Keith Rosson

THE KIND OF PEOPLE THAT DRIVE THESE ROADS

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SUMMER, 1986

The boy lay there in the yellowed grass with one pantleg still snagged in a line of barbed wire. Slowly the crickets started up their whirring again, and from some distant farm Dobson heard a dog bark. The boy had landed on his back and Dobson could see his hands drifting slowly over the grass at his sides as if he were absently looking for something. Dobson stood there for a moment and put his pistol away with a shaking hand and then walked to the fenceline and stepped between two lines of wire. His legs thrummed and nearly gave out on him. The boy was looking at the sky but then his eyes moved toward Dobson and he coughed once, a filigree of blood on his lips. Dobson cursed quietly when he saw that the boy could not be more than nineteen or twenty years old.

The heat stilled everything; the sun was red and shimmering as it sank beyond the darkening hills. Sweat ran in lines down his ribs and he felt gnats swarming the wound at his neck, saw them clouding the blood at the boy’s lips as if some terrible incantation had been made visible. Dobson knelt on shaking legs, his gunbelt creaking, and waved a hand at them. The boy’s eyes widened. He grabbed Dobson’s wrist, stronger than he would have thought.

“I’m sorry, son,” Dobson managed. He knuckled sweat away with his free hand and stared at the boy as he gasped a last husky breath and then the grip on his wrist loosened. The sun like a bloodied eye finally sank behind the dim hills there and Dobson got no sense other than that he was alone.

“Shouldn’t have run like that,” Dobson croaked, and lurched to his feet and ran towards the fence. He grabbed the fencepost and vomited in the grass, his guts tightening as if he’d been struck. His CB loosed a squawk of static and he looked at his patrol car, the rotating trouble lights the only movement in the growing dusk. Two small holes in the side of his open door. The pavement beneath with a scattering of window glass that reflected on the color of the setting sun. The boy’s Newport perched nosefirst in the drainage ditch.

Faintly the querulous sound of John Bishop’s siren could be heard over the whirring of the crickets, and Dobson spat the taste of sick from his mouth. He held hard to the fencepost and stared at his boots, the ground in front of him.

The light from distant farmhouses were small glittering things in the darkness, and Dobson stood smoking Bishop’s cigarettes with shaking hands. Dean Haverty leaned cursing in the ditch, trying to pop the trunk of the dead boy’s car. He had tried a screwdriver, a chisel, tried prying the lid open with a crowbar. Their lights painted everything in blues and reds.

“Sheriff,” Dobson said. “That boy’s body, it’s just…”

Bishop stared at the Newport as if he could will the trunk open. “That boy’s not moving now, Mike, and he won’t be moving five minutes from now. We’ll get St. Vic’s and the Staties and the whole clusterfuck out here soon enough. But we’re claiming this one; no way the State boys are taking this one away.” His cigarette sparked on the pavement and he called out, “Jesus, Haverty, I can’t stand this anymore. I was hoping you’d use your head, for Christ’s sake.”

Haverty turned, huffing, his collar ringed in sweat. “Hell, Sheriff, damn trunk’s locked.” Haverty was twenty-five and Dobson had caught him once spinning his pistol and striking poses in the station’s bathroom mirror.

Bishop lit another cigarette and then rubbed an eyebrow with his thumb. “How you open a lock, son?”

“I don’t know, boss,” Haverty said sullenly. Then he and Bishop both saw the dawning of realization on the boy’s face, the humiliation of it so transparent that Dobson felt a little sorry for him. His shoulders slumped and he looked at the crowbar in his hand as if it had suddenly appeared there.

Bishop nodded. “Yuh. Keys are probably in the ignition, Haverty.”

Moments later the three of them stood clustered around the Newport. The air was rich with the smell of dope. Haverty opened the trunk and John Bishop laughed and clapped Dobson hard on the back. Three green garbage sacks lay there, laced in duct tape and bulging amid a clatter of jumper cables and bungee cords and grease-stained plastic bags. The smell was pungent, intense. Bishop took a pocketknife from his trousers and cut open one of the sacks. He held a bud of marijuana between his forefinger and thumb and Haverty whistled. Dobson thought of the boy twenty yards over at the fenceline, the strange geography of his blood forming on the white sheet Bishop had laid over him.

