“Wardens don’t know yet,” said the sheriff, “but people do. So stop doing it.”
Burt reached his hand out to shake the sheriff’s. “I’ll do that, Sheriff. Thank you. You’re a good man, Sheriff, that’s what we all said since you come here. He’s a good one, Sheriff Cal. A bit inexperienced, but cares for people. I had no idea they could bring that kind of hurt down on a man, for varmints?”
Cal dropped the handshake and winced at the floor. “It’s all right,” he said.
Burt had his John Deere cap off his head now. He wrung it in his hands. Thin, matted hair crossed his forehead above his glasses. Then anger flashed in his eyes.
“I’m gonna go sit out by my field tonight and shoot at every set of eyeballs I can shine. Bears. Coyotes. Porkies. I figure I’m gonna pretty much shoot at everything.” He smiled a bit, like the declaration had allowed him to regain a piece of himself, remedy some wrong. Burt nodded and made his way toward the door. He stopped. “Oh, by the way, Tiff, I seen a hawk pick up a year-old puppy once, dropped it right on a barn roof.”
Tiff and Cal just looked at him, waiting.
“So there ain’t no saying what coyotes will get after—calves, children—if a hawk can pick up a dog. Nature’s a hell of a thing when it’s hungry.” He shook his head at the floor. “Fifty thousand!”
“See you, Burt.”
“See you,” he said, and he got a mischievous gleam in his eye. “Say, Tiff, you found a boyfriend to kiss on yet?”
Tiff raised her eyes at him like a teacher would, a warning for silence.
“I’d give that Texas Ranger a smooch if I was a lonely girl like you,” and then Burt pushed through the door, muttering about damning game wardens and all of Milwaukee as he went.
Tiffany wiped some spilled sugar from the countertop with a napkin. “Could wardens really fine him that much?”
Cal smiled as he watched Burt walk off toward his truck under the station lights. Burt’s truck was a big diesel with a spotlight attached to the driver’s side mirror. He used it for shining, which Cal learned was a pastime for many of the men in the county. They’d drive the back roads with a case of beer and shine for deer, not to poach but just to see what was out there, see whose fields had the biggest bucks. Cal had had a lot to learn in the past year. People didn’t go shining for deer in Houston.
“I have no idea, Tiff. I just figured if I threatened his tractor, he’d stop causing me trouble.”
Tiff smiled as she placed the empty pot back on the rack. She tucked her purple hair behind her ears and stole a glance at the sheriff’s pistol. It was a beautiful firearm, not plastic and soulless like the guns they carried on cop shows. Cal’s was made of brushed steel, buckled to his waist by a thick leather belt. The gun had checkered rosewood grips—she loved rosewood—and black sights and a black hammer. At least she thought that was what it was called, a hammer. It was the kind of gun a person could write a poem about.
“So when are you gonna take me shooting like you said you would, Sheriff?”
“What’s that, Tiff?”
“You promised to take me shooting at the range last month. You haven’t.”
The sheriff’s face immediately colored a bit red. Tiffany didn’t know how to read him. Was it frustration? When she was a girl, her dad’s face used to get red when he was frustrated. She didn’t want to frustrate Cal and regretted bringing it up. She turned back toward the carafes and pretended to straighten a stack of lids. Beer coolers hummed in the quiet. The sheriff was ten years older than she was, but that didn’t matter to her at all, and it wouldn’t matter to him either, once he got to know her. He was thirty-five. Tiffany learned his age from the captain of the women’s bowling team when the woman stopped in for cigarettes on her way to a tournament. The sheriff was outside pumping gas. The woman called him a tall drink, too young for herself—but now Tiffany, on the other hand. Cal was friendly, from what Tiffany knew of him from the gas station, and he had something reluctant or reserved about him that made her want to know him more. She had that too, that reluctance to enter into others’ lives. The good thing was that Marigamie County was a big county, and the sheriff had to fill his tank nearly every night at her station before heading home. She knew he lived in a cabin by Shannon Lake just past the North Star Bar, and that hers was the nearest gas station, but she hoped there was more to it, that he chose her, nightly, in some real way. Truth was, independence wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Tiffany didn’t just read poetry. She wrote it too and had done so ever since childhood. It was her way of thinking things out, naming them, knowing them. One year prior to her hungry summer, Tiffany’s poetry became preoccupied with all the lost hopes of living alone in a small town, the slow march of writing checks to banks and utility companies, the banality of daily life. Last winter, not long after she saved enough to get back indoors, she realized she’d convinced herself too completely of the enormity of her hopelessness. It frightened her, and she woke one night and rose quickly and burned with the electric oven-top all the poems she’d written in the last two years. Since then, she’s made an effort to name beauty or gladness wherever she found it—the sound of carrots
