All That I Have (4 page)

Russians are from away, if anybody ever was.

But Lyle don’t want to hear all that. He reckons he’s a cut above sheriffing. Or, put it another way, he reckons he’s a cut above sheriffing the way his boss does it, the way I do it. And Lyle’s got an answer for that, too. Don’t he just?

I learned sheriffing from old Ripley Wingate, who had the office here for about a hundred years. Wingate went in for a kind of horse-and-buggy sheriffing, and I was his deputy for ten or eleven years before he got done at seventy and I took over. Wingate could have had the job after seventy. He could have had the job after he’d died, at least for a while. Nobody was going to run against him, were they, any more than they’re going to run against Diamond Mountain, or the moon, or anything else that’s always been there.

That’s another thing that sets sheriffing apart. Maybe that’s the main thing: you’re elected. You get voted in, and you get voted out. No other lawman is like that, that I ever heard of. The sheriff has to run for his job, every other year. Therefore you can’t ever assume that you know even half as much as Deputy Keen thinks he knows about what that job is. And Lyle’s only a deputy, don’t forget. All he thinks he knows on sheriffing, and he ain’t even the sheriff. Or he ain’t, yet.

Not that Deputy Keen is a foreigner. He was born here in the county, in Humber, graduated from Cumberland Union. Basketball player. Lyle went to the Police Academy and took a job out of the county, with the police department in St. Johnsbury, looking to get into the state police. But the state police wouldn’t have him. I don’t know why. Lyle’s a smart fellow, but, of course, with the state police smart won’t do it for you. You have to have a genius IQ, or pretty close. Look at Trooper Timberlake.

Anyway, Lyle didn’t take to it up in St. Johnsbury, so he applied to join our department, and I hired him. That’s four or five years ago.

Again, Lyle’s bright, and he’s honest. He works hard. The occupational disease of sheriffing, you could say, is laziness, and Lyle don’t have a lazy bone in him. Fact is, he might get too far over on the other side. Because Ripley Wingate used to tell us (me and his other deputies): Don’t be lazy, but it’s okay to look lazy. Lyle don’t even look lazy. Far from it: his uniform’s always pressed, his radio’s always on his belt. He carries a gun.

I don’t wear a uniform; no need of one. People around here know me. They know who I am. They know what I do. They don’t have to see me in a fancy suit. I don’t have a uniform, and I don’t carry a weapon. Wingate never went armed. No guns, he said. Leave it in your car. And leave your car at home. I learned from Wingate. Of course, I have a gun. I have Wingate’s old army .45 that he brought back from World War Two. It’s in my sock drawer, where a gun ought to be. I also have the county’s expensive Remington police shotgun in the trunk of the sheriff’s car. At least I think it’s in there. It was last time I looked. I don’t much use the sheriff ’s car, though. I like my truck. Plus, it saves the county money.

Saving money is big. The sheriff is a county officer, but in this state the county don’t have taxing authority; the towns do. Towns that don’t have their own police forces — and that’s practically all the little country towns — make a contract with the sheriff ’s department to take care of policing within their limits. Those town fees are what make the sheriff ’s budget. Therefore, the towns reckon that budget is their business — and that’s fair enough. But, I mean, look at that Ambrose selectman the other day: those town boards and treasurers want to bite every dime you spend. They want to count your paper clips. They want to look over the tires on your patrol cars, and if they can see any tread at all on those tires, they want to know why you’re asking for money to buy new ones. You’re a bookkeeper, is what it is. It don’t ever end, and for time, it seems like it’s two thirds of the job.

Wingate’s right: you don’t need a gun to be the sheriff. You don’t need a badge or a uniform. You do need an adding machine.

I guess I could tell Lyle and my other deputies they’re not to carry guns, the way Wingate told us years ago. I haven’t done that. There are different kinds of people passing through here from what there used to be. Not long since, there was a sheriff ’s deputy up near White River who was shot and killed in a traffic stop. As near as anybody could tell, he’d pulled over a car for speeding or some other violation, went up to the car, and the driver shot him through the window and took off. Nobody ever found him. So I won’t tell my deputies they can’t arm themselves. Some of them do and some of them don’t. I tell them to figure it out for themselves, do what they want. (Within reason: no nuclear weapons.) Again, Wingate didn’t give them the choice, not in that, but Clemmie says I’m more Wingate than Wingate.

Clemmie’s fond of Wingate. Wingate never married, he’s all alone, and she feels sorry for him. After he’d retired we’d have him over for dinner now and then, or we’d take him out someplace, but not so much lately. He don’t want it. He’s by himself in his place over here in South Cardiff; it’s just Wingate and his bees. He keeps bees.

He hasn’t been well. Fact is, Wingate’s barely making it. After all, he’s eighty-three or -four. I go visit him every so often, but Clemmie don’t come. Wingate don’t want her. He don’t want Clemmie to see him broken down the way he is, it looks like. If you’re Wingate, you don’t show weakness, or anyway you don’t show it to women, or anyway you don’t show it to women of an age to be your daughter. Wingate’s old school.

