A Single Shot

He glances at the dead girl, thinking of the Kools in her duffel, then at the cavern, where, past the entrance, it’s pitch dark. He looks at the shovel and pick against the near wall, tools left from Old Man Hollenbach’s days, and, as he had right before he’d discovered the dead girl, wonders why they are standing, as if recently placed there, rather than lying haphazardly on the ground. He reaches out, grabs the shovel, and sees rust everywhere but at the tip, which is shiny and chipped. He looks at the pick and sees the same thing. He wonders why, other than for the reason he had planned to, anyone would be digging in the cave.

He sticks his head a foot or so into the cavern. Along with the dankness, he smells the faint odor of smoke. He’s not sure it’s tobacco smoke. It smells more like gunpowder. He thinks of the thousand tons of dirt and stone above him, and suddenly remembers why, as a child, he had never dared enter the cave. “I ought to make me a flare,” he thinks. He starts to back out of the opening and his right hand lands on a coil of thick flesh that, from experience, he knows will instantly strike or slither away. It does neither. John, his pulse resonating in his injured shoulder, ears, and belly, gingerly picks the thing up, backs out of the cave, drops it at his feet, and sees a timber rattlesnake, fat as his fist, several feet long, with most of its head blown off.

“What the hell have you all been up to?” John says aloud, glancing down at the dead girl, then disgustedly kicking the snake away from the opening. He runs past her and from beneath a bush near the pond picks up a short stick of ironwood, then glances around for something to make a flare with, but, other than the girl’s clothes or his own, can’t find anything, so runs back across the quarry toward the lean-to, realizing as he traverses the gruesome trail left by the dead girl that everything he’s done since reaching into her pockets has further undermined his credibility with the law should he get caught or decide to turn himself in, the latter option, under the circumstances and with his prior record, one he’s pretty far from considering.

Without hesitating, he pulls back the plastic strip covering the front of the lean-to and plunges inside, hoping to find among the abandoned tools and moth-eaten recliner he knows are there a dry piece of cloth to make his flare with. He is struck first by the smoke-filled air, then by the pungent smell of marijuana smoke mixed with beer and sweat. A few articles of clothing and an open newspaper lie atop a zipped sleeping bag stretched out on one side of the ground. John at first thinks someone is in the bag, until he sees protruding from its top the furry head of a large stuffed lion, the sight of which, when he realizes who must have owned the toy, causes in him a despondent pain, worse even than when he first discovered the dead girl. He pictures her nestled comfortably in the sleeping bag—like John’s own son nestled beneath the covers of his crib—cheek to jowl with the lion, smiling and dreaming about her future, and he feels like going out right then, getting his gun, and shooting himself.

Instead, he sits down on the sleeping bag and, breathing in that putrid air, thinks of his little boy, Nolan, being raised in town without him, and what it would feel like for the kid to learn when he grows up that his father had killed a young girl, then killed himself, and how no one would be there to cast any light on the situation, to put a positive spin on the old man, certainly not his wife, who, from John, wants only child support and an uncontested divorce. This train of thought transports him deeper into self-pity, where he mentally bemoans all he has lost and had taken from him in his thirty years, beginning with his birthright, the family farm, on which he had planned, like his father and grandfather, to raise his family, and followed shortly thereafter by his father, whom John remembers near the end, when the banks were starting to foreclose, grim-faced and determined one day, angry and violent the next, getting thinner, smaller, paler, until, to his sixteen-year-old child, he vanished like a ghost, as if he never was, and John thinks he wouldn’t mind dying, but he doesn’t want to be a ghost in the mind of a son who never knew him. “The girl is dead,” he emphatically tells himself as he stands, “and my bein’ so too—or goin’ to jail—won’t bring her back!”