A Single Shot by Matthew F Jones Page A

lays on the bed, one of the few articles of clothing Moira had overlooked when packing to leave: a long, blue-and-white-striped, country-style dress that John best remembers her wearing, six months after they were married, to a heart fund benefit square dance at the old armory. He puts his face to the dress and smells her. Then he sees her, stately and beautiful. Her hair up and in dancing clogs, she is several inches taller than John this evening. John feels the envious eyes of the other men—eyes envying him. Moira wins a cake in the raffle, three layers of sour-cream chocolate. Later, lounging naked where the dress now rests, they feed the cake to each other, then spend half the night in a lingering, nerve-tingling, impacted embrace from which Moira occasionally reaches down, gently squeezes the leaking tip of John’s inflamed penis, and whispers, “Rein it in, cowboy. Rein it in. This ain’t no race. It’s a swoon!”
    John never knew love could last that long. When, finally,he comes, he is a river, emptying into her not just his seed but all the words describing what he feels for her but is not adept enough to say. Looking at the dress now, he sees the moment as clear as if he were watching it on film: Moira’s wide-open eyes, like full moons in the dark; lean hands clutching his buttocks; vaginal muscles firmly milking him. Her throaty voice passionately urging, “Okay, John! Now!” A pulsating throb, like a crashing wave. Warm breath. That musky, just-fucked smell… John charges across the room and rummages through her bureau until he finds an overlooked pair of her briefs. Smothering his face in them, he inhales.
    Then he drops his pants, lies down on the bed, and, ardently calling out her name, masturbates into the underwear.
    He feels embarrassed afterwards. Then cuckolded. Looking at himself in the bureau mirror, he imagines his face is slowly evolving into a coarser, meaner him. Then he thinks, no. It looks like a clay lump that could turn out to be anything. He thinks of the crippled Daggard Pitt, who had helped steal John’s birthright, suddenly showing up in his life at this time, of all times. “I’m drunk,” he says aloud, as if that explains something. He thinks his face looks too predictable. He decides he will grow a beard. He puts Moira’s underwear on the headboard, goes out to the kitchen, and finds it engulfed in smoke.
    He throws open the door to the front deck, then runs over to the stove, where his strip steak and the pan it’s in are in flames. John douses them both with water, then opens all the trailer windows and, loudly cursing, charges around wavingat the smoke with a towel. In a few minutes, coughing heavily, he stumbles out to the deck to breathe. Collapsed in a plastic chair, he watches stodgy black smoke twist lazily into the night sky. He thinks about what he went through to get that rattlesnake back to the trailer, then butchered and filleted, and decides it wasn’t meant for him to eat. He goes back into the trailer, gets the burned strip steak and his .45 pistol, comes back out to the porch, tosses the steak onto the lawn, and empties his gun into it.
    Then he goes downcellar, pulls from the big freezer what’s left of the rattlesnake, half a dozen venison steaks, and a bag of ice, and takes them all out to his truck, where he tosses everything into the portable cooler. Standing in the driveway afterwards, still three-quarters drunk, he decides that offering mere meat to his family is not enough. A much bigger gesture is needed. He runs up to the woodshed, crawls beneath it, pulls out the pillowcase, withdraws several packets of money, then reattaches the pillowcase to the foundation beam.
    Sitting at the kitchen table, he counts the money. Five thousand six hundred dollars. A lot. Much more, certainly, than he’s ever seen at one time. Yet only a tiny percentage of the whole. He wonders, though, if it’s too much. If word got out that he was giving away sums that