Willnot Read Free Page B

to my mother, who would have had much to say about such folderol, codswallop, hogwash, and bull.
    Sheriff Hobbes was sitting on the bench by my car having a smoke when I came out. Sheepishly he extinguished the cigarette on his boot sole and held it up. “More filter than tobacco.”
    “Still get the job done.”
    “Yeah, guess it will, at that.” He fingered the butt to be sure no fire was left and tossed it in the trash container by the bench. The bench was spackled with pigeon shit. The container had K EEP W ILLNOT C LEAN stenciled on the side.
    “Through for the day, Doc?”
    “Never can say for sure, but I’m giving it a shot.”
    “Don’t suppose you’d be up for a cup of coffee.”
    “Best get on home, Richard’s expecting me. My turn to cook.”
    “Man administers to the sick and needy and cooks too.”
    “Let’s not talk about success rates at either. Is there something I can do for you, Sheriff?”
    Loose skin beneath his eyes, hunch to his shoulders. He’d slept poorly, or not at all. “You were out there, Lamar. What do you think?”
    “I think we found a hole in the ground with bodies in it. There’s not a lot more to be thought at this point, rationally.”
    “But you have to wonder.”
    “I wonder about most everything. How cruelty never declines, how it is that we’re using everything up at such a headlong rate, why people have to have big daddies in the sky.”
    The sheriff sat, bull’s-eye in the worst swirl of dried pigeon shit. What the hell. I joined him on the bench. “You know,” he said, and after a moment went on, “I ever looked ahead, what I saw was maybe twenty years of writing tickets, cooling down domestic disputes, scaring kids who were on their way to trouble, investigating the occasional traffic accident—I’m good at that, know what to measure, what to make of the numbers. But this …”
    “Not many of us wind up where we thought we would.”
    He shook his head. “Scares the piss out of me, Lamar. Not the bodies, not whatever happened out there. Not knowing what to do— that scares me. It’s like you open up a book and discover you can’t read, all the little hooks and curls don’t make sense to you anymore.”
    Grady Faim’s ancient Ford came chugging up the street, front bumper lashed on with wire and more or less swinging free. The pickup stopped, its window wound down, Grady grinned out at us.
    “And here to our left, ladies and gentlemen, we have two pillars of the community—such as it is, such as they are—hard at work helping make our tiny corner of the world a better place.”
    “You want to move along there, Grady? Stop blocking traffic?”
    “Don’t see as there’s traffic to block.”
    “You counted up your unpaid tickets lately?”
    “No sir. But I have ever’ one.”
    The two of them had never got along. Grady, a fantasist and aggressive paranoid, couldn’t bear authority figures of any sort. And the sheriff had little tolerance for people who refused (as hesaid) to live in the real world. But the sheriff chose silence and Grady, faced with no further challenge, continued on. We watched his head bobbing about in the back window.
    “There goes yet another full-tilt character in a mile-long daisy chain of them,” the sheriff said. “They do abound. You ever figure out why so many kooks wind up living here?”
    I stood and brushed at the seat of my pants. “We are, after all, a town rich with uncommon history.”
    That night in my dreams I’m working on a bridge. Girded with a harness that smells of sweat and machine oil, throwing myself over the edge of cement platforms and blindly into darkness, the harness plucking me from the fall with bone-jarring exactitude. Each time it does so, it seems that I partially surface from the dream, and the half-awake, half-aware part of my mind ponders how symbolic this all is.
    At 3 AM both parts of the brain awoke fully when Dickens the cat climbed into bed with us and started