Bishop hitched up his belt and shut the trunk. His face wore a hardness Dobson had never seen before, a fierceness others had warned him about but one he never believed would be directed at him.

“I don’t know who this young man was, Mike, and to tell you the truth I couldn’t give a shit. Winslow’s hot with trouble enough half the time, and I will have no truck at all with what this one was running.”

Dobson had wanted this only moments ago, had been desperate for it. An acknowledgment of some kind. He knew he’d only done what was necessary, in fact only protected his own life, but Bishop’s words rang sanctimonious. “I don’t need the pep talk, Sheriff.”

Bishop held up a hand. “Let me finish. They can do this shit in Bend if they want, or better yet, keep it in Eugene with all the hippies. This one could’ve been on his way to Canada for all I know. But we’ve got enough problems with every alkie ranchhand in the county tipping back a few and tooling up on his wife every time beef prices drop.”

“He came at me firing, Sheriff.”

Bishop nodded, a ghost of a smile playing across his face. “I know it, son. That’s what I’m saying. I killed no less than fourteen men during my enlistment in Korea and I will remain convinced to my dying day that God still smiles on me for it. It’s not a question. The lines are clearly drawn on some things. You were on one side and that boy over there was on the other. That’s all there is to it.”

Dobson said nothing. He could only remember that as the boy’s last breath loosed itself from his body, Dobson had felt no passing of anything eternal. He had been with a dying boy and then alone and that was all that was clear to him.

Bishop went to his cruiser to radio Candice at the station. She would send an ambulance from St. Victor’s over in La Pine and Dobson’s life would move beyond this stretch of empty road. He felt he had been there for days, months; that he could count every blade of grass, every leaning fencepost. The dead boy’s sheet glowed under the moonlight and in his daze Dobson asked himself if he believed in ghosts, knowing he had more than earned the fealty of haunting from the boy.

It was nearly midnight when he walked up the porch steps and found Karen in the kitchen. All the lights were on and she sat at the table with a cup of tea at her side, the portable fan plugged in and whirring. She rose and stood before him and he knew from her face that Candice had already spoken to her.

“I’m okay,” he said, setting his hat on the table and laying his gunbelt over the back of the chair. “I’m just tired.”

She searched his face and he knew she could read his hurt better than he himself could. Even more, she knew how much he could accept from others. She said, “We already ate. I wasn’t sure when you’d be home. I could make you something.”

“No, that’s alright.” He stood there feeling wholly apart from himself, like someone else entirely. “I just… it’s something to think about.”

“There’s time,” Karen said, and went to the table. The fan had pushed her papers across the table. She tidied them and then sobbed once, her back turned from him, and placed her fist against her mouth. He stepped to her and laced his arms around her belly and she leaned her head against him. Her hair smelled of woodsmoke and shampoo and something inside him loosened a little with it.

“There’s more to say. There is, hon. I just… I don’t have the words yet.”

“I know it,” she said. “I’m just so sorry for you.”

He went upstairs and Casey’s door was open. She lay in her bed reading and the lamp painted the room soft and dim. He thought again of the boy’s foot slung there on the wire and suddenly wanted to drop to the floor among the light blue walls and grasp her, crying fierce warnings against time and fate both. She closed her book and he sat gently on the edge of the bed. Her face creased with worry when she saw the bandage on his neck.

He shook his head. I’m okay, honey. It’s nothing to worry about. You’re up really late tonight.

I was waiting for you.

What are you reading? As tired as he was, his hands knew the words, forming their lexicon in spite of his own numbness.

She looked at him, unsure of his truthfulness. Then she lay back and smiled, put the book next to her lamp. Another one of those books where you get to choose what you’re doing. To choose your adventure. Are you sure you’re okay?

I’m sure. What’s this one about?

This one, you’re helping a troll. A family of trolls that everyone else thinks are mean but they’re really not. They’re ugly, so everyone just figures they’re mean. She made light, feathery noises as she signed, mouthing the words, knowing it was late at night. Her version of whispering.

That’s good. Trolls need all the help they can get.

