Authors: Castle Freeman

All That I Have (19 page)

“Nothing to it,” said Wingate. “You point the gun. You pull the trigger. Gun goes bang. You’ve done it.”

“I don’t mean her,” I said. “I mean him. Mort. He was ready to blow them both up. He tried to do it, too. How do you do that? How do you get there?”

“You lose it, it looks like,” said Wingate.

“But how? How do you lose it?”

Wingate shook his head.

“ ’Course,” I said, “some people would say he was right, Mort. Some did say it.”

“Some people will say anything,” said Wingate. “It ain’t right if you’re dead.”

“No.”

“Nothing develops, nothing gets better if you’re dead. You’re alive, things can get better.”

“They can also get worse.”

Wingate shrugged. “Well . . .”

“Tough to come home and find her like that, with some fellow,” I said.

“Sure, it’s tough,” said Wingate. “But people are going to do what they’re going to do, it looks like. You can’t stop them. You shouldn’t try. That’s where you get in trouble.”

“Mort thought he could stop them,” I said.

“Be hard to prove he was right, though, wouldn’t it?” said Wingate. “With the way things developed.”

Now a cat came walking into Wingate’s yard from the left, not sneaking around, but walking stiff-legged, almost strutting. It passed near the beehives, slowed down, looked at us, and went on across and out of the yard. We had a good crop of cats, here and there, that summer, no question.

“Whose cat?” I asked Wingate.

“Next door’s,” said Wingate. “He comes through every day about now. He’d like to get to the hives, too, but he knows what would happen if he tried.”

“What would happen?”

“He’d get stung.”

“Oh,” I said. “I thought you meant you’d get after him some way.”

“No,” said Wingate. “There ain’t much I could do to him. The bees can take care of themselves.”

“Except for if it’s a bear,” I said.

“Well, yes. Except for then,” said Wingate.

“Or a cold spring, or bee diseases,” I said. Wingate nodded.

“I didn’t know a cat would go for honey,” I said.

“Everybody loves honey,” said Wingate.

We sat without talking for some little time.

“Nurse Penelope said she heard, she understood it was out-ofstaters busted up your deputy, there,” said Wingate.

“They’re Russians,” I said.

“That’s out of state, ain’t it?”

“It is.”

“They’re a pretty rank outfit, I guess,” said Wingate.

“They are.”

“What are you going to do about them?”

“I’m going to make them go away,” I said.

“How are you going to do that?”

“I’m going to reason with them,” I said.

“Same way you reasoned with the Duke boy?”

“Sean?”

“That one. He was mixed up in that thing, wasn’t he? What happened with him?”

“That nurse keeps you right up to speed, don’t she?”

“I told you.”

“I cut him loose.”

“You did?”

“That’s right. He’s moved on.”

“I thought he broke into their place up on the Gold Coast,” said Wingate.

“He did.”

“And you cut him loose?”

“I did.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I don’t know why.”

“I do,” said Wingate. “It’s in the Bible. Fellow’s a shepherd, fellow has a hundred sheep. One goes missing. What does he do? He goes after the one, leaves the other ninety-nine. Good luck to them. They can take care of themselves. Does that make sense? Well, no, it don’t. Not really. The value’s in the ninety-nine, ain’t it? Not in the one. You write off the one. That makes sense. What the Bible fellow did don’t make sense, but he did it anyway. Everybody does.”

“Is that why?”

“Why what?”

“Why I cut Sean loose?”

“That’s one reason, ain’t it?”

“There’s another?”

“There’s always another,” said Wingate.

He leaned forward in his chair and rested his elbows on his knees. He looked out across the yard, past the beehives, and into the woods.

“I used to tell you,” he said, “you deputies? Years ago? I used to say, ‘You go out as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves.’ ”

“I remember. That’s the Bible again, ain’t it?”

“You bet.”

“You’re all over the Bible today, ain’t you?”

“Nurse Penelope’s a lay reader,” said Wingate.

“I might have known.”

“You’ve about got the dove part down, it looks like,” said Wingate. “You might need to work on the serpent part.”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I got that part down, too. Plus, the serpent part ain’t sheriffing.”

“It ain’t?”

“No. People are going to do what they’re going to do.”

“Well,” Wingate said, “but that don’t tell you too much, does it? That don’t help much, putting it that way.”

“That’s the way you put it,” I said.

“No,” said Wingate. “I put it that you were to do the job. Never mind how it sounds later, when you say it right out — just do it at the time you’ve got it to do. Do your job. I put it that way. Do the job.”

“But you didn’t say what the job was.”

“Didn’t I?” Wingate asked.

“Not that I recall.”

“If I didn’t,” said Wingate, “it’s because I didn’t have to. You knew.”

“What did I know?”

“People are going to do what they’re going to do,” said Wingate. “You can’t stop them. You get out of their way. Then you come in with the mop and the bucket.”

“That’s what I said, ain’t it?”

