I SHOT THE SHERIFF
When Sunbeam found herself inescapably involved in a scheme that she knew was corrupt she often tried to take the edge off her culpability by using vulgar army sergeant language: “Drop your cocks and grab your socks,” she told her group of veterans, “and let’s get this maneuver on the road.”
Sitting around the table were Shadow and Shrimp and Toon and Shakespeare and Stones, who today wore a snow-white eye patch with a narrow blood-red border.
Sunbeam looked at them all and wondered what Stones was smiling about.
“We need all you swinging dicks to get your duffle bags cleaned and your scissors sharpened,” Sunbeam said, “and your sorry asses shifted into four-wheel drive. So listen up. Whoever the malevolent bastards are who’re trying to move in on us, we need to teach them a lesson. A harsh lesson. We started last night, or you men did, and now we got to finish. We got to finish fast. Comments? Questions?” She sat leaning far forward in her chair with her elbows on the table. On the tabletop were two dead roaches in the green glass ashtray and her empty white coffee mug. With eyebrows raised Sunbeam looked hard at each man for two or three seconds.
They all looked back at her but no one said a word.
“Well?” she said.
“Any idea who these dudes are?” asked Shadow.
“I’ve heard rumors,” Sunbeam answered. “We all know what rumors are worth. Dog shit. I heard they might be Mexicans. Mexican Mexicans. I also heard they might be Canadians. I even heard they might be a big-city gang from someplace down south. What I know almost for sure is, they intend to rip us off and run us out. Whoever they are, they must figure to go big-time. They think we’re useless hicks out here. That’s what I think they think. What I surmise. So I already sent word to the Big Dude across the mountain. I asked him for a few reinforcements. We should get six men and they should be here by the middle of this afternoon. They’ll help us out and then we’ll owe them one. What we need now is some strategy. Sure, we can intimidate, especially with the Big Dude’s help. We can kick some ass. But we sure as hell don’t want to kill anybody. That’s not our style, not unless it’s self-defense. Comprende?” Sunbeam looked hard at everyone around the table. “What the hell are you smiling about, Stones?”
“Nothing,” Stones said. “I was thinking about something is all.” It was warm in the room and he rubbed the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand and then ran the hand the other way across his mouth to wipe the smile away. “Six dudes from the Big Dude?” he said. “Including the Hulk?”
“Why wouldn’t the Big Dude send the Hulk? Sure, the Hulk’ll be here.”
“He’s one mean motherfucker!” Shadow said.
“You got that right!” Toon agreed. “You can say that again!”
“He’s one mean motherfucker!” Shadow repeated.
Stones laughed and Shadow joined him.
Shakespeare sat there trying unsuccessfully to stop worrying over his Supercock problems and Toon still felt aggravation over the fact that he couldn’t make his tattoo session and Shrimp couldn’t get Rainbow out of his mind. For years he’d been attracted to her and he felt certain she was attracted back, but she was married to Uncle Sam so he’d never hit on her once even when he was buzzed from beer or pleasantly stoned on weed because he knew hitting on her would weigh him down with guilt. But maybe now it was finally time.
All the men at the table took occasional sips from their pints of ale or stout. Sunbeam had told them that one pint each was all they would get for now. When their problems were resolved and she hoped that would happen today, and if not today no later than tomorrow, then they could relax. When the outsiders were dispelled by whatever means it took to do the job then her men could come back to the Bird of Prey and celebrate with as much ale and stout and prime weed as they wanted. Then they could seriously party with everything on her.
“Where are these outsider motherfuckers?” Shadow said and then sipped from his pint and slowly lowered the glass. “That’s what we need to know, right? I mean, right now while we talk, where are they? We can’t have any strategy if we don’t have some idea where the fuck they are. Am I right?” He lifted his glass for another sip and lowered it slowly. “Do I make sense? Do I?” He raised his glass to drink yet again and lowered it slowly again.
