“I guess that’s right,” Rhodes said. “But I’m trying to improve myself. Now, back to Reverend Funk.”
“Oh, yeah,” Hack said. “Seems he had a crowd on the church parkin’ lot last night and this mornin’. He called to complain about it and asked for a little help. I told him that the sheriff’d have to deal with it.”
“First time I ever heard a preacher complain about a crowd,” Rhodes said. “But you say this one stayed all night?”
“All night,” Hack said. “Messed up that parkin’ lot somethin’ awful.”
“Messed it up how?”
Hack looked at Ruth Grady, who was standing with a very straight face. “Well, they messed it up,” he said. Rhodes didn’t get it. He looked at Ruth, too.
To keep from laughing, Ruth said, “It was cows, Sheriff. The crowd was a herd of cows. They spent the night on the church parking lot.”
“Oh,” Rhodes said.
“That preacher’s hoppin’ mad,” Lawton said.
“Mad ain’t the word,” Hack said. “They call it ‘wrath’ in the Bible.”
“Same thing,” Lawton said.
“Anyway,” Hack said, “he says it’s Mr. Clawson’s cows. You know, he has that little feedlot three or four blocks from the church. I guess the fence broke. Reverend Funk’s been out on that parkin’ lot most of the mornin’, so far, with a shovel and some plastic garbage bags. He wants you to arrest Mr. Clawson and put him on the other end of a shovel. If you won’t do that, he wants you down there yourself.”
“He’s kidding,” Rhodes said.
“I don’t think so,” Ruth said.
“You’re the sheriff,” Hack said.
“Seems like I’ve heard that one before,” Rhodes said.
That evening Rhodes and Ivy were eating supper at the Bluebonnet-hamburgers and Dr Peppers, Rhodes’s favorite. Ivy wanted to know how his day had been.
“You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Rhodes said.
“Considering the things I’ve seen, heard, and done in the last few days just being around you, I’d believe just about anything,” Ivy said.
“Speaking of that, you never did tell me about learning to ride a motorcycle,” Rhodes said. He thought fleetingly of Ivy’s legs and how they had looked when she hiked up her skirt. He looked down at his Dr Pepper in case he was blushing.
“I told you, my brother taught me,” Ivy said. “He had a bike when we were teenagers, and I wanted to learn to ride. We had to go out to an old field on the far side of town so my mother wouldn’t catch us. She’d have died if she had known.”
Rhodes looked wistful. “I always sort of wanted to own a motorcycle,” he said.
“It’s fun, but it’s dangerous,” Ivy said. “And look at the kind of people it can get you involved with.”
“That’s the truth,” Rhodes said.
“Now, about your day,” Ivy said.
Rhodes told her.
Ivy laughed. “Do you get any extra pay for that?” she asked.
Rhodes shook his head. “I even had to provide my own shovel,” he said.
“Maybe your job isn’t as glamorous and exciting as I thought,” Ivy said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Rhodes said. “Tomorrow, two government guys are going to show me how to burn a whole field of marijuana.”
“Now that does sound exciting,” Ivy said.
Rhodes shook his head again. “No,” he said biting into the last chunk of his hamburger. “It’s the same thing. We just won’t be using a shovel.” He wadded up the paper the hamburger had been wrapped in and threw it at the trash can.
Ivy stood up and took his hand. Then he drove her home.