All That I Have (21 page)

THERE SHE WAS (AGAIN)

You have heard the old joke about the fellow in one of these little towns up here who runs for selectman and loses. The morning after Election Day he goes to the post office and the store, the way he does every day, and all his neighbors gather around. They feel bad for him. They come up to him, and they all say, “I voted for you, wish you’d won,” and “It’s a damn shame, you should have won. I want you to know I voted for you,” and “Well, Bob, you got my vote. Wish it had been enough,” and so on. The loser finishes up at the post office and the store, and as he’s driving home, he realizes that, if all the people had voted for him who said they had, he wouldn’t have lost.

By the fall, when the election was a couple of weeks off, I began to feel like I was getting ready to be that candidate: everybody likes him, everybody votes for him, but the other fellow wins.

Deputy Keen, fully recovered, famous, and back on duty, was running hard for my job. Funny thing was, we were working together and getting along better than ever. Partly that was because Lyle was campaigning a lot of the time, so we didn’t see much of each other at the department. But when we did, he was respectful, he was cooperative, he followed orders without giving you his ideas about them. He was nice as pie — kind of like the way the fox is nice to the chicken he knows he’s going to be eating before too long.

Lyle had a good campaign going, and he had helpers. Letters started turning up in the newspaper from his supporters. They all said about the same thing: time for a change, time for a new man, new thinking. The present sheriff’s a good old fellow, but he’s so far over the hill he ain’t in the same state any more. He’s gotten lazy. Look at how he gives known evildoers a free pass. There was a letter from Emory O’Connor. Emory said how we can’t keep our communities safe today using the methods of 1950. I thought that was pretty good.

“That jerk wasn’t alive in 1950,” said Clemmie.

“Neither were you,” I told her.

Lyle wasn’t the only one with helpers, of course. I had helpers of my own. Clemmie and her father took the whole business in hand. Did they need me, really? Maybe not: it was for sure my own ideas on how to go about running for sheriff (something I had, on my own, done successfully seven times) came in last in the decision making.

For example, campaign signs. Lyle had them: red, white, and blue cardboard placards that said
KEEN FOR SHERIFF.
They were stapled to wooden stakes that you drove into the lawn in front of your house so everybody would know who you were going to vote for.

I didn’t like those signs. I didn’t see why everybody needed to know who everybody else was voting for. Just go vote, was my idea. Forget the advertising. I had gotten elected seven times without campaign signs, and I let Clemmie and Addison know this time wasn’t going to be any different.

Yes, it was.

“You’ve got to have signs, don’t you know, Lucian,” said Addison. “I’m sorry if you don’t like them, but you’ve got to have them.”

“Why?” I asked him. “I’ve run seven times. I’ve never had those signs. Why’s this time different?”

“You’ve run seven times unopposed,” said Addison. “Now you’ve got to beat Lyle Keen. That’s a difference, wouldn’t you say?”

“Daddy’s right,” said Clemmie.

So we got a couple of hundred
WING FOR SHERIFF
signs. Ours were green, because Lyle had beaten us to the red, white, and blue. I refused to chase around the county handing them out to voters, though, so Clemmie and Addison took that on, and there is where we almost hit the ditch.

The week before Election Day, Deputy Keen arrested Addison for driving under the influence. Addison had been passing out my signs up in Afton; though how many of them could he have placed at two o’clock in the morning going over eighty miles an hour?

“This is Lyle Keen trying to derail us,” said Clemmie.

“Doing pretty good with it, too,” I said. “Fellow’s running for your job, a law-enforcement job, busts your campaign manager for drunk driving a week before the election. It don’t look good. It don’t help.”

“He doesn’t drink as much as he did,” said Clemmie. “He was set up. I know he was.”

“He was doing eighty-one,” I said. “If he don’t drink like he did, it’s because he’s about topped up.”

That was probably the wrong thing to say.

“Whose side are you on in this?” Clemmie asked me. “He was trying to help you, you know?”

“I didn’t ask for his help.”

“Of course you didn’t. Mister Law. You don’t ask for anybody’s help. That’s the thing.”

“What thing?”

“You know what thing.”

“What thing?”

Well, we’d gone about as far as we could go down that road, it looked like. I spent the night on the couch. Next morning, there was Clemmie’s back, reared up in front of me like a mountainside, once again.

This was not Addison’s first round as a drunk driver. He lost his license for ninety days. Therefore we began to see a lot more of him than we were used to, because either Clemmie or I had to drive him.

“I’m sorry about this,” Addison said to me one day when I was taking him to his office.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s three months. Anybody can do anything for three months.”

“It’s going to cut into your margin, though,” said Addison. “We wanted a landslide, don’t you know, Clemmie and I.”

“What are you talking about, margin? What margin?”

“Your winning margin.”

“I ain’t going to win.”

“Of course you’ll win,” said Addison.

“You think.”

