Renewal 5 - an Untimely Fall (7 page)

Rob hefted the cloth sacks off the back of the truck. This time, Larry and his boys were strong enough to carry the heavy food bags back to their own truck. Larry set his boys to the task with another subtle wave.

“Thank you.” Larry said, with a slight dip of his head.

“You are welcome,” Bill said. “One other thing. Those guys up the road... they’re with us.”

“Hey, don’t you worry. We’ll move our truck and keep going until we hit the dinner table,” Larry said with a happy smile. “Any man who can turn one truck into four can have whatever he wants, I always say.”

“You say that, huh... I think I’ll borrow that one. Anyway, keep an eye out. We’ll be back. If it’s not me, I’ll give whoever comes out here a special code word. Let’s say, Bertha Bashing. If you aren’t sure, just ask and they’ll say that to let you know I sent them. I may be laid up for a while.”

“Ok, Bill. Thanks again, to all of you,” Larry swept his gaze over the truck. “I hope you get back on your feet soon.” Larry held his hand up in a tally-ho gesture and waved at Bill one more time as he walked over to his truck, climbed in, and drove up Gossburg Road into the hills.

***

Bill was tired from the travel. He was, in fact, thinking back to his hospital bed with some sense of wistfulness. There was one more task to complete, or at least to see to completion, before he could collapse into his own bed for a real night’s sleep. Jerry Doan Jenkins would finally have his date with ten state police, and justice.

The truck convoy rumbled across the muddy ruts in the fallow field, heading for Teeny Town’s training ground and unofficial jail. The guard had immediately reported their arrival from the road. When the trucks crunched to halt among the dripping leaves of the forest, they encountered a full complement of the guard, centered on Kirk, who looked as calm, yet implacable as always. Seth had thoughtfully turned the truck to give Bill a decent view of the important section of the woods. Bill could see up into the trees, filled with young men and women tasked with watching the Judge and his single living man. He breathed deeply for a minute, focusing on the clear drops of water slowly releasing their hold on the low hanging leaves. He knew what was coming, and he would face it on his feet.

Kirk made the connections quickly, and stalked over to his brother. “What happened?”

“I got shot. Shit happens. I’m fine. Help me out of this truck,” Bill growled testily.

“I can handle this, you know,” Kirk said.

“I know, Kirk. You can handle damn near anything, but I arrested this prick. I’m going to hand him over.”

“Alright then.” Kirk walked away.

Bill thought Kirk was ignoring his request, but Kirk was complying with no explanation, in typical Kirk fashion. He walked around the truck towards the edge of the woods until he found a young dogwood. He drew his knife, a wicked curved blade, and lopped the sapling off with one lightning strike. He picked another point near the ground and sheared the wood again. Satisfied, he walked back to his brother, and simply dragged Bill to the end of the tailgate until he could rotate to his feet. Kirk handed Bill the cut sapling, which became a remarkably well-fitting cane. Bill gimped over to the line of his guards and signaled for the police to come out.

Bill’s crew moved in close to protect their leader, and possibly to catch him if he fell, and the police made an impressive line at a respectful distance behind the local guard. Bill turned to Kirk, and ordered, “Bring down the prisoners.”

“We only have one now,” Kirk said.

“Which one?”

“The important one.”

“What happened to the other one?”

Kirk turned to his right, and pointed to a lanky young man with reddish hair and a near total coverage of freckles, all-in-all the least threatening guard in the whole community. “Donny, you tell him. You had the watch.”

“Well, sirs... uh, you see... The Judge was upset by the rain and demanded his man’s jacket. When the man refused, the Judge had a screaming fit and shoved his man over the side. The man, Jerrod Cantrell was his name, fell head first and broke his neck. He was dead before we could get to him.”

Bill looked at the young guard while he thought through the implications. Then he quietly said, “Very well. Thank you, Donny.”

Donny almost folded with relief. Apparently Kirk had given the boy a serious case of the frights before Bill had arrived.

Bill tilted his head back, winced at the pain of the slight motion, and called, “Thanks for the extra murder charge, Judge. That’ll make the trial so much faster.” He turned to Kirk. “Get him down.”