She was eleven years old and would be starting junior high at the public school, something that terrified him with the breadth of all that would most likely go wrong for her there. His daughter’s deafness had always made something in him bare his teeth against the world, wanting to protect her against the workings of what he knew would eventually overtake her, the disparity of it all.

Are you really okay? Did anything bad happen tonight? She yawned and pulled a string of hair from her mouth, her eyes searching his face.

He smiled. No, nothing too bad. He told her about Dean trying to unlock the boy’s trunk, editing the details, but going through the list of screwdriver, chisel, crowbar, and John Bishop finally irritably mentioning the idea of the keys being in the ignition, and by the time he was done she was cawing her wonderful barking laughter. This husky, careless sound a salve to his heart.

He smoothed the bedsheet and smiled. Time for bed now. It’s really late.

Okay, she signed. I was at the end of that story anyway.

I love you.

I love you too.

She kissed him goodnight and turned off her lamp and he stood in the doorway of her darkened room, marveling at the incalculable bravery of it: her world soundless and now darkened and still so she was so sure of her safety from the trappings of the world. If Dobson had ever felt that way as a child, he couldn’t remember it.

They made phone calls and sent faxes and things started to trickle in. There were forms and more forms to be filled out; their own reports, ones to be filed for the Staties and the District Attorney in Bend. Ones for the Internal Affairs Division if an oversight committee were ever to be appointed. He usually took solace in the work, the familiarity of distilling difficult, sometimes terrible events into concise statements. Today the words swam in front of his eyes.

The boy was going to college in Los Angeles. He’d been arrested two years earlier – a protest for the Sandanistas. They had his prints on file from the arrest and everything in his wallet matched clean with that.

He was from South Dakota. His parents and an older brother still lived there. Dobson could imagine it all too easily. Needing money, maybe for school, maybe not. He knew some people who knew some people. This was pot they were talking about; every kid in a tie-die sold pot these days. The wholesalers probably told him to take the county roads, to stay off the interstate. Someone gave him a gun and maybe he liked the allure of it. Then he ran a speedtrap outside of Winslow, Oregon and everything went to hell. They would never know his destination.

His name was Charles Harrison. He was twenty years old.

Dobson couldn’t reconcile the name with the face. He’d pulled out behind the billboard as the Newport rocketed past and started pacing the boy. Moments later the boy had veered into a ditch and gone rabbit, leaping from the car and running straight down the center lane. He wore khakis and a white t-shirt and Dobson didn’t see the pistol until he’d opened the door. The boy suddenly pivoted and sank to one knee and fired three times. Two shots went in the door and the third starred the driver’s side window, shards of glass peppering Dobson’s face and neck. Dobson’s gun was stuck in his holster.

His name was Charles Harrison. The boy had stood and ran towards the fields, tried to get through the wire and gotten caught in it. Dobson had touched his face; his fingers came away bloody. He yelled at the boy to stop and the boy struggled in the wire and Dobson sighted and fired.

After that shot he heard nothing. The crickets stopped, even the distant hum of Highway 97 to the north; the world seemed to him a thing newly carved from the old one, a world silent and bright with enmity.

The boy’s parents flew in from Pierre to retrieve the body. They trundled down the station’s hallway, clutching each other so tightly they moved as one. John Bishop led the way, speaking to them with the solemnity of a deacon. Mrs. Harrison was a small woman with a man’s haircut and a cream-colored blouse with pale white dots. A fist with a crumpled tissue never left her face. The boy’s father was stocky, with brown hair combed back and graying sideburns. He had tanned arms thick with muscle, the skin going loose at the elbows. A blurred green tattoo with a growling bulldog sat on his bicep, USMC etched underneath. He cast Dobson a glance as he passed and his gaze was red-eyed and baleful and terrible.

“Just a few forms to fill out,” John Bishop murmured. “I’m terribly sorry.”

Dobson sat at his desk and stared incomprehensibly at the carbons in front of him. In John Bishop’s office, Mrs. Harrison let out a long, quavering wail, and Dobson put a hand over his mouth and looked out the window, sunlight winking off passing traffic.

