“Nuh-uh.”
“You think he’s telling the truth about what he’s doing around?”
“Don’t know.”
“I told Daddy we ought to call the sheriff, but he didn’t want to.”
“That’s probably for the best.”
“I only hope none of us regret it later.”
“Me too.”
“Think about empowerment, John Moon. Daddy’s feeling a lot of pressure. And, same as me, he likes you.” She turns in the saddle, nudges the horse’s belly with her feet, and slowly rides off in the direction of the pines.
Against his tired body, the heavy wet branches feel like grasping arms, then bullwhips, so, going down the hill, he cuts right through the woods and, from there, walks the dirt road running like a funnel through thick forest that impedes his view of the valley.
Less than fifty yards from the trailer, he sees, in the not quite dark, moving on the grass below the pond, several large, ominous shapes. As if by instinct, he veers left and, stealthily as he can, slogs through the rain- battered meadow to the near corner of the trailer, where he crouches down to watch and listen to, with their distinctive gobbles, half a dozen wild turkeys picking at the drenched timothy. Among them are two large males. He thumbs off the shotgun’s safety and, to keep from tainting the meat, aims for the head of the larger. In his mind he hears the shot loudly shatter the still air and sees the headless bird fall sideways onto the grass, but before vision becomes reality, his hands begin to tremble, his teeth to chatter, and his heart wildly palpitates.
He opens the gun’s breech and, panting heavily, lays it on the grass next to him. He remembers his father telling him that the Indians native to this region believed turkeys to be cowardly and stupid and for fear of becoming so themselves refused to kill or eat them. Seeming to have little instinct for danger and with their fantailing and loud prattle constantly calling attention to themselves, the birds are, John agrees, dumb. He sits there watching the flock until it is dark and he can’t see it anymore, but can only hear its inane patter. Still, he sits. He wonders if he’ll ever again be the hunter he was. If ever again he’ll be who he was. He hears Abbie Nobie slowly walking Diablo back down the hollow road, her earnestly conversing about star constellations, and the horse’s brusque snort. After its footsteps have faded away, he picks up the shotgun, stands, and walks through the kitchen entrance into the trailer.
Lying on the floor are pots, pans, silverware, dishes, letters, canned goods, condiments. Every drawer and cabinet looks rifled. The cushions are thrown from the couch. The back of his father’s old recliner is sliced open and its stuffing torn out. Beyond the grease fire’s lingering stench, a faint, unpleasant odor mars the air. Moira’s breakfront is trashed; lying beneath it, atop bank statements, personal letters, photo albums, and John’s Instamatic camera, are his Polaroids of Moira posing nude, and others of him holding Nolan as a newborn, of Moira nursing the boy, of John giving him a bath. A stabbing pain breaches John’s chest. He kneels down, slides the snapshots back into the envelopes from which they had come, then carefully places the envelopes back into the breakfront.
He stands up and walks down the hallway, the stench getting stronger, into the bathroom, where the medicine cabinet is ransacked, the ballcock to the toilet ripped out and its porcelain top smashed on the floor. Every sheet and towel is thrown from the linen closet. Bottles and cans of cleaning solvents roll on the floor. The trapdoor covering the pipes is open.
He steps back into the hallway, turns left, glances into Nolan’s old nursery, where the closet doors are thrown back and the empty toy chest is turned upside down.
Halfway down the corridor toward the master bedroom, he sees, through the open doorway, clothes, magazines, and bureau drawers littering the floor. He smells what he smells more distinctly. In a frightened half-jog he enters the room. Lying face up on the bed, her body wrapped below the neck in clear plastic, is the dead girl. Attached to her chest a yellow sheet of paper declares: “John Moon murdered me!” In the middle of the rug, John drops to his knees, puts his hands to his face, and blathers in a mysteriously poignant way.
Beyond cerebration is a place clearer than thought. Equivocations don’t exist in this realm. There is no moral compass. Inside, only him and the dead girl. Outside, the world circling like vultures.
