oklahoma. It was stoled in the year 1990 from Ira and Molly Hollenbach by one bad man and another not so bad, who was my best friend. How it ended up with me’s a long story.

John Moon

6 /24 /95

Reading Group Guide

A SINGLE

SHOT

A novel by

Matthew F. Jones

An conversation with Matthew F. Jones