FALL, 1986

Downey Avenue ran through the town, and the leaves of the trees dripped with rainwater as the sun slowly edged from behind the clouds. The streets were black and slick and the chill of winter was still yet to come. Woodsmoke hung tattered from the chimneys of houses, and as it was deer season, men and women wearing camouflage fatigues and neon orange hats walked out of RC Market and Brad’s Red Apple carrying paper sacks of groceries and beer.

In Brad’s, the three of them stood together in line as a cashier – a high school girl with a tsunamied crest of hairsprayed bangs – sullenly rang them up. Dobson trotted to the display in the front window and grabbed a pumpkin, mottled and misshapen. He thumped it down in front of the girl, who wordlessly set it on the scale. “I tried to pick the ugliest one,” Dobson told his wife. Karen opened the checkbook and smiled wanly at the cashier, who rolled her eyes and continued ringing up their groceries. He turned to Casey. Ugly pumpkins need homes too, you know.

Casey laughed. Dad! Halloween isn’t for almost another month! Her smile stayed fixed in place as she signed.

Who cares? This guy’s too ugly – someone will have grabbed him up if we wait.

He’ll be all rotten by the time the trick or treaters come.

Dobson gravely shook his head. No way. Her name is Lucinda, and she has magical powers. She is invincible against rotting.

“Whatever!” Casey barked, dragging the word out with her hands planted on her hips. Since starting school in the fall, this had become a favorite of hers, something Karen lamented almost daily. Dobson vacillated between being fiercely proud of his daughter – her language skills had improved more in three months of public school than her six years worth of work with a specialist – and waiting for the other shoe to drop. The other children had so far been kind to her – she was friends with a group of girls who often came to the Dobson’s house that fall and seemed capable of powering entire rooms with their nervous, shrieking energy. But dread still skated around the edges of Dobson’s heart. The boy’s face came fleetingly to him in dreams, and he would wake sometimes with his hands fluttering across the sheets, as if repeating the boy’s death knells. He had pulled into the parking lot of the First Calvary Baptist church one hot day in September, but had found the oaken doors locked at midday. It was as close as he’d gotten towards seeking some kind of redemption. The memory of that stretch of road rattled inside him like a stone in a cup; it was simply something that he carried with him. He was growing familiar with it. The seeming necessity of the act and the fear it had awakened in him were entirely separate from each other.

They stepped out of the supermarket. Casey pushed the shopping cart as Dobson continued detailing to her the questionable powers of Lucinda the pumpkin. He was focusing on his hands and hardly noticed it when Karen walked to the driver’s side and recoiled, her face suddenly closed like a fist. Casey saw the look on her mother’s face and stepped toward the car.

What? What is it?

“Nothing, honey,” Karen said. “Come inside with me – I just realized I forgot to get stuff for your lunch.”

No, you didn’t. You-

“Casey, now,” Karen said, and took her by the wrist.

The driver’s side window had been smashed in, pebbles of glass dusting the seat and floorboard. On the seat lay a Polaroid of the dead boy. He grinned and held up a fish, a blurred blue lake in the background. Slightly younger, looking pale and proud.

Halloween night someone threw a dead raccoon on the porch. Its mouth locked rigid, fur blackly matted. Casey was out trick-or-treating with Kalie Dempsey and her mother. Deborah Tollson, dressed as a witch, rang their doorbell. Her children, a mummy and a ladybug, pressed themselves against her legs. Karen opened the door with a plastic jackolantern full of miniature candy bars, but set it on the end table by the door when she saw Deborah’s face. “Looks like someone pulled a trick on you, honey,” she said huskily, her hand over her mouth.

A week later Dobson came out on the porch for the newspaper and there was a scattering of .22 shells thrown on the flagstones. He called John Bishop, who said he’d look into it. Again, Dobson thought of the restlessness of the boy’s ghost, wondered distractedly if he was being haunted. Of the strange price of blood borne from this world.

They found a dead robin in the mailbox the day before Thanksgiving, along with three spent shotgun shells.

The first weekend in December and the Datsun sat on four slashed tires in their driveway. Dobson wanted to put his backup pistol in the drawer of the end table by the front door. Karen asked him if he was crazy. Haverty or John Bishop did drivebys of the house when they were on patrol now; Dobson did it himself when it was his shift. The fear was like a low current inside him, never entirely gone away.