One of the tree guards walked the bridge to the platform above the Judge, and kicked the rope ladder out and down past the Judge, who proceeded to ignore it.

“Come on, Jerry. You’re pissing off all the nice state police,” Bill said.

Nothing.

“Oh, Jerry... I should point out that you are resisting arrest, which will make your ride back to Murfreesboro a great deal less comfortable. But more importantly, I have a number of options to get you down here, all of which are going to hurt you, and worse, scuff those shiny boots of yours.”

Still nothing from the Judge.

Bill said loudly. “Seth, I remember you saying you were unhappy to have missed some of the action a few days back. What would you say if I said there is a strutting peacock on that platform up there, and I will let you personally go up and escort him to the ground, however you see fit?”

Seth played along with the most ignorant accent he could muster. “Boss, I’d love to go up there and beat that man until blood squirts out of his holes. That’d be real fun.”

Still nothing.

“Ok, Big Seth. Have fun.”

Seth took two slurping steps before the shiny cowboy boots slid over the edge of the platform, and Jerry Doan Jenkins started the long climb to the ground. The tree guards raised rifles into position, but Bill looked up and shook his head. The last thing he wanted was to shoot his symbolic bid for law and order in Coffee County. They nodded acknowledgment.

Jerry took his last stiff step, and turned to face his accuser.

“Well, Bill Carter. Looks like you tangled with someone tougher than you.” The Judge said with a sneer. “Was it one of my boys?”

“You give your boys too much credit. The men who did this take shits that are tougher than any man you’ve got, especially your own inbred flesh and blood.”

Jerry Doan Jenkins flushed an ominous shade of red. “When my boys find out what you did here, they’ll...”

“Let me stop you right there, little man. Once again, you let your ego run the show. What kind of fool does that in the face of...” Bill counted with his chin. “Twenty-four armed and trained men?”

The Judge’s mouth dropped open, stumped for a response.

“And let me offer you a free piece of advice. Rather than killing your own men with your stupidity, you might try training them to be better than you. Something to think about while you wait to hang...” Bill made an awkward half turn to the waiting police, who were working hard to hide their smiles. “Lieutenant Jackson, I hereby deliver the prisoner, Jerry Doan Jenkins, into your custody.”

The tall, broad commander stepped forward. “I accept the prisoner, Jerry Doan Jenkins, into State custody. He will be transported to an officer of the court immediately.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant. He was stinking up our woods.”

Two officers stepped forward to place handcuffs on the Judge. He waited until the last possible second before he dove headlong at Bill’s wounded leg. Kirk moved in that spooky fast way of his, making contact with the Judge’s shoulder a bare instant before Bill’s dogwood cane made contact with the Judge’s ear. Bill yelled with the pain of his thigh muscle’s protest that the rapid movement, and Kirk somehow transitioned from diving tackle to standing on the Judge’s back without anyone seeing how he did it. Kirk used his left foot to hold the Judge’s face in the wet leaves until the cuffs ratcheted shut, and stepped calmly to the side. The officers dragged old Jerry Doan Jenkins to his feet and none too gently chained him to the bench in the back of Bertha number one.

The Lieutenant issued orders, deliberately putting his least upstanding officers in the back with the Judge. When everyone was loaded for the trip back to the capital, Jackson shook Kirk’s hand, clasped Bill’s left shoulder, and said, “I still owe you, Mr. Carter.”

“Be safe, Lieutenant. The Judge is a snake in the grass.”

“Yes, sir. See you at the trial.”

The two police rigs departed without delay, wallowing across the field. Bill listened with satisfaction as the diesels spooled up on the main road and faded into the distance.

***

Seth wedged the pickup into the narrow space behind Bill’s house and squeezed himself out through the partially open driver’s door. Jeffry slipped out the other side with no trouble. Bill’s wife, Aggie, had already gotten the news that Bill was injured and had asked the people of the community to give them some peace and quiet. Bill would have been embarrassed to be seen in such a weakened state, she well knew, along with the kind of attitude he could develop if he was caught with his pants down, so to speak.

