The patrol car hadn’t even come to a complete stop when the sheriff pushed open the door, and then, like a magic trick, he was out of the car and standing beside it, the flashing lights still running. His deputy reached past him and killed the engine.
“Ain’t this something? What is this, Carl? The third one this morning?”
“Ayuh.”
“Where is…he?”
“Aye. He’s just at the end there,” Carl said, chucking his head to the western end of the rest stop island. It was sandwiched between the two lanes of the intestate so both eastbound and westbound travelers could stop there.
It was a cold November, and the gravel crunched beneath their boots, making them remember their youth in Arkansas. They were both local boys. Besides a brief time when Joe, the sheriff, had lived with a woman in Missouri, neither had left the little town where they were born and raised.
“He’s just over here,” Carl said, huffing. His breath in the early morning sunrise gave him a halo that the sheriff found ironic, considering the call they were answering.
They came to the western end of the rest stop. The lanes of I-30 continued along the west corridor, divided from each other by the strip of land between, but the maintained property of the rest area came to a blunt end on the west. The eastern end didn’t end abruptly. It tapered to something that would be a hiking trail for the local Boy Scouts and weary travelers alike, both looking to stretch their legs a bit. Like so many good ideas began in earnest, funding dried up, and the trails that would have extended the forty miles east to the next rest area never materialized.
Ain’t this a sight?
They came to a west-facing promontory. From this vantage point, they could see the morning commuters heading east to Little Rock or the airport, as well as those traveling west to Texarkana.
“Anyone touch anything?”
Carl knew Joe was referring to Jarred. He gave the sheriff one dismissive shake of the head and his look that reminded the older man that Jarred had only messed up once. That was on his first day.
“I made sure he was gloved up when I got here. He already was. Joe, he’s learned his lesson. It was just the once.”
Message received. I need to lighten up on the kid.
Sheriff Joe raised his eyebrows, nonverbally asking in that shorthand notation that only comes with working with someone you’ve known for so long that they are practically a part of your psyche.
“I got him scouring the trash bins by the restroom and vending machines. I didn’t see a…”
“Note. Good thinking,” the sheriff said, completing his thought. They were only four years apart, but some days, it felt like four hundred.”
The sheriff studied the ground around the man.
“Who called it in?”
“A commuter. A woman with her kids stopped here last night on their way back from Dallas. They heard the shot. She said she wanted to do her, and I quote, ‘civic duty,’ but…”
“That she didn’t want to get involved,” Joe said, again finishing the younger man’s sentence.
A tale as old as time.
Something’s off here.
“Does this look staged to you, Carl?”
Carl looked confused for a second.
“Not at all, sir,” Carl said, jabbing his thumb over his right shoulder: Carl’s shorthand for yesterday. “You said it yourself. The third one this morning…”
“Oh, damn. The election,” Joe moaned weakly.
“Found this in his jacket pocket,” Carl says.
Joe took the note from his deputy.
“We are far from being a united states,” the sheriff read.
Both men sighed.
The sheriff squatted down, his knees popped loudly, a decades-old football injury. He touched the ground near the man lying on a now bloody sleeping bag.
“His car. Orville picked it up three minutes before you got here. I’m kind of surprised you didn’t see him on your way in.”
A sleeping bag, a half-drunk bottle of wine, and a phone.
A place for everything and everything in its place.
Joe remembered watching the coverage after his shift the day before. The early returns weren’t what the pundits had predicted.
“He wanted to watch one last sunset. That’s the saddest thing I’ve seen since you showed me this,” Joe said, handing the note back to Carl, who returned it to an evidence bag.
“But Liza says it’s not over. There’s talk of a recount.”
“There’s always a recount,” Joe said, spitting on the ground.
“Ayuh.”
They looked at the scene and thought their thoughts.
“He was right about one thing.”
“Sheriff?”
Joe tapped the deputy’s coat pocket where he’d stowed the not-a-note note. “We are a deeply divided country. I think we’re in for a storm, Carl, a bad one.”
Carl didn’t have to look up to know Joe wasn’t being literal.
Both men turned when they heard the gravel crunch behind them.
“I think I found something, Carl. Oh! Good morning, sheriff,” Jarred said, stopping before the men, pushing the note forward to a point in space equidistant from both men.
Joe was the sheriff, but Carl had arrived first. He let his deputy, a man he’d trust with his life, read it first.
Carl’s eyes widened, but he took the note and read it to himself.
“It’s a short story called The Dandelion and the Hammer,” he said after a few minutes.
“Didn’t make no sense to me,” Jarred said.
“Any.”
“Sheriff?”
“It didn’t make any sense to you.”
Jarred looked ready to apologize.
“Don’t fret the small stuff, son,” Joe said to Jarred, putting a hand on his shoulder.
“Summarize the story for us, Carl.”
“I think it’s meant to be an allegory. Is that the word?”
“It’ll do until a better one shows up. Go on.”
“It’s about a hammer and a dandelion. They’re friends, but the dandelion is worried about dying. And the hammer wants to help his friend make peace, or whatever, with his mortality. He, the hammer, I mean, carefully reflects the sunlight off his head onto the dandelion so that it can be nourished by it. And there’s more. He, the hammer, also scares away any of the animals that try to eat his friend.”
“Aw. That’s kind of sweet. Isn’t it?”
Jarred is nodding along, finding new meaning in the words that had eluded him on his first reading.
“Is there more?” the sheriff said.
“Well, kind of. It looks like a bunch of notes he wanted to write to expand the story to include a section where after the dandelion dies, the hammer decides to study Buddhism. He…?” Carl said, gesturing to the body on the cold, cold ground.
“Is the story in blue ink? With that same lefthanded tilt?”
Carl nodded.
“Then, yeah, I’d bet all three of our paychecks that this is our author, the poor soul.”
The sheriff raised his eyebrows. His shorthand for continue.
In the notes he made, he says the hammer understands impertinence…”
“I think you mean impermanence,” the sheriff said.
It wasn’t a question.
“Oh, yeah, duh. Impermanence. The hammer understands the concept of impermanence, but he doesn’t feel impermanent. He feels fixed. His teacher designs a koan, I guess that’s one of those riddles that makes a fellow get all twisted up in knots trying to answer, right?”
A nod and a smile from the sheriff.
“Yeah, so that’s it. In the end, the hammer would see that he only looks permanent or essential because he’s made of iron. But the reality is he was no more solid than the dandelion who only lived three weeks.”
The men cast their heads down and thought their thoughts.
A few minutes later, the flashing lights from the medical examiner’s vehicle pulled their attention back to the road.
“So open and shut?” Jarred asked.
“Case closed,” the sheriff said.
Jarred hadn’t seen as much death as the two older men. He looked again at the departed, trying to remember every detail. He wanted to be and impress upon these men his earnestness.
Carl catches the sheriff’s eye and tilts his head at the newest member of their office.
The sheriff said nothing.
Carl leaned in and gently shoved the taller man forward.
“Um, good work. Jarred. Nice work today.”
The sun rose again in Jarred’s face.
Jarred tried not to smile, but he wasn’t up to the task. That would come later.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Well our tradition is breakfast at Irma’s anytime we solve a case.”
Jarred started to walk away. He had never been included at a post-case breakfast before, and he didn’t trust his up and down emotions not to give him away.
“You too,” the sheriff said, catching Jarred by the shoulder before he could slink away. “I’m buying.”
Stories by Shawn 