WINTER, 1986

The plow had gone through the day before and walls of dirty snow laced the ditches alongside the roads. Icicles hung from the eaves of the houses, occasionally cracking from their own weight and plummeting to the snow like daggers. It was mid-December and the old house was festooned in garlands and candles. Artificial snow dusted the windows and the tree was mounded with presents and scattered with lights. Casey had cut out construction paper mistletoe and taped it above the kitchen doorway, insisting her parents kiss every time they stepped under.

Dobson and Karen both flinched when someone knocked hard on the front door. Casey lay on the floor, working on homework in front of the television.

John Bishop stood there on the porch. The night sky hung low, a flat gray that promised more snow. He wore cowboy boots and dark bluejeans and a buttoned chambray shirt he’d tucked in. A fat winter coat the color of gunmetal. A straw cowboy hat sat on his head and he put his thumbs in his beltloops and smiled.

“Sheriff,” Dobson said. “Don’t know if I’ve ever seen you out of uniform.”

Bishop smiled, tipped his hat at Karen. “You got a minute?” He winked and Dobson saw that he was drunk. Dobson felt helpless to stop whatever was coming next.

“Sure thing, Sheriff.”

“Good deal. Get your coat.”

Karen tried not to look worried as Dobson kissed her forehead, signed to Casey that he had to go out to do a bit of work with the Sheriff. Bishop touched the rim of his hat again and they walked to the cruiser, their breath ragged strings the wind pulled apart. Bishop eased himself in the driver’s side with an old man’s groan. They pulled from the driveway. The trees illuminated by the headlights were skeletal and white. Farmhouses and barns sat clustered with light far from the road and again Dobson knew that yet again there was something coming that would send his life spinning irrevocably towards some violable and involute darkness.

“Where we going, John?”

“Hush now,” John Bishop said. His eyes did not move from the road. He pulled a small silver flask from his jacket but could not open it and drive so he put it back.

They traveled the quiet winter roads and he took them out of town, past Blake’s Auto Body and the abandoned granary and the new Wendy’s, all the places that edged the outside of town. There was nothing out here save one thing and when Dobson realized that the dread became a thing firmly alive inside him.

They pulled into the lot of the D & G Tavern, the wheels purring in the gravel, and John Dobson parked in a spot next to the front door. The dashboard lights painted his face with an awful green radiance and then he turned the ignition off. He opened the flask and drank deep, the wrinkles in his neck exposed and white. He reached into his other pocket and took out two silver badges and handed one to Dobson.

“What’s going on, Sheriff?” Dobson’s voice sounded very small to his own ears.

Bishop shook his head again. “Follow my lead, son. And do not step lightly in there.”

The air was fanged with cold and honkytonk music leaked from the tin walls and the snow squeaked under their boots as they walked. The parking lot was scattered with rust-swathed pickups and cars with plastic duct-taped over broken windows. John Bishop went to the cruiser’s trunk and opened it and took out a pair of handcuffs, stuffed them in his pocket. He took out a black baton and hefted it twice in his hand and shut the trunk.

“Sheriff, wait. Just wait a minute.”

John Bishop took two steps toward him and pointed a finger up towards Dobson’s chin like a pistol barrel. “Not a word, Mike. There’s lines crossed that you can’t go back from and that’s what someone did with your own family. We’re just setting things right again.”

Dobson stood breathing in the cold. He said nothing. “Now you put that goddamn badge on,” Bishop said, and he did.

The sheriff threw the door open and it bounced against the wall and came back at him. He slammed it again with his forearm and strode through the tavern, the baton clutched in one fist. A bar flanked one wall with tables lining the other, a larger room in the back with pool tables and a jukebox. Bishop slammed a forearm against Carl Alstead’s back to move him. Alstead was a big man who ranched summers in Pendleton, and his mug fell from his hand and shattered, musical among the steel guitar of the jukebox. He whirled around and Dobson held up a fist as he passed and snarled, “Try it, Carl. Go ahead.”

Alstead held up his hands. “No trouble, Deputy.”

