In his fifteen years as a deputy he had come to accept the fact that people did filthy, unspeakable things to one another. To those weaker than them. Smaller than them. Defenseless against them. Unspeakable things that made him sit next to the beds of his boys when they were small children. Home late and them already asleep and the knowledge of these things on his mind and sitting there in the dark listening to them breathe. Their bodies and their minds at the mercy of what was outside the door and the fact that he couldn’t walk with them every step of the way gnawing at him as he watched them sleep. Sitting there in the dark and praying that the things he had seen wouldn’t find his children and trying hard to understand a God that would allow the weakness of innocence and the strength of evil. He kept the ugliest of what he knew to himself. Unwilling to tell Lacey because he did not want her to lie awake at night and share his fears. There in the dark as he sat next to the beds of his children he could only hope and he had continued to hope over the course of the years and as the cruiser passed through the sleeping streets of his neighborhood he was reminded of this hope. The hope that there was a good out there and that it quietly protected when no one else was around to help. He was reminded of this undetectable good and how much was left to its mercy and he wondered if perhaps that mercy hadn’t presented itself on the night that the deputy was murdered. If there really was such a thing that he had always imagined there to be.
He drove out of his neighborhood and along Delaware Avenue and he crossed over the interstate and drove out into the emptiness of those beloved back roads where so much happened. There was beauty in the depth of the sky and the black of the trees and the stillness of the empty acres. He turned off his radio and unbuckled his gun belt. Unsnapped the holster and pulled out the pistol and set it on the seat next to him. He pushed a button on the armrest and his seat leaned back and he turned off the air conditioner and rolled down the windows and the warm wind wrapped around him like the arms of a good friend. He drove farther and farther out until the random lights were gone and there was only the man and the land and the night. Safe from any approaching cars he slowed down and turned off his headlights and coasted along with only the orange glow of the parking lights leading him as if the cruiser were some alien craft examining a foreign terrain.
He thought again of his sons. Thought of how quickly they were becoming men and he hoped they would become good ones and he wished that he had a better understanding of what that meant. He thought he had that understanding until tonight. Thought he could sit down with them in the living room and tell them what a good man was and how to become one and maybe he still could but he knew that whatever he decided to do about that pistol and that murder would somehow taint his definition of a good man. Knew that whatever he decided to do there would remain an uncertainty that would walk with him and sleep with him and go with him to ball games and cook out with him in the backyard and grow old with him.
He had always liked the badge and the law because it gave him what was right and what was wrong and he was adrift between that by no fault of his own but it didn’t matter. He was there anyway. He held his arm out the window with his palm facing forward and he felt the wind through his fingers, hoping to get a grasp of that undetectable thing that would give him an answer and then protect him from the things that came with that answer but nothing wrapped itself around his fingers and nothing crept out of the darkness and past the orange glow and into the cruiser and nestled beside him. He held his arm out and he held his hand open and then he slowed and came to a stop. He turned off the ignition. Turned off the orange lights. Silent black in front of him and behind him and all around him. He rubbed his hands together. Rubbed them on his face. Lay his head back on the headrest. And he sat there in a daze under the weight of the crown that had been given to him.
51
OCTOBER. THE THICKNESS OF SUMMER GONE AND REPLACED WITH the relief of the autumn air. Russell sat in his truck in the parking lot across the street from the elementary school and watched the first falling leaves spin and scatter across the playground. He rubbed at his face and felt the softness of his beard. Thicker and fuller as if it could soften a blow if it had to. He looked in the rearview mirror and picked specks of paint out of it and then he picked at the paint on his hands and fingernails and he tried to figure out how much longer it would take him to get done with the house he was working on so that he could get paid. He needed to line up another job soon. In a couple of short months the easy fall weather would be gone and he needed to find as much work as he could before the cold and rain of winter. A child’s workbook sat on the seat next to him and he opened it and looked at her capital letters. Some of them were successes. Some had a ways to go. She has a lot of catching up to do they kept saying and he knew that even by saying this they were being nice.