Terry followed directions from the guard and pulled Big Bertha into the barn on the west side of Teeny Town. Feeling a bit possessive of the diesel monster, he deliberately kept the keys in his pocket and walked out the door on the town side of the building. He headed straight for Bill’s house, mostly out of the close bond he felt for the man, and his promise to John that he would keep Bill safe. He found Seth and Rob pulling Bill out of the pickup bed on an old Army-style canvas gurney.

They wound through the house, up the stairs, and carefully slid Bill onto his own bed. The mayor of the community was an inch away from a long sleep, and the men took their leave as quickly as they had arrived. Terry was the last out the door, but Aggie called to him to wait for her downstairs. Since he had no idea what to do next, Terry figured that was as good as any plan. He was thinking about a long nap himself.

Up in their room, Aggie inspected Bill’s wounds carefully, and then wrapped them up in fresh bandages. Convinced that he was in no real danger, she switched from concern to anger.

“William Milton Carter, what are you doing getting into gunfights? You’re supposed to be the Carter who talks, not the one who fights!” Aggie emphasized her words with a shaking finger in her husband’s face.

“Couldn’t be helped, My Dear.”

“Bullshit! I got the short version from John. And I’ll get the long version from Terry. It was your choice to fight.”

“If you saw what I saw, you’d know I had no choice at all. We’ve got fifty good people here who those assholes would love to tie onto a wooden cross and burn alive. What does this all mean if those kind of people run loose in the world?”

Aggie saw the strain in Bill’s eyes and backed down, running her fingers through his unwashed hair. “Ok, Bill, alright. Sometimes the choices are hard, I know. You get some sleep and I’ll yell at you some more tomorrow,” Aggie said, her expression was a mix of frustration battling with pure and enduring love. She smiled softly to remove the sting from her words.

“Honey, before you give Terry the third degree, you should know something.”

“What’s that, Old Man?”

“He saved my life. I only heard it since I was flat on my back, but he somehow pulled a miracle of gunplay on those docks. I went down, and expected to take the final bullet in the next second. I heard a bunch of shooting and next thing I know, Terry’s looking down at me with big round eyes. Then I expected the kid to take a bullet himself, just standing there staring. I didn’t know until Rob told me what happened. I do know that I wouldn’t be here, taking your high quality shit, if it weren’t for him, so go easy, huh?”

“Go easy? Listen, my love. If I were only thirty years younger, I’d be shoving my own daughter out of the way for that young man.” She palmed his forehead and gave it a gentle shake to show she was joking. “I was just going to thank him for bringing you back.”

Bill smiled tiredly and said, “Ok. Well give him a kiss for me then. No tongues though...”

Aggie got up with a look of false exasperation at her crazy, idealistic old man. She shook her head once, and walked out the bedroom door. When she turned to close the door behind her, she saw that Bill was already sound asleep.

End Part 5

Author’s Note:

Well, Bill Carter has his hands full. A smart man in his situation would be better off shooting every last bad guy he meets, but then, how would he draw the line? Without at least a passing attempt at law and order, it’s only a matter of time before he would be the same as any other brigand. He could have buried the Judge in the woods and it might be years before anyone pinned the murder on Teeny Town. He could have just as easily shot the Dragon and watched the imprisoned cops stomping on the corpse, but Bill tends to take the long view. What’s the outcome? Well, it turns out that every extra effort sets in motion a chain of events that usually makes being right much harder than being expedient. We’ll see...

About the author:

Creative people tend to be lousy at self-promotion, and I fit the cliché almost perfectly. After many years of asking myself why I have anything to say that is worth writing, the answer can only be that I have finally, in middle age, managed to make enough mistakes to say something solid about how not to live life. If I hold up a mirror to my own life, I get a backwards reflection that may actually contain some value. More importantly, I have been fortunate enough to know many people who may have suffered, but did so with far more skill and grace than I have, and they set a solid example for a realistic method of how to live well.

In the meantime, I live in Washington with my wonderful wife, who happens to be one of those good examples, and our five rescue dogs, who manage to encompass an entire school bus full of joyous, childlike personalities. And to add to the rapidly mounting collection of loose fur and allergens, I also share the house with two cats; one with no social boundaries, and one who is
nothing but
social boundaries.