Percival Everett - Damned If I Do

I parked and walked the twenty-yard dirt path to the front door where I gave a solid but polite knock. A woman yelled for me to come in and so I did. I was met by a fluffy, purring white cat and reached down to pet it. The chill of the April air outside was lost and I found myself growing uncomfortable in my coat. The heater or a fire was roaring somewhere. An old woman of medium height and an angular face appeared at the end of the hall and she stared at me as if I was naked. I stood up from the cat and asked, “Are you Mrs. Bickers?”

She just stared.

“I thought I heard someone say come in.”

“Well, you can just get on back out.” She took a half-step toward me.

“Ma’am, I’m from the State Department of Agriculture and the Fish—”

She stopped me with her staring and I began to understand what was going on.

“Okay.” I backed through the doorway and onto the porch. She was at the door now. “Ma’am, I need your signature on this—”

But she slammed the door and managed to squeeze the word nigger through the last, skinniest gap.

I sighed and walked back to my truck.

I don’t get mad too much anymore over shit like that. It doesn’t make me happy, but it doesn’t usually make me mad. It doesn’t do any good to get mad at a tornado or a striking snake; you just stay clear. But I couldn’t really stay clear. I needed her signature, probably especially now. Who knew how many misshapen offspring she might have roaming that blasted mountain with no more elk to hunt. My next stop would have to be the sheriff’s office to see if I could get some help obtaining the woman’s scrawl.

As much as I love the West, the character of its contentious dealings with the rest of the country has been defined by a few rather than the many. The few being a self-serving, hypocritical lot who complain about the damn welfare babies of the cities and take huge subsidies to not plant crops and to make near free use of public lands to raise cattle where, if there were a god, no cattle would ever be found. But Westerners, perhaps a function of living in such a harsh landscape, perhaps a function of living in such isolation and distant interdepedence, stick together and so, blindly, the desires of the few become the needs of the many. A man with one section and five sickly cows is a cattleman just the same as a man with four thousand head and a lease on a hundred thousand acres of BLM land. But damn it’s a pretty place.

I drove back to the main street with the intention of returning to the gas station and asking where the sheriff’s office was, but I spotted it on my way. I parked in a diagonal space and walked up the concrete steps and inside. The deputy was a big man, even sitting, and he watched me coming toward his desk.

“What can I do you for?” he asked.

“I need some assistance.” I produced my papers from the Department of Ag and Fish and Game. “I’m supposed to go up and perform some tests on Rocky and Talbert creeks. I’ve got to get Emma Bickers’ signature on this piece of paper so I can take my readings and go home.”

“So, go get it. Her address is right here.”

“I tried. It seems she has a bit of a problem with my complexion.”

The deputy observed my complexion. “Yeah, I can see. I think you’ve got a pimple coming on.” He laughed.

I didn’t, though I appreciated his attempt at humor and his demonstration of something other than sheer amazement that I was there.

He picked up the phone and dialed. “Mrs. Bickers? This is Deputy Harvey … ma’am? … yes, he’s fine … ma’am, I’ve got a fella here from Fish and Game who needs you to sign a paper … yes, ma’am, that would be him … well, yes, but I think it won’t hurt for you to sign … just going to check the water in the creeks … yes, ma’am … yes, ma’am … I reckon, they’ll get a court order and he’ll get to go up there anyway … yes, ma’am.” The deputy hung up and looked at me.

“Well?”

“She said she’ll sign it, but you can’t come in.”

I stepped into the air. It was nearly four and I was hungry. There was a restaurant across the street and so I left my truck where it was and went in and sat at the counter. There were a couple of men sitting at a booth in the back. They gave me a quick look and returned to their conversation. The menu was written on poster boards over the shelves on the wall facing me.

“Coffee?” the waitress asked. She was a pie-faced young woman with noticeable, but not heavily applied, makeup. She held her blond ponytail in her hand at her shoulder while she poured me a cup. “Know what you want?”

“You serve breakfast all day, like the sign says?”

“All day long, every day,” the waitress said.

“Are the hotcakes good?”

“They’re okay,” she said. Then, quietly, “I wouldn’t eat them.”

“Eggs and bacon?”

She nodded. “Toast or biscuit?”

“Toast?”

She nodded. “I’ll bring you some hash browns, too.”

“Thank you, ma’am,”

She moved to the window and stuck the ticket on the wheel, then talked to me from the coffee machine where she seemed to be counting filters. “Visiting or just passing through?”

“I’m working for Fish and Game, doing some work up mountain.”

“What kind of work?”

“Checking the streams, that’s all.”

“We used to go up that mountain all the time when I was a kid. My daddy taught me to fish there.” She came back over and wiped the counter near me. “It was good fishing then.”

“What about now?”

“I don’t know really. I hear tell it’s not good like it used to be.” She looked over at the men in the booth. “You all right back there?”

“Fine,” one of them said.

“You don’t go up there anymore, eh?” I asked.

“Nobody does, really,” she said.

“Why’s that?”

She shrugged.

A hand reached through the window and tapped the bell, then put a plate down. The waitress stepped over, grabbed it, and brought it to me. “You want ketchup or anything?”

“Tabasco?”

She gave it to me.

A couple of young men came in and sat at the opposite end of the counter. “Hey, Polly,” one of them said.

“Hey, Dillard.” She slid along the counter toward them.

She and the men ignored me while I ate and I liked that just fine. I finished, paid the tab, and left a generous tip, figuring I’d be eating there again.

Emma Bickers’ house looked no more inviting than it had earlier. I walked the dirt path to the porch and before I could knock, two loud pops hurt my ears and I could feel the door move, though I wasn’t touching it. I looked at the glass high on the door and saw the small holes. I ran back to my truck, keeping low, my heart skipping. I fumbled with my keys, finally got my engine going, and kicked up dust as I sped away. I don’t like being shot at, always have a really bad reaction to it. I don’t get scared as much as I get really mad. I stayed hunched in my seat until I was well on the main road again.

I parked in the same space and burst into the sheriff’s office. The sheriff was standing beside the deputy and they turned to observe me. I was fit to be tied. “That old lady is crazy as hell and I want her arrested.”