“Gypsies. Who else would I be talking about?”
“Well now, as I recall, last time you came by, it was a busload of Mexicans being trucked in to pick crops. Time before that, it was a carload of city kids.”
“Gypsies,” the man said.
“They haven’t put a curse on you, I hope?”
“A curse? Don’t play with me, Lonnie. Ain’t no such thing as curses.”
“So what are the gypsies up to, then? Stealing?”
“You bet they are.”
“Which is what everyone says about them, same way they talk about curses. But the stealing’s real?”
“Yep.”
“You saw it?”
“Family of ’em came in to buy groceries. Afterwards, things turned up missing.”
“What kind of things?”
“Couple of Tonka trucks, a doll.”
“Family had children with them?”
“Course they did.”
“You ever been known to pocket a thing or two you didn’t pay for when you were little, Jay? Kids do that all the time. Hell, I did… . Tell you what. You bring me a list of what’s missing, I’ll go talk to them. Bet your goods’ll be back on the shelf before the day’s over.”
“Well… okay, Lonnie. If you say so.”
“I’ll swing by and pick up that list on my way, say half an hour?”
“It’ll be ready.”
“Hard not to miss the excitement of law enforcement, huh, Turner?” the sheriff said once he was gone.
“Oh yeah.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, just what is it you do all day out there by the lake?”
“Not a lot. That’s pretty much the idea. Read, put some food on the back of the stove for later, sit on the porch.”
“What I hear, you earned it. Peace, I mean. Sorry we dragged you away, into all this.”
“Some ways, I am too.”
This, I thought-this was part of what I valued here, sitting quietly, no one afraid of silence.
“Just between the two of us,” I said after a while, “I’m not sure I was coming into my own out there, not sure I ever would. Maybe all I was doing was fading away.”
Bates nodded, then dropped his boots off the desk and stood.
“Let’s go see the king,” he said.
The King, who was all of twenty-one, wore a gold-colored shirt from the 1970s. Its panels showed great paintings, the Mona Lisa, a Rembrandt, a Monet. His palace was a battered silver Airstream trailer, one of those shaped like a loaf of bread, mounted behind a Ford pickup. Tea came to the table in a clear glass pot-started off clear, anyway. Hadn’t been that for some time, from the look of it. Half a dozen children of assorted size and age sat against the wall watching TV.
“We have talked about this,” he said. “Drink, drink. There’s lamb stew if you’re hungry. No? You are sure? Please let the proprietor know the articles will be returned. I will bring the children into town myself this afternoon and see to it that each of them apologizes to him. Some would say it’s in their blood, I know that. But they are, after all, only children.” He poured from the pot into a cup and drank, as though to prove it safe. “Thank you for coming to me with this.”
“Your father and I always got along, Marek. I never knew him to do anything but what was right.”
The king looked over at the kids, out the trailer window to where old women sat around a makeshift table chopping vegetables. “Maybe someone will say something like that about me one day.”
“What I’ve seen this past couple of years, I suspect they’ll be saying a lot more.”
After finishing our tea, the sheriff and I climbed in the Jeep and headed back to town.
“You’ll be wanting to pick up a necktie for the mayor’s cocktail party,” Bates said after a time, adding, once I’d made no response: “Joking, of course. Hell, you could wear a butcher’s apron and waders in there and feel right at home.”
A mile or so up the road we both stuck out our hands to wave at Ida chugging along in her cream-over-blue ’48 Buick.
“Ask you something?”
I nodded.
“It’s personal. None of my business, really.”
I turned to look at him.
“You keep leaving things, quitting them, moving on.”
“I’m not sure I ever had much of a choice.”
“What would you have told a patient who said that?”
“That one way or another, we always make our own choices. Point taken.” I watched a hawk launch itself off a utility pole and glide out across fields of soybean. “Much as anything, I think, that’s why I quit. Couldn’t listen to myself saying these really stupid things, repeating what I’d heard, what I’d read, one more time. It was all too pat-I knew that from the first. We’re not windup toys, all you have to do is tighten a screw or two, rewind the spring, adjust tension, and we’ll work again.”
The hawk dove, and came up with what looked to be a small possum in its talons.
“The simple truth is, I didn’t make those choices. Never chose to crawl around a jungle some place in the world so far away I hadn’t even heard of it. Never chose to shoot my partner, or in prison to kill a man against whom I had nothing, a man I hardly even knew. And I sure as hell didn’t call up my travel agent to arrange for an eleven-year holiday weekend in the joint.”
True to form, Bates stayed silent.
“I never felt at home, never found a place I fit. Like you can use a wrench that slips, a screwdriver that’s not quite right. They’re close, you get the job done. But it makes things more difficult the next time. Threads are stripped, the screwhead’s chewed all to hell.”
Bates pulled hard right and bounced us and Jeep alike down a dirt path through trees. Bags of garbage had been dumped indiscriminately at roadside. Wildflowers and thick vines grew out of a forties-vintage pickup as though it were a window box. Bates pulled up at AVE’S, a boathouse, bait shop and occasional barbeque joint built into a low hill alongside the lake and extending on stilts into it. DAVE’S didn’t seem to be doing much business. Or any business at all. A lone truck not looking much better than the one sprouting vines back on the dirt path sat in the parking lot.
Bates climbed down and went inside. He was gone maybe five minutes.
“Everyone’s okay. I don’t get out this way all that often, always like to check on Dave and the family when I do. Been tough for them and people like them, these last few presidents we’ve had.”
We made our way back onto the main road. A camel ride. Bates popped the top on a Coke, handed it over. I drank and sent it back. A couple of miles passed.
“Folks ’round here appreciate what you do for them?” I asked. “They even know?”
“Some do. Not that that has a lot to do with why I do it.”
We were coming into town now. Serious traffic. Two, maybe even three cars at the intersection. We pulled up at city hall. Neither of us moved to climb down from the Jeep.
“Sometimes I think the first choice I ever made, my whole life, was when I packed all the rest of it in and came here.”
“Hope it works out.”
“Better than in the past, you mean.”
“No, I just mean I hope it works out.”
The mayor’s housekeeper, a black woman by the name of Mattie, had been with the family over fifty years.
“‘Cept for the spell I got work up to the packing plant,” Mattie said. “Always did like that job.”
“Woman changed my diapers.”
