Timothy Johnston - The Current

“Sheriff,” said Gordon. “How is she?”

“She’s OK. She’s busted-up some, but she’s gonna be all right.”

The man, Tom Sutter, passed his jacket from one hand to the other and stood looking at Gordon, Gordon looking at him. Sutter’s face so thin now. His hair, gone purely white, looked as if it would blow from his skull in a strong wind, like milkweed seeds. The man was sick and there was nothing to say about that. It was too big a thing to ever say aloud.

The young woman behind the desk sat watching them. Light tubes hummed in the ceiling. Machines beeped behind doors.

Sutter raised the jacket and said, “Well, you’re here, Gordon. Do you care to join a man for a smoke?”

THEY HAD THE shelter to themselves and they stood in its weak light, Sutter smoking and Gordon blowing into his hands. He put his hands back into his jacket pockets. Sutter was watching him.

“I saw it on the news, is why I drove up here,” Gordon said.

Sutter flicked the ash from his cigarette, raining tiny embers that flared out before they hit the ground. “She’s hardly been awake two minutes,” he said. “I’m not even sure what in the hell happened down there, except that she’s alive, and her friend isn’t.”

Gordon looked down and toed his boot in the thin remains of ice. “I figured it was too soon to see her,” he said. “But I came anyway.”

Sutter blew smoke and was silent.

“I remember when she was just a little girl,” Gordon said. “I remember seeing her sitting there in the cruiser that day. She couldn’t have been more than six years old.” He looked up again. Sutter was looking at the building.

“No, she’s nineteen now,” Sutter said, “so she must’ve been nine back then. She’d been sick at school that day and I had to take her with me.” He turned back to Gordon. “I was always sorry about that.”

“I knew you had your reasons. But, hell, seeing her there, just sitting there, waiting for you to come back to the car. I never did forget that.”

Sutter took a pull on his cigarette and blew the smoke.

“I won’t stand here and tell you I understand, now, Gordon, what you went through. Because I don’t. These situations, our situations, they aren’t the same, not even close. I know how God damn lucky I am—how lucky she is.” He shook his head. “I never could imagine what you were going through. And I can’t imagine what those folks down in Georgia are going through right now. A young woman like that. A daughter…” He coughed, then turned his face and coughed again, from the lungs, wet and ragged. He took a step away and spat, and stepped back and dropped his cigarette down the plastic throat of the receptacle.

“Well,” he said. “I best be getting back.”

“On the news they said there might of been a second vehicle,” Gordon said, and Sutter’s right hand, raised for shaking, lowered again.

“I don’t know what bigmouth said that,” he said, “but if he was one of mine we’d have us some kind of talk.”

Gordon watched the ex-sheriff’s face. His eyes. As he’d always watched them. What does this man know that he isn’t telling me? What right does any man have to know something about my daughter’s death that I don’t know?

“I know it’s none of my goddam business, Sheriff,” Gordon said.

Sutter shook his head again. “There’s just nothing I can tell you, Gordon. Like I said, she’s hardly been awake two minutes. I’m not sure she even knows where she’s at yet. I don’t think she knows about her friend. I called in some favors just to keep the cops off her a while longer, until she’s out of the woods. And I tell myself it doesn’t really matter right now anyway. Tell myself that all that matters is that she’s going to be OK.” He looked to the sky. “And I tell myself that all that matters to those folks down in Georgia right now is that they get their daughter home so they can begin to do what they have to do. But I don’t know. I don’t know what they need from me. I don’t know what they need from my daughter.”

“Hell, Sheriff,” said Gordon, “you’re not even close to knowing.”

Sutter watched him. “Meaning?”

Gordon shook his head. His heart was thumping in his neck vein. He thought he could put his fist through something.

“Meaning,” he said, “grief is just about the smallest part of it, Sheriff. Meaning if it turns out there’s some person out there who had something to do with this, and that son of a bitch just goes on living his life—?” Gordon swallowed. He was choking. Sutter standing there watching him.

“That man down in Georgia,” Gordon said, “that girl’s father? Hell, he ain’t even the same man anymore, Sheriff. He’s already some other man.”

Sutter had not looked away as Gordon spoke, and Gordon saw a light come on in those eyes, bluer than before. Brighter. But whatever was behind the light, whatever he was thinking about saying, Sutter said nothing.

You don’t have to say it , went Gordon’s own mind. You can just turn around now and go back home. Saying it won’t change a God damn thing for anyone and you know it .

“Tell you one more thing, Sheriff,” he said, “and then I’ll let you get back up to your girl.”

Sutter waited.

“The things I called you when you let that boy go, when you just let him walk away? Those words weren’t nothin compared to what I wanted to happen to you. I knew you’d lost your wife. I knew you knew something about loss. But this thing that happened to you here, with your daughter—I wished it on you. I wanted you to know what that was like. I’m sorry I wished it, and I’m glad your girl’s OK—but I did wish it, back then.”

Sutter was silent. Then he said, “I have to say you picked one hell of a time to tell me that, Gordon. With my daughter lying in that hospital room and that other girl in a box on her way to Georgia.”

“When would be a good time?”

“How about never? Did you think about that?”

“I did,” Gordon said. “I thought about it hard.” He looked down at the concrete, the crystals of salt. He ground at them with his bootsole, and the gritty crushing sound was the only sound. “But I just kept asking myself: What would Sheriff Sutter do differently now, if it was his girl instead of that other one who didn’t make it? What would he do for himself that he didn’t do for me?”

He looked up again and the two men stood watching each other, their breaths smoking between them.

“If you’re waiting for an answer to that,” Sutter said, “you’re gonna wait a long time, Gordon. All I know right now is my daughter’s OK. She’s alive. Jesus Christ—” he said, but then looked away. He took a breath and blew a long white cloud into the stars, as if to rid himself once and for all of whatever it was inside him—his cancer, maybe. The poisonous little cloud drifting through space with all the other gases and junk up there.

“I’m just as sorry today as I was back then, Gordon,” he said finally, like a man done talking. “I never stopped being sorry and I never will. There just wasn’t a God damn thing I could do.”

“I know,” said Gordon. “That’s what you told me ten years ago.”

Gordon offered his hand then, and Sutter stood looking at it.

“I just came up here to tell you I’m glad she’s OK, Sheriff. I’m sorry as hell about that other girl, but I’m glad your girl’s OK. I mean that.”

Sutter said nothing. Finally he shook Gordon’s hand. Then he stood watching as the man walked off toward the parking lot, as he climbed into his van and turned over the engine and backed out of his spot. He watched until the red taillights had disappeared into the darkness, and when he was alone again he got another cigarette to his lips, and he fished up his Zippo and he stood turning it in his fingers, the old familiar weight of it, before at last flicking it open and flicking the flintwheel once and raising the flame to his face.