“I know. Do you imagine the voters really want a bird dog like Keen for sheriff? Nonsense. All he does is run around arresting people. That’s not what anybody wants. Nobody will vote for that. People may say they will, but they won’t. You’ll see. Keen doesn’t understand the job.”

Addison was starting to sound like Wingate.

“We’ll see,” I said.

“Besides,” Addison went on. “Do you think I would have agreed to manage your campaign if you were going to lose? What do you take me for, Lucian?”

It wasn’t all politics that fall, though. From time to time I could still hear the echo of our old business with Sean and the Russians — and I could still count the rigs at the Ethan Allen, although they were starting to fade. Six rigs, five rigs, four, three . . . none. They faded. Should I let them fade? Could I? What was the strong thing to do? What was the hard thing to do? What was the right thing to do? Were they the same? I always thought they were, except for sometimes in sheriffing.

Then on Monday, the day before the election, an envelope came into the department addressed to me by name and with a French stamp on it. Inside was a fancy card that read:

Les Intérieurs Mâles
Photographies Americaines
par
MORGAN ENDOR
Galerie Faye
6 Rue Dauphine
Paris VIème

The card unfolded. When you opened it up, there was the photo of Sean in a frogman outfit: tanks, flippers, speargun. He was staring at you from behind his diver’s mask.

I thought I’d throw the card away. Then I thought I wouldn’t. I sat behind my desk for a good while. I looked out my window. You could see across the town green to the county courthouse behind the big old maple trees planted in front of it. You could see Leo Crocker raking up the fallen leaves under the trees. Leo had been a year ahead of me in school. First baseman, and could bat left- or right-handed. Leo had a daughter in the air force. You can have a daughter in the air force now. Leo’s mother and my mother had been friends. In fact, they had been cousins, so Leo and I were cousins, too, I guess.

Sheriffing was what I knew; it was about all I knew. But what was sheriffing? I thought sheriffing was the real thing: it was getting the job done the best way you could, Monday, then Tuesday, then Wednesday, and all week long. Sheriffing was soft, it was never perfect, but the job got done. The law was different. The law was hard. Clemmie said I think I’m the law. Mister Law, she said. I’m not the law. Far from it. I’m the sheriff. The law was almost the opposite of sheriffing; it was what you got to when sheriffing failed. Sheriffing wasn’t perfect, but the law was. It had to be. The law didn’t get the job done; it put an end to the job. The law was always there. You could always come to it. Maybe we had come to it here. I put Morgan Endor’s card in my pocket.

I took it home with me that night. Clemmie was in the kitchen getting dinner. I handed her the envelope and watched her take out the card. I watched her read the front of the card. I watched her open it to the inside. I didn’t say a word. Let’s get this done, I thought. It is what it is. This ain’t sheriffing anymore.

Clemmie looked at the photo of Sean.

“Oh,” she said.

“You know who that is?” I asked her.

Clemmie touched the photo with her fingertips.

“I know,” she said.

“We have to talk, don’t we?” I said.

Clemmie took her fingers from the photo of Sean and, stepping close to me, she laid them on my lips.

“No, we don’t,” said Clemmie.

There she was.

I beat Lyle the next day, beat him pretty smart. The week after the election, he took a job with the police force in a town in Massachusetts. He and Crystal moved down there. I understand he’s doing very well.

Epilogue

THE NEW MALE AND THE END

The Russians’ place burned up in the middle of the night a couple of days before Thanksgiving. It went with a roar: you could see the fire from twenty miles off.

We had been on our way to bed when the squawker went. Clemmie was brushing out her hair.

“You aren’t going up there?” she asked me.

“I think I will,” I said. I started getting dressed again.

“Whatever for? It’s a fire. Are you a firefighter? My Lord, are you a firefighter now, too?”

“No,” I said. “I ain’t a firefighter. Don’t wait up.”

“Be careful,” said Clemmie.

“Always,” I said.

Up on the mountain I found what looked like half the fire trucks in the county pulled in — half the trucks and three quarters of the firefighters. They had gone to a second alarm and then a third, though less to put out the fire than to make sure nobody missed the show. The flames were still going up above the tops of the trees. The flames lit the big red fire trucks and the shiny black and yellow suits of the firefighters, and they made shadows and sparks and red and black smoke. In the night, the place was like hell with the lights out.

I found the Grenada fire chief standing with his crew. The Russians’ house was in his town, so he was in charge. He was an old hand.

“Hello, Lucian,” the chief said. “Bring your weenies?”

“Just the one,” I said.

“Me, too,” said the chief. “Least, I think I brought it. It’s under here somewhere.” He patted the front of the long fireproof coat he wore.

“Quite a blaze,” I said.

“You should have been here half an hour ago.”

“Anybody inside?”

“I hope not.”

“Electrical, or what do you think?” I asked the chief.

He laughed. “This was no short,” he said. “Nothing burns like that without help.”