In the back room stood four or five men, kids really, clustered around a pool table. They wore baseball caps and Skoal cans had worn rings in the back pockets of their jeans. A group of women in acid washed skirts and cowboy shirts sat at a table nearby, its top laden with empty pint glasses and ashtrays. John Bishop stood among them, chest heaving, and Dobson stood behind him. Somebody up front turned off the jukebox and those in the back room fell quiet looking at the two men. Bishop radiated a crazed, gleeful menace.

“Which one of you all is Blaine Harrison?”

One of the boys, a glassy-eyed McIntee boy Dobson knew worked at the paper mill, turned and said something quietly to one of the women. She grinned and crossed her legs and was about to say something back to him when John Bishop brought the baton once sidelong into the boy’s mouth and then into one of his kneecaps and the boy collapsed to the floor as if he were a marionette destringed. Another boy stepped toward Bishop and he whirled and hit the boy in the throat with the baton. The boy coughed and fell to his knees, clutching his throat with one hand. His other hand gripped the rail of the pool table and Bishop brought the baton down on it. The boy raised his head towards the ceiling, howling like something gone feral. Another boy stepped toward the one on the ground and Dobson bent his thumb toward his wrist and the boy sank to his knees pleading. Everyone left standing was pressed against the plywood walls and John Bishop stood there grinning under the rim of his hat.

“Which one’s Blaine Harrison?”

Mutterings from the front room, the bartender stood there worrying a towel in his hands. The three women clutched each other.

The bartender took a tentative step forward. “Sheriff, please-”

John Bishop brought the baton down on the table and pint glasses exploded in fragments, cigarette ash flying in a cloud.

“Which one of you all is Blaine Harrison? It’s the last time I’m asking.”

One of the boys pushed himself away from the wall and timidly raised his hand. He looked to be in his twenties, thin, the knees of his jeans worn threadbare. His dark hair was shorn short and he had a small scar that turned his lip up, as if he were contemptuous of all that he saw. For a moment, Dobson’s heart lurched in his throat. The resemblance to the dead boy was unavoidable.

Bishop cuffed the boy and took a small sheaf of bills from his wallet, dropping them on the pool table. He found the bartender amid the crowd and said loudly, “For your pint glasses, Jim.”

They took him out the front door, the wind pulling their breath to tatters. It was snowing, the flakes falling fat and slow, a tumbling mosaic haloing the parking lot floodlights. The Sheriff backhanded the boy once and punched him in the kidneys and he dropped groaning to his knees. He bounced the boy’s head against the flank of a pickup and the boy pitched backwards and fell on his back in the snow. Blood welled slowly from his forehead, black under the light, his cuffed hands pinned under his back.

“Sheriff, stop.”

Bishop leaned over the boy. “Should of just shot the man, if that’s what you were gonna do. Instead, what? You put a dead bird in his mailbox? Jesus.”

He leaned down and grabbed the boy by an arm, pulled him up standing. The boy staggered but stayed upright, his back dusted with snow. He wore no coat, his shirt rucked up his back. His eyes took on a glassed-over cast, as if he were somewhere far away.

“Turns out Dean Haverty’s cousin Pat does some serious drinking at the D & G, shoots some 8-ball every once in a while.” Bishop opened the back door of the cruiser but left the boy gasping and leaning against the car.

Someone stepped out the front door of the bar and Bishop raised a hand and without taking his eyes from the boy called out, “Get your ass back inside. This is a police matter.” He took a drink from his flask and put it back in his pocket. “Pat hears this fella here talking one night about how his brother got himself killed last summer. Got killed in Winslow moving some dope for some fellas. Tells Pat how he come down here from the Midwest and got himself a job at the mill and he’s just been messing with this cop the past few months. The one what killed his brother.” Bishop grabbed the boy by the hair and pulled his head back, the boy’s throat white in the moonlight. “Isn’t that right, Blaine? You throw a dead fucking raccoon on this man’s porch? Slash his tires? And then drink some beers and tell folks about it?”

“Sheriff, stop. He’s just a kid,” Dobson said.

The sheriff leaned in close to the boy, his teeth bared. “Your brother was transporting dope, son. He shot at this officer when he got pulled over.”

He let go of the boy’s hair and wiped his hand on his pantleg as if he’d touched something filthy. “And still you got the nerve to act the righteous one here? Like you God’s right hand man or something?”

