“May we come aboard slowly and singly? You’ve done a splendid job,” their captain, Gene, cried.
“What are all y’all so goddamned happy about?” demanded Sidney.
“Mister Mortimer brought back our silly runaway girls. Minny and Sandra tried to break in his Clinton house and he brought them back to us. He could have turned them in to the law. He’s what this world is made for!” said the woman at high volume, thrilled, radiated by the deed of another.
“Ain’t that forty-five miles or so?” Sidney wondered. “Well, unlawful hitchhike, true.”
Sheriff Facetto took Melanie Wooten to the high school football game in the last week of August. It was in a different county, east twenty miles in the town of Edwards, out of the loess hills. Facetto had once played the sport and done well. Big and quick but not a fast runner. A dodger. He was first team. He now reflected under the lights, sitting down with Melanie, that every other cop he knew was a second-stringer. Usually the ones who knew the game better than the starters, as they explained full-bore. The players tonight were a third again bigger than his team. He wondered if he would find his younger self here, running toward a line as if it mattered hugely.
God help me love these country lizards, he asked during the before-game prayer. Lord, may there be significant but not tragic hits made to the other side.
I run back and forth between them. So they sleep safe in their beds, thought Facetto.
He had gotten a call that afternoon, a wild, high voice on the other end saying, “My uncle put out cigarettes on my forehead for twenty years.” “Why didn’t you do something, or move?” the sheriff asked. “What could I do? He was blood,” the reply. His uncle had just died, the man said. He wanted his uncle’s corpse arrested.
Some fans recognized Facetto as they found their seats, and they thought he was there with the newly divorced governor’s wife. They could not fathom this bright scandal, but who knew? Mastodons, tapirs and buffalo had roamed here once. Coyotes had made a vast migration east to Connecticut. You just couldn’t tell even who was where anymore.
They adored the scandal until somebody said no, that isn’t her. Then they turned their wrath on this person, for otherwise that night was charged with wild meaning, and their lives attached to it, like the football. “She’s an actress,” the person said. “I seen her playing the modern queen of France.”
“There isn’t a queen of France, liar.”
“Fuck you.” A squabble broke out several rows behind Melanie. Facetto made a pacifying gesture and it settled.
Melanie looked ahead, understanding a bit of the game from her years with Wootie but more delighted now. Blown by the first cool breezes of the season. Once or twice he touched her knee. She went wet as an oyster, blind with tears.
A blond cheerleader twisted and hollered for the love of the night and her own fame. Usually the cheerleaders were watched by their parents and pals only. Except when a flash of thigh. Mortimer was watching.
The sheriff told Melanie, “Men don’t want eternal life so much as the years sixteen to twenty-three back, with what they know now and their bodies no longer middle-aged.”
“You’re not even middle-aged. Don’t try to impress me.”
The cheerleader struggled on. You don’t know me yet, wing and thigh launched in air. Know me. Eat me up.
Mortimer went to the men’s rest room and waited, leaning on a wall, then standing again. Between urinal troughs, doing nothing else. The teenagers, children and few fathers who saw him didn’t know his function. They couldn’t read his troubles. Nobody lingered in this bunker. There was no leisure space here. Somebody said he was half-time entertainment, but shit, why would he loosen up here? Maybe to escape pesky fans. Sure, but who was he? Not dick if he was playing here. Some were disturbed as by the ghost of Twitty, but they couldn’t identify his age, if he was supposed to be dead or if it was his son. The tall thick waves of hair, the thyroidal eyes that swept them, then looked out at the concessions. A celebrity down on his luck. One said he was Russian. In black polished loafers with that special glare when you’re either from the casino or in sales.
Then a small boy came in alone.
“You having a good time? Having a good game?” asked Mortimer.
“We’re not having the game, we’re watching it, mister.”
“Could I play?”
“I said we’re not playing it.”
“Come on. Tackle me. Show me some touchdown.”
“I’ll go get my daddy.”
“Sure thing. He could play run up my ass. But sonny, you see that man at the hot dog counter. That’s my friend Mr. Booth. Please go tell him to come in here. I’ve found his wallet. Call him Mr. Booth.”
The boy went out and Mortimer watched him call Frank Booth in the line. Booth felt his pocket, lifted out his wallet and looked puzzled. But he came.
Booth walked in, and by the time he had opened his mouth to say thanks but he had his wallet on him, Mortimer had seized him by the face and cut him so quickly over and over on his cheeks, brows, even neck with a carpet knife that he was not yelling until it was over and his face was streaming blood. Then as he knelt squealing, Mortimer straddled him, knowing he could strike across the throat. But he did not. He said something about higher law and Booth’s not wanting to find Mortimer because he might want to keep his eyes, then ran from the blockhouse with a clap of loafer heels. The concessionaire who watched him said, “That sonofagun went out of here like a running back.”
Mortimer entered a strange car. It was his but strange. The car was new and had a grumbling muffler and nobody on a bet would guess he’d be caught dead in it. It was a Trans-Am with a firebird painted across its hood such as the car punks of every trans-Appalachian district would use to demonstrate muscle and arouse fright and disgust. He had never had the thrill he had watched richer boys have, North and South. Burning gas loudly and for no point whatsoever except to warn the universe. He saw them chase girls, the cars of troubled librarians, teachers at the end of their rope. The muffler spoke to his blood. Leave rubber, leave pavement, leave governance. You got your foot in something, but it feels like you’re kicking it. Cock-deep in internal combustion, metal, fire and gas.
It was five minutes before anybody could remember a sheriff was at the game. Two local officers had gone out into the parking lot, hunting between cars slowly on foot. But with grim authority, warning all others to stand back. This was not really an issue, as nobody was standing anywhere except for the small group around Frank Booth outside the Masonite bunker. Milling, they watched this stricken man, and you could not have paid them to follow that monster into the night.
The sheriff told them he had no power here. He was out of his jurisdiction and not armed. He did not offer to help, did not even arise and walk to see the man’s ravaged face, and this was held against him. He had swollen up beyond the workingman, him on TV. Him and his sugar woman. They would go off and drink their wine and forget where they were from, which was where?
Melanie was not aware of their ebbing popularity. Her smile was radiant under the lights, she was a moist girl, serene. To the east the ambulance crept in with dogs barking around it. The crew took off a beswathed thing who cursed God through a hole in the gauze.
Facetto said they had better leave.
The cheerleader, ignored all around, stared at the powdered dirt on her shoes as if her face had fallen there.
The sheriff was not affectionate in the county car and let Melanie out in a mood he apologized for. He said for her to lock her doors well, and she looked at him curiously. For all his build, he seemed a frightened boy. The night, or the people in the night, concerned him, reached out and held him. She had never seen him nervous before.