“They want our cannabis,” Sunbeam said. “Then they want our land to grow their own product. Where are they? My guess is, they’re out prowling around one of our grows right this minute, maybe the same one where you caught them yesterday. That’s our biggest grow and they must know it. What should we do? That’s what we have to figure out. The only serious question is—”
They all heard tires squeal as a vehicle turned off the road at high speed into the parking lot. Two seconds after that the tires screeched on asphalt as the vehicle came to a quick stop outside the front door. The motor died and a door slammed shut hard and the front door of the tavern swung open and Deputy Winter stepped into the room. In his tight-fitting uniform he stood there short and fat and outlined against the bright outside light with his pig eyes squinted against the interior dimness. His silhouette included the .45 automatic and the nightstick and the Taser in the black leather holsters on his gun belt.
A faint smell of exhaust and burnt rubber drifted into the room.
“We’re back here, lard ass,” Sunbeam said and all the men at the table laughed quietly.
Winter leaned forward at the waist and squinted and saw them and then reached back to close the door.
He sauntered across the room to the table with the .45 bouncing up and down against the tube of fat where his hip should have been. There were no empty chairs so he stood behind Stones looking down at Sunbeam. “I’ll lard ass you, you scrawny old bitch,” he said with a forced smile. “But why’s it so goddamn dark in here? Why’s it like a goddamn haunted house?”
“We’re environmentalists,” Sunbeam answered. “We’re conserving energy. We’re fighting climate change and we’re helping save the world from morons like you. Any objections? The point is, these trespassing outsider sons of bitches, these bastards, these rippers, want to come in here with pesticides and fertilizers. They want to drain the creeks dry and cut the big trees down. Not to mention the fact they want to rip us off. What about that?”
Winter opened his eyes wide and maintained his smile. “Well I’m here to help save your alls’ sorry asses. You think I want outsiders around? All I want is to help you citizens out. Any objection to that?”
Stones had never liked Winter or trusted him and he began softly singing an old Bob Marley tune with slightly revised lyrics:
“I shot the sheriff, but I should have shot the deputy.”
Shadow didn’t like Winter either and he knew that in the old days the original hippies had called cops “pigs” and he threw his head back and conspicuously sniffed the air. “I do smell me some bacon,” he said.
None of the young men around the table had ever liked Winter and they liked him less than ever now because they had all heard he intended to run for county commissioner and they all believed that politics was an even lower calling than law enforcement.
Winter ignored them all and went on talking. “You been compensating me for a good long time now, Sunbeam. In return I keep you informed. Ain’t that it? It’s been a good system, good relationship, works out just fine for everybody involved. We aim to keep our system going along good as ever and that’s all. Ain’t it, ol’ girl?”
Sunbeam looked at everyone around the table and winked and smiled. “I guess we got just a little bit of time for some euphemisms now,” she said. “‘Compensating?’” she began, looking back at Winter. “You mean we’ve been bribing your fat ass, paying you off. ‘Keeping us informed?’ What you mean is, you’ve been ratting out the people you work for to get your bribes from us. You are ready to get into politics, Winter. Once you get elected you could call torture ‘enhanced interrogation.’ You could call planking your mistress ‘hiking
a trail.’”
“Euphemisms” was a game they played often and knew well and Shadow took the next turn: “Yeah, put ol’ Winter here in politics and he can give a big speech about a war and call dead civilians ‘collateral damage.’ Or he could call bombing the civilians ‘air support.’”
They worked their way around the table. “He could call his prisoners ‘detainees,’” Shrimp said. “He could call shooting his buddies ‘friendly fire.’”
Then came Toon: “When he wanted to get it from the dude in the toilet stall next door he could call it ‘taking a wide stance.’”
“Or,” Shakespeare said, “he could call bombing homes and killing innocent women and kids ‘pacification.’”
“Or,” Stones added, “if he got caught lying his fat ass off he could just say he ‘misspoke.’ Or he could—”
The detonation came like an unforeseen clap of thunder and the building shook and windows shattered behind the closed shutters, and powdery dust wafted from the walls and ceiling.