We sat. The same cat came into the yard from the way it had left by a minute earlier. It walked across the yard in front of us, disappeared.

“How’s Clementine?” asked Wingate.

“She’s good,” I said.

ANOTHER WORLD

Deputy Keen got his Governor’s Public Safety Award for Distinguished Service in Protecting the People of the State at two in the afternoon Monday. They made quite a thing of it. The ceremony took place in Lyle’s hospital room, where there was packed in enough brass to open a candlestick factory. The lieutenant governor was there, the state’s attorney general, both state senators from our county, the head of the hospital’s board of trustees, Lyle’s surgeon, the assistant surgeon, a couple of nurses, two press photographers, and — lo and behold — Crystal Finn, looking like the new young minister’s wife, her hair washed and pinned up, wearing a pretty blue dress with sleeves down to her elbows so you couldn’t see her snake. Lyle lay there in his bed having his picture taken and shaking everybody’s hand, flashing a big grin. His busted leg was hauled up in the air, making him look like he was trying to kick the moon.

After the ceremony, when people were starting to leave, I went over to the bed to say goodbye, when, “Stick around, Sheriff,” said Lyle. “Come back in ten minutes.”

So I went and got a cup of coffee and brought it back to the deputy’s room. Everybody had left but Crystal. She was sitting on the bed next to Lyle. When I came in, she gave him a big kiss, picked up his hand, and held it in her lap.

“We’re engaged,” said Lyle.

“Yes,” I said. “I guess you are.”

“When I saw how she ran off those weasels with that old Ithaca, I knew she was the girl for me,” said Lyle.

Crystal giggled and patted his hand.

“Yes, sir,” said Lyle. Then he looked up at Crystal and squeezed her hand. “Give us a minute, sweetheart,” he said.

Crystal got up from the bed and left the room. Lyle and I watched her go. She was a well-put-together girl, no question.

“Sit down, Sheriff,” said Deputy Keen. I sat. He reached to the table beside his bed and picked up the award he’d just been given, a framed certificate with ribbons and seals. He looked at it and dropped it on the bed.

“Bunch of crap, ain’t it?” the deputy said.

“Not all of it,” I said.

“Thanks,” said the deputy. “Thanks, but you know different. I just got a medal for being coldcocked like the dumbest drunk in the bar. That’s a bunch of crap.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’ll take it, though,” said the deputy. “I’d be a fool not to.”

I nodded.

“Here’s the thing, Sheriff,” said the deputy. “I don’t know how to say it but to say it. I want your job.”

I nodded.

“I’m coming after you in the fall. The election. I’m going to run against you.”

“I thought you might be,” I said.

“I want you to know it ain’t personal,” said Lyle. “You’re a good man, you’ve been a good sheriff. But it’s another world we’re in now from the one you came up in.”

“It is?”

“You know it is. The ways you learned don’t work any more. They for damned sure don’t work on them Russians. They don’t even work on the locals. Look at Superboy.”

“What about him?”

“He’s a criminal. He has been for years. He belongs in jail. But you won’t put him there. You keep waiting for him to shape up. We had him cold the other night, but you let him walk. You and that trooper. Where is he now?”

“Traveling.”

“Traveling to someplace where somebody else will have to put him in jail. Because you punted. You know I’m right. Admit it.”

“I don’t know you’re wrong. I’ll admit that.”

“And then them Russians. You keep tiptoeing around them. They’re the enemy, Sheriff. We are at war. They are our enemies.”

“Suppose you believe that,” I asked him. “What would you do?”

“I’d ride them out of town on a fucking rail,” said Lyle. “And when they fell off, I’d shoot them.”

“Is that right?”

“You bet that’s right,” said Lyle. “You? You do this job like you’re some kind of a social worker. You don’t use your departmental vehicle, you drive around in that old wreck. You don’t carry your service weapon. You don’t even wear a uniform. Do you think people like the Russians, people like Superboy, respect somebody like that?”

“Old wreck? You insulting my rig, now?”

“Do you, Sheriff?”

“I don’t care if they respect me,” I said. “I care that they do what I want them to do.”

“Which is?”

“Leave us alone.”

“Well then, you’re out of luck again, Sheriff,” said Lyle. “Because they ain’t going to. No way they are. They ain’t going to leave us alone. They’re coming in here like a wave of snakes. They don’t respect you, they don’t respect other people, they don’t respect the law. They’re coming. They’re already here, others are on the way, and we’ve got to have something more to put up against them than a nice man with a long memory and good intentions.”

“Nice man? You calling me a nice man, now?”

Lyle grinned. He shook his head. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess I am.”

“That ‘more’ you’re talking about,” I said. “That ‘more’ we need to have? That ‘more’ would be you, I guess.”

“Your damn straight right it is,” said Lyle.

“Maybe so,” I said. “We’ll see. But I ain’t going to roll over for you, you know. There’s an election in the fall — that’s unless you’ve got a better way of doing that, too. Do you?”

“No.”

“Well then,” I said, “good luck to the both of us.”