4

THE SWEETHEART OF SIGMA CHI

Coming down the long drive from the Russians’ house, I followed Deputy Keen. At the road, he went right and I went left. I wasn’t going back to the department. I was going to look for Sean Duke. His parents lived in Afton. He wouldn’t be at their place, but they might know where he was.

I had hoped Melrose wouldn’t be home. I had hoped I’d be able to talk to Sean’s mother. But Melrose was in front of their house when I drove up. He was washing his car, playing a garden hose over it to rinse off the soapsuds. He turned off the hose.

“Hello, Lucian,” said Melrose. “You looking for Superboy?”

Melrose Tidd couldn’t stand Sean. He wasn’t Sean’s real father. Sean’s father had been dead for, at that time, I’d guess thirteen, fourteen years. Melrose was his stepfather.

“You know where I can find him?” I asked Melrose.

“Going to arrest him this time?” asked Melrose. “Going to take him in?”

“Nothing like that,” I said.

“No,” said Melrose, “I didn’t think so. Not you, right? More likely you’d pat him on the head, ain’t it? Get him to sit in your lap?”

“You know where I can find him?”

“Hell, no, I don’t,” said Melrose. “If you ain’t going to bust him, then you can find him on your own.”

Ellen came out of the house — Sean’s mom. She’d seen us talking, and she came out drying her hands on a dish towel.

“Hello, Sheriff,” said Ellen.

“He’s after Superboy,” said Melrose.

“Is that right?” Ellen asked me.

“I did want to talk to him.”

“See?” said Melrose. “What’d he steal?”

“Shut up, Mel,” said Ellen.

I talked to Ellen. “He’s been working for Tim Russell’s crew, hasn’t he?” I asked her.

“For almost a year,” said Ellen. “He’s doing very well with it.”

“That means he ain’t in jail,” said Melrose.

“Shut up, Mel,” said Ellen.

“Yet,” said Melrose.

Ellen shook her head at him.

“What do you want with him?” Melrose asked me.

“I want to talk to him,” I said.

“Is he in trouble?” Ellen asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know for sure. That’s why I want to talk to him. You know where he is?”

“You mean today?” Ellen asked.

“Today would be good.”

“Well,” Ellen said. “If he’s not at work, he’ll be at Crystal’s. She lives over in Monterey.”

“She’s got a trailer,” Melrose said.

“Sean lives there, too,” said Ellen.

“At night,” said Melrose. “Some nights. When he ain’t had a better offer.”

“He and Crystal have been together since Christmastime,” said Ellen.

“He got her in his stocking,” said Melrose. “Along with the candy.”

“Shut up, Mel,” said Ellen.

The trailer where Sean lived with his girlfriend — his girlfriend, now — was one of half a dozen trailers on a lot back of the lumberyard as you come into Monterey. It was an old trailer, a good deal older than either of the people living in it. Its siding was rusty, its windows were dirty, and it had a blue portable toilet set up off one corner.

I parked in front of the door and got out of the truck. There were no other vehicles at the trailer; there were no flowers or other plants in pots like any proper trailer ought to have. Only the little dirt yard, three cement blocks at the door for steps, and an off smell, faint but there alright, that must have come from the portable. You can drive from the Russians’ house, Disneyland, up on its own mountaintop, with its security gate, its tennis court, its pool, its golf range, its five-acre lawn — you can drive from there to this place in the same car, get there on the same day, in the same hour. It don’t seem like you should be able to, but you can.

I knocked on the door. Right away a dog with a voice like a foghorn began barking inside. I stepped back from the door. The dog was roaring and banging against the door, making the door shake in its frame. Then a woman’s voice started in yelling, “Jackson!” The dog shut up.

In a minute the trailer’s door opened, and a young woman stood in the doorway. No sign of the dog, no sound.

“What is it?” the girl asked.

“I’m Sheriff Wing,” I said.

“I know who you are. What do you want?”

The girl looked like she’d just woke up. She was about twenty; she had a lot of curly red hair. Her legs and feet were bare. Her toenails were painted blue. She had a tattoo going around the upper part of her right arm, a snake, like a purple snake winding around her bare arm there. Nasty looking thing. She wore a Tshirt that came down just far enough to make her decent. Decent — speaking legally.

“Sean here?” I asked her.

“No.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Working.”

“Are you Crystal?”

“I don’t have to tell you that,” said the girl. “I don’t have to tell you who I am. I don’t have to tell you nothing.”

The girl’s T-shirt had
SHIT HAPPENS
printed over its front; the letters were pushed out in front of her chest. She was a well-puttogether girl, no question. Now she raised the shirt and took a cigarette from a pack she had tucked in the elastic of her black underpants. She lit the cigarette and leaned in the door frame, looking at me in the yard.

“What’s your last name?” I asked her.

“I don’t have to tell you that, either,” said the girl. “Here’s the thing. Why don’t you fuck off?” She blew cigarette smoke into the yard, then bent at the waist to scratch her ankle. We had Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair, here, it looked like. We had the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.

“Sean is working at a big fancy place in Grenada,” I said. “I need to see him about that place. Will he be here later?”