Shrimp sprinted across the room to the nearest window and threw the shutters wide and as shards of broken glass fell at his feet he squinted and blinked against the sunlight. The first thing he saw was a brown-gray cloud of dust and smoke and then within the quickly spreading and thinning cloud he saw Shakespeare’s Bronco with its roof crushed nearly flat under the weight of one of the metal stanchions that had fallen. The stanchion lay across the Bronco and extended all the way across the road. The second stanchion lay parallel to the road and the Bird of Prey sign had come down bent and misshapen on the shoulder of the road between the stanchions.
When he looked down south Shrimp saw a shiny gray pickup he thought might be a Dodge Ram traveling fast and by then the others had crowded around the window to look.
“My Bronco!” Shakespeare said. “My fucking Bronco! Look at that motherfucker! What the fuck happened?”
“A goddamn explosion happened!” Winter said.
“No shit, Sherlock!” Sunbeam said.
“Don’t get wise!” Winter answered.
“Who the fuck did it?” Shakespeare said.
“Who the fuck knows?” Winter answered.
Though he stood in warm sunlight Shrimp suddenly felt like a bare-chested man in icy wind with nothing to wear against the cold and he turned quickly and squirmed through the small crowd and crossed the room and took the stairs two at a time and opened Rainbow’s door without knocking and there she was sitting on the chair beside Uncle Sam’s bed. Smoke and dust that had blown into the room through the shattered window behind the bed coated everything.
“What happened?” Rainbow asked without looking up. “What was it?”
“No idea,” Shrimp said. “Are you all right? Is Uncle Sam?”
“When the window busted open some glass landed on the bed. But I already cleaned it off, he’s all right. We were lucky. None of it hit his face. He didn’t get cut any. I was back in the bathroom when it happened.” Rainbow was stroking Uncle Sam’s forehead. “When I told him I loved him after it happened he blinked his eyes,” she said. “It even looked like he tried to talk. It did.”
“Listen! Listen to me now! Are you sure you’re all right?”
“We’re all right. Yes we are. Are you? Is everybody else?”
“Yes.”
“But what’s happening? What should we do?”
“Stay where you are. Just stay right here for now. I’ll be back in a while, I promise. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes!”
Back downstairs the small crowd remained clustered near the window. Inside the tavern the dust had settled and outside the smoke had drifted off in the late morning breeze.
When he reached the window Shrimp saw that two southbound cars and a northbound log truck had already been stopped on the road by the fallen stanchion. Two elderly couples on one side of the stanchion and the short burly man who had to be the log truck driver on the other side were standing there talking.
Winter stood with his back to the window facing the others. Shrimp had heard Winter talking on his way down the stairs and he thought Winter sounded like many men of authority he’d seen and heard who always acted sure of themselves but seldom made sense.
“We get these disturbances often enough,” Winter was saying now, “pretty damn often, maybe not this extreme but extreme enough, and you can’t panic, oh no, not that, because the only way to make sure you don’t panic is not to let yourself, understand me? Sure you do! Things ain’t always as bad as they seem! Sometimes they’re worse! Some sorry sons of bitches did this shit because they panicked but we won’t, not me!”
“Goddamn it, fatso,” Sunbeam said. “Cut the bullshit!”
“See? That right there’s panic talking! We got to cool off an’ think, figure things! We got to—”
“I said cut the shit, fatso! You’re a useless asshole, a piece of shit, a turd!”
“I’ll forget you said that, Sunbeam,” Winter answered, “because it wasn’t you who said it!”
“It sure as hell was!”
“I’ll forget because that was fear talkin’, woman! An explosion gets to people! Oh, I know explosions! You got to get hold of yourself now, all of you do, we got to—”
“You fat son of a bitchin’ asshole!” Toon interrupted. “Who the fuck you figure you’re talkin’ to? Us guys in here’ve been in way more explosions than you could fuckin’ count !”
