“Actually, being a sheriff around here is easy,” he said. “A lot of times people take care of the law by themselves. A few years ago one of those California motorcycle gangs rode into Virginia City on a Saturday afternoon and said they were taking over the town. By that night every sheepherder and cowboy in the county was in town. They broke arms and heads and legs, beat them till they got down on their knees, and left just enough of that crowd intact to drive the others out of town. That’s the way it gets done out here sometimes.”
“What’s all this about?”
“Not too much. I just want to tell you a couple of things.” We passed the Sweeny Creek grocery store, a small wood building set back from the blacktop in the trees, and turned onto a rock road that led back toward the mountains. I puffed on my cigarette and looked at him from the side of my eye. He wasn’t carrying a billy on his hip, and I hadn’t seen one in the glove compartment, but maybe it was under the seat or lying within a second’s reach against the doorjamb.
I had never been beaten in prison, or even mistreated for that matter, but I
could never forget the time I saw what a Negro could look like after he had been sweated with a garden hose three nights in isolation. He was serving peas in the chow line for the free people, and when one of the hacks told him, “You better start ladling out them peas a little faster, boy,” he replied, “You ladle them out yourself, boss.” Three hacks cuffed him in the serving line and took him down to the hole. When he came out his eyes were swollen shut, and the striped bruises on his stomach and back looked like a black deformity.
The sheriff parked the car close into the shade of the pines along the creek and cut the engine. He took another drink out of the whiskey and offered the bottle to me.
“Go ahead. You ain’t going to get trench mouth out of it.” He laughed and took a cigar from his pocket. “You know, you’ve got a shit pot full of good luck. The FBI man couldn’t find a thing on that shell casing. Either you must have wiped all them hulls clean before you put them in the magazine or a deer walked over and took a good, solid piss right on top of it.”
He bit off the tip of the cigar and spit it through the window, then wet the end as though he were rolling a stick around in his mouth.
“Do you think you got pretty good luck?” he said.
“You tell me.”
He struck a match on the horn button and lit the cigar.
“I don’t think your luck is too good at all,” he said. “But that’s another matter. I wanted to drive up here today mainly because it’s my day off and this is where I always come the first day of deer season. You see where that saddle begins right after the first mountain, where the meadow opens up in the trees? I get two whitetail there opening day every year. I got an elk cow there last year, too, right up the nose with this .357 magnum from forty yards. I was using a shotgun with deer slugs, and I got some snow in the barrel and blew it all apart firing at a doe. Then the elk walked into the meadow with the wind behind her and never smelled a thing. I put it in her snout and tore her ass all over the snow. Those steel jackets will go through an automobile block, and they don’t even slow down when they gut an animal.”
I handed his whiskey back to him and looked out the passenger’s window.
“You’re not a hunter, are you?” he said.
“I gave it up in the army.”
He had started to take a drink, but he lowered the bottle and looked hard at me. I tried to keep my gaze on his face, but it was too much. His anger toward me and what I represented in some vague place in his mind or memory—some abstraction from a childhood difficulty, a sexual argument with his wife, a fear of the mayor or the town councilmen or himself— was too much to contend with in a stare contest, even though he was trying to pull my life into pieces.
“Let me tell you something before we drive back,” he said. “I don’t like you. I probably can’t get you for shooting up the mill right now, but I’m going to make you as unwelcome as I can in Missoula County. I’ll put you in jail for spitting on the street, throwing a cigarette wrapper down, walking in public with beer on your breath. I’ll have you in jail every time I see you or any of my department does. I have the feeling that if I lock you up enough and call your parole officer each time I do it, you’ll get your sack lunch and bus ticket back to Louisiana. Which means you better keep your ass out of my sight.”
“Is that it?”
“You better believe it, son.”
I opened the door and stepped out on the short grass. My head was light, and the wind blowing through the pines along the creek bed was cold against the perspiration in my hair.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he said.
“I’ll hitch a ride back to the Riordans’.”
The sun’s rays struck through his windshield, revealing in his face all his anger, all his doubt about leaving me to find my way home (and the possible recriminations later), and the most serious question—whether he had struck the fear of God into me with a burning poker.
I walked up the rock road toward the blacktop, smoking a cigarette, and he drove along beside me in first gear with his fat arm over the window, the doubt and anger still stamped in his face, and I was glad no one could see this sad comedy of two grown men acting out a ludicrous exercise in a mountain wilderness so that one of them could go home with a piece of scalp lock to keep his pride intact.
The sheriff floored the car in front of me, fishtailing off the grass that was already turning wet with dew, and spun a shower of rocks off the back tires when he hit second. He threw the whiskey bottle out the window into the gravel as he turned onto the blacktop, then roared away toward Missoula with both exhausts throbbing, his arm like a ham on the window.
By the time I had hitched a ride back to the ranch, the sunlight was drawing away over the mountains in a pink haze, and Buddy was sitting on the porch steps in a sheep-lined jacket, tying tapered leader on his fly line.
“Where you been, man?” he said.
“I went for a ride with that fat dick.”
He looked up from his concentration on the leader and waited.
“That shell casing was clean, but he says he’s going to make my life interesting every time he catches me in Missoula,” I said.