Dobson’s hands were freezing, like stones at the end of his arms. John Bishop drove and his eyes were flat and deathly and cast back even the scant light given them. He looked in the rearview mirror and said, “Do you know the kind of people that drive these roads, son?”

“I’m not your son,” Harrison croaked from behind the mesh of the backseat, pressing the palm of his cuffed hand to his face. His words were nasally and misshapen. One side of his face was a red mask, rills of blood running from the wound on his forehead. The whites of his eyes shone out of it.

“And you need to thank your stars for that, boy.” Bishop turned the heater off and they drove in silence. Dobson looked at Sheriff Bishop and knew he would never again hold any reverie for a perceived justice; understood fully now that men would simply do as they have always done and claim it under the term of equity or righteousness.

They drove back the way they’d came. Winslow was dusted with fresh snow and nearly empty of traffic, the shops of Downey Avenue ghostly and empty. “The kind of people that drive these roads,” Bishop said, “are the ones just waiting to fall off the edge of the world. They’re waiting for the Russians to fire the nukes. They’re waiting for the oil to run out. They’re waiting for war and disease and famine, pretty much. Your average fella out here’s waiting for the goddamn End Times. He’s just hoping it don’t come any time soon.” He took off his badge and tossed it on the dashboard.

“They’re waiting for God to abandon them, is what I’m saying. They’re hoping it doesn’t come, but they wouldn’t be surprised if it does. People that drive these roads, boy, they go day by day and there’s enough hard luck in their lives what they make themselves. They don’t need any trouble handmade by someone else. You get me?”

The boy said nothing.

“The simple fact is that if your brother had not been moving dope, and if he hadn’t fired a gun on a police officer, he would be alive today.”

“Shut your mouth,” the boy finally said, and the sheriff laughed.

“I’m sorry,” Dobson said quietly. The whirling flakes seemed small maelstroms in front of the cruiser’s headlights, and John Bishop cast an eye at him. It didn’t matter. “I’m so sorry for it. I’m sorry he’s dead.” Dobson’s voice came out husky and raw.

There was only the hum of the wheels on the road and the alcohol stink of the sheriff and his own blood thrumming in his ears. There was only those worn wooden steps of his porch and all that they lead to.

They drove out to the offramp of Highway 97. John Bishop pulled onto the shoulder and turned off the car. He heard the sound of the ticking engine and the boy’s labored breathing from his swollen mouth.

The sheriff stepped out of the car and opened the back door. He eased the boy out and unlocked his handcuffs. Dobson stepped out and looked at the boy over the roof of the cruiser. He would not meet Dobson’s eyes. The lights of the highway ahead colored the roof of the sky a dull gray. Their shoulders became dusted with snow as the boy rubbed his wrists and looked at the snowchoked weeds lining the offramp, the gentle rise of the white hills, the green signs up in the distance marking the miles to places other than there.

“You’re lucky to be alive, son,” John Bishop said quietly. “That’s just straight truth. Don’t ever come back to this town.” He nodded once toward the highway and got back in the car.

Dobson took off his jacket. The air was brittle with cold, a wind that flattened his shirt against his back. He walked around the car and held the jacket out. The boy looked at it, then at Dobson’s face and back at the jacket. If there was anything there, Dobson couldn’t tell what it was.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. He thought of the boy’s mother as she had howled like some kind of wraith, remembered the way she seemed anchored to her husband. The boy turned from him and ran his hand down his face once. He grimaced and grabbed Dobson’s jacket and put it on as if angry at it.

Dobson got in the car and watched as the boy pulled the jacket’s hood up. John Bishop started the car and turned around, the headlights playing across the sloped hills and chokes of bramble. Dobson knew the dead boy would own him in ways he could never dictate, ways he would never fully know. He knew his heart held many dark rooms and many lighted ones; that he could turn towards one or the other on any given day.

He looked in the rearview mirror and saw the boy walking towards the highway, his shape limned in the gray halfshadows of the snowy night.

–

Keith’s previous or soon-to-be-released publications, if you’re into that sort of stuff, include PANK, The Ne-er-Do-Well, Poor Claudia and the British sci-fi mag Murky Depths. He has published the punk zine Avow since 1995; it’s been anthologized twice in book form. Check him out at www.keithrosson.com