“You got to get hold of yourself now, all of you do, we got to—”
Winter broke it off when the motorists stopped on the road walked through the front door with the log truck driver leading the way and the elderly couples following close behind him.
The log truck driver was pot-bellied and middle-aged and wearing faded jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and his long black hair was tied into a ponytail. As he passed through the door he pulled the tail of his shirt out of his jeans and used it to clean his glasses. After replacing his glasses and tucking his shirt back in he finally spoke, “Who in hell knocked down that pole out there?” he asked the room. “Or what in hell? How the hell’d that happen? What’s goin’ on around here?”
“We been wonderin’ the same damn thing ourselves,” answered Winter. “It ain’t been down more’n ten minutes.”
“Well I got me a load of Doug fir I got to get delivered,” said the driver. “What in hell you intend to do?”
“What I’m gonna do is,” Winter answered, “I’m gonna tell you to get on back out there an’ chain up your rig to that pole an’ then put ’er in reverse an’ drag that sucker off an’ clear the road. You do that an’ you can deliver that Doug fir any damn place you want.” Winter looked at the two elderly couples and smiled and nodded at them. “An’ these fine citizens here,” he said, “they can go on about their business too once you get that pole dragged off.”
At that one of the old ladies spoke up: “Melvin and me are headed to a birthday party! My sister’s eighty-eight years old tomorrow! She’s miles down yonder in the nursing home! Garden of Eden. That’s what they call that nursing home.”
“Okay, I’ll do ’er!” the log truck driver said. “I can do ’er! An’ then after I do ’er I’m marchin’ straight back in here for a quick cold one!”
“Olive, that’s my sister, she’s got the Alzheimer’s,” said the old woman, “but she’s A-okay except for that! She just can’t remember stuff an’ can’t think is all! My name’s Olivia! Olive and Olivia! That was us! Still is!”
“We better help that dude get his truck hitched up,” said Shadow.
All the men walked single-file out the door.
“Olive, she can’t remember who we are, but we’ll be there! Once that pole gets off the road that is! I never did like poles that much!”
“Will you pipe down, Olivia?” said Melvin. “Will you stuff a cork in it?”
The other couple—a tall old man with a shiny wooden cane and a skinny lady with whit
e hair tied into a high bun—stood still with their heads down and remained silent.
“You all sit down now,” Sunbeam told them. “You folks take seats anywhere you want. I doubt if it’ll take long, but you might as well relax while you’re waiting.”
The couples took the table nearest the open door and turned their chairs so they could sit and watch what was happening outside.
Winter gestured to Sunbeam with his fat white hand. “Now that we got a few minutes, let’s you an’ me sit down and talk one more time in private,” he said.
Sunbeam followed him toward the back of the room.
They sat at the table as far away as they could get from the old couples up front.
“One question,” Winter began. “I’m curious is all. Are you satisfied with the way I play dumb? Am I still convincing enough?”
“Oh yes,” Sunbeam answered. “I have to admit you keep getting better all the time. You even have me fooled about half the time. I guess you just must be a born natural.”
“Your gratuitous insults don’t impress me. Never did. Have you ever read Huckleberry Finn?”
“A long time ago I did, in school. Sure. Doesn’t everybody?”
“Then you must remember the King and Duke.”
“Those con men.”
“One of them, I think it was the Duke, plays what they call ‘the deef and dumb’ when they’re trying to swindle a family out of their rightful inheritance. That’s somewhere toward the end of the story. That scene functions as a kind of inspiration to me. But they’ll get that stanchion dragged off pronto so let’s get to the point and make this quick. Things have changed some. Things have changed considerably. Last night final orders came in from upstairs, from the top dog.”
“And?”
“So just listen. We’re well on our way toward providing ourselves extremely comfortable and satisfying lives. There’s big money waiting for us. Playing an idiot and dealing with you is the small price I’ve been obliged to pay. The point is, things are about to get better than ever, for us, and I hope I’m safe in assuming you want that to happen as much as I do. Am I correct?”
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