Above the Waterfall. Ron Rash

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      Where does any story really begin? One thing can’t happen unless other things happened earlier. I could say this story began with an art class I took in ninth grade, or broken promises, one by Becky Shytle and one by me, or that it began when a shirtsleeve got caught by a hay baler’s tines. Instead, I’ll say it began on the Monday I first saw the blue cell phone, the same phone I held, briefly, in my hand the following Friday.

      This all happened three weeks before I retired as county sheriff. There would be a meth bust on Tuesday, but otherwise I figured it to be an easy week—tie up some more loose ends, do a few more final favors, get my retirement paperwork done. I’d already quit coming in before midmorning, letting Jarvis Crowe, my replacement, get used to running things on his own. An easy week, but when I got to the office on Monday, Ruby, our day-shift dispatcher, let me know it would be otherwise.

      “C.J. Gant called a few minutes ago, Sheriff. He’s coming to see you. It’s important, he said. Of course we know it’s always important if it involves him or that resort.”

      “We do,” I agreed. “Where are Jarvis and Barry?”

      “Jarvis is checking out a break-in and Barry’s serving a bench warrant.”

      “Anything else?”

      “Not any crime,” Ruby said. “Bobbi Moffitt was being her usual nosy self over at the café this morning. Said to me it didn’t seem right for a man to retire at fifty-one. I told her thirty years for a lawman was like aging forty years for regular folks. And it is.”

      “I suppose so,” I said. “I’m closing my door so I can try to figure out how to download these damn retirement forms.”

      “My grandson can come over and help you.”

      “I’ll figure it out. I’d like to retire without some sixteen-year-old making me feel like an idiot.”

      “What about C.J. Gant?”

      “Send him on in when he gets here.”

      The red light flickered on my office phone. The message was from Pat Newton, who owned the paper mill outside town. He’d offered me a part-time night watchman job, two twelve-hour shifts, one on Saturday and one on Sunday, starting next month. “I need an answer by next week, Les,” Pat’s voice said.

      Clearing out my office. That was something else I needed to do, though that would be mainly filling trash cans, shredding old files. All I’d take with me would be some books off the shelf, a few things stashed in my desk. And the three paintings on the wall, two framed watercolors I’d done, each with a ribbon proclaiming BEST IN COUNTY, and the print of Edward Hopper’s Freight Car at Truro.

       Even Hopper’s boxcars are alone.

      That was the first thing Becky had said when she’d entered my office two years ago. Not how most people would start a conversation, but as soon as Becky said it I saw it too—the freight car hitched to no other. Not a single shadow other than its own. The sky empty.

      Yes, it seems so, I’d answered that morning, our first exchange like passwords in a Masonic ritual.

      I checked my e-mails from Becky, the first from last night.

       I wish you could have seen the black-eyed susans Friday night. They were transcendent, Les. Maybe another time you can go. There’s something else, but it’s not good. Darby took Gerald’s lawn mower two weeks ago and still hasn’t returned it. Can you help get it back?

      I’ll go see Darby this afternoon, I typed, but it’s Gerald’s fault letting Darby take it in the first place.

      Becky wouldn’t see it that way, though. In her eyes Gerald could do no wrong, even though I’d cautioned her that Gerald wasn’t quite the lovable old man that she thought.

      Becky’s second e-mail was from 9:06 today.

       There was a school shooting in Atlanta this morning.

      Anywhere a school shooting happens, not just around here, I want to take extra precautions at the park. Becky had told me that during her first office visit. By then I’d heard the scuttlebutt around town that Locust Creek Park’s new superintendent was a bit quair, as the older folks put it—that she didn’t own her own vehicle, just a bike, and no TV or phone. Not easy to talk to either, people said, some claiming Becky was autistic. I’m not autistic, she’d told me later, I just spent a lot of my life trying to be. New on the job, so overzealous, I’d thought at first. Then Becky had brought up an elementary school shooting in Emory, Virginia, in 1984. Two students and a teacher had been killed. She’d given enough details that I’d asked if someone she knew had been there. I was there, Becky had answered. I’d been curious enough afterward to Google Becky Shytle, but instead of something about the shooting, I’d found a newspaper photo of her and Richard Pelfrey, a terrorist who, had his timer worked right, would have killed СКАЧАТЬ