Free A Single Shot by Matthew F Jones Page A

intensifies.
    “Widen the goddamn loop, Cecil.”
    “She’s wider’n a whore’s legs a’ready. She’s so covered with muck, though, I can’t toss her straight!”
    When finally he gets the rope around the cow, it slips down onto her neck, so pulling on it would strangle her. “Now I can’t reach the friggin’ thing to get it off, John.”
    “Let me run get a pitchfork. We’ll get a prong into that loop, then run it back over her ass.”
    “Just don’t leave me here in the goddamn quag, John. I might not be here when ye get back.”
    After yanking Nobie from the muck, John gets a pitchfork from the barn. Ten minutes later, the loop surrounds the cow, though only her head and the upper third of her torso are still above the muck. Nobie and John are slime-covered. The pitchfork is lost to the quag. When the two men pull on the rope, the cow doesn’t budge.
    “I better run get the John Deere.”
    “I wouldn’t spend much time talkin’ ’bout it,” says John.
    Nobie runs for the barn, his waders making wet, sloshing sounds.
    Kneeling by the quag’s edge, John, watching fog patches move like ghosts over the damp meadow, talks softly to the cow. Working to break through the haze, the sun tinges the grass gold. The organic smell of that world is an opiate to John’s frayed nerves. He daydreams being fifteen years old and working, not with Cecil Nobie, but with his father.
    As Nobie backs the John Deere up to the quag, half his herd gathers round. John ties the loose end of the rope to the tractor’s drawbar. He pulls the rope until the loop closes tightly around the cow. “Ease her forward till she’s taut, Cecil. I’ll sit down on her. Maybe keep her from jumping.”
    Nobie drives the tractor ahead until the rope is like a tightwire over the slime. Feeling the loop’s pressure, the cow moos protestingly. Still gripping the rope, John sits down on it. “Steady she goes, Cecil.”
    Nobie gives the tractor a little gas.
    “Don’t jerk her, now.”
    Nobie eases out the clutch. The rear wheels briefly spin, then take hold. The cow groans. It lifts up some, comes forward a foot or so, lifts up higher, then, bellowing, falls on one side in the muck and is pulled free. “Whoooa!” yells John.
    Nobie stops the tractor. He lets it roll back a little. With the clutch in, he guns the engine victoriously.
    John jumps from the rope, pulls the loop from the muck-encrusted heifer, then stands back as the animal scrabbles toits feet. Blowing its nose, shitting and pissing at the same time, it angrily charges toward the pasture, while John, watching it go, thinks if only he’d had a similar chance to save the dead girl.
    Stinking to high heaven, they stand in the back yard of the house John grew up in, while the last of the fog lifts.
    “Got ye any work, John?”
    “Just chopped up that old lightning-struck oak.”
    “Any a’ the paying kind?”
    “That’ll pay me something come fall when I can sell her.”
    “Thought you was doing some blacktopping.”
    “Nah.”
    Nobie strips off his waders, then, in his skivvies, leans back against the porch railing and starts scratching different parts of his wiry, hair-covered self. “My oldest boy, Eban, he’s done with school come spring. Already got hisself into college. Place in Rochester.”
    “Good for him.”
    “Got hisself some smarts from his mother, I guess. Wants to do something with computers—make ’em think or something.”
    John nods.
    “Never used one myself.”
    “Me neither.”
    “He thinks they’re the best thing since sliced bread. Says I ought to have one for the farm. Keep all my records on it.”
    “Maybe ya ought to.”
    “I got me an old shoe box works plenty good enough.” Nobie hunches forward, pulls his dick out of his underwear,and starts pissing into the yard. “Once he goes to Rochester, John, I don’t expect we’ll be seeing much of him ’cept Christmas and summertime, when, if we’re lucky, he might help bring the hay