have time to buckle his seat belt before the deputy spun them around and bounced onto the highway, accelerating as fast as he could.
“You care to explain any of this?”
“I don’t imagine I’ll need to. Anyhow, Sheriff told me not to spoil the surprise.”
“The surprise?”
“His word, not mine.”
Kyle let his curiosity ride. At the speed they were going it wouldn’t take long to get out to the Pickens place and see what breed of trouble the old man had crossed. He and Gerald Pickens were the only two Democrats who sat on the county commission, and the general consensus among the other serving government officials was that only Kyle had an insight into the old man’s ravings. Whenever some touch of the inscrutable lit in Gerald’s brain, Kyle was consulted in order to determine the cause.
A couple of minutes past the turnoff for Hampton they took the only road leading into the hollow. Not far up the way they could see deputy cruisers pulled off to the side of the road. A bit farther on and they saw a potbellied man wearing aviator sunglasses and a Kevlar vest with Velcro straps dangling loose. When he saw the approaching vehicle he clapped a Stetson on his bald head and waved them forward.
“Well, if it isn’t Christ Almighty himself,” Sheriff Holston crowed. “Glad to see you could make it up, Commissioner Pettus. I truly am.”
“You going to tell me what the damn fool has gotten to or do you plan on window-dressing in front of your deputy a few more minutes?”
“Yeah, I’ll let you know all right. Get out and follow me up here a little bit. Tyler, reach out your second-chance vest from the back. As much as I’d like to see a straight Republican commission, I’d prefer it not to come at the wrong end of a Remington.”
Kyle and the deputy stepped out and went around to the rear of the SUV. The vest was as floppy and oversized as the one the sheriff wore, though it seemed distinctly more ineffective around Kyle’s slender frame. He tugged the straps as far as they would go, then went on with the sheriff until they made the bend of the road where they could see a beige Lincoln town car settled on a pair of flat back tires. Its back windshield was shattered, though he could see a trio of men remained seated inside. They were talking and smoking cigarettes.
The sheriff pointed, said, “Now those boys were backing out of that driveway there when your libtard buddy across the way sniped out one of their tires from his front porch. Bam. Didn’t say a goddamn thing, just opened fire like he was back in the Mekong rice paddies. When the driver got out to see what the hell was going on, bam, a second shot half a foot in front of him. He dove right back inside and shut the door. Then a third shot, took out the other tire and one more in the glass. That one must have been for shits and giggles because they didn’t even try anything after the third shot. That was about two hours ago. Here’s the best part, though. It wasn’t any of them boys being shot at that called the law. It was that tar sunk sonofabitch setting up there on his porch! Called dispatch, said he had a bunch of damn wild dogs that needed us to pick up and take in or he’d start wasting ’em. Wasting ’em, he said, like he’d been watching Dirty Harry movies since daybreak. Now dispatch didn’t know how to make heads nor tails of what he was saying, but they figured they didn’t want to have sanitation come out and scrape somebody’s house pets that had gotten out of their fences off the side of the road. So they sent Shirley from animal control out and this is what she seen, a damn bloodbath waiting to happen. She talked to them boys to find out what was going on and when they told her she tried to go and talk to Pickens, but he told her the only man he would talk to was you. Said you were the only one who would understand what was on his mind. Since then we’ve been in what the news media likes to call containment. Until we could get your happy ass up here, that is.”
Kyle went up a few more paces until he could see Gerald sitting behind his porch rail with a scoped 7 mm Magnum. At his right hand a cup of coffee and between his teeth a brier pipe. Kyle couldn’t be sure, but it looked like he was wearing a bathrobe over his clothes and his PROUD VIETNAM VETERAN ball cap.
“What if I decline?” he asked the sheriff, though by then Holston had turned back the way he had come and was headed out of the direct line of sight. Kyle recited a few epithets to his back before he went on up the hill.
“Who goes there?” Gerald hollered down.
“I imagine you can see me just fine through that scope you’ve got trained on me, Gerald. I’d be obliged if you took those crosshairs off my chest.”
“Crosshairs ain’t on your chest, anyhow. They on your head.”
Kyle could tell the old man was enjoying himself. Still, he went on.
Two of Gerald’s goats met him on the way up. Molly and Malone, he believed their names were. Each cocked a yellow alien eye at him, stamped a hoof. Malone then bounded into the higher brush like the banished wood spirit he was. Molly, the one with white socks, bleated as she dropped a quick chain of turds before clattering up the steps and peering out from beneath the porch railing. Her nose twitched at him like she smelled something bad in the wind.
Gerald was known to leave the front and back doors of his cabin open all through the course of a day so that his pet goats could come and go as they pleased. He had told Kyle once that he preferred their company to most others who would have had business darkening his door. When Kyle had asked what he did if one of them took a shit indoors the old man told him that he only had to worry about it once. That a butcher knife and a crock pot made short work of any recidivists.
“Hey, Gerald.”
“Howdy.”
“You care to explain the events of the morning?”
“I’d say you probably have a good idea of it already.”
“It’s not looking too good for you from what I’ve heard so far.”
“You been listening to the wrong end of a gassy hog then.”
Kyle sighed, eased his weight onto the porch rail, tried to get within reach of the deer rifle as casually as he could.
“You can’t shoot at people, Gerald.”
“People he calls them. This is what he comes up here to tell me.”
“It’s not civil.”
“Wolf is at the very door and he tells me to kowtow.”
“The wolf, huh?”
“You step in there to the front door and get that pair of birdwatchers on top of the mantel. You look over yonder and tell me what you’d call it then.”
“If I do will you put that damn gun up?”
He mulled this over.
“I’m open to the possibility,” he said.
Kyle went in and got the Otasco binoculars from above the fireplace, came back and glassed the neighboring front.
“All I see is three boys who are likely wearing loaded britches.”
“Look on further back. Up there in front of the old asylum.”
Kyle searched through the shaded distance and was about to set the field glasses aside when a slim languid movement of red slipped across a bright hole of sunlight. The breeze played at the edges of the flag before it fluttered and flung out to its complete length. He saw the swastika.
“Do you see it?”
“Yeah, I see it.”
He placed the binoculars on the porch rail.
“Will you hand me that rifle now, Gerald?”
“That’s all you’ve got to say?”
“What the hell else do you want me to say? You’ve got some rednecks taking up residence across the road from you? That’s hardly breaking news. You know how many Confederate battle flags I passed coming out to market