Oblivious to the stench, he sits down on the mattress near her head and studies her pale, bloated face. Her mouth is slightly open and a small particle of food is still lodged between her teeth. Her eyes are closed, her nostrils exaggeratedly flared. The ponytail lies like a thick nest beneath her head. Mashed to her forehead is a dead mosquito. He imagines her voice, medium-pitched and resonant, sounding beyond her years. She laughed often, a free-flowing verse, occasionally at things that others didn’t find amusing. She sometimes cried without provocation. The world struck her as ridiculous or tragic. She wasn’t sure why. She had a weakness for bad men. Mean men. Men who beat her up, then brought her roses.
He reaches down with his forefingers and gently pushes at her eyelids. They’re swollen shut. He pushes harder. The lids open with a quiet pop to eyes the color of deer hide. She kept getting into situations. Her parents were pathetic. Her friends were the world. She liked sex because they did and she was supposed to, but what really got her hot was pushing things to the limit. She had trouble seeing a point beyond that. She didn’t like to hurt people, though, or to see them hurt. She was compassionate toward those who were helpless. If she could, she would avoid stepping on an ant. She didn’t like to think about growing old. She had a sneaking suspicion she wouldn’t. Old people were like robots. She once dreamed her parents ran on batteries. She wrote a short story about this and while reading it to her English class felt so liberated she thought of becoming a writer but decided she couldn’t spend that much time sitting down.
John lies down next to the girl. He stares up at the ceiling and softly talks to her. He tells her he is sorry he shot her and that most of the time he believes it was an accident but occasionally, when he thinks about how angry the world sometimes makes him and how little he seems able to change things, he’s afraid it wasn’t. He tells her that when he was her age his only plan had been to marry the girl he loved, move her back to his family’s farm, be the best farmer he could be, and raise his children to do the same, and that his father’s having lost everything when John was sixteen crippled John the same as if he’d been in a car accident and lost the use of his legs. He tells her about the many failures in his life and that the only things in it worth holding on to are his wife and son, but that they had left him.
The body is bloated with gas. It occasionally burps or breaks wind. Sometimes it shifts on the mattress. When its right arm jerks out and hits John’s elbow, he stops speaking and gets up from the bed.
Standing over her, he apologizes for talking only about his problems when he at least was alive. He tells her that, no matter what else happens, he will try to find out her name and where she was from and that, if he succeeds, he will somehow notify her family about her death and let them know either where her body can be picked up or that she has received a proper burial.
He lifts up the cadaver, stiff with rigor mortis, and slides the plastic out from around it. He takes off the dead girl’s shoes and socks, then wrestles her out of her jeans and blood-soaked T-shirt. She isn’t wearing a bra. He pulls off her panties because they are soiled and wet. He drops everything into the plastic. Then he takes out his hunting knife. After rolling the cadaver onto its back and eyeballing the bullet’s course through the torso, he goes after the slug with his knife. He locates it just beneath the skin’s surface, embedded in soft flesh. He quickly cuts it out, then drops it onto the clothes.
He walks down the hall to the bathroom, picks up from the floor a towel and washcloth, dampens the latter with soap and water, then returns to the bedroom and spends several minutes scrubbing blood, sweat, and dirt from the cadaver. He sees no star-shaped birthmark; no scar on her knee; no blood-red bull’s-eyes. Far from being large and womanly, her breasts, surrounding the bullet hole, are small and girlish. She has almost no pubic bush. For these things alone, he is thankful.
He pulls on a pair of Moira’s rubber cleaning gloves, then from the floor takes one of her combs, a tube of red lipstick, black eyeliner, and blush. After combing several hair strands away from the dead girl’s forehead, he unties her ponytail, combs out the snarls, and catches the hair again in a rubber band. He applies the eyeliner and a thin gloss of lipstick. Still, he thinks, she is too pale. He dabs blush on her cheeks and, less so, her temples.
After tearing the tags from one of Moira’s panties and a T-shirt, he puts the underwear on the dead girl. He considers outfitting her in a blouse and skirt, but is afraid they might somehow be traced to Moira, so settles for a label-less pair of her jeans. He dresses the corpse one side at a time, using a hand to hold the rigid body upright
