I know you’re mad, but don’t call Sheba. She’s too gentle a spirit for your fits. If you want to yell at somebody, yell at my picture. It won’t change anything, but then again none of your yelling or beatings ever did.
Avon read the letter twice, then burned it up in the ashtray with his Bic disposable. As far as he was concerned, the boy was dead now, laid out by the side of the road with a state trooper’s bullet between his eyes.
Which, maybe that’s how it shoulda gone.
He puts his feet up on his desk, thinking how over time this country takes everything from a man. It grinds him down, separates him from the people that matter, but then being a man of principle has always been a recipe for isolation. That’s why the Bible is full of prophets and martyrs. Consequences. That’s how they trap you. If you stick to your principles, vote your conscience with words and bullets, well—there aren’t many who will stay by your side, the human animal being driven by a need for safety, comfort.
Avon holds no illusion that if the shit hit the fan, Girlie would be gone in a New York minute. Love is a lie, just like all the other lies, or what’s the name of that Al Gore movie, the made-up one they call a documentary, A Convenient Truth?
All Avon knows is that one day he’ll be looking down the barrel of somebody’s gun and he’s gonna have to answer the celestial question—did I live true to my principles? Was I a man? What else matters? Some woman you got used to? A child born from some Wednesday fuck? They were all bricks stacked in the tower you called your life. And Avon’s tower was going to reach all the way to heaven.
The conditions of Avon’s parole state that he is to avoid all contact with other convicted felons and is not allowed to possess a firearm, plus all the standard bullshit about not leaving the state, et cetera. Before he went in this last time, Avon buried all his weapons in the backyard in an insulated steel box he’d welded himself. It took a winch to get it in the four-foot hole he dug with the John Deere parked behind the garage. It takes most of his second night home to dig it out. He drops it in the back of his pickup and pulls into the garage. By dawn the hole has been refilled and the John Deere’s engine is ticking behind the garage once more.
Avon is in the kitchen making coffee and eggs when Girlie gets up.
“Aie, my floors,” she says, seeing him standing on the linoleum in his filthy work boots. He ignores her and takes his breakfast into the garage. In prison the best he could do on his hot plate was Spam on toast. At home he’s been living it up, milk, butter, hamburger every night. He sets his plate on the worktable, climbs up into the pickup bed. The steel box has three combination locks on it, each set to the birthdate of a founding father. He cleans the box thoroughly before opening it, oiling the hinges.
Inside the guns have been set into foam cutouts. Nothing extreme. Working guns for a working man. A compact semiautomatic rifle, a shotgun, and three pistols, two semiautomatic and a revolver. He has enough ammunition to hold off federal agents for a few hours, but Avon has always been practical. He knows that when the shock troops arrive, he won’t be walking out of here. He just wants to make it as painful for them as possible, so that when they say his name it’s with a scar on their souls.
He empties the crate, storing the guns behind a panel in the wall. He fills the crate with tools from his workshop and puts it under the worktable. Thomas Jefferson himself said “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” When you read your history, Avon thinks, there’s no excuse for surprise. It was always going to end in blood.
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men, right? Isn’t that the Pulp Fiction quote? This shit isn’t complicated. Someone has to shepherd the weak through the valley of darkness, to protect them from politicians who use them, insurance companies who exploit them, landlords who evict them, elites who seek to oppress them. This is why the sheriff is so fundamental to the heart of America. A western figure, a county father, supreme in his authority, an American Solomon able to consider facts and render judgment. A simpler figure from a simpler time.
He sits on the tailgate of his pickup truck and eats his egg sandwich and drinks his coffee. He doesn’t care that they’re cold. He is a free man, free to eat what he wants, when he wants. When he’s done, he hoses out his truck bed and coils the hose on the wall.
Girlie comes out at nine thirty to say she’s going to work. She tells him she’s sorry what she said about the floors. All that matters is he’s home. He can see from her eyes that she doesn’t mean it, but what matters is she shows him respect. That she respects the natural order, man over woman, white over colored.