Timothy Johnston - The Current

Well. He’d been a good dog, after all. Smart, obedient, happy—devoted to Danny as if he’d never forgotten that day, that sudden change of fortune. When Danny went away, years later, leaving him behind with Rachel and Marky, he was not the same animal. His heart was broken. Sickness saw an opening.

Now in the dawn, in the cold, the dog returned to her. “Good boy,” she said and held open the stormdoor. So much life, so much love, and memory, and grief in such a short-lived life. Does he have any idea what a life is? What his might have meant?

In the kitchen she filled the kettle and lit the burners and took out the half can of dogfood from the fridge and spooned the remainder into the saucepan. She crushed up one of his pills and added that to the dogfood, and with the spoon began to break it all down over a low flame while he sat on his kitchen blankets, watching her, shivering with cold and pain. Rachel at the stove stirring his breakfast, her eyes on the window where the new day was coming, the sky growing pale in the east and you should put him down, Rachel. The only kind thing to do. The vet’s advice.

But Danny is far away and Marky knows only his love of the dog, his terror of death, and Roger is gone. There’s no one but you to make that choice, to say whether this animal, this member of the family, after all, goes on living or has come now, so quickly, to his end.

It was the water, she remembered—the sound of water in the pipes. If he had not used the outdoor spigot she would not have come downstairs. She would never have seen him standing out there with the hose in his hand. Would never have seen the look on his face the moment he knew she was there, the moment he knew he’d been seen.

Of course, if she had not had a date with Gordon Burke—if she’d never had feelings for Gordon Burke—Danny would not have been out at all that night.

This was her final thought on the matter, again and again, all these years later. Standing at her grandmother’s stove, the winter sun rising, stirring dogfood and drugs in a saucepan for the outlaw sheriff.

SUTTER WOKE UP coughing as if he would drown and he coughed his way into the bathroom and put his hands to his knees and stood bow-backed until at last he hocked the thing up and into the bowl, thick ball of Jesus knows what that bobbed in the water in a spreading cloud of pink. He spat again and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stood over the bowl dizzy and sweating.

He got into his jeans and his shirt and stepped barefoot onto the cold concrete of the motel’s second-story walkway and lit the day’s first cigarette and stood looking down on the gray lot below. Birds somewhere, calling and whistling. Iowa birds. Semis somewhere, brakes gasping, the big diesel engines rumbling. He looked down from the height of the balcony and he remembered falling though space and then he remembered his dream: he’d been on the river with his father, the two of them in his father’s old johnboat way up north above the falls, his father heavy in the stern and himself just a small boy riding high in the bow. But in the dream they had no outboard and when he searched the floor for the paddle he found nothing but dead fish, the boat rocking in the current and moving fast as the falls roared louder and his father yelling, Just hold to the gunwales, Tommy, and don’t… but he could not hear for the roar of the water, and then the bow was out in open space and he with it, way out over the drop with the weight of his father in the stern, nothing under the bow but the plunging water and the open air and the far small rocks below. He hung there and he hung there, the world below him, before the boat fulcrumed over the edge and began its dive and he’d woken up with his fists gripping the gunwales and his lungs full of water.

THE GARAGE DIDN’T open until eight a.m., the sign said, so he drove back two blocks to a café and then drove another block and parked, and killed the engine, and sat with the keys in his fist.

“What?” he said. She hadn’t said a thing.

He half expected to see Ed Moran’s cruiser on the street, or parked before the café, and when he went inside and sat at the counter he half expected to see Moran himself walk in with his deputies, and he half hoped he would. Save everyone a lot of trouble, probably.

But no sheriff walked in, no deputies, and at eight a.m. he let the waitress refill his mug. She was forty or so and on the big side and she had a bright patch of pink on her neck he took to be a birthmark. Her tag said rhonda.

“You sure you don’t want some real breakfast, hon?” she said, regarding with an unhappy look the untouched half of his buttered toast. The other half he’d swallowed just so he could take his heart pills and not vomit them right back up.

“Thank you, but I gotta watch my figure,” he said, and there was a half beat of nothing before she cocked her head back and laughed.

“Hon, you call that a figure?”

When she’d gone away again he sat drinking his coffee until he’d emptied the mug—no sheriff, no deputies—and then he left a few bills on the counter and walked out a free man, a free citizen of his own country, and he walked to his car and got behind the wheel and drove back past the café and pulled into the lot of the mechanic’s garage and parked off to the side, out of the way of the closed bay door.

An electronic chime sounded when he entered, and there was no one at the desk and he waited to see if someone would respond to the chime. Stink of grease and tire rubber and sweat, decades of it in the crammed little office and no one coming, so he stepped into the garage through the open door and stood watching the only man in there heft a tire from off its bolts and bounce it away on the blackened floor. Finally Sutter said Hey and the man looked up from his work and said Hey yourself. Stood and came over, working a red rag in his hands. He was a squat and strong-looking man with enlarged gray eyes behind thick lenses. Midforties. His face was not marked, scratched, in any way.

“Can I help you?” the man said.

Sutter looked for a name on the blue mechanic’s shirt but saw none. “Maybe so,” he said. “Are you the owner?”

“I am, and my old man before me and his old man before that.” He stuffed the rag in his back pocket and set his hands to his hips.

“Any chance you’ve got a young man name of Bud works for you?”

“Bud,” said the man, merely repeating the name. He took Sutter in anew. Sutter wearing his regular canvas jacket, now. His jeans, his khaki shirt. “You mind if I ask who’s asking—not to be rude or nothin.”

“Not at all. Tom Sutter,” he said and put out his hand.

“Pete Yoder.”

“Glad to meet you, Pete. I’m just asking because this guy Bud gave me a jump up in Decorah awhile back, said if I was ever down this way I should stop by the shop and say hey.”

“Which shop did he say?”

“Said best shop in town.”

“Well, you found it. But I only got one man working for me and his name ain’t Bud.”

“Well, shoot,” said Sutter. “What’s his name?”

“I just told you. Pete Yoder.”

Sutter smiled. “That’s how I liked it myself, back in the day. My name on the door, my name on the work. Well,” he said, turning to go.

“What kind of work was that? If you don’t mind me asking.”

Sutter turned back. “I was a sheriff for fifteen years.”

“That so. Whereabouts?”

“Up north. Just over the state line.”

“That so.” Yoder adjusted his smudged lenses. “Then you probably know Sheriff Moran.”

“He used to be a deputy of mine,” said Sutter.

Yoder nodded and studied his own fingers, front and back. He pulled the rag from his pocket and began working it in his hands again. “Well, Sheriff. I reckon this brake job ain’t gonna do itself.”